Yellow and Green Promises

There was once a woman who followed the rules. She married a man who she was happy with and who could provide for her, and they lived in a little house by the edge of the woods. She had a baby with him and she carried the child in her arms always. 

Then, one day, she ventured into the woods with her family to show her son the trees and the squirrels. Her husband played with the baby as she took a walk along the beach. In the sand, she found a body. She knelt down next to it, fearing the worst, but the body opened his eyes. He was coated in algae and mosses, and sand stuck to his face, and he started to whisper, ever so quietly. The woman lay down so her face was right up to his and she could hear his words. She listened, her interest piqued, and whispered back, and when her husband started to call for her she pressed her lips to the man’s forehead and the salt and the sand on her lips corroded her need to follow the rules. She went home but she couldn’t stop thinking about the encounter.

The next day she ran into the woods alone and the man from the beach was standing, waiting for her. He smiled and opened his arms and proclaimed himself the Bog King. She ran into his arms and tangled herself in the moss hanging from his robes. He lead her to the bog hidden away in the middle of the forest. She swam and climbed trees and did all things the rules had forbade her from doing. She lay with the Bog King and he told her wonderful things she’d never heard before, and on the third day her husband found her and begged her to come home as the King watched from the trees. She went with him, and she fed her starving child, but she would not hold her baby. 

“I know you are scared to be a parent. I’m scared too. But we promised to do this together. You can’t just run off into the forest.” He told her.

“You do not know what it is like to be a mother, nor do you know what it is like to lay in the arms of the King of the Bog. I am not the same person I was when I made those promises.” She said.

“Please,” Her husband pleaded, “We are your family. I’ll be a better husband, a better father. I’ll hold our son. I’ll forget this ever happened.” 

The woman agreed, and for a time, everything was fine. 

One day, she was picking berries near the edge of the woods when the Bog King came to her. She told him of her promise to stay with her family. He smiled, and invited her to the bog, promising to have her back with her family that same day. She went with him, and they lounged in the dead tree branches that dripped moss above the green-watered bog. He told her that he controlled the forest, and would never let a tree drop her. He promised she would always be safe among the trees. 

“You were with him again,” Her husband accused when she returned home. He could smell the reek of still water and decaying plant matter on her skin. 

“But I came home to you,” she said, pressing her hand to his cheek. 

“Very well,” he sighed. If he upset her, she would leave him for the Bog King, and he could not raise the baby without her. He accepted with a heavy heart that he loved his wife more than she loved him. 

So the woman would sometimes run to the Bog King, and one day, she showed him her baby. He touched his thumb to the babe’s forehead promised to protect him as well. 

From that point on, the woman’s son grew up partly in the bog, where he was safe under his Godfather’s watchful rule. The boy’s father waited anxiously by the window whenever his wife and child left for the trees, until he saw them both return. Though he itched to meet the man his son was spending so much time with, he dreaded meeting the other man in his wife’s life. 

The boy became a teenager, and then a man, spending less and less time in the forest and more in the nearby village. The woman and her husband grew older. The whispers in the wind that had once beckoned ‘run to me’ now murmured ‘come to me.’ A subtle but sympathetic change. The woman stopped dancing and running as she went to the woods, but she still giggled and sang. And when her hands were wrinkled and her bones frail, she would still stray into the bog.

Until one day, she could not get out of bed. And the Bog King knew it, in the way immortals who understand humans often do. So he whispered one last time to the wind. It was the husband who heard this time, and helped the woman out of bed, and out to the edge of the trees. The Bog King was waiting. Though the husband had never seen him before, he knew that the King looked the same as he had on the day his wife had met him. The Bog King sat down in the moss and the ferns and he lay the woman’s head in his lap.

And he sang. The birds sang with him. He sang of love and worship and sin, he sang to the woman and her husband and the world. His voice rose into the leaves in the trees and the clouds in the sky, and it sank into the earth and the roots of all the plants, reverberating through every stone. He stroked her hair and the deer and the beasts of the woods formed a crescent around their eternal king and the woman who had briefly been their queen, and they bowed. And there, she died. Every toad and crow fell silent. 

“May I take her body?” The Bog King asked, humble and reverent. The woman’s husband, wiping away tears and awestruck by the scene around him, could do naught but nod. It was what she would have wanted, there was no doubt in his mind. 

The Bog King carried her into the woods one last time, with his concession trailing after, and the man never saw them again.