Part 1 - 3

Before inked a name, a woods sprawled thick as nested toothpicks. Two villages flanked these woods with a path between them that grew fainter each year. Boasting of traveling the Old Trail puffed up egos, and perked ears around campfires. Everyone was rapt to the stories of journeying through the woods, no matter how unknown the person was before. In the early years, the mysteries of a quaking fern or odd patch of fur was enough to keep everyone’s rapt attention. But like any tall tale, the supposed dangers swelled over the years, with a hunger for the extraordinary growing worse than a weed in a garden. But these travelers couldn’t be to blame, because any attempt at a humble story never gave anyone a belly of food or soft bed to sleep in for the night.

Wishing to make the most of the limelight with the fickle townsfolk, every severed limb, jagged scar, and loose tooth got tied up into the encounters within the woods. People lost their knack to see the mundane in those giant evergreens, and new traditions were borne. From campfire to the kitchen table to a child’s bedside, all tameness broke loose from the gossip that caught hot as wildfire.

The tale of a hungry beggar gone missing became a warning of a bone-eating witch. A sensible tip of staying on the path turned to one of your feet getting cursed, never to find a way home again. Even sensible quietness around wildlife became mandatory for fear of angering a monster in the marshes. Boars, two stories tall and breathing poison, guarded a treasure only fools tried to steal. Nearly all of them were spun with so many lies a person wouldn’t know what to trust.

Or who.

The crossing between the villages thinned like a well-worn blanket, with each new generation given a stern warning: never go into the woods. Seeds of fear rooted in the townsfolk in both villages, and one day the villages were cut from the other. No one deemed anything worth crossing, even when luxuries of rare salts or spun fibers waned. Even when people broke their ribs, and needed tending from a doctor beyond the Old Trail. Even when someone died. Questions and rumors and gossip seeped out until hemorrhaging to the point where no one ever talked about it anymore.

Save for children, because why became the most commonly spoken word babies learned to speak in the villages no matter what the parents did. Most got a hint and were distracted easily enough from their inquiring. Most, but not all.

The inquisitive ones got parents who rambled on stern voices and wagging fingers to never go into the woods, or else. Some children, who were very young and had yet to master walking, let alone language, mustered up the point of their never fully answered questions to never woods. And so, the woods got a name. And no one went into the Neverwoods for many years, save for one pair of travelers who took a wrong turn onto a path that proved there was a little truth in all those liar’s tales.

Perhaps just bad luck, but a series of mishaps were always snaring Mr. and Mrs. Hamfrill. Born on the other side of Hemlock Pass, they were spares in Glenbaine, a village full as a belly spilling over pants a size too small. Mr. Hamfrill spent his days tinkering with smithing. Every fixed object, be it hinge or lock, came out working a little better than before, and a good deal more beautiful. Mrs. Hamfrill gardened in an unwanted plot of land near the woods and became an apothecary before anyone knew what it was called. She’d cure sore coughs, treat burns, and always know how to make the blandest of foods taste scrumptious. But One day the work ran out for both and left them idle. After one bad crop last winter, their cupboards ran out of even crumbs for mice, and their once snug clothes got very billowy on them.

One unusually blustery day, the scent of berries swept over Glenbaine from a northern wind, like strawberries and mint. Mr. and Mrs. Hamfrill’s stomachs growled out, and the urge to remember what jam and pie and syrup tasted like crested over them, drowning out all their other wants. Without telling a single person, they made a plan hoping to skewer their poor luck: forage for berries in the Neverwoods along the way, and use their talents in the little village of Porttown.

The plan was sweet, good, and foolishly naïve.

That’s why, when they left on a muddy day in their slipshod gear, the villagers sensed something amiss, but no one quite placed it. Some counted their chickens once more than was usual. Others checked to make sure their bread hadn’t burned in the hearth. Most fetched an extra jug of water from the river. That tug of remembrance swept in for a few by nightfall, but far too late to drag back Mr. and Mrs. Hamfrill out of the forbidden woods.

The travelers crossed the fringes of the Neverwoods at dawn, towards the Old Trail too faint to see unless in the summertime, when the leaves cleared, and the snow melted to reveal a path trampled by animals more than people. Trees hushed the village morning bustle once beyond the moss drenched trees, and the quaking aspens and yellow pines dimmed the light like a gaslamp turned low. The outside world dampened to another far more still.

Mr. and Mrs. Hamfrill senses tuned up like a strung harp, aware of everything that on an ordinary day would slip past faster than a chased hare. Crickets from the fields were replaced by the buzzing of mosquitos brushing past their ears. Flora and fauna crunched underfoot, undisturbed for decades until their arrival. That’s what made the woods, stir, and inhabitants to awaken.