war was a good thing, yes, according to the many tribes enna had once documented at the height of the crimson war. war is conquest and pain, but also an opportunity to sow new seeds into barren land, with new techniques brought to the lowly people around them, was something almost all the elders said, and like sheep, gentle and foolish and utterly unknowing, their next generation followed them into battle, hailing the brutishly mutilated bodies of their brothers and sisters and friends as keepers of the souls of the brave.
but enna knew better than that. enna always knew better than that.
she was content with her little shop near the mountain range that divided their lands into the north and south, tending to the blends she created specifically for her ailing customers. enna had seen much pain, but pain often brought with it contentment, and she was content.
"enna! hello!" she hears as the door jingles open, and a young orc walks in, coin pouch on the ready for sweets or a specific blend his mother might've forced him to get. yes, she was content. there was nothing about this life that she hated at all. except the weird one-off customer, but that was customer service for you. "my mom asked me to get her the same blend as last time, if you can make it!"
"ah, ah, duma." enna murmurs gentle, and for a minute, she worries if her age shows through, though the boy doesn't acknowledge it. "no receipt, no blend. every blend is unique to the customer, and this lady's too old to remember all the blends she's ever made."
"i know, i know, auntie." he sulks, passing the coin pouch to her. "it's in here, along with the money for last time. can i go look at the sweets?"
some of my mutuals wanted to see this, so im releasing this a bit early hehe :) but basically, this is a cosy fantasy that revolves around my fmc enna, a witch who mysteriously managed to get younger as the years passed by. however, instead of obsessing about her looks, enna has only one goal in mind- find the perfect blend of spices and herbs to create the perfect storyteller, all while writing down whatever she's seen and heard her whole life in order to preseve the stories of tribes that no longer exist.
The rest of the evening passed without further excitement. The yokai continued to stalk between the trees, emerging from shadowed brush and howling mists. Robin exorcised each that crossed her path, her heart burning with a hatred that flared brighter than fear.
It was the kind of hatred born from heartbreak—old and aching—rattling in her chest like a second heartbeat. Each swing of her mother’s sun-infused blade left searing trails of golden light, its dull edge slicing through the corrupted spirits like a whisper through silk. She didn’t know if the blade hungered for purification, or if it was simply her grief feeding its fire.
She couldn’t bring herself to care. Not tonight.
Robin wiped the sweat and blood from her brow, panting. The onslaught had come in waves, as it always did around Oumagatoki. When the boundary between the physical and spirit worlds thinned, the Lost Woods spat out everything it had swallowed: memories, ghosts, monsters. Things with too many limbs. Faces turned the wrong way. Shapeless things that hissed her name in voices that belonged to the dead.
Hours passed before the forest began to still, the oppressive weight in the air lifting just slightly. Robin stood alone, surrounded by scorched moss and the still-flickering remnants of exorcised yokai. The light of her blade dimmed.
She sheathed it in one smooth motion, then leaned back against a nearby tree. The bark bit into her spine, real and grounding.
For a moment, she allowed herself to feel the ache that crept in after violence. Her limbs trembled not from fear, but from sheer exhaustion. She tilted her head back, eyes tracing the canopy above, searching for even a sliver of moonlight. But the sky was too thick with mist to see anything clearly.
A wind stirred the leaves. She thought it whispered her name again.
Robin.
The voice was soft. Gentle. Feminine. She flinched and turned sharply, hand reaching for her sword as quickly as her weariness allowed.
There was no one there. Only the wind, curling around her ankles like a cat before vanishing into the mist. That awful, deep unease settled back into her bones. Tears burned at the corners of her eyes, but didn’t fall.
Why? Why did the forest insist on mocking her?
Her mother, her father—everyone she’d loved—was gone. The name her mother had once pressed to her brow with joy now felt like ash in her mouth. A mark the spirits used to taunt her. Robin didn’t follow the pull of that strange, ancient whisper.
Not tonight. Her exhaustion cut deeper than her curiosity, and there was no part of her heart left open to wonder.
So instead, she turned back toward the old family cabin. Home.
The path was barely a path at all—overgrown, choked with mist, like the forest itself had tried to reclaim it. Her boots crunched over fallen leaves, twigs snapping beneath her soles like brittle bones. By the time she reached the weathered porch, the last light of dusk had bled away, leaving only the hush of the forest and the occasional distant call of something that no longer belonged in this world.
She usually didn’t return home so early into the night. But the encounter with those strange spirits had left her worn.
The cabin stood quiet—a ghost of its former self. Slanted wooden shingles. Shuttered windows. Faint ofuda charms still clung to the doorframe, their paper edges frayed, ink smudged and curling from years of rain. She brushed her fingers across them, hesitating before pushing the door open.
Inside, the air smelled of old pine, dust, and memories too heavy to breathe.
Western-style furniture sat beside Japanese décor—an awkward mix that somehow made sense in the strange liminality of the Lost Woods. A rusted cast iron stove slouched in one corner beside tatami mats worn thin by years of pacing. Shōji doors framed the back rooms, half-open and bowed from humidity. A faded woolen couch, patched and sunken, faced a low altar table still set with offerings long since wilted: dried rice, a cracked sake cup, and a photograph of her mother, smiling with the same tired, wolf-like eyes Robin now wore like an inheritance.
Cobwebs curled in the corners. Dust blanketed every surface like snow.
Robin dropped her satchel by the door and stepped out of her boots, the floor creaking beneath her weight. She didn’t bother lighting the lanterns. She knew every inch of this place—even in the dark.
She made her way to the low table and sank to the floor, fingers brushing over the photo frame before pressing her hands together in prayer.
(How did you do it, Mama? How did you smile through the pain? Through the rituals? Through the dying?)
She rested her forehead against the frame, heart pounding.
The cabin had always felt too quiet since her mother’s death, as though it were waiting for something. Or someone. Robin had tried to keep it alive—sweeping when she remembered, cooking the same dishes her mother once made, lighting incense on the proper days. But even that had slowed over time.
Grief was heavy. Heavy in the lungs. Heavy in the bones. She was tired—far too tired for a woman her age.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d spoken to another living soul. Not truly. Not for more than a passing moment. The forest offered no company, only screams in the dark and whispers from the past. Any humans she encountered were panicked, desperate to return to the world beyond the woods. They never stayed long enough for conversation. Never long enough to answer the questions she wanted to ask—what era it was, what country they came from, what had changed.
Slowly, she rose to her feet and whispered a soft goodnight to her mother.
Then she curled up on the couch without changing out of her blood-specked clothes, her sword resting just within arm’s reach.
Outside, the Lost Woods stirred—always watching. Always waiting.
And inside, Robin closed her eyes, afraid to dream.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
That night, sleep didn’t come so much as it claimed her.
She drifted in a slow, sinking weightlessness, swallowed by a hush so deep it might have been the womb of the world. No breath. No wind. Only the rhythmic beating of something vast and ancient, like the pulse of a forgotten god.
Then—light. Blinding, golden light.
She stood barefoot in a field of sun-washed reeds, the air glowing like morning just before the world woke. Petals drifted past her feet, carried by a breeze she could not feel. The sky above shimmered in gold and rose, and in the distance, mountains loomed like sleeping beasts wrapped in clouds. Somewhere far off, a bell rang three times.
Before her, a holy, ancient village bloomed into existence.
Pale torii gates framed the path ahead, tall and regal, carved with runes she could not read but knew in her blood. The houses had thatched roofs and vibrant silks, windows glowing softly like fireflies in the dusk. Figures in white and crimson danced beneath the boughs of golden trees. Robin reached out, as if touching the dream would anchor it to her, make it real.
She took one step forward—and the sky cracked.
A black smear tore across the golden light like spilled ink. The mountain quaked. Shadows rippled at the village’s edge. The dancers froze, then turned to her in unison—each wearing her mother’s face, vacant and weeping, blood splattered across their lips like painted masks.
“Daughter of the Sun Wolf,” they whispered in a thousand overlapping voices. “The seal grows thin.”
She turned to run, but her feet sank into the reeds, the world melting into tar. The golden light was swallowed by ink. Her body fell, mouth opening to swallow it, her throat choking on the despair that burned like the deepest pain a soul could feel. The figures vanished. The bells tolled again—deeper, distorted.
Then, silence. Robin’s eyes flew open. She couldn’t see.
Panic clenched her throat. She scrambled upright on the couch, heartbeat pounding as she clawed at her eyes. Nothing. Only void. Darkness pressed against her like a second skin.
“No, no, no—not this again—”
Panicked gasps. Her voice cracked, a frightened little girl’s. She remembered this. The same thing had happened to her mother after one of the dreams.
Her hands shook as she fumbled toward the altar, the furniture like strangers in the dark. Tears welled in her eyes unbidden. Hot. Blistering.
And then, thankfully—the light returned. First in flickers. Then shapes. The altar. The photograph. Her own pale, trembling hands.
The guardian collapsed to her knees with a choked gasp, her forehead resting against the floor, arms clutching her sides. Her breath came in sharp sobs, trembling with leftover fear and revelation.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Morning found Robin curled on the altar room floor, the wooden boards beneath her stiff with cold. Her limbs ached from the awkward sleep and the sudden flurry of her sharp awakening, but she didn’t move right away. The golden light of dawn seeped in through the paper windows, dappling her arms in fragile warmth, and for a moment, she let herself pretend it was her mother’s touch.
(Just five more minutes, before the world remembers I’m still here.)
Eventually, she rose. She washed her face at the cracked porcelain basin, lit incense at the household shrine, and whispered the prayers she knew by heart. But her heart wasn’t in it.
Her hands shook as she struck the match. The words felt dry in her mouth.
She stood before the shrine a long time, watching the smoke curl in ribbons toward the rafters. In the silence, her mind drifted back to the dream—the radiant village, the dancers in white, the mountains like slumbering gods. The warmth of it. The familiarity of it.
And then, the horror.
(“The seal grows thin.”) Her mother had never spoken of a seal. Only the Kagura dance, the sacred ritual that was supposed to keep the Lost Woods safe.
"Gratitude," Miyuki would say, "is the root of all protection. So we dance, we pray, we serve the kami who watches us from the sun."
Not once had she spoken of the darkness beneath it all. Not once had she warned Robin about the price.
Robin bit her lip until she tasted blood. She stared at the framed photo of her mother on the shrine shelf—smiling with tired eyes, radiant, draped in white and gold as she had been the last time she performed the dance. When the photo was taken, her hair had already begun to turn white from the stress the ritual put on her mortal body.
(You lied to me.) Immediately, regret snapped in Robin’s heart. She trembled. No—not lied. Her mother had shielded her. Kept the truth close to her heart, perhaps out of love. Or perhaps... out of fear.
Robin’s stomach twisted. The truth was that Miyuki had died without telling her everything. The truth was that Robin had inherited a legacy wrapped in secrets. Utterly alone, she was left to unravel them, alone, in a forest that grew darker with each passing day.
Slowly, the wolf woman stepped back from the shrine and looked around the cabin. Dust clung to the ceiling beams. The scrolls on the walls had yellowed, their ink faded with time. A family sword—her mother’s katana, its sunlight-infused blade sheathed in quiet judgment—rested in a stand by the door. A weapon passed down like a crown of thorns.
Robin touched the hilt with trembling fingers. “This wasn’t supposed to be mine,” she whispered.
(I wanted to be normal. I wanted to leave. To see the world outside.)
Haruki, as the eldest, was meant to be the inherited protector. He had promised her that one day, he would fix the yokai problem, and they could explore the outside world together. But the Lost Woods didn’t let go of its keepers. Not without a cost.
She looked toward the window, where the trees loomed like sentinels, their branches casting long shadows across the yard. She knew, deep in her bones, that she would never leave—not really.
From where she sat in the copilot’s seat, Aome glanced over her shoulder at Rynn.
Yojackson steered the ship straight again and accelerated its speed. “See? We’re fine. I know what I’m doing.”
“A little too well,” the priestess observed. “You really seem to know your way around this...cargo...ship.”
Yojackson shrugged. “Remember when I said I wouldn’t know how well fern sells?”
Aome’s lips parted. “You mean to tell me you’ve...”
“It’s in the past, priestess.” He smirked. “It doesn’t sell like it used to, anyway.”
Aome squinted at him. She pressed a button on the ship’s control panel and the entire craft began to hiss.
Rynn furrowed his brow.
“Heading into jump. ...Maybe.” She frowned.
The ship’s hissing lessened and the stars and Arsteine blurred behind them.
Yojackson leaned back into his chair. “I told you, the rickety old ones are the best.”
Rynn turned to Kilderan. “But where are we headed now?”
Kilderan gently pulled the sleeves of his coat and shirt up, revealing the drawing of Ormena. The black ink swirled in a muddled yet extraordinary pattern against his skin and veins. “We have to find this constellation.” He blinked and then pressed his lips into a firm line. “But I don’t know how. I think we should take a less-traveled route across the galaxy than everyone else, because that will make it harder to track us.”
“We’re approaching Melerak, we’re going to pass it,” Aome announced.
“All we have to go off of is that tattoo,” Yojackson pointed out. “We have absolutely no clue how to reach the spring.”
“It’s at the edge of the galaxy—” Kilderan started.
“But which edge?” Yojackson queried.
Kilderan ran his fingers through his hair, all while fixing his blue-eyed gaze on Rynn.
“Maybe—” Rynn started.
But he was interrupted by the sound of groaning metal and the strong smell of smoke.
A tremor ran through the ship and suddenly the lights flickered as it came to a halt, drifting in the void.
The burnt smell increased.
Yojackson glanced around, concerned, before leaping from the pilot’s seat.
“What’s going on with the ship?” Aome asked.
“Blast it.” Yojackson stared out the cockpit window before kneeling on the ground in front of the ship’s main control unit. He opened a panel Rynn had not even noticed at first, and began rummaging around inside it.
He soon emerged with a smoke-covered face. “The blasted jump drive just blew itself out. We can’t go into jump anymore.”
The pirate stood and furrowed his brow, returning to the pilot’s seat with a frustrated groan. “But I’d say we’re a little lucky. We’re right above Melerak.”
“We can get the ship repaired, then,” Aome said with a relieved sigh.
“How much time do we have until we’re out of fuel?” Kilderan asked.
The already dim lights died down completely, and Rynn glanced around warily in the darkness. The floor seemed to tilt below him, and turbulence suddenly buffeted the ship. “Do you feel that?” he asked.
“I’d say about now,” Yojackson said to Kilderan. “Hold on to something.”
Some woods forget.
Others remember.
But the Lost Woods mourn. Always.
And tonight, they weep for a girl who refuses to dance.
The Lost Woods are not quiet. They hum like old bones beneath the soil, sighing through the trees in a language too ancient to be named. Fog clings low, thick as grief, curling around roots and ankles like fingers that never learned how to let go. Time drips here, slow and sticky, pooling in the hollows where sunbeams used to live. Somewhere in that dreaming forest, a girl stands alone—wild and untamed hair glistening in the light of her lantern in a tense, worn hand, ash on her tongue. She does not dance anymore.
She walks the path only she can see, a lantern swinging at her side like a heartbeat gone crooked. The woods whisper around her, branches bowing with recognition, but she does not bow back. Her steps are careful, but not reverent. The leaves remember when her mother danced—when she wore the sun on her back and the wind dared not touch her. Now, even the light avoids her. (Let it avoid me. Let them all forget.)
Robin stops at the edge of a broken shrine, half-swallowed by moss and time. A shimenawa rope hangs limp above the threshold, untended. She stares at it for a moment too long, the way one might stare at an open wound, before turning away. She does not enter. She never enters. (I’m not ready.)
How could she ever be ready? This place had once been perfect, protected and kept clean by the women of her family. But that had been long ago, long before Robin’s time. Back when the Kobayashi clan was whole, with divinely born women who cared for the forest the same way a mother cherishes a babe. It was an honor, her mother had once said. A power blessed each member of the clan, their daughters breathing sunlight, using the light to change their forms into the Sun Wolf their family worshiped—an honor bestowed by the kami of the Lost Woods.
Those same kami had let her mother die. Even now, when her throat clenched so tight she could scarcely breathe, when darkness loomed and threatened her with a cold chill like death, Robin recalled her mother’s pale face. The way her mother’s body had trembled, wracked with coughs. Several times, she had discovered bloodied tissues in the garbage, placed there to try and spare the children from witnessing such a gruesome, slow death.
For years, Robin and her family had prayed for her mother to get better. They left offerings at the shrine—sweet rice, salt, apples from the old orchard a mile from their cabin, whatever they could gather—and whispered desperate pleas into the incense smoke. Her father had promised the Sun Wolf, the guardian of their family, would hear. That if the ritual was performed with pure intent, the kami would answer.
But the Sun Wolf did not come. The ritual faltered. Her mother’s voice cracked and vanished before the final verse, and by then, the shadows had already begun to pool beneath the floorboards of their home.
Robin remembered how her elder brother had screamed the night it happened—how every ritual sconce had blown out, and the smell of iron filled the air. How their mother collapsed mid-step, clutching her chest like something was being torn from inside her. No amount of prayer could fix what had been broken. There were no doctors within the Lost Woods.
After that, no one spoke of the Kagura. Not properly. Not without fear or bitterness. The elders were gone. The dancers had disappeared. In a year’s time, her father was murdered by a yokai in the woods, a spirit that never should have existed within. And Robin… Robin had stopped believing the forest would ever let her escape. She had to atone for the ritual she refused to perform.
(How could I ever be ready?) she wondered again, digging her nails into her palms. (How could anyone carry a duty that had killed so many before us?)
She had to atone for what she had done.
The Lost Woods no longer felt sacred. Just… lonely. Like even the trees were mourning. And somewhere deeper in the forest, where the path had grown too twisted to follow, something else was stirring.
Watching. Waiting.
He remembered the heat, the teeth of something morbid upon his flesh. He remembered the way the stars turned their backs on him as the woods swallowed him whole.
No name. No father. Only the rage that kept his shadow stitched together.
He was not born in the dark, but he died to it. The last thing he remembered was the heat of the altar stone against his back, rough ropes tying him down and his breath catching, his father’s voice like broken glass chanting a name that didn’t belong to either of them. Silence came not long after that. And then—screaming. Not from his mouth, but from the trees, the sky, the earth splitting open to swallow him whole.
When he woke, he no longer knew his name. Only the hunger, the smoke curling from his skin, and the unbearable ache of something holy burning wrong inside him. There had been light once. Not warm, not kind. Just… blinding. A searing line drawn down the middle of his soul—before and after. Before, there had been hands. A mother’s lullaby, maybe. A boy’s laugh. But now, there were only claws. A voice that wasn’t his, whispering: Use your rage. Let them fear you.
He moved through the woods now, torn feet hardly touching the ground, as if the once-sacred earth might burn him. A shadow limping through fog. The trees leaned away when he passed. Small things—mice, birds, lost spirits—fled from him. Not because he was cruel, but because the woods remembered what he had become. What he had done.
(Was it me?) The question rose sometimes, unspoken. (Did I choose this?)
He tried not to look at his hands. He knew what he’d see: something inhuman, smudged at the edges, more smoke than flesh. The remnants of a boy carved hollow to make room for something else.
And still—deep beneath it all—there was grief. Not his own. Someone else’s, echoing like a bell through the bones of the forest. It pulled at him, night after night, whispering down from the mountain with the wind. He did not remember her name. But he remembered the way she wept. Sometimes, when the fog thinned and the wind curled just right through the cedars, he could almost hear her again. Footsteps thudding through leaves. Lantern light, weak and flickering. The sharp scent of crushed camellia petals. A girl’s breath held tight in her throat—not out of fear, but reverence. She’s still here, the forest would whisper, or maybe he only wanted it to.
He did not follow her. Not anymore. But he watched.
From the shadows beneath the shrine roots, from the places light no longer touched, he watched her walk the path he once knew. She moved like a prayer denied—soft, bitter, angry with the wind for remembering her. Her presence stirred something old in the woods, something restless. The yokai grew bold when she stopped dancing. They slipped through cracks like blood through gauze. They called him now. Some whispered his name. Some offered their throats.
And still, he waited.
Something inside him knew her presence was not an ending but a tether—thin as thread, burning gold, unraveling a story neither of them had finished. Not yet.
Some nights, the wind brought her voice, low and hoarse, singing the first notes of a ritual long forgotten. He could not sing it back. Not with the mouth he had now. But he remembered the rhythm. The way her feet once moved through sunlight.
One from the Magiverse today! Brienne is a trans girl and has a great rapport with the eccentric alchemist who supplies her potions -- I wrote this scene to showcase that small part of her routine and worldbuild a little of the normalisation of being trans in this world!
“Brienne, welcome in my dear!” The alchemist, Barnaby, was an eccentric old man who had worked here for as long as Bri could remember. She had fond memories of coming here with dad for her prescription medication and getting a sweet treat or three when she was younger, and in all those years his crooked posture and warm smile that crinkled his eyes had always been a source of comfort for her. “The usual today?”
“You make it sound like I’m coming for a drink,” she laughed, “But yes, this month’s estrogen supply, please.”
“You drink it, do you not?” He chuckled, peering over the counter with bright blue eyes as he bent down to retrieve her prescription, “Can’t believe it’s been almost a year since you first asked for this.”
“I can,” she laughed, taking the bottle concealed in a brown paper bag from him with a grimace, “The taste never gets better.”
Being outside for the first time on his own, completely free of his master, is rough for Blade. Everything is overwhelming -- he's spent his entire life spent mostly in a claustrophobic underground facility. What's worse is that he has to face the comrade who'd left him for dead -- and he's still madly in love with him.
Here's a little snippet from the first time he tastes the sunlight by himself.
It was only as the trees parted to sparkling water in the morning light that he finally had a taste of what Tori and Josh were always gushing about in their poems. The air was crisp and cool, mist hanging over the seemingly endless lake and diffusing the honey-gold sunlight peeking over the mountains. It was Erik. Cold and sharp and soft and gold around those endless blue eyes. Why did it remind him of Erik; why must everything remind him of Erik?
He snarled, turning away from the view to find something else to distract him.
His gaze landed on a patch of ground nearby: a mound of disturbed earth haphazardly covering what looked like a makeshift grave that had been clawed out of. Josh.
Also regarding novel; I made a joke here once about how one of my beta readers didn’t want Taleisin to say fuck, and initially I disagreed. However, I’ve decided he doesn’t say fuck UNTIL he has his crash out with Alex regarding “hey why didn’t you tell me my dad was pursuing a criminal organization and that’s why he’s gone missing”
