The Fae’s promise had been simple, joy without end, and a horizon made of golden light. I stepped into their twilight world willingly, drinking ambrosia from silver cups and biting into the heavy, golden flesh of Idunn’s apples. I danced until the centuries blurred, completely blind to the truth that immortality is a slow-working poison.

When I finally stumbled out of the briars, the world I knew was gone. The great stone cities of my youth had not just fallen; they had been ground into dust and swallowed by the earth. A thousand years, perhaps two, had passed while I indulged in the otherworld. The miasma and magical foods of that place had changed me, binding my soul to my bones, rendering me an immortal relic of a forgotten past. Left with nothing but the ghosts of a dead civilization, I retreated into the deep, choked heart of the woods. There, I built a sanctuary, a small timber cottage that doubled as a library and a workshop.

I filled its uneven shelves with books of the old tongue,desperate to anchor my drifting mind. But time is a heavy weight for a human mind to bear. Isolation curdled into madness. The monotony eroded me. My body, which had once been soft, average,and comforting, began to warp under the pressure of my decaying sanity. To maintain a semblance of who I was, I locked myself into strict, desperate routines. I swept the dust around my cottage, I read pages out of my books, and in moments of clarity I would write anything I could about the time that I had left behind.

For hundreds of years, I remained there, a myth whispered by the new tribes of men. When they trespassed into my woods, ambitious young men and terrified fathers bearing cold iron weapons, the feral hunger took over. I fended them off. I devoured them. I became the Greenwood Wight, a monster of the forest named for the nearby village of Greenwood, a nightmare of cracking bones and weeping flesh hidden in the dark.

Until she arrived. She stumbled into my clearing, and the breath caught in my throat. Her face was an impossible echo of a lost love from the days before I fell into the Fae’s trap. She did not run. Slowly, agonizingly, she coaxed me from the shadows. Month by month, I listened to her voice, learning the strange, clipped cadences of her modern tongue. Then it happened. A sudden, violent twitch behind my ribs. My long-dead heart, a calcified knot of ash, fluttered.

I was falling in love. The repetitive haze that had locked my mind in a vice for centuries vanished, burned away by a sudden, blinding clarity. Reminded of the human I used to be, my warped form began to shift back, the sharp angles of my monstrous geometry softening into familiar, human lines. For a beautiful, fleeting second, I tasted hope. Then, the horror hit me.

With clarity came the memory of my sins. The madness cleared just enough to show me the blood on my hands. I remembered the screaming young men, the fathers, all the terrified ancestors of this very woman, whom I had hunted and torn apart in my mindless decay. The guilt was a rushing torrent, drowning my brain.

Run, I wanted to scream at her. Run and never look back. "Leave me!" I choked out, my voice a grating rasp of rusted iron. "Leave this place!" But she refused. She stepped forward, her eyes wide with a tragic, foolish courage, offering to help drag me back from the brink of my self-inflicted hell.

Her kindness was the final trigger. The sheer stress of the guilt and the warring natures within me shattered my fragile, reforming humanity. The transformation hit me like a bolt of lightning. My flesh, which had only moments ago felt warm, began to putrefy, oozing from disjointed, crackling bones. My spine snapped outward. My eyes dissolved, replaced by hollow green spheres of light, a sickening luminescence that radiated a darkness heavier than a moonless night.

I stared down at her. And there, on her beautiful face, I saw it. The expression I had seen on a hundred men before I slaughtered them. Pure, primal terror. At the sight of her fear, the ancient, monstrous hunger roared to life inside my chest. A vicious, animalistic urge commanded me to hunt, to leap across the floorboards of my library and tear her apart. With the absolute last shred of my human will, I fought myself.

I screamed a sound like tearing wood and dying wind and threw my grotesque body backward, crashing through the window and sinking into the blackest depths of the forest. I abandoned the cottage. I abandoned my uneven shelves, my books, and the last physical remnants of my old life. I ran to save her from what I had become. Now, I wander. Most days, I am trapped in the passenger seat of my own mind, listening to the constant, exasperating cacophony of monstrous voices and terrible thoughts that control my physical form. But every now and then, in the rare moments of brief respite when the madness ebbs, I find myself thinking of her.

I wonder how long it’s been since that day; I wonder if she still visits that abandoned little cottage, reading the stories of my life left behind in the dust. I wonder if she truly could have been the key to returning to my humanity. The thought is a beautiful, agonizing spark. But it always fades, swallowed back into the dark; the moments of lucidity are becoming far too brief, I suspect it won't be long until the last of my humanity fades. When it does I hope and pray that the men who enter my forest will end me swiftly, though I know I do not deserve such mercy.

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