Archive of Our Own

You knew it was later than you felt it was, but you had no idea how late it was in truth. Your watch had stopped working hours ago, maybe even before you started your hike and entered the woods.

Well. No. You also knew that your watch had stopped working at the exact moment you’d entered the woods, but you wouldn’t think it. Not yet.

You wanted to be wrong, because that knowledge didn’t make sense. It unsettled you, pulled you away from your foundations, from the things you understood as real outside of the woods, from everything that had surrounded you just that morning. It should have been just a feeling, and what you should have known was that it was a feeling that would fade as soon as you got out of the woods.

As soon as you stopped being—

Lost.

Yes, lost.

How had you gotten lost, anyway? You hadn’t set out on a notably long or dangerous hike. You’d chosen a popular path. The woman at the desk of the bright, efficiently-run hostel you were staying at hadn’t given you any words of caution when you’d chosen to log where you were going and when you expected to be back. There hadn’t been anything unusual about the start of your hike. You’d gotten to the trailhead by bus, for fuck’s sake.

You had been the only one to get off the bus at that stop.

But there had been a sign! And one of the languages on it had been English! There had been a little wooden box full of maps, and you had taken one.

You still had that, actually.

You’d folded it away when you reluctantly admitted to yourself that knowing the shapes of the trails that shallowly dipped into the edges of the woods couldn’t help you when you weren’t on any trail at all.

How had you gotten lost? Hiking wasn’t your primary hobby, true, but you liked it, and you weren’t unfamiliar with basic trail safety. You’d spent hours upon hours on the trails of the Kettle Moraine as a child and teen in your native Wisconsin, nearly every summer your family had taken vacations that made good use of everyone’s National Parks annual passes, and even as you got busier as an adult, you’d made time to explore some of the cool, lush forests of British Columbia (though you’d been paying much more attention to your traveling companion at that time). If there was a trail (with a sign and a box full of maps and everything), you could follow it. You would follow it, no matter what might call you off the trail.

Well. There was another thought that didn’t make sense.

You hadn’t been called off the trail here, either, had you?

Who

what

would have done the calling?

You were sure you hadn’t heard any human voices calling for help, and you were also sure you wouldn’t have left the trail for anything less.

But still, you were off the trail now. Off the trail, and deeper into the woods than the trail would have taken you.

You wouldn’t have left the trail for anything less than the sound of other people in distress. All right. But what about something more?

You’d wanted there to be something more in the woods your whole life, hadn’t you? But on every hike there hadn’t been, there hadn’t been, there hadn’t been anything but the woods themselves. You had made peace with that, because the woods themselves were already enough, already more than enough, intricate and abundant, delicate and robust, strange as the millions of miles of mycelium connecting every white pine, green ash, red maple, black oak, familiar as darting, chattering gray squirrels.

Then again, maybe if there had been something more in the forests of your childhood, maybe it had hidden from you. Maybe, whatever was in the forests of your childhood wanted you to stay on the trails. It didn’t want you to go deeper, because even if you’d known nothing else, those woods weren’t really yours, were they?

These weren’t your woods either, of course. You’d never been in them before today.

You really had no chance, born as you were, so terribly untethered, an empty place as huge and deep and unsettled as the maelstrom inside you. Knowing you had no right to fill it would never make it go away.

But for the sake of your great-grandmother, and so many mothers before her, maybe something more in these woods had recognized you, and called you deeper.

Something like that would have been irresistible, wouldn’t it?

You shouldn’t be thinking things like this. You were just confused, because it was later than you thought, and you were lost, and you were off the trail, and you still didn’t know how that had happened. If there wasn’t something more in the woods, then the possible reasons you might have made such a strange decision were still worrisome. The mildest possibility was that the combination of little sleep and jet lag had impaired your judgment and memory.

What you needed to do was focus on getting back to the trail, on getting found. Could you follow your own trail back to the real trail? You wouldn’t have been trying to be subtle as you walked. Could you use your compass to pick one direction and walk in a straight line? Woods weren’t that big these days, right? Surely you would come out sooner rather than later. And if you had to spend the night, at least the night wouldn’t be very long. Could you call for help? Your phone was fully charged when you left the hostel, and there was no reason to assume without trying that you wouldn’t get a signal. Even if you didn’t know the emergency number here, the hostel’s number was in your call history, and that would be a start. You knew the polite, efficient woman at the desk would answer. Whatever fees you had to pay for calling would be worth it to get out of the woods. Could you, perhaps, simply ask to be led to the nearest bus station and follow a bright blue line out of the woods?

And if you didn’t do any of these things, could you at least stop walking? When you were a child you were told that when you were lost the best thing to do was to stay put, to give the people looking for you a better chance of finding you. Had you forgotten that? And if your childhood was too long ago for you, didn’t you remember reading The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon? You read it more than once. You let yourself enjoy the dread when you learned that the girl would have been found had she only stopped walking. Had she only not gone deeper into the woods.

Then again, you did enjoy the dread.

You didn’t turn around and try to retrace your steps.

You didn’t take your compass out of your backpack.

You didn’t take your phone out of your pocket.

You did stop walking, for a moment, and looked at your stopped watch and finally thought about how you knew it had stopped working as soon as you entered the woods.

And then you kept walking. As if you’d been called.

But you thought about that less and less as you went deeper, and deeper, and deeper into the woods, while it was so much later than you knew.

Fallen needles and leaves made your footfalls soft as you walked, cushioning your path as you pushed them a little farther towards the dissolution they needed to move to their next phase of the cycle of rot and rebirth. A sharp but dusty scent of decay insinuated itself into your nostrils like intoxicating smoke, more vivid and distinct than it had ever been before, even when you’d been trying to notice everything in the woods on purpose. You took a deep breath, then blew it out through your nose, shaking your head as reflexively as an animal. Shaking your head in an attempt to clear it, which didn’t work.

You went on.

You were sweating now as you walked, your windbreaker long shoved back in your backpack, the long, long day hotter than you expected. But why would you have expected it to be cooler? You were closer to the North Pole than you’d ever been before, but it was still summer.

In fact, it was still Midsummer. The longest day of the year, the solstice, that tipping point of the year, the moment of the sun’s last total, blazing triumph before night began again nipping at its heels.

When you’d left the hostel, you’d known this, but you’d only thought of how it meant that you’d be able to take as much time as you wanted on your hike without being cut short by the sunset.

But now you were in the woods, and here the solstice—no, name it Midsummer—was not only an astronomical curiosity, a point to mark on the calendar. It was something more.

You didn’t have words for what exactly it was. You barely had thoughts right now, the heat of Midsummer enveloping you and starting to make you brighter, darker, other.

You would never have chosen this, if you’d had a choice.

You’d wanted this since you were alive enough to want.

Further in, and yet further. Trees towered around you, subsuming you in the deep green that was Midsummer’s true darkness. To you it felt like the green spread far beyond the leaves, filling the air, filling your lungs, ancient life newly added to your own. You shivered in the heat. You took deeper breaths.

Perhaps you thought, I would die for this.

Perhaps you thought, I would kill for this.

But with every step you grew more alive, and there was no one here to kill.

Even deep in the woods’ sublimity of green, the Midsummer sun had its part to play. Spears of gold that could be neither hoarded nor gifted dove through the canopy, shocking patches of leaf mould into steaming exhalations, the power that had once brought the leaves up shining green now speeding them back to earth. You walked among these spears, dazzled, buffeted from one bright ray to another, the hot, wet summer reek of growing green and eager rot pulling you ever further into delirium, until you felt you could almost hear the forest panting, panting like you were, panting like an animal.

But not everything that lived and moved and panted was an animal.

You were still an animal, though. For now.

You blinked, you stumbled, you shook your head. You were still moving deeper into the forest. You knew that, you wanted it. What you couldn’t understand was why it had become so difficult. You’d been fortunate enough to be able to refresh yourself just a few minutes ago—was it just a few minutes ago? It was so much harder to tell than it should have been.

You remember what you did, don’t you? Wasn’t that still clear? Clear like the swift stream you’d found, by scent and sound. Gold and crystal, ripples smooth and sparkling. Breathtaking. There were so many stories across miles and ages that had described something like what you felt upon seeing that stream, but none of them were exactly right. And you recalled none of them. You didn’t even think of crystal and gold. If someone had showed you some crystal and gold at that moment, you wouldn’t have been able to understand the similarity between them and the stream. You wouldn’t have been able to understand the appeal of those hard, solid things.

You were an animal, you were thirsty, and here was clear water moving under sunlight.

You knelt, and you bent down, and you scooped the shining water into your hands and rushed it to your mouth. It was cold enough to numb your fingers, but it was a numbness of too much feeling, not an absence of it. It was cold enough to shock your teeth, to make you gasp, to make you bare those teeth to the sunlight.

You plunged your hands into that stream again and again, drinking and drinking and drinking until your thirst was quenched.

Did it taste clean? Did it taste pure?

Did it taste like the green, growing, rotting smell of the woods, but so faintly that with the scent already in your nose, you couldn’t tell?

Whatever it tasted like, the water was so cold that you could feel it within you for a few moments as you walked on. And then it warmed, and was part of you.

And you walked on, pleased with the gift of the stream.

That morning, you would not have believed you would have done such a thing. That morning, you had packed two liter bottles of water in your backpack, more than enough for the hike you had planned.

One was still full, right now, bouncing heavily against your back.

You couldn’t think about it. You were too preoccupied with moving forward, with moving toward—what? You didn’t know what, but you knew it, you animal, by now you knew it more than you knew your watch had stopped as soon as you entered the woods.

You pushed on, through rays of Midsummer light like stooping hawks, over ground soft and uneven as any flesh kept private, your eyes catching and sliding off green, green, green, a darkness as varied and alive and incomprehensible as the red darkness inside of you.

The red darkness that you’d cooled and sustained by the water flowing out of the green darkness.

The sound you made was something like a laugh, and you stumbled, catching yourself against a tree, managing to stop for just a moment. You blew all the breath out of your lungs, and airless you thought, I need to catch my breath, I need to have a moment of quiet.

But you couldn’t catch your breath without breathing the heat, the life, the death all around you, and the woods would not be quiet. Yes. You knew that about woods, that they were not silent places, that the life in them filled them with sounds large and small, that silence in woods was what you really needed to be wary of.

Ah. You could take comfort in that, couldn’t you? The noise of the woods that washed over and subsumed all your thoughts: It meant that you were, in some way, safe right now. Right? Despite being lost, despite being disoriented, despite the fact that it was later than you thought. These woods held all the correct sounds.

And, too, these woods—these woods hummed.

Should woods hum?

No, no, it was all right, that hum. Woods hummed in summer; when insects chorused it sounded like a hum. And there were insects here, how could there not be, with the bright green of life coming up and the rich brown of death rotting away. There’d been tiny flies around you for some time, catching sunlight and turning into brilliant sparks as the light reflected off their wings whenever you stepped close to or through more of that Midsummer light. Just another part of the dazzle. It was a wonder you hadn’t inhaled one yet, honestly. They were constantly flitting so close to your face, confusing your vision just as much as the endless green and the golden needles that pierced it. They couldn’t explain the whole hum that you’d heard, that you were hearing; they were so small that the sound of their wings would be a whine almost or certainly too high for you to hear. But they were enough to let you reason that there would be many other kinds of insects in these woods that would be able to make that hum.

There was nothing out of place here.

(Weren’t you out of place? Didn’t you want to get back to a place that was yours?)

(Oh, but that was right, you didn’t have a place. You didn’t have a place and the maelstrom still churned.)

You pushed yourself off of the tree that had supported you for a moment, and continued on, stumbling, dazzled, determined, and drawn. Forward. Onward. Towards.

You heard the hum grow louder as you resumed your unmarked path, or maybe you didn’t, you couldn’t say for sure. Something about it was rising, though, rising, and rising, and rising, even though the sound that entered your ears didn’t seem to change at all. You closed your eyes and you shook your head again and again, but you didn’t stop, and you didn’t stumble now, either. Your thoughts didn’t mark any strangeness in that, and if you couldn’t mark that, then how could you ever hold in your mind the other thing you should have been able to tell yourself, the thing you knew very well: that even in these unfamiliar woods, you knew that the hum of insects had never sounded, and would never sound quite

like

that.

And then all at once you loped out of the cover of the trees and into a clearing of tall grasses and wildflowers. You froze in the full sunlight, panting, your eyes darting over the sudden newness of this place. This was what you had been looking for. No, it wasn’t. It would be. No, it already was. It was here. Something was here. Nothing was here. You couldn’t see anything here.

You groaned, and blew your breath out your nostrils, and took a few steps forward into the clearing. Grass brushed against your pants, and something was wrong about that. What was wrong about that was that you could barely hear the rustle. The hum was that loud, here.

Loud was the wrong word, but you barely had words right now, and perhaps no words spoken by any mouth in this age would have been truly apt. You were not in danger of being deafened, and your body recognized that, for there was no pain in your ears, and you hadn’t raised your hands to cover them. Such an action would have done nothing to hide your senses from this hum.

This hum, that filled the world around you completely, as no ordinary sound ever could. It was a hum that moved through the trees and the soil and the grasses and the flowers and the mould and the fungi and the insects and the water and you with just as much ease as the air. It played with the sunlight, making the whole clearing shimmer, the flowers gaining smeared coronas of color, the tips of the trees blurring into the deep blue of the sky, the blue of the sky seeping down into the trees.

The sun and the hum meeting in you made your hair stand on end, brought sweat prickling out all over your body, brought your blood up blooming hot just beneath your skin.

You’d never felt farther from death.

You’d never felt closer to something else that might be impossible to distinguish from death.

This was when you dropped your backpack. You didn’t hear it hit the ground.

You followed this by taking off your boots, and it was a wonder you still understood the knots of the laces. Naturally, you removed your socks immediately after your boots. You could feel the hum through the earth, through the bent, half-dry grasses that spoke the summer to your feet.

Of course, this wasn’t enough.

When you’d completely removed your clothes—piercings, too (you’d forgotten about the filling in one of your molars, and that was probably for the best)—you stepped away from them, just a little farther into the clearing, toward the death that had made it.

Yes, even in the shimmer of Midsummer sunlight, even with the hum filling your skull, this thing stood out, an ancient settling into a dissolution that would take as long as its growth. It was a massive fallen tree, bark and flesh blackened in its transformation, the sparse remaining crown of its sturdiest branches reaching expansive towards the sky and through the waving grass, stark and vigorous as any life in death had ever been. The moss and mushrooms that had settled upon it softened it not at all, but rather emphasized the blur between end and beginning and end for something for something so vast, and old, and strong.

The corpse of the tree called for your attention, but it still wasn’t what had pulled you here. You paused, and breathed. You hummed, and shimmered. Oh yes, you did. You couldn’t not, now that you had reached this place.

You waited, empty. You waited, full. You waited. Waited. Waited.

You lifted your foot for another step forward, then set it back down. The pull in your head, your chest, your belly had gone slack. You trembled in your bare skin. You were not afraid; the hum and the shimmer were too strong for that, but without the pull you were able to know again that you were lost. You could remember that the you of the morning would have found it unbelievable that you would have taken off your clothes to stand in the Midsummer sunlight in any woods, much less woods that were strange to you. But without fear—the hum was louder than fear, the shimmer hid fear—(the water had drowned fear)—all you wanted was to know why.

That was what you knew you wanted. But you always wanted more than you knew.

Though you had stopped walking, your heart continued to beat faster. Though you had taken off your clothes, your skin continued to get warmer.

Your gaze remained fixed on the tree that had created the clearing, had died and was now filled with other life.

You knew it wasn’t the answer. But it was close to it. You were sure, you were sure.

The hum grew again, it billowed and bloomed like a thunderhead of sound-not-sound. The air and the light woven through it waved and rippled like the water you had drunk. You swayed where you stood, knees weak.

It was unbearable. It was going to be unbearable if it went on just a few moments longer. It was going to kill you, and if it didn’t—

If it didn’t—

If it didn’t—

You didn’t need to answer that right now. The hum and the shimmer were drawing away from everything around you, leaving behind the only the wonders you’d expected to see on your hike into the woods.

You pulled your arms across your chest slowly, unsure if you needed to protect yourself or not.

The hum and the shimmer drew together into one point beyond the fallen tree. The grasses around you and under your feet gave off a scent of sweet, hot hay. You blinked rapidly, tossing your hair to drive away the tiny flies. In the absence of the encompassing hum, word-shaped thoughts struggled to form again in your mind.

Lost...kept going...why...no...drinking...why...naked...why why why...it’s like...nothing is like this...nothing can be like this…

But it had been, all the shimmer and hum of it. Your word-shaped thoughts twitched and died as you looked past the fallen tree to where that shimmer and hum had spun together. You couldn’t do anything else. This was what had drawn you.

You saw it, though you didn’t know what you were looking at. The black branches of the tree confused the lines of something behind it, something that branched like a tree and was not. An extra shadow that wasn’t tucked under the trees.

Maybe you should have run. But you’d taken off the parts of you that would have run when you’d taken off your clothes.

It moved forward, and you saw that it had legs.

It stepped forward, and you saw the full shape of it.

You saw the full shape of her.

You didn’t wonder how you knew she was her, it was the smallest part of the astonishment before you. Perhaps you’d been told in a way you didn’t recognize as telling. Regardless, again, you didn’t wonder at that.

Not when there was so much else to wonder at.

She stepped forward again, unhurried, a being of shadows moving freely and easily in the forest’s Midsummer light. There was something about the light that loved her, even. And why? You couldn’t think why, you couldn’t think anything right then. But she in all her darkness was part of the unspoken side of Midsummer, the sweet and dire promise that this peak of brilliance was not a triumph of light but more truly a turning point from which the seed of the year’s darkness would sprout and slowly grow.

And of course, the darkness under the trees wouldn’t fear the light of the sun. The light of the sun helped create that darkness.

And so she walked in this clearing, in the late, late light that had never been her enemy, never a means of keeping her at bay. She walked toward you.

You stood.

You looked.

The legs she walked on and the body above them were most like that of a monumental prehistoric elk, though no elk had ever had a ridge of bones spiking up in a line down its spine like she did, as if she was already in the midst of decay. Short hair, dark like rich soil, covered her flesh where it still concealed her bones, and as her muscles moved the sunlight played with it and made it gleam a deep, glossy red. You saw some mottling within that fur, over her shoulders and near the bones of her spine, the black of rot, of living dissolution. You were sure it did not pain her, even as something that words could only call disgust twisted in your belly.

You kept looking. There was nothing in you that could have looked away, now that you had looked so far.

Her head, on that great elk neck, had some of the form of an elk’s skull, covered thinly with flesh. But that was the least part of it. Most of her head was in the shape of a man’s torso, human flesh with no human context. The seeming torso had a neck but no head; naturally, no man’s head was needed. The arms of the body were raised, bent at the elbows, and from their wrists sprouted black antlers like branches; this was part of her that had confused you when she was behind the crown of the fallen tree. At the hips, the torso split not into legs but into a pair of human arms that did end in human hands, held now in a delicate, easy readiness.

These arms framed a part of her that was pure shadow, a near void tucked under the torso, the part of her which inexorably drew your eyes. It was an absence, but an abundant one. Hair, in that same uncanny black-shining-red of her fur, hung in two sections below the torso, as if there was something like a human head with long human hair hidden in that darkness, but you knew that probably wasn’t true, there was nothing as comprehensible as a head that was being hidden from your sight. The darkness was too full for that.

Oh, but despite the sublime mystery of that darkness of her head, that void was not all void. Two lights, round and gold and bright as the moon when it skimmed the treetops shone out of that hair-framed, arm-framed space. It was so easy to tell that they were eyes, because they were looking at you.

You met those eyes, looking back.

Your heart beat faster, and something within you gave a convulsive jackknife kick, crying out for you to look away, to run away, that this was something you were not meant to see. But there was more of you that couldn’t look away, that wouldn’t look away as she held your gaze, and the kick of that thing within you died away, nothing but the final convulsion of something stillborn.

If, in some way, you were not meant to see her, it was only that no human being was really meant to see her. But she had called you once you were in these woods, and she had become herself before you. The shimmer and hum were not enough for you, and her, and Midsummer.

Not enough! Hadn’t you already almost fallen apart?

She reached the fallen tree and stepped over it as thoughtlessly as you had stepped over myriad low roots on your way to the clearing. You gasped. You knew she heard, but she did not slow her steady pace or alter her path—the path that led her directly to you.

The other end of the same path you had followed here.

Her legs more visible now, you noticed the fungus, fans and round-headed mushrooms, clustered around her joints. You did not think they looked out of place, or that they looked like they showed something was wrong. A wordless thought twined through you, something of the mycelium, and of how it might serve her, threading together her chimeric body.

Your eyes again roaming over that body, your gaze plumbed between her hind legs. There, with shock that prickled hot on your cheeks, you saw that instead of the smooth furred arc you might find on a more ordinary she-beast, she possessed another pair of human-like hands, hanging from arms held just as easy as the ones that framed her face.

You could not help but return your eyes to hers after seeing that second pair of hands, wanting and not wanting to know if she knew where you had looked. Surely you had not been meant to see those; you should not have looked, why did you need to know, why did you want to know? Shock turned to shame and burned even hotter in your cheeks, hot as it had burned when, as a child, you’d decided what else you’d needed and wanted to see and know. Oh, dear animal. It is that curiosity that makes the human animal of you. You were always going to look. She always knew this.

And did you think she did not look at all of you? Did you think that the patch of dark hair below your belly was any kind of unknown to her? Did you think that there was any mystery for her about what would be found between your thighs?

Oh, no. Oh, never.

She moved across the clearing as stately and powerful as a thunderhead across the sky; any decay in her was not a process that diminished her strength. You heard the rustle of the grasses as they brushed against her legs, each soft thud her split hooves made when they touched the ground. You trembled; her solid presence in the world washed away so much of what you knew, and only she was there to replace that knowledge. You didn’t know if she would give you any knowledge, or if she did, if it would fit inside your mind the way the things that were gone had.

You also trembled because it was a thrill to notice that point of similarity between you two. Your feet, her hooves, pressing down the grasses, pressing against the warm earth. You and she were not entirely different.

She stopped and stood before you, not quite close enough for you to touch, close enough that you had to tilt your head back to look at her eyes, close enough that it was difficult to take in the whole of her. At the same time, nothing you had seen before could be unseen or ignored. Sleek, living flesh and stark, sharp bone. Warm, singular life and the hotter, teeming life of death that is rot. Plant, fungus, animal. Animal and human. Headless head and faceless face. A shadow that stood in the light, lights peering out from shadows. Hooves and hands. And hands.

You stared, eyes wide and wild. The part of you that wanted this moment and was greedy for whatever would follow was all of you now.

You didn’t exactly wonder if she could quiet the maelstrom in you, nor did you quite wonder if she could fill all the empty spaces that had grown in you since your wide eyes had started taking in the world. You didn’t wonder if she was all. That kind of wondering called into the future and reached toward the past, and standing before her you were of the present only.

What mattered was that she was all to you right now. You couldn’t have told her your own name, so badly did you want to know hers. She must have found the question in your stare, as you remained wordless in this ever-blooming now.

She deigned to answer.

She bent down her great, mysterious head until her luminous eyes met yours. This close, you could still see no sign of any other features, the blackness cool and featureless like the empty space of an undiscovered cave. Your breaths were short, gulping things now, and you could smell her, taste her on the air. She smelled exactly like the woods.

But she also smelled like blood. The old, familiar kind, that had shocked you once and then nevermore for all the years that followed.

A moment of stillness and then—

Moder.

Ah. Of course that was her name.

She reached out with the hands that framed her face and gently pushed her fingers into your hair. You gasped at the sun-hot, fever-hot touch of her hands, and that gasp came back out in a sound that was a little like a sob but was more like a sigh.

Did you guess what her touch was going to do to you? Had you dared to think it? Perhaps not. But you weren’t surprised, either, were you?

A deep blush spread over your face and down your chest as Moder worked her fingers through your hair, heedless of your sweat, incomprehensibly deft fingers swiftly untangling all the knots you had gathered on your way to her. Her eyes never changed, never blinked—though even if they did, you might have missed it, unable to stop your own eyes darting away and then back again. Yes, of course your eyes always returned to her face—where else could there possibly be to look? Beyond her, the world might as well have been nothing but a blur, when her hands were on you.

When your tangles were gone, she trailed her fingers through your hair, lulling you and not lulling you. Your blush spread and deepened, and your heart raced. You weren’t afraid; you didn’t want to run and hide, but you were unsure. Here in these woods, you were so new, compared to the unfathomable ages contained in her flesh. You couldn’t know what would be next. You had come because she called you, and you had been able to hear the call and stay when you saw her because of the deep, deep want in you.

Such a huge, confusing, indefinable want. If you’d wanted like this before, you couldn’t remember doing so. If anyone had satisfied a want like this before, you couldn’t remember that, either.

She wrapped your hair around and through her fingers, rubbing across it with her thumb, as if examining thread that she had spun. You could have wept with the sudden ache of hope that what she found pleased her.

You were unsure of so much, but at that moment, you were sure of one thing: she could satisfy every last part of the want that hollowed you.

But would she? Oh, would she?

“Moder,” you said, your voice so small it surprised you. But she heard. Oh, of course she heard. And she would.

She moved just a little closer, holding your eyes with her own, twin moons for your brown moths. Her hands cupped your face, thumbs tracing your cheekbones. There was something almost ordinary in this gesture, wasn’t there? And then there wasn’t. She brushed her fingertips over your forehead, your brows, your nose. Even your eyelashes, she touched. Her fingers traveled over your face as easily and familiarly as if it was something she had made. Her thumbs paused on your lips, the pressure ever so slight. No more was needed to cause your lips to part, just as slightly, just enough to receive a thumb if she so chose.

She didn’t choose that. You thought you heard some breath—from vast lungs, but through what mouth?—and then she brought her hands lower. She held your jaw for a moment, then moved her hands down your throat, fingertips pausing over your pulse, fluttering reciprocally where your blood rushed beneath your skin, fast as the stream, hot as it was cold. You swallowed, and her fingers moved. Breath, blood, sustenance. She held the paths for all. You were surprised that this was part of what you wanted, but want it you did.

This was still only the smallest part of what you wanted and what she would give.

Oh, but here was another thing to wonder: was there any taking, for her, in what she did? She could take. You would not insult Moder by thinking for even an instant that she couldn’t.

Should you be worried if she was taking as she was giving? Whatever the answer, you weren’t.

The question faded from your mind as her hands left your throat and softly moved over your shoulders, for a moment warmly shading them from the sun. They drew together over the top of your chest where your blush still burned. She followed that blush down your sternum with both hands, letting you push them with your speeding breaths.

Moder tilted her strange head, considering, curious. Her hands separated in arcs, her fingers always staying in contact with your skin along the flesh that covered the lower edge of your rib cage. And then they turned and lifted to cup your breasts. Her hands were bold on you, caressing, squeezing, playing. You made some little sound of both embarrassment and need, the full truth of the nature of your blush undeniable now. Your nipples had grown so hard and sensitive even from that first touch—and more, Moder’s hands on your breasts had sent a sudden, dizzying rush of heat to your cunt. You’d never felt such slickness flow from you so quickly, and you pressed your thighs together, as if to try to hide your reaction from her. You knew it couldn’t work, the way your muscles clenched only teasing your own aching clit, only reminding you of the emptiness of your cunt.

The attention of Moder’s hands narrowed to your nipples, becoming delicate, almost an examination, as if your body was something she hadn’t seen in a long time, and now she wanted to see what you’d made of it while you were away. Again, you felt dizzy with the desire to please her. And under her hands, you could hope that you had. Her thumbs moved so slowly, so gently, over the stiff, sensitive tips, slower and more gentle than you could remember anyone else being with you. Your heart pounded, and you whimpered as your clit throbbed in time with your racing pulse, as your wet, wet cunt contracted around nothing.

Moder spread her hands and gave your breasts one more full-handed squeeze, then set her hands to roaming over the soft flesh of your waist, belly, and hips. She gripped and kneaded as much as she could, as if to tell you that you were about to be shaped by her, or perhaps that you had already been shaped by her.

You thought again that you heard a deep, slow breath, and you realized that Moder had to be able to smell you, summer-sweat and shame-sweat, your abundant arousal, the touches the woods had left on your skin, and any remnants of the world beyond the woods that might still linger on your skin, though you couldn’t imagine any of them remained after the path you had followed. You squirmed and glanced away, and Moder brought one of her hands up to pull your face, your eyes, back to hers. You calmed under their burning gold and she slid one hand to the small of your back, one hand behind your head, and pulled and pushed and tilted you down until you were lying in the bloom-laden summer grass, and looking up, up, up at her.

She bent her head down to you, her hands lifting your knees up and spreading them wide, the warm air feeling cool on your desire-wet skin. Yet the moment only made the rest of you the hotter. Your body’s demands had grown so strong that it was almost without thought that you started to bring your hands down to your clit, never wondering what Moder might do upon seeing you frantically, mindlessly rub yourself.

Moder’s hands caught your wrists before your fingers could do anything about your need, and you gave a soft little whine.

“Moder,” you said. “Moder.” As if it was all there was to say, as if it was the only thing you could say. She replied only by putting your hands on your breasts and pressing firmly, telling you to keep them there. You obeyed, but you also played with your breasts, following a contrary impulse that said if you could not find relief, you would at least torment yourself further. To this, Moder had no objections. She pressed lightly on your spread knees again, instructing you to keep them open. You gave a little moan, wishing those deft, knowing hands would slide up your thighs to give you just that little bit of attention you’d need before coming completely undone. Instead, her hands left your legs, pausing to touch your lips as if your moan was something tangible she wanted to keep, then lifted her head high before you could even consider suckling at her fingers.

She took a small step forward, but no trace of worry entered your mind that she was about to abandon you. The angle of the light was low enough that, with her standing upright over you, you were still covered in Midsummer light. But then she knelt down, her body low and close to yours, and her huge shadow enveloped you. Had she—was she—

You stilled your hands, trying to orient yourself when her shaggy, soil-black fur was most of what you could see. You extended one of your legs, seeking what you could discover with your toes, and before your knee had straightened your tender, shoe-soft foot landed on dense, springy hair covering muscle only barely soft enough to feel alive. Her thigh. You flexed your toes against it, feeling the heat underneath, feeling the great muscles slowly shift as she spread her own legs, lowering herself further and further down. Bringing those other hands closer to the aching, wet heat of you.

In the dim, hot, animal cave of the space beneath her, you whimpered when you felt the first touch of one of those hands. It wrapped around your calf easily, despite your long history of hiking, and it was like the hands of her face, gentle, and both curious and knowing. Another hand alighted on your opposite ankle, stroking up your shin to pause, cupping your knee. You wondered what she made of your legs, the skin so fragile and the hair so thin and wispy compared to her thick, abundant fur.

You wondered if these hands between her legs enjoyed only hands’ ordinary joy of touch, or if it brought Moder erotic delight to touch with them. Was she teasing herself as her fingertips pinched each of your toes in turn, as she rubbed her palms up and down your legs? You hoped so. You hoped so. You and Moder both bent the grass when you walked on it; you wanted her to be able to feel the way you felt because of her.

Her fingers played along the insides of your thighs, just above your knees, and you moaned as your clit gave another urgent throb, as more wetness flowed from your cunt. Would Moder never touch you like you needed? She knew, she knew, she had seen, she had heard, she had smelled—

How impatient you had become. You had been right before, in your confident instinct that Moder would satisfy.

With those hands around your legs she pulled you a little way over the summer grass to bring you closer to her body. Your legs were forced high and wide, resting on her thighs. You squirmed against her fur and reached out to touch it with your own hands. With it under your fingertips you felt like the tense air before a storm, and even though your stomach lurched with something like vertigo when you felt where the fungi started to emerge around her knees, the heat in you never diminished.

Moder’s body shifted above you with a vast breath. Her hands skimmed up your legs again, slowing at your thighs to caress them, run over them like a river shifting a landscape while you burned and flooded in a disaster-delirium of desire. No stitch of inhibition remained to you when her fingers finally passed through your little patch of fur and slid between your wet, wet lips to unerringly find and stroke your stiff and aching clit. You cried out, arching your back and tilting yourself toward her hand, chasing the sensation.

Oh, you had been so helplessly ready when she touched you. You couldn’t help the myriad little sounds of need that rose from your mouth, you couldn’t help the way you grabbed and tore at the summer grass beneath your hands, you couldn’t help the way your hips jerked even though one of her hands held them, as if Moder wanted you to be still.

But then, maybe she just wanted to touch you, one large, long-fingered hand curling around your hip so that her fingers pressed hard against your buttocks, and the other playing at your clit in maddening circles. She had to be able to feel your pulse against her fingertips as they slid over you, slick with your own wetness. What did she think about your heat, your blood? She couldn’t disapprove, not as she gave you a firmer touch that made you gasp. Pleasure raced through your nerves like lightning, until you were almost frantic with it, until you were tense as a drawn bow, your release so close if only Moder would be kind—

Moder ceased her circling, and with the force and familiarity you would have given yourself if only you could, she rubbed and stroked your desperate clit. It only took a few brief, glorious moments before your orgasm overcame you, ecstatic release blooming hot through your body and over your skin, a long, wavering sound tied to no language or culture leaving your lips and losing itself in the fur of Moder’s belly, a sudden rush of new wetness flowing from your cunt.

Moder took her hand away and reached up to gently pat your belly, and though you couldn’t say exactly what she meant, it felt playful, it felt approving. You giggled, lying there, your legs still spread so wide, your cunt still so open and wet.

For a moment, she let her hand rest, feeling your breaths, your little life under her palm. But only for a moment. Then, her hands, both the one with still-wet fingertips and the other, began to rove over your body. They were hot as the direct light of the sun, a heat that became deliciously secret under her shadow, and you understood that though your first, frantic desire for Moder’s touch had been so wonderfully satisfied, you were far from spent, and Moder was far from done giving you what you were to take from her. A heat answering hers rekindled low in your belly as her too-smooth hands (no fingerprints, you might think, much, much later, when your curious human mind was not so overwhelmed by the interest of the present moment) ranged over your body, easy and languorous. Her hands treated every curve and angle of you, all your softnesses and hardnesses, your scars from recklessness and your scars from the times you grew too fast for your skin, as if they were all equally desirable, all equally worthy of her touch. You were no series of parts in hierarchy to her, only a whole. She treated your flesh as if your shoulder, your navel, the backs of your knees might all be just as sensitive and attuned to pleasure as your clit. When she twined her fingers with yours, you couldn’t swear that she might not be right.

That moment of sweet confusion didn’t last long, however, when she withdrew to once again play with your breasts, and the way she squeezed those particular softnesses with her whole hands and teased the particular hardnesses of your nipples with her fingers brought you back completely to the reality of how your form was knitted together, how the strings of your nerves were best played. There was something light in Moder’s hands now—she knew what she’d done to you, and it was just as she’d intended. Her hands skimmed down to your raised knees and then they at once started kneading and massaging up your thighs, easing the ache that came from them being spread so wide for so long, but only increasing the urgency of the empty aching at their apex. When her fingers reached that blurry border at the very tops of the insides of your thighs where the fine hairs bloomed into dark curls, she lingered on that line, tracing it, as if in fascination, as if this was, to her, something like her change from fur to fungus was to you. But it couldn’t have been, could it? In every way she touched you, she proved that she knew all about you.

“Moder,” you begged. “Moder.”

She toyed with your tiny bit of pelt and you bucked your hips helplessly, begging with your lower lips just as you’d begged with the higher. You gasped when your entreaties were answered, two of Moder’s fingers sliding into your wet cunt with intoxicating ease. You were astounded by the ease of it, despite your eagerness, having seen and felt the way her hands were larger than a human’s. But that astonishment burned only for an instant, and something deeper in you felt that it was right that you should be so open to however Moder wanted to touch you. And, after all, you were greedy, and her fingers filled you sweet and deep. Half-consciously you clenched around them, as if your aim was to make of your cunt a drooling, suckling little mouth. Moder flexed her fingers inside you. She moved them back and forth, just a little, like the kicking legs of a swimmer. You moaned, and whined, and she slid the thumb of her other hand around your clit, the wave of pleasure drawing from you yet more sound, yet more wetness.

Moder began to work on you in earnest, then, her hands fucking you with a calm assurance that made you squirm. How could she have such knowledge of you? But she did, and this was how she used it, herself so ancient, huge, and incomprehensible, pleasuring you so small and new and simple with need.

It wasn’t long before you came again, the slipping drag of her thumb over your clit and the powerful thrusts from her fingers pushing you to another ecstatic peak. Moder paused while you rode it out, feeling how you clenched and fluttered around her fingers, petting your trembling belly. But you did not cool once your bliss had leveled, and Moder did not remove her hand. Gently, steadily, she began to build you up again, as if you were a daydreamer who needed a lesson repeated one more time. (If Moder was such a teacher, would she be one who would be angry if she learned of you daydreaming solely so you could be taught, alone, with all her attention on you? Oh, surely not. She’d wanted you alone as well, after all.) You moaned and rocked against her fingers, your pleasure slowly growing like nectar replenishing in a bloom after a visit from a bee.

For a time, you lost time. You cared for nothing but the heat and darkness under Moder, Moder’s hands in the heat and darkness of your cunt. She made you come like she was the moon and your orgasms were the tides, rising again, and again, and again. If sometimes her hands grew quick and rough, or even clumsy for a moment, the dissonance only made you writhe with the contrast and then more with the return to harmony.

Though you were so overwhelmed with Moder, you still did all you could to chase even more sensation. You rubbed your feet against her fur. You raked your fingers through your hair, nails too hard against your scalp. You bit your fingers and sucked on them when they weren’t running over the rest of your body, stroking and squeezing and teasing, your most formed thoughts returning to those first explorations Moder had made of you using the hands by her face, making you wish that she could touch you with them at the same time as this other pair.

You had two of your fingers in your mouth, one hand on your breast, lost in a haze of overlapping past and present pleasure, when another curious thought began to unfold in your mind. It was slow to take shape, as you couldn’t resist mirroring the way Moder rubbed your clit with the movements of your fingers on your nipple, igniting a bright loop of pleasure burning down the length of your body. But with the sucking of your mouth and the kneading of your hand, the thought you had was inevitable, perhaps the most natural thing of all.

Moder had seemed fascinated, even delighted, with your breasts. Had that been because they were strange to her? Surely not! Every way she touched you had revealed her intense familiarity with your body. Had the attention of her hands, then, perhaps been the delight of recognition, despite so many differences between you? You did, after all, both bend the grass where you stepped.

Above you, her belly moved steadily with the rhythm of her breath, and sometimes unsteadily with muscle movements you had no hope of deciphering. Her thick, dark, curling fur was so close to your face, so close to all of you. You lifted your messy little hands from yourself and pushed them into the curls, spreading your fingers wide. You felt the Midsummer heat of her pulsing under her hair and against your palms. She started fucking you harder, and you lifted and rocked your hips to let her. You moaned to feel how real she was, how physical, as you inched your hands through the wilderness of her fur. The flex and yield of her belly was no vulnerability to you, only more awesome vitality: only life could be so soft and hot, her life had to be this astounding conflagration to balance all the parts of her that were also death.

If the search had gone on any longer, your fingers might have forgotten their quest, but, level with your face, both your hands found what you’d been looking for, her symmetry in this another point of similarity between you two. Her teats felt like your nipples, smooth skin with some pebbling variation, though they were shaped far differently, like your thumbs, but a little longer and thicker—so you found when you stroked her. There was this difference, too, that you found: your thumb at the tip of her teat brushed against a drop of liquid.

You didn’t question the deep rush of heat this discovery sent through you, the way it made a blush spread over your chest, made your cunt suddenly clench around her fingers. (They’d slowed when you’d found her teats, become teasing and curious. As if wondering what you were going to do.)

Your hands had told you that her teats were level with your face, but it was more than that, even if you’d shied away from the knowledge for a few moments. They were level with your mouth.

All you had to do was twist your body a little to the side, and you did. All you had to do was push yourself up on your elbows, and you did. It wasn’t comfortable, but you barely noticed. You lifted your head to her warm and living bulk. Your lips fumbled with hair and skin for a moment or two, and then, like it was the most natural thing in the world, you took her teat into your mouth. You closed your eyes, the forest-blood scent of her fur almost overwhelming, now that her hair tickled your nose. But you never thought of letting go.

The remnant of the drop of her milk that you’d touched was too small for you to understand the taste, but it made you greedy, determined. You sucked hard, desperate to find the right rhythm, the right motions of your lips and tongue that would garner you what you were now so suddenly starving for. What did you need to do? What was right, what could you—you felt that perhaps Moder’s fingers in your cunt were offering some knowledge, her movements below drawing you closer to one satisfaction and at the same time teaching you how to find another. You rocked your trembling hips and let the knowledge flow to your mouth.

Just that speed. Just that firm. Just. Like. That.

You moaned as her first stream of milk squirted into your mouth, and then you sputtered for a moment, almost losing your lips’ grip, some of that so-desired milk leaking from the corners of your mouth to flow down your face and gather around your neck. It had been decades since you’d done anything like this, after all, and you had no conscious memories to aid you. But your desire and your thirst were greater than any difficulty, and your body remembered more than enough.

Suck and swallow and breathe. Three simple actions, coordinated into one, all focused on you getting what you wanted. It was easy, now that you’d started, her milk warm and abundant, each swallow close to a gulp. Its taste, the taste of milk from a chimera such as she was, did not surprise you, though it was unlike anything you’d drunk before. Oh, it was milk, it was undeniably milk, the texture smoother and richer than anything you let yourself buy. But within that creamy milk-taste was a touch of the greenwood sap of a new branch, broken; a note of the bitterness of a tree long-fallen enough to crumble at the touch; some sour-salt-savor of life, life, animal life that was not squandered but dispersed in death. And finally, so subtle amidst all these, yet undeniable to your attentive tongue, a hint of almost-vanilla sweetness, something familiar rising up from an unimaginable depth, a well deeper than words, memory, or consciousness, a well just as deep as dreams.

You wanted everything that was in this milk, even though your eagerness for the last sent a tiny curl of almost-fear through you. Whatever it was, you should be shocked that you tasted it in her. Whatever it was, you shouldn’t want it the way you did, as you were now, under her with your legs open wide.

Such a fear was so small, in her overwhelming presence, in your overwhelming need. All it could do was add to your thrill.

You nursed at Moder with pure, sweet, greed, the warmth of her milk in your mouth and belly raising and merging with the pulsing, throbbing heat called forth by her fingers in you and on you. You had so much of Moder, and she had so much of you. Everything about her form was a demonstration of the blurriness of boundaries, and with her milk, was she showing you the final uncertainty of the boundary between you and her?

This was not clear to you in this moment, of course. What was clear to you was Moder’s teat between your lips, and Moder’s fingers returning to your clit. You kept suckling, you kept nursing, as she rubbed your needy flesh with perfect knowing, bringing you to heights of pleasure that baffled you with the way they were not yet release. More, more, more, you begged with every nerve and muscle of your body, lost in the awe of all of Moder’s vast attention given to this little thing between your legs.

And then, finally, suddenly, it was enough. You let go of Moder’s teat and fell back to the grass, your elbows no longer supporting you, only to immediately arch your back away from the earth with the intensity of your release. Any control your mind had over your body was obliterated by pleasure; any regulation your body had over itself was overwritten in the favor of your orgasm. You clenched, you throbbed, you pulsed, you shuddered. You panted as Moder’s hand drew your peak out to an unimaginable length, an unimaginable high, calling all the ecstasy from your body that it could give. If you could have wondered anything, you would have wondered if it could end at all, until at last, with a cry, with a gush, you gave back what felt like most of what you’d taken from the stream, and you finally started to slowly, slowly, return to yourself.

At least, the self that had wanted to lie down under Moder to begin with.

Moder’s hands left your cunt and clit and you shivered, then shivered again as those hands, wet with you, rearranged your legs until they were not spread quite so wide, and your feet were once again resting on the grasses of the clearing. She stood, then, herself moving slowly, being careful of you or because some languor of release also pervaded her, you didn’t know. She towered over you, pausing in the lowering angle of Midsummer sunlight, then stepped back, just a few steps, until she was clear of you. Another pause, and then she lowered herself to earth again, settling so that her head was at your side, about at the level of your waist. In your dazed state you immediately dared to meet her eyes, though you didn’t know what you were looking for. Maybe it was there, maybe it wasn’t. Were those lights understanding? Amused? Were they so hard to read because they were the eyes of something so much older and stranger than you? Did she see how much you wanted to understand, and if she did, did she approve?

You looked away, up to the sky, its blue at last starting to grow deeper. You couldn’t move, and you weren’t sure when you’d be able to again. You couldn’t bring yourself to care, and you still weren’t afraid. No one had ever sated you the way Moder had, and while she was near you, you trusted her absolutely, even if you knew you couldn’t comprehend her.

Some little time passed. You half-dozed and your body settled, nerves resuming their normal duties. You became aware that the grass under you was not so comfortable, and you found your arms useful again, and pushed yourself upright. Upon changing your position, you belched before you could even consider stifling yourself. You waited for the telltale heat of a blush, but it never came. Moder took no notice.

You took what stock of yourself you could, sitting beside her. The back of your body prickled with the phantom press of grasses and flowers, as well as places where the prickle was no phantom at all, but the remnant of some green thing that had more than held its own against tender human skin. Some of the larger muscles in your legs and the smaller ones between them held the warning of the future ache that followed too much stretching, but the ache was not here yet. In truth, you felt as collected and content in your body as you ever had been as an adult. You were warm with satisfied desire and late sunlight. You felt no need to move your body so that it appeared in any particular way or any particular angle for Moder.

And even after your long, long day, you were neither hungry nor thirsty. You rested your hand on your belly, knowing it was Moder’s milk that now sustained you. Something of her body, that would become something of your body.

You weren’t afraid. You didn’t regret anything you had done, or try to tell yourself that it couldn’t have happened—how foolish that would be, with Moder still close enough to touch. Still, now that you were not being called, now that the first astonishment had passed, now that your first wave of incredible desire had been satisfied, and now, too, that the Midsummer sunlight was not falling so directly on you head, you were returning to a self that was more familiar to you. You could look at your discarded clothes and backpack and know that you would need to use them again. You could wonder what it might mean that you’d drunk the milk of a being of both life and death, of a shadow that the Midsummer light loved.

But for now you could be content with no answer, and, too, you could smile at Moder, gladdened by her incomprehensibility.

That felt like something you would not lose, even when you put your clothes and backpack on again.

Now, though, Moder beckoned you, and her gestures spoke enough that you easily accepted the knowledge that she wanted you to sit in front of her, with your back to her face, though you knew they hadn’t been that specific. When you settled down, she began to pick your hair clean of every leaf and stem it had gathered while you were under her, and when she had finished with that, she started working out the tangles with her fingers. She was incredibly gentle with you, even more so than she had been when she first touched you, and you weren’t amazed when tears began to well from your eyes. You never would have asked this of a lover, for it was something that you’d determined was lost to you because of your age, and, eventually, another’s death. You favored the pain of absence more than you wanted imperfect echoes. But this was more than perfect—this was what you’d always wanted and never quite had, at least physically. Moder had infinite patience with your curls now, never mind that her hair was nothing like yours. No tugging. No pain. When your tangles were gone, she ran her fingers all the way through your hair, over and over again, and when she stopped doing that, she massaged your scalp, always pausing at the top of your head where your skull had not always been solid. Nothing could replace what was lost, but Moder offered something perfect, and you’d always wanted something perfect, just once.

She was gentle, and patient, and she was in no hurry, no other cares distracting her or calling her away. You sighed with how good it felt. You wept enough to shake under her hands.

Her hands eventually left your scalp to trail through the tears on your cheeks, wiping them away, or maybe playing with them. You didn’t know and you couldn’t know. Her hands brought your tears over your body as again they roved, peaceful and proprietary. Oh, she’d claimed you from the moment you’d stepped into the woods, hadn’t she? You’d been lost far before you knew it. It had been good to be lost, so far, you thought, relaxing into her hands, knowing she was strong enough to take your weight, to move you however she wanted. You breathed deeply, not worrying about how it changed your silhouette, and wondered what it would be like to become un-lost, by the standards of the clothes-and-backpack world, carrying the great unspeakable secret of this day within you.

Something had to change, didn’t it? But what?

You had no answer, finding yourself almost dozing again. Her hands calmed you now, however they touched, and no surprise, after the way you’d spent yourself under her. Strange state, to have your shoulders, arms, hands, back, breasts, belly, thighs, labia, knees, calves, feet, every bit of you touched so indiscriminately, and to feel it all as one. You didn’t know why she was doing it, and you knew you couldn’t know. Where did all this lead? It was with that thought that a taste of unease returned to you.

It was with that thought that Moder turned you around, and—carefully, but inexorably—pushed you back to the earth. She kept her face close, and met your eyes with hers. Star-eyes, spark-eyes. Her only feature in that void beneath the torso that seemed to say now that she could mimic a human, but never had and never would.

She put her hands on your knees, which rested together, and placed the slightest pressure on them, not pushing them apart, though she could have, easily. She was letting you know that it was her desire that you should open your legs.

This was a choice, now. And now you were afraid.

You wanted to know where this encounter would lead, and this was part of the answer.

Moder had called you. Yes. Moder had claimed you. Yes. Moder had given you the sight of her in the full light of Midsummer. Yes. She had given you gentle touch, and the milk from her body, and orgasm after orgasm, until you’d been satisfied as you’d never been before. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Moder could satisfy you this way because she knew what you were down deeper than your bones. You were an animal, and so these animal satisfactions were vital.

But the animal you were was a human animal, and that particularity meant there were ways you needed to be touched that could not be achieved by hands.

For this thing that made you distinct, Moder was offering you a choice. Or a kind of choice. Everything she’d given you so far was easy, compared to what you knew she was offering now, as you looked into the flame-shine of her eyes. She’d given you some of what you wanted and needed. You would be changed a little, if you left now, knowing that Moder existed in the world, having been brought to ecstasy and fed by her.

But Moder had not called you to change you only a little. The way she was offering to change you now would be greater than anything that had changed you yet in all your years, and stranger than you could imagine. Perhaps you should have known that she would ultimately offer you something like this as soon as you saw her impossibility. As soon, even, as you had heard the hum.

Perhaps you had, but your desire had distracted you.

And it was only now that you understood that Moder had not called you so that you would walk out of the woods the way you walked in.

You would be profoundly changed.

Or you would die.

If you could only accept the earlier gifts, and faltered at the last, Moder would not let you leave with the earlier ones. No wonder, that you would be afraid with this knowledge.

Except there was no fear in you for your own death.

As the human animal you were, you were afraid of the unknown that was inherent in this final gift Moder offered you. But you had no thought of refusing it. The fear of death had not pushed you. As before, desire had pulled you.

Desire, desire, again desire!

You felt it in your mind: Moder would offer you knowledge that few had ever been given—maybe none. Though you were such a tiny piece of life, you were still particular to Moder.

You felt it in your heart, your chest, your gut. You had places in you that were empty, next to the paces that could be filled by love, but that love could not fill. You’d been waiting for something else, something you couldn’t describe or define. You thought it might be part of Moder’s last gift.

And even now you felt it in your body. Yes, even after how fully you’d been satisfied. The change, the gift was for all of you, and your soft, warm, fragile body was you just as much as Moder’s animal-fungi-vegetable, living-dead, human-inhuman body was hers.

You wanted whatever knowledge and transformation Moder offered you, even though you would be forever different from how you’d been before. You’d had less of a choice at eleven, and you wouldn’t turn any of that back, either. The choice that Moder held before you—transformation or death—was it really so shocking? Or was it, after all, simply the cycle of life again, concentrated into something astonishing, like Moder herself?

Change, be changed, or die.

As much of a choice as taking your next breath, which you did. “Moder,” you said with it.

The hair all over your body stood on end. Fearful eagerness brought the blood up to your skin, brought blush-warmth again over your face and chest, made your curiosity manifest as heat between your legs. Your whole self ached for her, and when you opened your legs this time, you opened all the subtler, intangible parts of yourself as well.

Again, Moder knelt. The hands of her head slid from your knees, up your thighs, and around to your buttocks, where the fingers pressed in and effortlessly lifted half your body from the earth. She met your eyes with hers once more, but only for the briefest of moments. How long does it take to say yes, how long to think it? How long does it take to hear the constant sound that is the rush of the maelstrom, when one is standing close enough?

She bent her head and pressed the void beneath her eyes between your legs.

Your first sensation was of warmth. Then, one of being explored. Yes, explored. Not touched, not exactly, not in the way she’d touched you with her hands. Whatever that void hid, it was more curious than physical. This was not to say that you couldn’t feel it stroke your skin, couldn’t feel it tracing patterns on you, ever so lightly, patterns like antlers or arteries or lightning. But with that touch came something harder to define, as if the void-touch was illuminating not just your nerves, but also the nerve-like, mycorrhizal connections between you and everything which up till now you had assumed was not-you. The void-touch made you feel permeable where it pressed your skin, and you feared and wondered what might flow in and out of you. The void-touch made you feel as though you were but one shape of something not permanent, but endless, and you feared and wondered what it might be like to change and change and change and know it, with death only as final and fearful as the dark of the moon.

You did not have all these words, then, even if you did hit at a few. For as the void-touch learned your skin, opened you up in infinitely subtle ways, and marked where you were currently knotted into the world, it also worked with Moder’s deep familiarity to make you wet. Perhaps it would be more accurate to speak of a void-tongue rather than a void-touch (though the sensations on your skin were not those that could be caused by something as singular and fixed in form as a tongue). After all, it was warm as it explored you, and somehow slick—or at least you had no other way to feel or describe what it was instead—though you could not imagine what it might be leaving behind on your skin, if not spit.

Of course, it didn’t matter if you were able to imagine it or not. You were not going to go back now. You were not going to die. You were going to change. And that change began with something unseen and undefinable, but tongue-like in all the ways that mattered to your body.

You groaned as Moder’s tongue—a simplification, but all words would be equally inadequate, so let it stand—lapped at you and mapped you. She was marking the edges of exactly what you were. She was showing you the spiderweb-thinness of those edges, your place in a woods far vaster than this woods, a woods that was everything, that you would never find your way through if you remained as you yet were. And she was also using that not-tongue, that other-tongue, to caress and stroke and taste your skin, sweat and musk and remnants of the wetness from when she’d made you come with the hands between her legs, new wetness now as your body eagerly gave itself over to whatever she wanted to do to you.

Your body gave itself over—ah, more than that. You gave yourself over. Selfhood was everywhere in your body, and you’d never felt it more vividly than now. Whatever made you, you, Moder touched it as she swept her tongue over your tender inner thighs, your swollen labia, the slick entrance of your cunt, your sweetly aching clit. All the shades of your desire for what Moder would give you were manifest in the way your body throbbed and heated, the way you grew soft and open, stiff and sensitive. The topography that Moder found between your legs now matched the desiring topography of your mind and heart, and she licked all three at once. She’d always intended to treat you this way.

You trembled, your breaths growing quicker as she touched you in ways no other tongue, no other hands—even hers—had done. The way she toyed with you even as she cradled you was purposeful even as it was playful, and you felt another thrill, of fear and eagerness, with your sudden impression that whatever Moder intended to do to you, it was not meant to take long.

And then some aspect of that tongue pushed inside you. She moved slowly, so you had time to think that you hadn’t really grasped what it would mean to experience being changed by her. And then you lost those kind of thoughts. It wasn’t like when you were under her, where you’d let yourself sink into a physical ecstasy that flowed under all the thin layers of words like magma under the earth’s crust. Now, she kept you at a level where none of your self was ignored, where you were whole, where she was going to make you more than what you, particular human animal you, already were.

Of course you’d lost your words again. There weren’t any for something like this, and you were already wise enough to know it.

Deeper and deeper Moder’s tongue pressed, filling your cunt with a strange and shocking fluid solidity, stretching you to the edge of your pleasure, undulating within you in waves that made you gasp. You bucked your hips reflexively, demanding because you could not help it, but not worrying what Moder might think of that, because she had pressed the nerves that made you do so.

You thought of Moder tasting you, and your body at once gave her more to taste. Such a curious exchange between you this day, you drinking her milk, and her lapping up your wetness. Oh Moder, Moder. She wouldn’t have let you drink, otherwise.

Your cunt clenched around that unknowable tongue, and you knew your body was taking as much as it could beg in pleasure, but you also knew this was not all Moder intended. You took a deep, shaky breath, trying to open yourself more in ways you’d never tried before, in ways you didn’t understand.

You must have succeeded, because Moder pushed deeper. Something of her grew and twined inside of you, no longer physical but still winding within the you-ness of your body, the selfhood of the twisting path of your guts, the frantic but unfaltering fruit of your heart, the fragile but ever-open branches and twigs of your lungs. And whatever it was within you, it was still something that could lick, could taste, could explore with a delicacy that somehow brought to mind the idea that tongues were usually near to teeth.

Did you want there to be teeth? Did you not want there to be teeth? Impossible to say. Just as it was impossible to say if what Moder was doing to you beyond your flesh but in it, through it, felt good.

You thought it did, because you wanted more. Moder was licking you, Moder was fucking you, Moder was knowing you. Yes. Yes. Yes. That was the goal, even if you did wonder if while she licked you out she was going to lick you out, lap up your selfhood like juice from a ripe peach.

You were so very confused in your knowing and wondering now, but this was perfectly understandable. You’d never done anything like this before, and the more physical part of Moder’s tongue both stroked your clit and pressed on the roots of the nerves from inside your cunt. She was slow with you, on all your physical and more-than-physical parts, both soothing and teasing, as if she wanted you to beg for whatever would come next.

But what could come next? What, after all this?

Had you forgotten? The point of this was that Moder was going to give you something. And in your confused comparison of yourself to a peach—well, did you think that the pit was where Moder would stop?

An inhumanly long lick up along your clit, making you throb and whine with how close your body was, and an impossible caress, from the inside, of everything that made you, you.

You had no idea how you could make yourself more open, but you’d chase whatever would come next. Moder. You didn’t know how you spoke it, but she heard.

Those tongues that had pushed with not-flesh into your not-flesh, your self that was your body and was not, gathered together and inexorably pressed onward into you, all levels of you, and the metaphor of your flesh could no longer be sustained as Moder went deeper, and deeper, and deeper. She was going into the peach pit. Your skull that was not your skull. Some shell you’d had to make. Whatever it was, she found where it was not entirely sealed up. She gave a mouth-intimate, tongue-intimate touch over that thin spot, that spot where you still let in anything that could satisfy your curiosity and your wanting. That membrane of your self that had vibrated with that hum.

You gasped, you panted, with your lungs in the Midsummer air and with your something else in something else. You couldn’t open that place that Moder tongued. You needed—you needed her to—

Unstoppably, but with infinite care, Moder pushed through that thin place, through that fontanelle of your soul.

You would never be able to explain exactly what she did in that final, inmost place of you. Words were for experiences shared in common, and this was not that. For a time, you existed only on the mercy of Moder’s tongue, your core essence so easily dissolved or swallowed if she saw fit. The rest of you, the outer parts of you, physical and non-physical, blurred into the grasses, the trees, the insects, the fungi, the water, the air, the sunlight, and so many things you had no name for, so many unsuspected things. The permeability that had teased you came to full fruition, and in that singing web of light Moder was like a sun, so bright, even her bare bones that sang of death and rot blazed. Her shadow nature was but another kind of illumination to you, and this was one of the pieces of terrifying knowledge that was changing you, one of those pieces of knowledge that could make you terrifying to those who didn’t believe it or know it.

You shivered, and so did a million and a million and a million connecting threads. With the thoroughness of sunlight melting frost, Moder continued to touch everything in that final shell of you, her touch leaving behind or revealing a kind of nacre. You were shocked to recognize the iridescence. Turning and turning, a bead on her tongue, and then another incomprehensible change, and you were watching yourself through burning golden eyes. You saw your body tremble with pleasure, and saw how it allured simply because it was a body, a body that lived now and in time would die. You were permitted, using flesh you could not comprehend, to give your own clit a warm, wet, sucking kiss.

Your eyes went wide, your eyes went wide, your eyes went wide. And now again you saw yourself, but yourself as a brilliant node. Your were dim compared to Moder, you could still see that, but the way you were bright did not seem so dissimilar.

You were not of a kind with Moder, for Moder was of all kinds. But you were a little more like her than you were like anything else.

At least you were now.

Moder made a final circuit of that inmost point, filling every hollow space with a suddenness that shocked you even now.

This was beyond overwhelming words. It overwhelmed memory, too, or it would, later.

The moment passed. Moder withdrew, first from that pearl or pit or shell. Then from the body that was not flesh, her tongues slow and savoring this last taste, giving your you-heart a playful flick.

And then you were all returned to matter, a dip to earth like the swoop of a stooping hawk. The attention of your nerves brought completely to Moder’s tongue writhing in your cunt, the hot, wet, eager manifestation giving your throbbing, desperate clit all the wondrous attention you needed.

Such a return to your body pulled you at once into another gushing orgasm. It was a physical peak that in its strength seemed to assert that there was no other kind of satisfaction, nor would there ever be, but even as you cried out in pleasure, you heard how your voice connected to the hum, you felt how your sensations tugged on the unseen web. And so you came down, trembling and shivering, all-through uneasy with an ecstasy that was such a prism for meaning, for connection, for something that could not be contained in words such as these. You knew something now, and you could not un-know it, even if you couldn’t say it.

Moder set you down gently. The grass, a cool tapestry of textures, bewildered and grounded you. You watched Moder watching you for a few deep breaths, and then she lifted her head just slightly, and you followed, raising your eyes to the sky.

The long, long day had finally ended. Above you, a sea of stars turned slowly in the void, the sun’s absence revealing a dizzying multitude of other suns. Dark and light, the unsayable and the known, you and whatever else you were, the way Moder saw you and the way you saw you, and still your body breaking out in goosebumps, even Midsummer’s night not kind to a naked human in these woods. You shivered again, with cold and with everything else.

But then, you smiled. If you feared, you at least had not died from your fear. Whatever you still wondered at, whatever you still did not understand, it was not because you had been too afraid to look—to take—to taste.

Moder looked back down at you for a long moment, tilting her head. You said her name, and this time there was no pleading in it. You did not need anything more from her. She had given you all you needed to go on, and more. She bent her head towards you, until again she was very close, meeting your eyes with hers. You thought you heard a brief, sharp exhale. And then she put her hands on you, one last time: one hand gently covered the lips of your mouth, while the other gently covered the lips of your vulva. What exactly she meant was hard to say, but it felt like the thrill of a shared secret.

She took her hands away and stepped back, standing tall, taller, tallest, rearing up until her silhouette was an uncanny shock against the trees and stars, distinct from all common things yet blending into them and making them strange and glorious and terrifying.

You looked greedily at what you could see of her in the starlight, taking a deep breath to try to catch her scent again, as your heart beat fast with what could only be called love, but only because the word had meant so many things over the centuries—what was one more wild branch of meaning from that root?

You caught the spark of her eyes one last time, then lost it as she turned away. You heard the quiet thud of her hooves returning to earth, and then rustling in the grass, and then—nothing.

You sat up. You noticed the sound of the leaves and the grasses against each other in the night wind, and then the sound of night insects, and then a few night birds, and some sounds from other animals. You were still not afraid, but you knew that your body might die if you didn’t do something about being naked and lost in the woods at night.

The parts of you that knew about things like buses and hostels and cell phones had not yet fully reasserted themselves, and perhaps that was for the best right now, since from that perspective you had very little chance of finding your way to shelter before much hardship. You stood, your legs for a moment barely solid enough to support yourself. But you had to walk, so you did. Your eyes had so much adjusted to the starlight that you easily found your clothes and pack, and just as easily made yourself look almost indistinguishable from the person who had walked into the woods.

And then you walked out of the clearing, and out of the trees.

You never remembered that walk. The next distinct memory you had was placing your hand on a wooden trail-marker post and staggering, as if impossibility had weight and you had suddenly been forced to carry it all. You took a few shallow, frantic breaths, and then considered: did you really want to panic or did you simply feel as though you should? (And why Panic? Your encounter had been with Moder.) You had been touched and you had been changed and you had lived. And now you were going to get back to your hostel.

You still let out a giddy laugh as you took out your cell phone and the map—there seemed something irreconcilable about hands that had touched Moder’s fur now opening a flashlight app—but you pushed through the incongruity. Moder might see fewer contradictions, you thought. You were using tools, and that was what human animals did. A phone and a torch would be all the same, to her.

It didn’t take you long to identify the way back to the trailhead, and you took it. When you got there, you were able to use your phone to set systems in motion to return you to your hostel. Yes, it was late. You’d lost track of time. You were fine, just tired.

You were glad of how easy it was to give plausible lies. If you had been given a revelation you had also been given the right of a secret. (And what exactly was the secret? How had you been changed? The answers were in you but they did not come yet.)

Eventually a car came and took you back to your hostel. You and the driver said a few things to each other. Greetings, your vague apology for being out here at all at this time.

In the hostel you marked in the log that you’d returned. No one was staffing the desk at this hour, and the few people in the common room had given you only the notice of a glance or two when you’d walked in. You waited a few moments for frenzy to hit you, for you to be seized with the uncontrollable urge to grab someone’s shoulders and shout at them about Moder, Moder, Moder, do you know what’s out there in the woods? Do you know what she did to me? You waited a few moments more for something else, perhaps a collapse, perhaps you ought to faint after what you did.

You neither fainted nor shouted. You decided you did not like to define the time in the clearing as something Moder had done to you. It was true, but the words were a phrase that didn’t carry the right meaning. You would never say or think it that way again. You smiled.

This is not to say that you were calm, or could understand everything that clamored in your memory. Impossibility still loomed over you like a thunderhead. But you had always wanted there to be something like Moder out there, and now you could still feel in your cunt how she had fucked you. You would swim, not drown, in this new water.

You went upstairs to your tiny private room, and fell asleep.

Over the next few days, you did not gain any more clarity in your thinking about your encounter with Moder. You found yourself not thinking about it, the way you didn’t think about gravity, or how to walk. It was as if the memory had burrowed into you, and was waiting for the right signs, the right conditions, to come out. You worried—though maybe not as much as you would have before your encounter—what those circumstances might be, and if you would have any warning, and what would happen, then. Because, though you found yourself again, and again, and again, not thinking about it, your body kept bringing it back. It hadn’t been exempted from the change, after all.

You were neither hungry nor thirsty for three days after you returned, and you knew it was Moder’s milk that sustained you. When you finally sought out water again, when you finally sought out ordinary food again, you felt weak with pathetic relief that you had not been changed in this particular fundamental way. You had not wanted to become so inhuman. You thought, back in the clearing with Moder, you would have trusted that she would not take away your humanity, but it was easy to doubt when the impossible truth of her was not before you.

Your appetite for food was not the only one that was strangely altered for you in the days after you left the clearing. More frequently and more powerfully than you had ever experienced, you were overcome with sudden arousal. Almost every time, there was no probable reason for any arousal at all, but reason had no recourse against your body’s immediate demands. And they were demands. If you could have avoided locking yourself in a museum bathroom, one hand frantically working away at your clit, the other in your mouth to stifle any sounds you might make, you would have. But you preferred to come in some kind of privacy, rather than in public due to the friction of your clothes, the pressure of certain sitting positions, or the rumble of a train seat. You preferred not to discover how your discretion might break when all your senses burned.

It was a strange kind of helplessness, and in a way you liked it, because it reminded you of how helpless you’d been before Moder.

It was easiest to remember anything about Moder when you were masturbating, as you discovered in your tiny private room, where you also discovered that you were more sensitive now, that you pleased yourself more easily. You lost hours to your own hands, and when you finally fell asleep the taste of her milk was so perfect in your mind it might as well have been on your tongue.

It was only reasonable to wonder what unknown—unacknowledged—unimagined appetite might be thrown awry with clearer memories of Moder, of what Moder had shown, of what Moder had given. Of what Moder had left behind.

But as the hours and days passed, you held onto the thing that slipped forward into your memory over and over again: your encounter was not intended to end with death. Whatever happened, you would live through it. You couldn’t spend your time in fear of what you had desired.

And by then you had started eating again, and satisfying yourself by your own choice had started to lessen the urgency and frequency of unexpected arousal. (You had orgasmed in public once, from frictions and pressures and movement that would ordinarily have meant nothing. You didn’t think it had been identifiable, and you’d made an effort to confuse any suspicion of the way you breathed or your expression by reaching up to hold your head as if you were in pain, and muttering about a migraine. No one who had even had a chance of noticing anything amiss said anything. You’d lost some of your fear, then, and that might have also helped calm your impulses.)

There was one specific thing that truly worried you, though. This was why, when your period started bright and bloody the day before you were to return home, you slumped forward on the toilet with relief, though your long flight now would include this added discomfort.

Moder had not made you pregnant, at the last, with her tongue, with whatever was hidden in the void beneath her eyes. Making you the vessel for some strange child was not the endpoint of the change she’d wrought. You hadn’t really thought it would be, not with what you remembered, but you couldn’t be sure. It seemed like the way a myth would conclude, and Moder was...Moder was…

Moder was not a myth, and she had done something else to you.

You grinned at your blood.

The systematic motions of travel scooped you up and carried you along, and it was easy to follow all the old paths. You went from line to line, had your passport checked, you went to a certain place to wait for a certain plane. You bought a coffee, and you read a story on your phone that you had trouble focusing on because of the television in the waiting area, even though the news program being shown wasn’t in English.

You waited to hate your current situation, for the way it was not the woods, for the way it was so regimented, for the way everything had to be just one thing in this place. You were at the right gate or you weren’t. You had your boarding pass or you didn’t. Weren’t places like this a threat to Moder?

The new kind of hate, for Moder’s sake, didn’t arrive. Now, in the bright, hard cavern of the airport, bored and yet forced to vigilance for any changing circumstances—because the machinery of travel was far from perfect and you had a very long way to go—now, somehow, you finally found yourself better able to think about Moder.

You thought about her walking through the terminal, her hooves clicking on the tile. You knew she would not look small, despite the height of the ceilings. You knew the fluorescent lights would be helpless to make her comprehensible, little things so much weaker than the sun, which loved her darkness. Torches and paths marked out with stones and wooden posts. Carts on wooden wheels. Those had never driven back Moder, and neither would this place.

You looked around slowly, looking for the things you needed to notice.

On a display board, delays due to weather.

A child licking a candy wrapper, then fingers, heedless of anything but sugar.

A fly landing on a forgotten plate at the nearby restaurant. Whatever had been served, it had had bones, and those remained.

A couple leaned against each other on the uncomfortable chairs. One’s hand lightly played in the other’s hair, one’s nose pressed against the other’s neck, seeking comfort in a closeness that rejected the ideal of filtered air.

It was all still here. Of course it was. The lines of light you’d seen couldn’t be cut, not as long as there was even a little life to eagerly pass its span, and die, and feed the life that followed in rot. You’d had to go to the woods to know it, but it wasn’t something you could lose or un-know, now.

Life, life, life.

The boundaries always breaking, thin and fragile as they were.

The web never breaking, though its hold was not always gentle.

You held these things in your mind like you would hold smooth stones in your hand. They were not what Moder had left inside you, at the last. They were not nearly all of what had finally made the malestrom of your need into a sea of cool, deep, still water. But they were tied to it. You would use them to bring up what waited at the bottom of that sea, to draw out Moder’s complete gift to you, the gift beyond knowing that she was in the world.

You didn’t know what would flow from you the more you knew of that gift. The simplest speculation was that you would create something, but you didn’t dare speculate any further. In truth, you didn’t want to. You were ready to start out lost again, to find your way with care or not at all, as if you were once again in the woods. You were ready to find that humming clearing in yourself, that place that meant you would never feel displaced again. You would have your place, as Moder had hers.

You were ready to hum.

You were ready for others to hear that hum.

And if anyone followed it to you, well. Then, you’d find out even more about what Moder had given you, and how much you’d really been changed.