Pursuit

January 2025. Fantasy.

She stirs in the grass. A thousand distant stars stare down. Her back itches where tiny blades, sharp and cold, prickle her. She sits up.

Old, tired shadows loom around her. The trees shake and whisper in the wind that howls. The midget who sits among them, beneath their branches, stares up with pure wonder at the stars that watch the world patiently as it spins.

She can feel it spin. She can feel the huge heaviness beneath her, a rock with thick muscles of basalt and tough bones of granite. It pulls her down, and in its strength is the tenderness of a mother with a child in her arms.

She stands. She breathes in. Sweet dirt and sour rot mingle with pine fragrance that makes her nose tingle. She breathes out. The wind takes her breath away, a transient white vapor.

She walks forward. Her steps disturb worms and scaley dwellers underground. Their presence glows for her through the dirt like lanterns in the fog, brighter than the dim presence of the trees and the grass. The birds in the boughs above pull their wings tightly around their nests, sheltering eggs within which tiny hearts beat for the first time. Even the tiny hearts have that bright presence, and when she closes her eyes, an even brighter presence glows within her.

She opens her mouth.

“I greet you, forest host,” she says, “Can you tell me who I am?”

The stars are silent. The trees shake their branches. The underground dwellers stir and return to sleep.

She turns and there is a new presence, full of heat and rage and perfect stillness - like the stars. It is taller than her, and shorter than the trees. There is a certainty in its heart, a clarity of purpose and thought which the presence of the trees and even the underground dwellers lack. She closes her eyes; it is the same kind of presence as hers. But within this new presence, a lion prowls, deep in its inner being: the strength to bend worlds.

She is afraid.

“I can tell you who you are,” says the strength. “You are alive.”

She turns and runs. She hides herself in the thick bushes with sharp thorns that tear at her skin and make the heat come out in thin red rivulets. She holds her breath and it stops, but she cannot hold her presence, and she knows that the strength can feel her.

“Let me entreat the forest host,” she says in her heart, and she knows the strength can hear her. “I will seek my answers from them.”

The strength speaks in its heart, and she hears. “They cannot give you the answers you seek.”

“Then I will find those who are bright like me and ask them. They are here on this rock. They do not have the strength that prowls like a lion inside you. I am afraid of that strength.”

“Of every presence on this rock, I alone can give you the answers you seek.”

“Then I will never find those answers,” she says. Leaving the bushes, she stands and runs, and she outruns the wind. Her pursuer never stirs a foot, never twitches a muscle, and yet is always behind her, always in front of her, always by her side, and always far away. She runs for an age. The scaley beasts of the planet die and hairy beasts take their place. She runs until the bright presences appear in time, the ones she felt an age ago.

She approaches one, tall like her pursuer, its head covered in hair, its body covered in the dried skin of a different dead animal.

“Who am I?” she asks.

The hairy one is surprised at her appearance. “Are you a ghost?”

“I do not know,” she says. “How would I know if I am a ghost?”

“You would remember your life,” says the hairy one. “Perhaps you would remember your death.”

She thinks back to the beginning, when she awoke in the forest, before the pursuit began, when the strength told her she was alive.

“I remember my life,” she says. “I don’t remember my death.”

The hairy one thinks for a moment. Meanwhile she feels the strength approach.

“Please protect me!” she cries out, and runs to the hairy one, who steps back.

“If a nearby beast ate you, and that is why you are a ghost asking for protection, then I must apologize, for I cannot protect you from what has already happened, but I can alert my tribe of the danger.”

“No, there is no nearby beast,” she says. “I was not eaten. I have been pursued for an age by that one.”

She points, and the hairy one looks, but at once she knows the hairy one's heart is dim, so it cannot know the presence of the strength the way she can.

“Carry me like the little ones you love,” she says. “Nurture me as you do them. Teach me your ways and I shall become one of you.”

The hairy one hesitates for a moment. Though she wants to read its heart, though her fear and curiosity are strong, she closes the eyes of her mind and lets the hairy one think in the sanctuary of its heart.

“I will bring you to the tribe elder,” the hairy one says. “Follow me.”

She offers up her hand and the hairy one leads her. At last, the strength does not follow.