It unmade the physical trappings of Cabeswater – the trees, the creatures, the ferns, the rivers, the stones – but it also unmade the dreamy ideas of the forest. The memories caught in groves, the songs invented only in night-time, the creeping euphoria that ebbed and flowed around one of the waterfalls. Everything that had been dreamt into this place it undreamt.
The dreamer it would unmake last.
He would fight.
They always fought.
As the demon unwound and undid, it kept encountering threads of its own story teased through the underbrush. Its origin story. This fertile place, rich with the energy of the ley line, was not just good for growing trees and kings. It was also good for growing demons, if there was enough bad blood spilled on it.
There was more than enough bad blood pooled in this forest to make a demon.
Little stopped its work. It was the forest’s natural enemy, and the one thing that would stop the demon in its tracks had not yet occurred to anyone. Only the oldest of the trees put up a fight, because they were the only things that remembered how. Slowly and methodically, the demon unpicked them from the inside. Black beaded from their decaying branches; they crashed down as their roots rotted to nothing.
One tree resisted for longer than the others. She was the oldest, and had seen a demon before, and knew that sometimes it wasn’t about saving yourself, it was about holding out for long enough until someone else could save you. So she held out, and stretched for the stars even as her roots were being dug away, and she held out, and she sang to other trees even as her trunk was rotting out, and she held out, and she dreamt of the sky even as she was unmade.
The other trees wailed; if she had been unmade, who could stand?
The demon did not sleep.
Depending on where you began the story, it was about Gwenllian.
She awoke with a scream that morning at dawn. “Get up!” she howled to herself as she leapt from her bed. Her hair hit the slanted attic ceiling, and then her skull did; she pressed her hand to her head. It was still dull gray outside, early morning, but she hit switches and scrolled knobs and pulled cords until every light was on in the space. Shadows keeled this way and that.
“Get up!” she said again. “Mother, mother!”
Her dreams still clung to her, trees melting black and demons hissing unmaking; she waved her hands around her to clear the cobwebs from her hair and ears. She tugged a dress over her head, and then pulled on another skirt, and her boots, and her sweater; she needed her armour. Then she weaved through the cards she had left spread on the floor and the plants she had burned for meditation and headed directly to the two mirrors that her predecessor had left there in the attic. Neeve, Neeve, lovely Neeve. Gwenllian would have known her name even if the others had not told her, because the mirrors whispered and sang and hissed it all the time. How they loved her and hated her. They judged her and admired her. Lifted her up and tore her down. Neeve, Neeve, hateful Neeve, had wanted the whole world’s respect and had done everything to get it. It was Neeve, Neeve, lovely Neeve, who hadn’t respected herself in the end.
The full-length mirrors were set up to face each other, eternally reflecting a reflection. Neeve had performed some complicated ritual to ensure that they were full of all the possibilities she could imagine for herself and then some, and in the end, one of them had eaten her. Proper witchery, the women of Sycharth would have said. They would have all been shipped off to the woods.
Gwenllian stood between the mirrors. The magic of them tugged and howled. The glass was not meant to show so many times at once; most people were not built to process so many possibilities at once. Gwenllian was just another mirror, though, and so the magic glanced off her harmlessly as she pressed her palms to either glass. She reached into all the possibilities and looked around, darting from one false truth to another.
“Mother, mother,” Gwenllian said out loud. Her disordered thoughts transmuted if she didn’t say them out loud at once.
And there her mother was: in this real present, this current possibility, this reality where Neeve herself was dead. A forest, being unmade, and Gwenllian’s mother, unmade with them.
Unmade
Unmade
Un
With a scream, Gwenllian smashed the mirrors to the ground. A cry came from downstairs; the house was waking. Screaming again, Gwenllian cast about her room for a tool, a weapon. There was little in this attic that could make a dent – ah. She snatched up a lamp, the cord slapping from the wall, and clattered down the stairs. Thump thump thump thump each foot on the stair, double time.
“Artemusssssssss!” she cooed, her voice snapping halfway through. She slid into the dim kitchen. It was lit only by the little bulb over the oven and the diffuse gray through the window above the sink. It was only fog, no sun. “Artemusssss!”
He was awake; probably he had had the same dream as she. They had the same starry stuff in their veins, after all. His voice came through the door. “Go away.”
“Open the door, Artemussss!” Gwenllian said. She was out of breath. She was shaking. The forest, unmade, her mother, unmade. This coward magician hiding in this closet having killed everyone through his inactivity. She tried the door; he had secured it with something from the inside.
“Not today!” Artemus said. “No, thank you! Too many events this decade. Perhaps later! Cannot do the shock! Thank you for your time.”
He had been an adviser to kings.
Gwenllian smashed the lamp against the door. The bulb shattered with a silvery sound; the end of the lamp split the thin laminate of the door. She sang, “Little rabbit down the hole, down the hole, / Little foxen down the hole, down the hole, / Little houndlet down the hole, down the hole! Come out, little rabbit, I have questions. About demons.”