Stories always seem to start with “deep in the forest” or “once upon a time”, but this tale begins in a much more mundane fashion.
Just down the road, and just the other day, on the shores of the Silver Lake, three children of local birth and rearing were playing together. Their momma is a washerwoman (you may well have paid her tuppence to have your shirts and smallclothes whitened), and their pappa tills a small patch of his own not far from here. And though their parents are good and industrious people, their three youngest children are not yet so gainfully employed.
With summer reaching the end of its swing, there was naught for this young trio to do of a balmy afternoon—their older siblings were busily at work with their parents, and they were left to roam as they pleased.
Being aged six, seven-and-three-quarters, and nine, they have reached the early stages of rebellious adventure, with just enough freedom to satisfy the occasional naughty caprice. Naturally, they have been told many times not to leave the shores of the lake alone, and especially never to venture into the forest without their father or uncles. Though the signs warning against trespassing into the woods have been removed, there are always other dangers to be feared in the trees. All children of Myrkentown and its surrounds know of its hazards:
Poison oak. Hornets with stingers the size of your thumb. Wolves. Bandits! Mad witches! Child-eating, fire-breathing dragons!
And yet, the trees did call to them, with the rustling whisper of swaying boughs, and bade them enter the cool, dappled shade after chasing one another through the lake shallows. The trio crept to the very edge of the treeline with sighs of relief, but the smallest still checked over his shoulder to see that they were unobserved.
“Baby,” his sister (one year and seven months his senior) crooned under her breath, and his head snapped around like she’d yanked on his ear. She had seen well-dressed ladies in open carriages of late, cooling themselves with delicate fans made of ivory and perfumed silk. With the power of make-believe, and an already wilting leaf in hand, she now fancied herself equally fine. She practiced her aristocratic glower as the ‘baby’ came near, staring cross-eyed down her nose in an exaggerated fashion.
“Kaia! I am not!” he snapped back, and marched a defiant three steps farther than where she leaned against a sturdy trunk, fanning herself with a snapped fern frond. But Kaia didn’t budge from the tree, not even when he planted a chubby fist on each hip, and smiled his challenge. She was above such petty, childish, baby games.
The eldest of the three, less condescending, and not to be outdone by their baby brother, leapt almost his full body length farther still into the trees. He had hit a growth spurt recently, and was marvelling at how quickly he could cross distances that had seemed to take ages only weeks before.
“Yer both chicken!” he declared from his new position. “Chickens, chickens ... chick-ens!” In a fantastic display of maturity, he began to turn on the spot, shuffling his feet and waggling his arms as he did his best impersonation of their mother’s laying hens. He clucked and chortled at his own wit, while his siblings stewed and glared.
“Well, if I’m a chicken,” his sister sputtered, “yer a … a … a filthy, fat worm! And I’ll crush you, Fynn!” Discarding her bedraggled fan, Kaia bolted past both of her brothers into a thick pile of shoulder-high ferns. She had not yet hit a growth spurt—the fronds nearly swallowed her tiny frame, and she shoved them aside impatiently.
“Betcher too scared to go pass me!” she taunted. And with that challenge, they all broke the rule that had been repeated from when they were in the very womb: don’t enter the woods alone.
The boys darted and dashed past, and their sister strove to keep up. Her ‘baby’ brother was nearly as tall as she, and more than her match at running, so the boys soon left her scrambling behind. With shrieks of laughter and continued taunts, they ran and leapt for five minutes or more. Then, the eldest stopped short of a sudden, his arms windmilling as he struggled to catch his balance at the edge of a sharp drop. A sapling bowed in his grip, and he pulled himself upright only just in time.
“Dom! Watchout!” he shrieked at his younger brother, still barreling towards him. Unheeding, the youngster charged straight ahead.
“Who’s the chicken now--oooh--OOHHH!” For one moment, Dom hung suspended in the air like a featherless, graceless bird. Then gravity remembered that children are not immune to to its effects, and the boy began his descent. With a series of leafy shudders and twiggy snaps, the young boy went down—and down further still.
Fynn watched from above, sick with horror as the six-year-old vanished into the undergrowth. Only the shivering of brush and saplings between the trees marked his passage as he rolled down the hillside. By the time their sister had reached the sharp drop indicating the start of the gully, the plants had ceased their trembling below.
“Oh,” she said, so out of breath that she couldn’t manage more. The pair strained their eyes to find sign of their brother in the thick growth beneath them.
“Mum’s gonna kill us,” Fynn whispered, his eyes bright and glossy with the start of tears. “Mum’s. Going. To kill us! We killed Dom!” But the eldest’s nattering was cut short by a wail—Dom was definitely not as dead as Fynn presumed. The wail intensified into a wild, sobbed cry of pain and fear, and the still-upright siblings shinnied down the embankment to race towards the sound.
This time it was Kaia who led the way, and Fynn who lagged behind, his guilt at not stopping his brother’s fall dragging like a lead weight on his ankles. Though their sister had started the game, guilt hadn’t yet caught up, and she bullied her way through the undergrowth towards the screaming boy. Plants that didn’t brush aside were snapped out of the way, and a tiny trail of destruction marked her passage.
“Dom!” she shouted, “Dom! Can you stand? We ca’n see you!”
“Dom! Where are you, Dom?” Fynn joined in, the effort lightening his guilt and his feet.
Slowly, a thick bush disgorged a still desperately crying Dom. Covered in scrapes and superficial scratches, he lurched towards his siblings on no longer confident legs—but most of the shaking seemed to come from shock at falling, rather than any serious injury.
“Dom!” Kaia and Fynn shouted nearly as one, and the three were reunited.
“Does it hurt?” the sister asked.
“You dinnit break anything, right?” the brother insisted.
But Dom only wailed louder and clutched both of his siblings tightly. Satisfied that he wasn’t actually hurt, Kaia shrugged out of his grip and crossed her arms with a frown.
“You really are a baby,” she chastised. “You broke your arm when you fell from Uncle Saro’s roof last year, and you dinnit cry nearly as much.”
Fynn glared at his sister, and opened his mouth to defend the crying lad, but she shook her head and stiffened her lips. The words died before they made it to his tongue. He’d seen their father make that face when Dom was having a cry, and watched amazed as the boy began to settle almost immediately under their sister’s frown. His sobs became hiccups, and his wail turned into a sniffle. Once he’d calmed down enough to release Kaia and Fynn’s arms, Dom smeared snot away from his face with both muddy hands.
“There,” said Kaia, looking a bit smug at her accomplishment. “Innit that better?”
“Uhhuh,” Dom grumbled, emotions still tumbling after—fear and pain were replaced by grudging acceptance and embarrassment. He continued to scrub his face with grubby, scraped fists for a few moments, and the elder two waited patiently for him to cease.
“Where are we?” he finally asked, once he’d managed to turn his face into an almost solid cake of blood, mucous, and mud. The other two joined him in slowly turning about, unsure. They had come down the hill, and could go back up, but where was here exactly? They had never come into the wood alone, and though they were not far from the lake, they had never seen this gully, either.
It stretched wide and high, and they could see no easy path in or out. They had made their own, of course, but that would be a difficult trek back out again. Some distance away, the trees began to thin, and light streamed bold and bright in wide, cheerful beams. Fynn pointed towards the break in the forest wall.
“I bet that’s a shortcut out, c’mon!” Fynn leapt ahead of the other two again, waving enthusiastically for them to follow. Bolstered by his confidence, the younger two followed. Dom occasionally wiped his nose on the back of his arm, but his spirits seemed much lifted already. It took but a minute to reach the edge of the trees, but longer for them to figure out what they were looking at.
Directly before the three children, and shrouded by invasive growth from the forest, was a wide, circular pavilion of marble.
They had found a forgotten temple.
(to be continued...)