If a prince falls in a forest, and no one is around, does he make a sound?
The answer, yes. Although he is the only person to hear it, he makes a sound of surprise when his horse is startled by a rushing band of coyotes, and then a sound of pain when he hits the ground with a crash and a snap. The branches of a bramble bush bend underneath him, and the thorns poke into his skin with painful clarity. As he's laying there, he's pretty sure he's at least bruised a few ribs if he hasn't cracked them, and he knows there will be purple and blue on his skin to show the damage. But the thing that hurts the most is his leg.
Looking down, he's broken it in two places. The shin is bent in a crooked, funny way, and there's a pool of blood steadily getting larger on his thigh where, with a surge of nausea, he realizes he can see the bone poking through.
So. If the heir to the throne falls in a forest, does he make a sound?
Yes. He does.
He yells for three days with burning lungs until his voice first cracks, then shatters, and he's left gasping words that make no noise.
His horse, like the loyal creature that she is, stays with the prince until she grows thirsty,and then she stays some more. She nudges him gently, and after three days, she leaves, presumably to find water. The prince does not notice when she leaves, he only notices when she is gone.
The prince does not know this, but two days after his horse leaves, she is killed and eaten by wolves.
The forest is a dangerous and complicated place, more complicated than most. It isn't called Wild-edge for nothing, you know.
When the prince falls in the forest, does his absence make a sound?
Of course.
There's mild worry when his brother says he should have arrived two days ago.
There's more concern when his mother says he should have been here a week ago.
A search for the prince is mounted when the king says my son...where is my son....
It is known that the forest is dangerous. The paths twist and bend and split off in many directions until you are lost and cold and alone. And when you are losing hope of seeing sunlight again, you find your way back to where you started, confused as to how you have spent a month wandering and getting nowhere.
It is not known that there are more things than birds and wolves and brambles in the forest.
When the blood from his leg pools and spills onto the forest ground, everything in Wild-edge knows. One by one, they all turn their heads in the same direction. Some begin making their way toward the clearing where he lies, but they pause. Something else is already moving towards him. Something...
Large.
Ancient.
Powerful.
One by one, they stop, and they ignore the blood as best they can. Some settle for the horse instead, and it satisfies them, for the moment.
(For the prince, it would have been better if he had been found by wolves.)
So the prince waits, on the threshold of his first death, and tries to ignore the strange passage of time in this twilit forest.
After a month has passed outside the forest, the kingdom gives up. They hold a funeral, then two as the king dies shortly after. The throne passes to the second eldest, who rules shakily and uncertain.
But this is all unimportant.
When the prince falls in the forest.
When the prince falls in the forest....
Does his death make a sound?
The answer to this question is both yes and no.
Yes, because the kingdom mourns his loss, and then slowly falls apart. What started as the death of a prince turned into the death of a king, and those in turn forced the kingdom into a war with a neighboring queendom. Many more died than just the prince and the king, more beyond the counting, many without graves.
And the answer is no because...the prince never died. He waited on the threshold, waiting to go over, but he never did. When a month out of the forest passed, the Lady came. She wandered out of the boughs and the leaves seemed to bow to her. The trees swayed respectfully, as if bowing. The brambles that had pricked the prince's skin and drank his blood shrank back, afraid, but did not let go.
The Lady approached, and the prince, hazy with fever, thought himself to be in a dream.
The Lady bent down to him, and with a touch, removed his fever and his pricked skin and his parched throat.
She was large, and ancient, and powerful, and she seemed to fill the clearing with her very being. She seemed to glow with twilight, and her skin seemed dusted with stars. She was not pale like the moon, but dark like the bottom of a lake, and the prince thought her to be beautiful.
(If you were expecting a happy ending, where the prince finds a strange lover in the forest to live with for the rest of eternity, you were wrong.)
He found her so beautiful that he did not feel when she grasped the bone that was sticking out of his leg and pulled. The blood that had congealed on his leg now flowed once more, and her skin turned purple as it absorbed the life that was not hers.
(That life was not hers, but the rest of the forest agreed that it was hers to take)
He stared in wonder at the beautiful person who had walked into the clearing. He stared until his skin turned pale and began to sag. He stared until the bruises lost their color. He stared until he couldn't feel his arms anymore.
In some far corner of his mind, he was screaming.
Eventually, his head dropped, and his last view of his life was of a terrible creature. A horrid thing that had absorbed his blood, who's skin was no longer dusted with stars.
With her long fingers (they might have been claws), she stroked the prince's face as the light faded from his eyes. She looked at the brambles and knew they wanted the body.
So she stood, her twilight powerful glow tinged a dark red on the edges. She let the brambles take what they wanted, and watched as they curled around the princes body and dragged him into the dark, trying to squeeze a few more drops of blood out of their scraps.
If a prince falls in a forest, and no one is around, somehow, everyone hears the echo, if not the sound.
