You’ve been made of wood such a very long time. Old oak, stained dark by age, by blood, by the sweat of the young woman who saw your best impression of carved vine-work and birds in relief beneath the lichen and carried you on her back out of the dark. Up the jagged stone slopes and rooted wilderness to a fireplace where she scrubbed you clean and varnished you new. Planted you in this life of warm and bright. A hearth of song and soft comforts.
You’ve been made of wood so long that when you uncurl and stand, the wood and the varnish remain. Your joints creak. Your voice groans. Your teeth curve in like thorns.
“Leave,” you rattle to the men, (Leaf, it sounds like. Even your language has turned to wood.) and their shocked faces rise to your direction. There are three of them, bramble-faced and odd-angled with the protrusions of hilts and scabbards. Behind their grimy silhouettes, over the horizon of the polished bar with her hands still raised in a gesture of non-violence, the old adventurer stares at you. Her spectacles are askew.
“What the fuck,” one ruffian mutters. He lifts a crossbow. You bare your thorns.
“Leave,” you snarl, and your voice splits like trees in fire.
You bend through a single step, advance in the ruffian’s direction. He fires and the arrow comes, but the head of it is iron, and the shaft of it is wood, and the fletching is made of crow feathers. None of these things are very dangerous to you. The arrow thumps into the knot of your stomach and the pain only makes you hungry.
Bend. Another step, it’s a little easier now. You had forgotten these feelings, how they rise up and make you warm: the flush of anger when your home is invaded, the bright anticipation of a meal.
The ruffians draw swords, but you can see panic sending blood into their organs and limbs. The old adventurer, eyes wide, edges sideways out of your slow, inevitable path.
“Leave!” you crack. The men judder. The start makes one of them snap back to himself and he looks around for the old adventurer, makes a scrabbling reach for her neck.
He must be the clever one. He’s figured out the one thing you won’t go through.
Not too clever though, or he might have wondered how a star-haired, old woman ended up with a blood-thirsty, magic chair. She grabs his fingers and breaks his hand.
His scream is very good. It makes your leaves grow and rustle. Makes your root-tongue rattle and ache.
The men are blood. They’ve been blood all their lives, it’s all they know. You want more of those screams. You want the woman who polished a soul into your wooden bones made safe.
So you eat, because that is how monsters protect their homes.
The men struggle and scream deliciously, as you knew they would. They demonstrate their will to live with cold steel and fingernails. Then they break and grind between your thorns, and soak into your root-tongue like wine. It’s been roughly fifty years since your last meal, so when they are gone, you spend some time crouched down by the floorboards, picking up their metacarpals and crumbs, licking up anything that’s left.
A clatter from behind the bar draws your attention. You stand to find the old adventurer with a knife in one hand and a rag in the other. Her line-carved skin is ashen.
Now that the violence is over there is time to feel your own shape. You can make yourself anything, or you could, once upon a time, but what your instincts have made you today is tall and thin, with a round head that brushes the ceiling and two legs and two arms that bend once in the middle. In all your thousand years, you never tried to be human. You never wanted to before.
This is as close as you’re ever likely to get. It is evidently not, based on the old adventurer’s expression, a very comforting likeness. She’s afraid of you. Appalled. Moving like she means to fight.
You try a smile, then remember the blood on your thorns and close your mouth. You try a wave, but there are strips of leather armor still tangled in your branched claws. You pull in, thread your claws together and stand still. You try to look non-threatening.
The old adventurer shifts, controlled in her body, even if she’s not nimble anymore. She comes out from behind the bar and her knife swings to stay pointed at you. The rag hangs limp at her side. She’s breathing very hard. Sweating. You hope her heart is alright; you’ve seen her rub her chest, like it aches, sometimes.
Should you apologize? Leave? (You don’t want to leave. Here you have the fire, the hearth, the hands that polish…But it’s clear the old adventurer is upset.)
You decide to continue being still. You’re very good at it.
Eventually–a long, creeping eventually–the old adventurer puts the knife on the bar and fixes her spectacles so they’re straight. With shaking hands, she pushes you down to sit (oh, you bend at the waist too) in a chair. The chair is much too small, and your knees fold up almost to your shoulders. It’s a very awkward position and feels transgressive, given how you spent the last fifty years. But it’s what she wants, so you oblige.
She wipes your face with the rag. Washes your branch fingers clean. It tickles, and your rattle-laugh makes her flinch. You subside back into stillness while she works.
“Thank you,” you say, quiet as you can, when she’s done. It still sounds like a wind storm, but the words are clear.
The old adventurer looks at you, firelight in her star-hair and pink rims around her eyes. Slowly, very carefully, you push a tendril of gray away from her forehead. This time she doesn’t flinch.
“Why did you never eat me?” she wants to know.
You shrug, a sway and creak like a sapling in a breeze.
“I’ve always thought you were much too beautiful to eat.” You say, awkwardly.
Her surprised laugh is like the snapping of twigs in the dark.
