At the End of the Ashen Forest, the Sage Learns of the Boy's Past Life
The continent's frontier, where the forest elves once flourished and are now said to have perished. The deep Ashen Woods spread everywhere, where miasma and beasts keep people away. Magic remains only as ancient relics and curses, never systematized. Villages are isolated, and the closed societies fiercely expel heretics. The village where the boy was born has a law to quarantine, not kill, the cursed children.
Sol, a boy with memories of a past life, has lived in lonely isolation as the cursed
At the End of the Ashen Forest, the Sage Learns of the Boy's Past Life - Forest of Questions
The air before dawn was heavy, like ash saturated with water.
Soru felt the sound of his own footsteps against the ground echoing strangely distant in his ears. One step, then another. His knees were trembling. A dull spasm ran through his lower back, and each time it did, the edges of his vision blurred white. He no longer knew how long he had been walking since crossing the village boundary stone. All he knew was the sweet stench of miasma rising from the depths of rotting leaves—a smell he was experiencing for the first time in his life—and the bitter scent of earth and bark, clinging deep inside his lungs.
*(I've known this forest for a long time.)*
In his dreams. Over and over. A city of burning giant trees. Collapsing canopies. Screams. Silver-haired people fleeing in panic. The afterimages were still seared onto the backs of Soru's eyelids. For sixteen years, in the darkness of the isolation hut, he had seen this landscape nearly every night. Now, overlapping with the real forest before him, each dead tree looked like the burnt remnants from his dreams.
*No.*
Soru shook his head. The motion sent a sharp pain through the wound at his temple—the place where a stone had split his skin in the village square days ago. There was an old scar at the corner of his lip, too. Also from a stone. The third stone had been thrown when he was barely ten years old. A village woman had thrown it, laughing. She said it was to purify the impurity. The people who spoke that way always had the most accurate aim.
He didn't remember that woman's face.
And yet, the coldness of the stone and the sensation of his lip splitting—those came back every time he traced the scar with his finger.
Soru found himself unconsciously running his fingertip along the scar on his lip. Then he let that finger slide to the black stone amulet hanging at his neck. A black stone the size of his thumb. His only possession, tied around his neck with a leather cord. A stone that had slept cold against his chest since childhood. When danger approached, it grew faintly warm. That was all—a stone of unknown origin, unknown name.
It was cold now.
*(...Still fine.)*
That was the moment.
The black stone grew hot.
Not gradually—suddenly. As if a fire iron had been pressed against his skin, the heat seared his chest. Soru caught his breath and stopped walking. His heart pounded against the inside of his ribs as if trying to punch its way out.
—*It's coming.*
The presence arrived before the sound.
A lukewarm wind blew from straight ahead. The smell of rotting flesh, damp ash, and something metallic mixed together. The stench of miasma. A cold sweat traced a line down the back of Soru's neck. *Crunch.* The sound of a dead branch being stepped on. Then a low growl, like something crawling along the bottom of the earth.
From the depths of the gray forest, it emerged.
A twin-headed ash wolf—a High Wolf.
Its shoulder height reached an adult's waist. Its body length rivaled that of a gaunt cow. Two necks covered in gray, withered bristles swayed slowly left and right, each fixing its gaze on Soru from a different angle. All four eyes glowed with a murky, clouded white, and corrosive saliva dripped in strings from between bared fangs, sizzling and foaming where it touched the ground.
Soru felt the strength about to drain from his legs.
*This isn't something I can run from.* Some cold part of his mind understood that. Human legs could never outrun a beast of the Ashen Forest. The more he struggled, the more surely it would crush his cervical spine from behind. He'd seen it in his dreams. No—this was knowledge. His body had known it first. He knew exactly how he would die.
—*I'm going to die.*
The words settled into his chest with startling ease.
*(...So this is how it ends.)*
Instead of burning in the Full Moon Festival's flames, it would be the ash wolf's fangs. That was fitting for the death of a cursed child. No one in the village would mourn him. No—the villagers would probably offer prayers of celebration if he died. They'd laugh around the well, saying what a blessing it was. That was fine. That was—
*(Is it really fine?)*
The black stone burned against his chest.
Soru gripped it with trembling fingers. He had left the village searching for a place to die. It wasn't that he wanted to live. But.
*(Dying right now—that's wrong.)*
He thought it without any basis.
The High Wolf moved.
Its left head lowered its body. Corrosive saliva glinted in the faint morning light. Then, in the next instant, the beast's body sprang like a coiled spring. A gray mass tore through the wind, closing in. Two open jaws. Beyond the fangs, a bright red maw. Rotting breath expelled.
Soru twisted his body on reflex. But his body wouldn't move. His legs were heavy, as if sewn to the ground. —*No good.* The fangs grazed his right shoulder. *Ssss.* Not the cloth—it was as if acid had licked the surface of his skin, a searing pain. Before blood could even spray from his shoulder, the corrosive property of the fangs was already turning the flesh white and foaming.
"—gh, ah"
A voiceless sound died in his throat.
Unable to kill his momentum, Soru fell backward onto the ground. His back slammed against a bundle of dead branches, forcing the air from his lungs all at once. His vision went white. Through it, he could see the High Wolf raising both heads. Two pairs of murky eyes narrowed slowly, as if savoring the final moment before finishing its prey.
*(I'm going to die.)*
This time, death had a much clearer outline than before.
Soru closed his eyes.
—At that moment.
From the depths of the earth, something made a sound like crawling out.
A dull *rumble rumble rumble*—the sound of tree roots splitting the ground.
Then, outside Soru's closed vision, alongside the High Wolf's roar, the air tore apart with tremendous force.
"—!?"
Soru's eyes flew open.
From the withered soil, countless blackened tree roots were rising all at once—like a fountain, no, like a swarm of serpents devouring a beast. The roots entangled the High Wolf's limbs, its two necks, its torso, in the blink of an eye. Right foreleg, left hind leg, one cervical spine, both jaws. Each time the roots bit into flesh, the beast let out a dog-like yelp and thrashed. But the more it struggled, the tighter the roots constricted its body.
"...Another forest beast. You've got a stupid look on your face."
A voice.
Through the thin morning mist, between the gray trees, a woman walked forward. She wore a black robe, and her long, wavy hair was a gray so pale it was nearly white. With each step, faint traces of talisman powder spilled from inside her robe like glowing scales. Her left eye shone gold; her right eye was a deep brown. Her gaze seemed unfocused, yet in truth it pierced through everything, fixed directly on the gray mark on Soru's right shoulder.
A wandering witch.
The woman who had spoken to him last night at the forest's edge, when he had failed to die. The woman who had said: *I'll save you, but you'll be my traveling companion.* Her name was Efi.
Efi was down on one knee. The hem of her black robe spread across the ash and fallen leaves. In her hand was a slender dagger. With the back of the blade, she was carving a pattern into the ground. Her movements were fast, and quiet. With each stroke, each line she traced with the dagger, the sigil etched into the earth pulsed faintly—*thump, thump*.
The Root-Binding Circle.
One of the primary arts remaining in this world: circle magic. By carving specific patterns into the ground or objects and using catalysts left behind by the forest people, one could activate it. No incantation was needed—only the precision of the circle and the concentration of tree-vein essence flowing through the caster's blood determined its power. Efi was drawing the intricate circle almost in a single breath.
"Hold still. This is going to thrash a bit."
Her voice was flat and drawn-out, as if being absorbed into the forest's silence.
With the fingers of her left hand, Efi plucked a small fragment of bark from inside her robe. A forest person's bark fragment. A catalyst, dried out and dusted white, small enough to fit in her palm. She tossed it into the circle on the ground using only her eyes.
The next instant.
*Whoosh*—the circle erupted with light.
No, it wasn't light. From beneath the ground, black roots surged with incomparable force. It was as if all the anger sleeping beneath this forest's soil had awakened at once.
The High Wolf was crushed.
The beast's torso was constricted by the roots, and the sound of bones creaking—*crack, crack*—echoed eerily through the quiet forest. Its two heads were bent inward and outward at their respective necks, corrosive saliva foaming and soaking into the ground.
*GYA, GYAGYA, GYAAAAAA—!!*
The death cry tore through the forest for an instant.
Then, silence.
Soru watched the scene, breath held.
Efi slowly stood up. She brushed the ash from the hem of her robe with her left palm—*pat, pat*. There was no tension in the gesture. In the newborn morning air, only her shadow stretched unnaturally long across the gray ground.
Then Efi let her gaze drift toward Soru.
The gold eye and the brown eye appraised him simultaneously. This was not the look of someone checking on a person she'd saved. It was the look of someone examining a stone picked up from the roadside—trying to determine whether it was really just a stone, or something else entirely.
"...You look a lot closer to death than yesterday."
"............"
He couldn't answer.
His throat was dry and stiff, as if someone had poured lime down it.
Efi let out a small sigh.
"I save a dying man and don't even get a word of thanks. You're really something."
Her lips twisted slightly. An expression that could be read as either a smile or a sneer. The light in her eyes wasn't smiling.
Soru bit the scar on his lip.
"...Sorry."
A crushed voice finally emerged, with great effort.
It wasn't a word of thanks. *Thank you for saving me.* He knew, logically, that a normal person would say that first. But the words wouldn't come. Sixteen years of life, raised behind the locked door of an isolation hut, forced to pray. He had far too few memories of exchanging words with other people.
*(No. That's not it.)*
Somewhere in his heart, a different voice spoke.
It wasn't that gratitude wouldn't come.
*(I survived.)*
He was supposed to die. He should have been able to die. By dying, he could finally escape from this self that was nothing and no one. And yet, this woman had taken that from him—yesterday, and today. Why wouldn't she leave him alone? Why.
—*I see.*
Soru realized it for the first time.
He was grateful to this woman—and at the same time, angry at her.
That contradiction tangled into a mess in his throat, leaving him unable to say anything.
Efi silently looked down at Soru's face for a while.
Then, abruptly, she crouched down. She knelt on one knee, bringing her face level with his. Her silver-gray hair swayed softly at the edge of Soru's vision, though there was no wind. The front of her black robe opened slightly, revealing for an instant the band of talismans wrapped densely inside. The smell of old cloth, faint talisman powder, and a hint of grass and smoke.
"Hey, Soru."
Hearing his name, Soru's head snapped up.
The gold and brown eyes were right there.
"You heard me, right? Yesterday, I said you'd be my traveling companion."
"...I heard."
His voice trembled.
"If you remember, then this'll be quick."
Efi touched the wound on Soru's right shoulder—the gash from the fangs—with her finger, just for an instant. Touched? No, she hadn't touched it. Her fingertip merely moved slowly over the skin at the barest distance, as if tracing it.
Even so, Soru's entire body went rigid.
Being touched by someone. Just the anticipation of it made his organs clench, as if seized by a cold hand.
Efi's finger stopped.
"..
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