Chapter Text
In the center of a cursed forest, lies a corpse refusing to rot.
Some have speculated that the corpse is the body of a cursed creature. Someone or something that caused the forest to rot away. Others say it contained the chaos, acting as a seal to keep the darkness away. Few have made it to the center and even less have made it back. The dead forest lives up to its name. Even for the three people who made it to the center and back alive, they left their week long journey at least eighty years older. They all died from old age only a few days later.
On an average day you would not want to do anything with that forest. Your spells and magic were that of healing. Of relieving pain and suffering. You were a caster of life, not the dealer of death. For the few years you've lived in this cozy town with the arguably best library and café, you have tried your hardest to stay as far away as you could from the forest. Which is probably why people gawked at you as you strolled in. Not that you really noticed, you were too entranced by the relic leading you in.
It was an old metallic container that housed crystals in the center, the magic potential of it was insanely powerful and it seemed to draw energy to the forest. You packed up your best healing potions you would need to try and survive the forest, and as if you were in a trance you followed it's invisible tug to the center of it. If you knew you were being led into the center you would have dropped it. Let go of the handles on either side of the spherical container and fled back to the outside. The center of the forest was known to give off an ominous feeling of death and despair. It was known to be dark even in the middle of the day and looking around, light speckled through branches. You thought you were simply passing by it, moving past around the outskirts of it.
And then, you saw the body.
If you hadn't heard the stories, if it wasn’t daily gossip to talk about the newest traveler who tried to venture into the center of the forest, then maybe you would have believed that he was alive. That you found sleeping beauty lying in a clearing in the woods, with a ray of sunlight acting as his spotlight. He had dark, almost black, blue hair. It looked like it had been slicked back before, but the flowers that bloomed around him seemed to have ruffled it albeit slightly. He wore armor of a bright and vibrant red with a few bits in blue that stood out amidst the moss and plants that grew atop of it. On his face was a metal mouth guard that covered his ears with two semi-circles of metal. From those two circles jutted out thin fin like contraptions wrapped in vines. They reminded you of some sort of metal mimic of an elf's ears.
As you observed his body, you noticed a small bundle of bright blue flowers, the same color as the crystals within the metal container. You moved to pick one from the bunch only to promptly find they went deeper than they seemed. You brushed aside the flowers, thinking that perhaps his chest armor had been dented, but they would not budge. Instead, you reached past the flowers, and found soft muddy earth. A gaping hole pierced the man before you, if you had any reason to believe he was somehow alive before, your thoughts were dashed. No way could someone survive being pierced through an area with so much damage to internal organs. His heart, specifically, was most certainly one of the things obliterated from whatever attack killed him.
The relic pulled at your grip, trying to move closer to what you could assume was it's owner. Complying, you held it over his chest and watched with silent awe as the blue flowers glowed in bright reply. You set it down on the soft bed of blue. The metal container fit perfectly with the hole in his chest, and glowed as it returned to its rightful place.
In a daze stricken awe, you watched as the flowers around him, all glowed. Flowers of different colors all began to glow, and began to grow. They grew upwards and outwards, ferns and leaves popping up all around you. A few vines even began to wrap around your legs, but the most miraculous thing to watch, was the metal of the relic, melting over and merging with the metal of his armor, sealing the hole within him. You could marvel as the trees regained their leaves and bloomed with soft pink flowers that glowed in the sunlight that dappled through the trees and it would not compare to the pink that flushed his face with life under the sunlight or the pale pink of his lips, newly revealed as the mouth guard snapped back. The forest, now alive around you, sighed and hissed as a breeze ran through the newly grown leaves, but you couldn’t bring yourself to care, too intently watching the soft rise and fall of his shoulders as he took his first breath.
Finally, with all the beauty of a starry midnight, he opened his eyes.
The sclera of his eyes, the part that was white on your own, was a pitch black that only highlighted the vivid blue of his eyes. A color, you had to note, that was the same as the crystal in his chest, and subsequently the flowers that grew through the hole.
He sat up, slowly taking in the beautiful surroundings of the forest. If his starry wide eyes were anything to go by, the forest's beauty was new to him as well. His eyes eventually landed on you, connecting with your gaze as your eyes refused to look away from him. Whether it was from the awe of what just happened or his apparent beauty, was up to debate, and your brain did not want to cooperate to make any excuse against it. If it did, you would probably conclude that it was both.
"Did…" he paused, his throat dry and scratchy, sounding sleepy as if he had just woken up from a long nap rather than be revived from the dead. "Did you do this?"
Your brain took a few moments to process the question, but in the mushy state it was in, you couldn't muster any caution. What if he did not want to be revived? What if he was upset because you had just released something terrible upon the world? No, your mind skipped over all these perfectly reasonable assumptions as you simply answered,
"Yeah."
Not even a formal yes. For all you knew, he could be some sort of ancient prince. Nonetheless, you couldn't muster the will to hate yourself as your simple answer made him grin, clear to see without the mouth guard hiding his lips, and as radiant as the burning sun. Wind swept through the clearing once more, rousing you from all your poetic comparisons of what his smile was like, and drawing your attention to hear his deep voice speak up again.
"Thank you. Thank you very much."