Free IGMS Issue 49 by IGMS Page A

wolf's ghost smiles cruelly. "Don't you remember, Man?" It prowls across the woodsmen's bodies. "Did the dead give you back what you begged them to steal?"
    Why would I
ask
for this? "Where are your bones? I will see you buried outside these Woods and at peace and you will
leave me be
."
    "Look down," the wolf says. "You will see."
    The raven inclines its head, hooks the eye from its socket with its talons, and pops it back into my skull. The wolf does the same.
    Again my vision reels, settles, and I blink against crusted blood on my eyelids.
    The ghosts' vengeance falls like an ax blade. Their memories and my own wrap together in my eyes and play out unflinching, unavoidable.
    He feeds blood to the map so it will show him where the old huntsmen are buried, cursed into undeath for their failure to save the First Forest from the war between Sun and Moon. Crouched among the petrified tree stumps, agate-colored in the campfire, he uses his knives to dig through ancient soil until he finds the six huntsmen.
    (High above, the raven watches him.)
    "Why do you disturb us?" the huntsmen wail.
    He pulls them from their graves and offers a simple bargain: Follow him to the Woods, which have grown on the blood and bones of the dead left from war. There their axes lie; they will pick up their tools again and kill him. Chop his name into nothing and make his body the same. His bones, full of sunlight, will burn them into ash and they will be free.
    (His death is what he promised the raven.)
    The woodsmen agree. They take up their axes in the Woods.
    (Far away, a wolf races across the land, a rippled blur of silver-black. The wolf raises his head and howls. "Wait, my love! Wait for me!"
    But the raven does not hear. The wolf cannot reach the raven in time to save him.)
    The huntsmen toss a net over the man, and he waits for the end, waits as they dig his name from his ribs with cold hands, waits as they cut it to pieces, waits -
    But the woodsmen's blades are rusted and they have lost the strength in their arms.
    It hurts. Of course it hurts.
    They fail to kill him, leaving wounds ragged to bone not broken, and they chop away memory. For the undead, memory and flesh are the same - privileges of the living. They cannot tell the difference.
    He forgets why he came and who they are, but he never forgets his knives. He cuts himself loose and flees.
    A raven flares its wings, blocking the man's path. "Let them finish," the raven says. "You swore to me you would be no more! You swore you would pay for what you did!"
    (Far away, a wolf howls.)
    He kills the raven.
    The memory snaps my head back and the living trees of the Woods rear ancient and hateful above. I drop to my knees.
    "You remember," the wolf whispers. "How you, heartblood of the Sun, crawled far beneath our mountains and incited the earth to rupture in fire and ash. You turned our mountains into weapons. You burned our homes, our ships, our people into
nothing
."
    The ache in my gut threads like thorns through every vein. "Yes, lord wolf…"
    I sought darkness afterwards so I could forget what I did. But when was I ever honest? I didn't want to forget. I wanted the darkness to devour me, blot out my existence so even the Sun would forget. But the darkness failed.
    No … no, I shied away, unable to ask. I fell in love with the darkness, with that face in the shadows, and could not beg for my end that way. The map would only send me back to the Sun. So I found the huntsmen instead.
    With the holes in my memory now sewn shut with ash-gray thread woven by ghosts, I look up at the wolf and the raven.
    "Your bones aren't here, are they."
    The wolf's muzzle crinkles in a sad smile. "You're kneeling on them. The huntsmen buried us together when I was dead. The Woods cannot hurt us."
    "You needed no living flesh to come here," I say, numb, the words coming in dull monotone. "And my blood was never in your eyes."
    The raven's neck feathers shine blue-black and red. "No, it