Demoncember writing prompt — Demon who haunts the forest, preying on presumptuous travelers. But some few are instead brought into the fold, into the embrace of the trees
The last of the humans is stumbling through the forest on a twisted ankle, shaky and terrified and inevitably listing to one side on her hurt leg, path twisted into a circle too wide for her to perceive, looped back on itself through the unfamiliar trees to return to the cabin on the lake.
She’s muttering to herself, as if delirious, about Final Girls and genre savviness and crude morality plays and getting out of here.
The thing following her, listening in fascinated incomprehension, has no name. Some of its kin have attracted such a human adornment, but this one, no; birthed of green-black fecundity, leaf-litter decay and the fears of small eaten things, it has crept and crawled and stalked through the trees since there have been trees and rot and small eaten things beneath them. No wars have been fought for it, or against it, or because of it; it inflicts no lusts, twists no wishes, whispers no toxic promises.
It creeps, it crawls, it stalks. It frightens; it eats.
The drunken boorish youths, throwing bottles into the bushes from the cabin’s porch, they did annoy it. Aesthetically, not morally. And if it picked them off one at a time, that’s largely the impulses of a predator midway down the food chain; not to be outnumbered, not to be surrounded, not to be ambushed in turn.
Leaving the grisly trophies of its kills to terrorise the rest? It was birthed of frightened eaten things. Fear is seasoning. Fear is sustenance, as much as meat and cracked and sucked-hollow bones are.
But it’s no more immune to the occasional charm of the human-people than its sorry ilk plying sly trade in unwise bargains.
The last human has pretty hair. Long and shiny. It likes her eyes: green and frightened.
Sometimes the others of its kind strike bargains that leave the humans cursing their fate, captive forever in ironic dooms. It’s all a bit elaborate, isn’t it, though? Fiddly. Perverse. Decadent, even. A remote and jaded, convoluted means of satisfaction, like eating brandy-drowned force-fed ortolan in order to wallow in the sheer cruel gluttony of it, rather than simply crunching meat because your belly is only full of hunger; like yawning boredly at the urge to grind your body against another in heat in favour of enfolding it in specific fabrics and causing precise little pains with precise little implements and labyrinthine little ritual parodies of social humiliations because one is too sophisticated to fuck.
Terrible ends are delicious in simply being terrible. Dooms need not be ironic.
It does admit a certain thrill in the human’s hope that she’s going to get out of here, though; a juicy enrichment from the stuttering rise and fall of her spirits, her sudden wild conviction that things will work out! — cut down to nothing, like the crashing fall of a tree, by its sudden grasp on her arm.
The human fights, feebly even for one of her kind, as sheltered as an infant. It holds the slim wrists, straddles the bucking waist, encourages delicious terror with tongue and teeth and the teasing draught of cold, leaf-scented breath. The human doesn’t even fully realise when doom begins, not simply its foreplay; it’s not until her hands, stretched above her head, have sunk into the tree trunk they’re pinned against, as if into viscous mud, not until only her fingertips are still kissing the air, that she screams and wrenches against what’s happening. But by that point, bark is scabbing over the desperate clutch of her fingertips, and her arms are encased to the elbow; wood is liquidly sucking her shoulderblades inward, giving softly behind her hips.
It licks her lips, grinds against her kicking thighs, riding her down into the creaking dark.
The other trees shiver, and those that it left with eyes to watch with, watch.
