The Price of Passage

Before Zen lay the Sunken Fields, a vast, eerily beautiful, shimmering expanse of golden wheat that stretched toward a horizon that was always shrouded in opalescent mist. He was surrounded by the very air, which was heavy and dense with the cloying sweetness of invisible, ghostly blossoms and the endless, eerie refrains of forgotten lullabies. It was a steady, mild, but incredibly exhausting attack on his senses and, more subtly, on his determination. Its astounding beauty was a skillfully created and frail facade worn over a heart of unfathomable, inconsolable, terrible anguish. He understood, with a certainty that had become ingrained in his bones, that the deceptive tranquility that clung to this place was a cleverly designed enticement.

He had stood silently, patiently, at the very edge of the spiked wheat for several hours. His eyes followed the almost imperceptible thorns as they appeared to stretch and contract with a predatory, almost sentient awareness, like strands of spun shadow. A delicate, rippling barrier that betrayed a deep-seated suspicion, they reacted especially to any wayward breeze that ventured to carry his fragrance too close. The rainbow-hearted lights, known as the Children's Souls in Icor's notes, pulsed with a gentle, rhythmic radiance within the golden sea of grain. Sometimes, heartbreakingly obvious, were their ephemeral, childlike shadows, as transitory as mist, constantly involved in some quiet, interminable, and profoundly unhappy play that brought no joy but only repetition.

In order to avoid disturbing the heated silence further than was required, Zen said, "Others have clearly tried to pass this way before," in a low voice. He discovered the glaring proof strewn around the edge of the field: a rusted, broken shovel with a snapped handle that was half-swallowed by the soggy ground, its blade's metal oddly pitted and corroded as though it had been subjected to a steady stream of acidic tears. Later, a particularly ferocious-looking clump of wheat stalks that had encroached past the main field was skewered with a ragged, faded strip of what appeared to be an explorer's oilskin cloak. As though imbued with a focused hatred, the thorns buried in the cloth were longer, sharper, and nearly black. He guessed that the field's active, quick, and uncompromising defense had enticed these poor trespassers with the promise of the apparent bounty, the illusion of an easy harvest, or perhaps just the desire of a simple passage through the forest's tricks. Sharp, terrible pain was the unmistakable response to greed or simply simple, thoughtless passage.

He made the decision to carry out a modest, careful experiment. He took one of the smooth, symbol-etched stones out of his old leather pouch, an item Icor had painstakingly crafted to convey a sense of benign, peaceful purpose, and flung it a few feet into the wheat's edge. The wheat here reacted with shocking, almost personal violence, in contrast to the mysterious, papery structures of the Warden's Grove, which had either absorbed or rejected foreign items according to some strange, unfathomable procedure. With an audible hiss, the stalks immediately surrounding the stone rushed towards it, their thorns sticking out stubbornly like a phalanx of tiny, shining spears. For a minute, the soft tapestry of the lullabies seemed to tear apart with a discordant, sad cry that sounded like torn silk magnified a thousand times. The soothing colors of the rainbow lights closest to the disturbance dimmed and pulsed with agitation, flickering wildly. Although Icor's enchantments prevented the stone from being pierced, it was obviously unwanted.

"So, it is not a matter of a material offering, or even of demonstrating neutral intent," Zen concluded out loud while he delicately extended a stripped branch to remove the stone. "This isn't a toll booth asking for a small price. It's an open, raw wound.

His fingers traced the familiar, spidery script of Icor's notebook again, looking for comparisons, for some sliver of insight that may shed light on this sad dead end. His instructor had described in great detail locations in Kuro-no-Mori where the sadness of the forest was so deep and pervasive that it was hard to engage in normal discourse. One particularly pertinent passage stated that "the usual currencies of intent, energy, or even benign offerings may prove entirely insufficient, or may, tragically, even be perceived as further aggression, another violation, in zones of extreme and prolonged psychic trauma." These establishments don't aim to trade or haggle. They're looking for resonance. An expression of deep empathy and recognition of their suffering in a language they can grasp on an innate level. An unquestionable portion of one's own tale, a shared burden, or an unquestionable fraction of the self are sometimes the only offerings of genuine value, according to Zen.

A piece of the self. a burden that is shared. Zen's thoughts echoed the words with eerie clarity. He gazed at the glistening, perilous field, at the dim, ghostly shapes of kids destined to play a never-ending, melancholy game among the weaponized grain. Since entering the Sunken Fields, he had been experiencing a subtle psychic drain that was a persistent, sneaky pressure that tried to drag him down into the same suffocating, listless sadness that pervaded the air. What if this place, this wounded mind, wanted to share its crushing weight of memory, its terrible anguish, rather than take something material away from him? What if it longed for an echo of what it had so sadly lost, in its wounded, infantile way?

He had learned the hard way that the forest was inherently reactive. It reacted to purpose, to emotional undertones, to a person's core nature. The wheat's needle-sharp spikes swiftly and effectively punished reckless encroachment and avarice. So what, he thought, looking across the somber countryside, would soothe such a profoundly damaged, even infantile mind? It wouldn't be strength since that would be interpreted as a danger. Not astute instruments, since they would symbolize the dispassionate analysis incapable of understanding such profound suffering. Even simple kindness would be insufficient if it were interpreted as the vacuous disdain of an outsider who had not endured the same suffering as it had. Maybe... maybe a memory was needed. Something incredibly intimate, unquestionably genuine, and given without hesitation or expectation of reciprocation. A portion of his own experience, a piece of his own past, freely thrown into its sadness.

This area was marked with the horrifying possibility of a "Memory Sacrifice" in the event map, the icy, dispassionate schematic that he kept in his head. It was issued by the shadowy Directorate and was assembled from disjointed and frequently lethal historical records. He had held onto the notion that this was a dramatic exaggeration, a somber misreading of a lesser occurrence. It seemed like a dawning, indisputable, and terrifyingly inescapable fact now, as I sat at the edge of this lovely, awful field, surrounded by the ghosts of lost innocence and lullabies.

He allowed his attention to focus on a single rainbow light that appeared to float slightly nearer the field's edge than the rest, with a slightly softer, more tentative pulse. If he didn't look too closely, he could almost make out the quivering figure of a young girl, maybe seven or eight years old, among its soft, changing hues. Her shape, fashioned from light and grief, was blurry but painfully recognizable from the innumerable representations of childhood purity that can be found in all cultures and at all ages. A small, almost imperceptible spark of inquiry could be seen in her melancholy, opalescent glow as if she, or the spirit she represented, were staring at him.

In order to provide a memory—but which one? It would have to be something important, something that included a real part of himself, a reality of who he was. With icy fear, he realized that it would be an irrevocable loss, a hole painstakingly cut out of the fabric of his own past, an emptiness where there had once been substance. It was a deeply disturbing, almost sickening thought. Many have already lost so much to this forest, this Kuro-no-Mori.

But if there was a way forward, it seemed to need just that. He could not continue to be an objective outside observer, an analyst with his instruments and his journals, if he were to actually comprehend this layer of the forest's incalculable suffering, if he were to walk through this ethereal Garden of Lost Lullabies and maybe, just maybe, provide some minuscule amount of comfort or real understanding. He had to join in, to become a part of its grief. He needed to adjust, learn its language, and provide a form of payment that this particular, tragic expression of the forest could comprehend.

The air was cloyingly sweet, a taste of syrupy anguish, and he drew a deep, trembling breath. He made a decision that was as cold as the tomb and as heavy as a shroud of lead, yet it was completely determined. He would offer it. The awful cost of journey would be borne by him.