Enter again the sweet forest
     Enter the hot dream
       Come with us

He likes spring.

(If he can like things.)

He likes spring because it exposes winter’s carnage. 
And he does like carnage. 

He likes spring because it fills his slow river with new water and it gushes forth, spilling itself drunkenly onto the dust. They’ll bring life, him and the river, where life does not belong. It is a labor that demands patience and industriousness – he is happy to subsume himself to it, once again.

(He likes spring, because it relieves him, somewhat, of the heavy, distant, old sub-memories that keep him weary;
Those cold, northern drifts of snow and that bitter wind that flush his skin (smooth, shamefully hairless, as only a boy’s could be) to a bright, painful pink; many-coloured lean-tos set like a jolly, saccharine painting, on a barren strip of Norway. An outpost on a ice-bear island.

The sensation of falling; the eerie glow, like polluted old headlights, green and unblinking.)

Spring. 
It chases these things away, hides them under the gush of icy water; under the mud that forms in thick wallows beneath his cleft toes, leaving strange footprints, like an overgrown stag, in his wake; buried under old bones and preserved skin, like stips of cloth, hanging off ribcages. 
It thaws, taking the damp-cold from his thigh and hip and it lets bloom, from scorched earth, all manner of fanged and dead-skinned seedlings.

(She brings him little things, Sinew – flesh and blood – and he promises not to afear them.
One cannot imagine how tempting it is, but she takes it for them. And for him.)

He does not enter the forest tentatively, though it sends a shrill cold up his spine and the perfume she wears is too rich and too decadent. He knows these are ghosts that haunt, wailing and querulous; he knows it is the absence of nothing – earthy, sumptuous everything – that stings his nostrils, now, after so long. He once loved (if he can love things) the smells of this place. His home. His throne, forsaken for one made of dust and stone. 

He never loved the ghosts, but they were his to bear, regardless. Not all of them had abandoned this place and taken up Pangean quarters, the ones that had stayed are overeager to slip their claws back into him him upon return.

Still, he feels the woods breathe in towards him, like an ex lover that can never move on and strikes out at him out of resentment and shame – but of course, he is arrogant and crowned and when he stops, running his heavy, crude ram’s horns down the smooth, white skin of a birch tree, he fancies this place a spring palace of sorts; 
a hunting lodge. 
A part of his dominion.

the gift-giver