He trusted nothing - but isn’t that how it always goes? Beqanna churns out darkened souls like cogs in a machine. Although, it is hard to trust anything when all you have known are the trees and the dead. There is quiet in the trees, perhaps quite similar to the pressing of water where all of you should be. There is quiet in the dead too, sometimes (although their voices always linger, sometimes never stop).

He rarely leaves the womb of the trees. And why should he? They are the only thing unchanging, everlasting. While he had fettered away his years in the woods - the world had changed (and would continue changing, he supposed). But the timber that arched around him would continue growing, continue changing in its own familiar way. It changed him, too. But that is to be expected, when you only speak with the souls of the dead for so long.

He would prefer to stay here, in the sullen and shadow soaked woods. He felt the churn of the world, felt it changing again (and again, and again). But here? Here he was safe, here he was secluded. Here he worried about nothing but the flora and fauna that he played with to his content, and the dead that he reaped when he felt in need of company.

He was not dead, though, unlike his friends that wove between the thickets. Wu, sadly, needed nourishment. Days passed since the rumbling from deep inside the world, and still Wu refused to leave the wood - surviving off the dew that was pocketed amidst the flowers he grew. He did not want to see, he did not want more change.

Survival outwins us all, though. In the last dregs of day, he quietly slinks to the edges of the wood, heading towards his usual nook of the river to satiate his thirst. The bleeding rays of sun seep slowly into the horizon, and he is quite assured of his safety and solitude. Until he sees the unmistakable eyes of an equine, followed by two swiveling ears. In the goddamn river.
“What the fuck?”

He is used to solid things - trees, the earth beneath his feet. Or predictable - the flowers he grows, the souls he summons, the way the sun drips between the trees. His life does not allow for the unknown, the unsudden. He does not like it. The way the sun’s dusty kiss floats off of her, the way the river is undisturbed by her step- it is not right. Nothing is right.

She is not right.

This thought ripples through his brain - a resounding echo, the further she approaches. Nothing makes sense.She is moonlight in the dusky haze. She is all teeth, but none of them equine. She is glowing like the moonlight - but not throughout the trees. It is unnatural. It is not where he should be.

She rises like the moon, and the riverbank the horizon. But she is something hideously unnatural. Her teeth are the very shards that live on the bottom of the river - shards that those who are too weak get caught on. Her eyes hold nothing save for hunger. The river flees in her stance.
She is not right.

She is immediately sharp and cold and all of winter when she arises - with the smoking hiss that rises from the river. She is not right. And Wu steps back, ears pinned, as she slithers onto land. The wood is too far now - and this is his penance for stepping too far away. He should have stayed - his souls and his solstice flowers. He should not have come here.

He falters everywhere. Not just his voice, but his step away, his (should be involuntary) reaction) - everything, everything, everything. What was once a creature, is now a.. ‘Woman’.

‘No.’ The only woman he had truly seen was his mother. But he remembered enough that she did not look like this serpentine, fanged, lavender, thing.. ‘’I’m not really sure you’re supposed to look like.. this.” Another step back, at he looked at her in full - not quite sure if she was all real, or not. “I haven’t been around, lately.” An excuse, but not entirely untruthful. “But no, I don’t recall… this”.
His eyes do not leave her fangs.