Far, far away from the hustle and the bustle of the city, in a valley deep in the mountains, where it becomes difficult to tell the the road from the wilderness, there is a small village. It’s so far removed from civilization that the people of the village would sometimes go years at a time without speaking to an outsider. I was abandoned by that village.
Who was the fool? My mother? My father?
Some outsiders had arrived in the village for the first time in many a year. They sold works of art unlike anything even the oldest members of the village had ever seen. But they hadn’t purposely travelled to the village. A long period of rain had caused a cliff to collapse and block the road, which in turn forced them off the trail more and more until eventually they found themselves at the village with no where else to go. They brought things from far away lands, merry stories rousing torrents of laughter, gorgeous dancing girls and a man who played the harp. That man was my father.
He stole a young woman’s heart with a single glance. That young woman was my mother, a woman who knew nothing more than working the fields and knitting hemp. The travellers only stayed for a few days while the weather cleared up, but that was enough time to create me. My mother couldn’t keep me a secret. Everyone in the village knew each other and everything that was said at home, even within your own family, would be overheard by someone.
They knew right away that my father wasn’t in the village any more. They thought that you could leave a single child to raise itself. Everyone in the village, even the one who gave birth, was afraid of the blood of an outsider being mixed with that of their own. They wouldn’t stand for the bloodline of drifter living on in the village. They pretended like I had never happened.
It all started one clear summer’s night when they threw their baby, me, from the crumbled cliff. The glimmering stars high above looked like the spirit of the baby, as if I had already risen to the heavens. How could a baby, who couldn’t yet see, understand what was happening? I, the one they threw from the cliff, was embraced by the forest. The spirits of the forest showed little compassion, despised boredom and were had grown tired of the village, so they had been very interested in the boisterous visitors who had shown up little over a year ago.
The spirits of the forest expected me to be like those travellers. To give them the beauty and the wonder and the laughter that they had brought with them. That’s why the spirits of the forest, whom couldn’t be seen, saved me and raised me. However they raised me much differently than a human would have. They fed me strange fruits, put me down on a bed of moss and first taught me the words of the wind. Eventually I had grown, was smiling brightly and dancing to music. They had raised me into a wonderful looking young lady.
Though just because I looked wonderful didn’t mean that I was, in the depths of my soul, a wonderful person. A part of me had been twisted, having been raised without human sensitivity. I was missing emotion and my soul had turned black. The spirits of the forest were very pleased with the way I had turned out. They loved me, especially my twisted soul. What the spirits of the forest wanted was something to ease the boredom, and a girl who no longer had the heart of a human filled that role perfectly.
Nineteen years. Just short of twenty. I was older than my mother was when she met my father, but not as old as my father when he had met my mother. Nothing changed in the village over the months and years, and all had forgotten about the abandoned baby.
The village hadn’t changed, but the those who made up the village had. The village elders, the ones who had taken in the travelling entertainers, had died and new babies had been born. A woman of child-bearing age had become the wife of a man in the village and had soon given birth. As a matter of course this young woman had married a man from the village, but it was as if she was nothing. Or perhaps more to the point, for people of the village, she was never there.