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The traditional question is “Who are you?” But Enoch knows from the moment he meets the eyes in the woods that “What?” is far more fitting than “Whom?”
Enoch is himself, barely more Whom than What, and it’s a distinction that dissolves the deeper one is willing to dig into grave-soft soil.
They skirt pleasantries first, good evenings and remarks about what fine weather they’re having, both standing in a foot of sleet, regarding each other, before Enoch asks.
“And what do I have the honor of addressing this evening?
For a moment the creature says nothing, and Enoch begins to wonder if perhaps it has already departed, and he’s only watching the afterimage of it’s deceptively bright eyes burning in the maypole’s vision. But after a long moment, the creature shifts on its feet.
“Nothing of any concern to you, I believe, Kin-of-kin.” the voice attached to the eyes replies, and bids him farewell before departing into the black night, evidently content with its own assessment.
And it might not have been, had the years not gone by and found them at those same borders, having much the same in the way of conversations, and then later, much more.
In a way, it doesn’t truly matter what his conversationalist is, beyond the fact that he is Enoch’s neighbor, and seems to share a similar opinion about dying or doing any other similarly foolish thing that might interrupt their sporadic companionship. But he still asks, when his neighbor first steps into the light and graces Enoch with a glimpse of his crown, when the fur on his neighbor’s back turns out to not quite be attached, when the hands that touch Enoch’s ribbons are etched with the shape of screams.
He asks out of politeness, curiosity, fascination and habit, but his neighbor only demurs with a hum and a flash of his colorless eyes.
He asks his neighbor in, asks to be treated to a dance, asks whether his neighbor would like to stay the evening, asks if his neighbor might possibly give him a name, a title, an identity, and each time he is rebuffed. But still, he asks, and slowly it begins to dawn on him that perhaps his neighbor is not simply being coy when he refuses to say what he is. And Enoch begins to wonder if perhaps, his neighbor doesn’t know either.
Eventually Enoch stops asking what his neighbor is.
He starts guessing.
The first thing Enoch truly comes to believe his neighbor to be is The Wolf, Big and Bad.
His neighbor isn’t shaped quite right. The hand that reaches across the border to touch at Enoch's ribbons is closer to fingers than paws, and the shape of a face Enoch catches in profile lacks the snout where Enoch would expect him to keep his teeth.
But he’s wrapped in a cape of fur, dark and black and shaggy, slick with something Enoch hesitates to call blood but doesn’t know another name for, and his nose is sharp enough to smell fear on the air from clear across Pottsfield and through the distant forest.
His neighbor sings like it’s going out of style, from the bottom of his stomach and high enough to reach the moon, low, bassy notes that make the sky tremble and quake in resonance. And when Enoch is lucky, or the moon particularly dark, his neighbor can be tempted to huff, and puff, and howl out a song older than language, that makes the teeth in Enoch’s catskin rattle and its eyes start to melt and threatens to blow Enoch's wooden barn clean away.
And Enoch knows that there are children in the woods, little girls in red hoods, and sets of seven brothers, trios striking out on their own, shepherds sleeping in the down of their flocks. And Enoch knows that his neighbor is old and crafty and clever, and like most things that are old and crafty and clever, he is so dearly fond of things that are young and new and naive.
And Enoch knows that when he has the opportunity to, and he so often does, his neighbor likes to swallow children whole.
He only says it and means it once. When he opens the catskin’s mouth in the curl of a smile and invites the hereditary enemy across the border and through the door.
“It’s been a long winter, neighbor, surely you must be tired.” The moon is yellow and bleeding, and the light it casts is warm enough that to Enoch’s borrowed eyes, it looks like day. From the other side of his fence, his neighbor hums a noncommittal noise. “I believe the Dawsons have a soup on the fire, some sort of pork. They’ve been brewing since autumn. Won’t you come in and have a bowl, Wolf?”
The way his neighbor laughs is enough to tell Enoch he’s got it wrong, but for the first time in their long history, filled with invitations and polite refusals, he does come in.
He calls his neighbor Wolf many times after that, nearly constantly until the endearment goes out of style, and then for a few decades after that for good measure, only for how much it seems to tickle his neighbor to be called such a thing.
He never does vocalize the epithet, but perhaps it's for the best.
After all, it’s the only part of the first title he got right.
Enoch doesn’t row with his neighbor, not like his neighbor fights with the Queen and the Coven and his lantern bearers. He debates, banters perhaps, and sometimes they even argue, but Enoch never finds himself without more than one or two ribbons when they quarrel. Truly, he loses more when they are on speaking terms.
When they part, and Enoch cannot even reluctantly bring himself to let loose the ribbon around his neighbor’s wrist, it is Enoch’s body that gives as his neighbor withdraws. It is his body that is patchworked and animated past death, his ribbons that fray and snap and hang like bunting in his neighbor’s antlers as he retreats into the woods.
Which is why it's such a surprise when one warm day in spring, his neighbor makes to depart, and instead of some small shred of Enoch going with him, Enoch finds himself with no small part of his neighbor dangling from a ribbon.
Enoch stares at the arm, less concerned than he is baffled. It helps that his neighbor does not react in the manner any creature might reasonably be expected to when severed from one of their limbs.
“Spring.” His neighbor scoffs. “It's as if I grow more brittle every year.”
“Surely not,” Enoch says, allowing his ribbons to be dragged about as his neighbor plucks up the arm with the one that's attached.
“No.” His neighbor agrees, and the single syllable hangs in the air with a melodic quality as he lifts his furs. “But this year has been particularly egregious.”
Beneath his cloak, Enoch can see a length of pale fabric wrapped around his neighbor’s thigh. Thoughtlessly, he curls a ribbon around it as he watches his neighbor set the splintered stump of the arm against the fragmented joint of his shoulder.
“If you would do me the favor of lending a ribbon, Harvest Lord.” His neighbor intones, words grave-dark and slick. Enoch, thoroughly intreated, reaches out a single ribbon to dither at his neighbor’s shoulder before curling down to lash around his neighbor’s arm several times, affixing it in place.
He watches, vaguely bewildered, as the injured arm, the one that should be dangling limply at his neighbor’s side, reaches up to catch the cornsilk as it slips into a knot.
“That cannot be a viable long-term solution, neighbor.” Enoch hears himself murmur as the frisson of his neighbor tearing loose his new bandage travels up his ribbon and settles somewhere at the base of the maypole’s head as something heavy and electric.
“It will do until I have time to graft this one back.” His neighbor murmurs, one hand lingering at the clasp of his furs, as if allowing Enoch a moment longer to look at the mending before he lets his furs fall closed over himself again. “And if it will not graft, I will grow another. But for now, I have use of it, and matters I must attend to.”
Enoch takes that polite dismissal as his cue and allows his neighbor room to step back.
This time, he’s careful to disentangle his ribbons from his neighbor’s body, surreptitiously untying and unsnaring himself so that when his neighbor takes a step back, he slides out of Enoch’s ribbons like water across silk.
He watches his neighbor's retreating back until he can no longer parse the edges of his antlers from the crooked fingers of the forest, his streamers curling against the phantom memory of the texture, smooth and dry, splintering at its edge.
Wood, barkless and unarmored.
His neighbor’s ferocious protection of his woods takes on new light.
His neighbor is a dryad, or some other tree spirit, something that’s been fighting tooth and claw against Enoch’s every encroach into the forest, something with a tree it’s been dearly fighting to protect.
Enoch sickens himself at the thought, pulls a dread from deep under the ground, and carries it around with thoughts of accidentally cutting his neighbor’s tree down like so much firewood.
Coincidentally, Pottsfield doesn’t expand that year. Or the year after. By the third year, they’re building houses for the newly dead with the planks of the coffins they’re dug up with, and by the half-decade, they’re running out of farmland to expand into.
Reluctantly, Enoch clears three acres, and Pottsfield flourishes into the new space, though the arborists in his congregation get more than a little exhausted chasing him away from their work.
It goes on like that for several decades, Pottsfield taking tiny slivers out of the forest around it only when it cannot possibly endure within its own borders any longer, suffocating itself, until even that becomes untenable.
When he finally asks about what he should do if he comes across his neighbor’s tree, his neighbor blinks at him.
“Cut it down.” He remarks. “I’ll grow a new one.”
Enoch nearly shakes the ribbons off the maypole with the force of his relief.
His neighbor, bewildered, pats the ribbon that coils around his arm so tightly it creaks in a famacile of comfort.
“If it truly bothers you, Harvest King, you can save me the wood.”
Not long after, Enoch comes across the first of his neighbor's trees.
He begins to understand.
He saves the wood anyway.
A traveling magician had once come to Pottsfield and amazed Enoch’s congregation by pulling rabbits from first, his hat and then, after enough encouragement, from theirs.
Enoch has never quite mastered the trick, though he’s beginning to make something of a habit of reaching blindly into the woods and pulling out whatever strange creature his ribbon first clasps around.
It’s a pleasant day in May that he reaches for a shifting sound and manages to grab a creature that is only his neighbor by an even thinner technicality than the creature he’d been expecting to close his snare around.
This is a neighbor, of whom he knows the answer to the question of both what and who, but he cannot speak either answer aloud without risking grave insult.
The flighty creature is not as it was the last time Enoch saw it, with longer ears than he is used to and hair white as the noon sun. He’s also a great deal shorter than the neighbor Enoch had been expecting and now hangs from Enoch’s entreating ribbon, blinking with wild insect-hewn eyes that rapidly trade surprise for pleasant mischief.
A devilish smile spreads across that hauntingly beautiful face.
Puckish.
“What an honor to be invited in by the cat with only one name, and so enthusiastically at that!” The fae chirps, crossing his legs at the ankle daintily, looking every bit delighted by the surprise.
“You are too generous, Puck,” Enoch says, demurring embarrassment as he gingerly places the fae upon its own two feet. “I admit I was expecting someone else. Someone with whom I have a standing invitation. I had no intention of accosting you on your travels, Merry Wanderer, my sincerest apologies to have disturbed you in your wanderings.”
“Oh, kitten, the things that disturb me have never even graced your pretty coffins,” Puck replies, looking absolutely lovesick for whatever it is that could torment a creature like him. Enoch suspects he will never know. “No! No, I insist, accost away, but you must tell me, Harvest King! Who is it that bears your welcome as he walks!”
Puck does not let Enoch’s ribbon go when he draws it back. He uses it to let the Harvest Lord pull him forward and carries the momentum to spin them into a slow whirling waltz.
“No one of any great importance,” Enoch replies. “Only a wolf I’ve come to know.”
“But you have known them! And surely that makes them worth knowing.”
“Perhaps,” Enoch replies on a tongue equally silver, and the fae thing tosses its head in mirth.
“You are the strangest creature I have ever known, Harvest King.” He sighs pleasantly, and Enoch refrains from answering pot with kettle.
“If you won’t take the question as an insult, what is it that brings me the pleasure of your company this fine evening?” Enoch asks, twirling the sprite with a ribbon. Puck laughs and clicks his heels in a jump that lingers just a bit too long in the air to have been fully natural.
“No offense is taken if you promise to take the same from my answer. I confess, Harvest King, it is only merry coincidence that I am here to pay you my companionship!” It chirps. “Indeed- I admit I did not know you were here until you snared me,”
“Oh, I simply must know then,” Enoch purrs. “What brings you so far from king and queen?”
Puck’s expression turns downright foxlike.
“Nothing that pleases them, I assure you! No, it is vows older than Kingship that bring me to these woods. I am following the footsteps of my antithesis, and he passed this place not long ago.”
“And his name? As he has let you call him? Perhaps I can point you in the direction he left.”
Puck laughs, high and flighty.
“He has not one to give me, and I have none to gift you save the one I have given to him, but if you recognize it, tell me true, has the Gloomy Wanderer of Night paid visit unto you?”
Enoch’s smooth whirl of the dance through the pumpkins stutters only a moment, but it is long enough for Puck’s eyes to grow attentive and sharp, present in a way the fae rarely are.
“The Gloomy Wanderer, he is horned, as you are when the mood takes you?” Enoch asks.
“As I am.” Puck replies.
“And he wears a shroud of shadows as you wear your shroud of summer?”
“As I do.”
“And he is as exacting in his manners and words as all the fae, but most certainly you,”
“As I, indeed!”
“And he sings to all the strange things that lose themselves in the woods in much the way you are prone?”
“In that self-same way, Wearer of Many Skins.”
Enoch considers, for a moment, denying any knowledge of his neighbor
“He is following the wishing star as it travels across the sky,” Enoch says. “Pursuing the hopes it inspires across the land.”
Puck gasps in delight.
“Oh, Harvest Lord, you have my many thanks,” It says, tossing its head in something like mirth. “You have certainly shaved a decade from my wandering,” He looks up to the maypole, eyes twinkling. “For I already know where the star is going to land.”
With a twirl, Puck deftly disentangles himself from Enoch’s ribbons and, with a spritely leap, lands perched atop the fenceposts.
“I must leave you immediately, Harvest Cat if I am to meet my match there.” He says but reaches his hand out to catch one of Enoch’s swaying streamers. It bows its head and lifts the ribbon to its lips, pressing a chaste kiss to the fabric. “A gift from him and a gift from me!”
Enoch’s streamers flutter with amusement.
“Shall I point the way?” He rumbles, anticipating the answer.
“I can hardly be a wanderer if I know the way,” Puck says, and with that, he is gone, a flicker of laughter through the trees, a breeze slick as water moving among the leaves.
Enoch lingers there at the border, with a ribbon curled around a kiss bestowed on behalf of his neighbor, and watches the moonrise.
He should have guessed that the queer winter spirit that visited his borders and was so protective of his name and nature was one of the Unseelie Fae, but it’s just as well he didn’t because he would have been wrong either way.
His neighbor doesn’t give him the opportunity to embarrass himself making the assumption. A scant decade later, Enoch finds him playing scarecrow standing out in the fields, uninvited, but certainly not unwelcome. And when Enoch manages to persuade him to stop menacing the corn, he even differs to have a bottle of Enoch’s finest red, even though neither of them can parse exactly what’s in the bottle, except for the fact that it is, indeed, very red.
A witch is a what which is rather poorly defined, for what a witch is not quite a species, nor is it quite a profession, but falls somewhere in the nebulous space between an inheritance and an undertaking.
The lines that define what is a witch and that which is not are not easily found, drawn in the sand and wiped away as easily. The woods are filled with wise women and cunning folk and healers, sorcerers and warlocks and occultists, and to know which are witches is no small matter, indeed.
In general, Enoch has found that the only thing that really defines a witch is their word.
But there are traits, characteristics, that crop up across generations and covens, like a family resemblance that he begins to recognize on his neighbor.
A hunger, deep and dark and bitter.
A brewery of potions, black as oil.
And a heart he keeps outside his body.
Witchhood is a wanting, a need, a wound, not as a thing that bleeds, but as a thing that wants, a thing that gapes empty and aches to be filled. It’s hard to call a witch a cannibal, harder still to call them human, but his neighbor isn’t the first witch Enoch has known to eat children to slake the hunger that accompanies their practice.
And when he’s not feeding himself on children, he’s feeding himself with his potions, his poisons.
He allows Enoch to drink from his cauldron once, lets the catskin curl up in his lap, and lap up oil as dark as its fur with a pink tongue. It tastes like anguish, it tastes like despair, it tastes like hopelessness, it tastes empty . It sticks to his tongue but runs thin enough that it drips through his teeth. Enoch cannot imagine ever drinking enough of it to fill his own belly, much less his neighbor’s, but neither can he imagine stopping, breaking from the brew long enough to try and find something else to fill the sudden hollowness under his ribs.
The catskin dies there, in his neighbor’s lap, the gentle stroke of his neighbor’s fingers across the fur of its stomach the last sensation Enoch has before he slips out of the body with its last starving, shuddering gasp.
His neighbor's fingers carding against his stomach is the first sensation Enoch feels when he manages to reanimate the catskin and wedge his way inside.
The catskin’s organs are dissolving beneath each pass of his neighbor’s fingers.
Enoch sighs dreamily.
It’s not long after that that his neighbor lets Enoch see the heart he keeps in an iron lantern. And not very long after that, indeed, that his neighbor has his own little death, cradled, with both heart and body, in Enoch’s ribbons.
Enoch pets his neighbor's stomach with the same care he’d shown to Enoch’s catskin as the lights come back on in his neighbor’s eyes, and he feels a swelling of conviction that he’s figured it out this time.
After all, Enoch is certainly bewitched.
And Enoch has it on good authority that his neighbor has been known to commune with black cats in the dead of night.
The fact his neighbor doesn’t perform magic is little more than a wrinkle in Enoch’s conclusion.
For a long time, it’s enough, a title that doesn’t really define anything. It fits loose enough that his neighbor can wear it around slender shoulders and is just barely tight enough that Enoch can snare it around his neighbor.
It is not wrong.
But it is not right either.
And there comes a day when Enoch calls it into the lonely woods, and his neighbor does not even turn his head in acknowledgment.
The nature of a dragon is to be born dying, dreaming, or dead.
Only a story can sustain a dragon, only a story can suspend them without folding beneath their weight. But in the waking world, in this world, the land simply crumbles around them and swallows them whole. It is a simple truth, a dragon cannot live long without being vanquished, and only in the vanquishing do they live at all.
Somewhere, beneath fallow ground, a great drake sleeps. It sleeps the sleep of eternity, curled upon a pile of jewels and bones of meals it never ate. It will not wake. It was born fully grown. It was born sleeping.
There are bones in the dirt and swords embedded in dragon hearts. There are kings crowned in teeth, and halls lined in ribs.
But there were never any dragons flying in these skies.
They are a queer species, but it is the way of the dragon to be born extinct.
Enoch wonders, sometimes, if his neighbor is one of those rare exceptions, that fragile second where the monster gasps, heart fluttering around intruding steel, alive, but for the fact that it is about to die.
One of those fleeting moments of aliveness in which the dragon wakes, that untenable moment in which wings unfurl and the sheer substance of what makes a dragon fills the air, and sucks everything else from the story, folding, curling around the density of a dragon, the singularity of it consuming anything else of note, anything else that matters. Breathing around his neighbor is like breathing in the presence of a vacuum, a sheer emptiness, a somethingness that overpowers all else and steals the breath from his lungs.
Enoch is very fortunate, then, to have met a dragon in the single moment between Once Upon a Time and The End.
He is fortunate that the moment that a dragon lives distorts around itself, swallowing down time itself, dragging its claws into parchment and dirt, holding fire frozen between its fangs, for a split second that stretches out into eternity.
Or perhaps he’s only fortunate that his neighbor is not a dragon anymore. That whatever wyrm his neighbor might have been before, it had been bent and beaten into something that could be sustained, it had made itself into something else, forced into another shape by the crushing pressure created by its own vacuum. Forced into a form that could walk this earth without scouring it black, a form that could linger more than a single moment before devouring itself, a form that resisted being flattened down into a story, into a name.
Becoming something that lived.
Enoch doesn’t know if it was a stroke of luck, or his neighbors indomitable willpower, or something much more arcane, but he knows that watever draconic heritage his neighbor still claims, it is draconic no longer.
Because a dragon that lives, a dragon that wakes, is a dragon no longer.
But sometimes he sees it, like an echo lingering beneath his neighbor's voice, like a vapor of charcoal markings, rubbed away, bleeding through the drawing sketched atop, like the afterimage of a star, burning in the darkness after it collapses in on itself.
His neighbor is covered in plated bark scales, with claws that he sharpens on his own knives, and a snarl in his chest that’s still deep enough to shake the mountains his neighbor is no longer big enough to move.
He’s ancient and territorial and vain.
Guarding a hoard of black gold beneath the arches of his claws.
Horned, crowned in the mantle of drake and deer, his one pride, the only one he flaunts, while he wraps the rest of himself in shadows so thick not even summer sun can pierce.
But claws and fangs and wings don’t make a dragon, only surround them, contain them, give them a shape, sculped by scales clinging like chainmail, stretched taught to bursting around the sheer force of a dragon. The only way to see a dragon, the only way to know a dragon is to look through the glowing seams between their scales, to peer into the inferno raging behind their eyes, to lean over and look between their teeth, and gaze at the flicker of distant fire in the back of their throat.
The only thing that makes a dragon is a fire.
Smoldering deep in their chest.
And Enoch’s neighbor has a fire burning in his soul, glowing behind his eyes and lighting them from within.
Dragon isn't right, but it's the closest Enoch ever gets to correct, the closest he suspects he’ll ever get.
His neighbor is something far more fearsome than a dragon, something with all of its presence and none of its fragility, something with an appetite and without the traditional teeth to feed it, something that burns, something that burns without scouring itself from the face of the earth.
A wick that never ends, a light that never dies.
A flame flickering in the well of an old wrought iron lantern, eating its own light.
His neighbor isn’t a dragon, the proof of that is in every moment he stands before Enoch and survives, but sometimes, when his neighbor’s eyes turn blue-hot, and he tosses his head back and laughs, Enoch could swear the steam coming from his lips is nothing but smoke.
“You’re a monster,” Enoch admonishes affectionately into his neighbor’s chest. The nest of ribbons pinned beneath the maypole’s head, draped across his neighbor’s lap, writhes as his neighbor’s clever hands sift through the hay inside.
His neighbor hums and Enoch can feel the sound against the ribbon he’s got wrapped flush around his neighbor’s neck.
He’s elbows deep into the maypole, the neat bow Enoch’s Pottsfielders make after stuffing him with hay, a disregarded tangle of twine lost somewhere in the dirt beneath them. He’s got enough of Enoch’s ribbons pinned beneath one foot that Enoch can’t quite manage enough leverage to roll away, though he can’t remember when he stopped trying.
“A beast,” Enoch says and pushes weakly at his neighbor’s chest with a ribbon. His neighbor is undeterred, reaching deep into the hay where Enoch had taken the catskin in retreat. “ The beast.” He keens as he twists away from the claws that sink into his scruff.
His neighbor’s grip brooks no room for argument as he hauls the catskin, its long dark fur littered with errant hay, up from the depths of the maypole.
“I am,” His neighbor intones, though his annoyance has long faded into a grim shadow of amusement. “Though I would not need to be if you were not such an unrepentant thief, graverobber.” He says as he retrieves his lantern, prying its handle from the cage of Enoch’s teeth.
Enoch pouts.
Tries to fight down a smug grin.
“ Now .” His neighbor murmurs, lantern held triumphantly in one hand, as he releases the catskin from the other. “I am off.”
Enoch lands upon his feet on the swell of the maypole’s brow, tail lashing a fine line through the air. He gives a dignified shake which dislodges none of the hay before making a neat circle, kneading the fabric, before settling down pillowed by the maypole. He yawns, a flash of teeth and tongue in a circle of black, then blinks at his neighbor.
“Enoch.” His neighbor says, the word a rasp of steel on stone, dangerous.
“Hm?” Enoch replies, flicking an ear. “You are departing, yes, I heard.” He gives a languorous stretch. “I believe I’ll settle in for a nap, that chase you gave me quite wore me out.”
Enoch watches through the heavy curtains of his eyelids as his neighbor’s inscrutable expression flickers with comprehension.
He feels him shift beneath him, testing the bulk of the maypole in his lap, which is being far less cooperative in getting off than it was in getting there in the first place. His neighbor gives a few probing pushes to the maypole’s eyes, then a vicious tug against its streamers, before his hands fall slack at his side.
“Whatever beastly thing I am, Harvest Lord,” He murmurs, his voice a velvet-coated threat. “You are certainly a monster.”
Enoch gives a satisfied sigh and pretends to be asleep.
His neighbor pretends to be annoyed just long enough that Enoch almost gets there, before gentle claws are scooping beneath the catskin’s paws, lifting the catskin as his neighbor lays back. Enoch soon finds himself settled upon his neighbor's chest, and his neighbor's hand settled above the catskin's, pinning Enoch above his heart.
Enoch begins to purr and after a moment the beast beneath him starts to hum.