Gathering himself the best he could, Wulfstan decided to approach Donngall and put forth the idea that he had been playing with. He knew that he needn't ask for permission, he was not a child nor was he a biological son of Ita and Donngall, so he had no real legitimate reason to need to stay at the farm. Regardless, Wulfstan steeled himself just in case he had to fight his case.
As the old man settled down for his lunch, Leofric still working in the field for a while longer, Wulfstan approached him and sat down on the bench next to him. Twiddling his thumbs, he couldn't bring himself to look at Donngall yet. "I have something I wish to ask."
Donngall sighed. "Yah wan'a go back tah woods we found yah in, don'cha?" His big, rough hands clamped around Wulfstan's shoulder, comforting, but it almost felt like a set of manacles holding him in place. "Is t'at wha' yah were goin' ask?"
Wulfstan startled slightly. "How… how did you know?" He didn't think he'd been that obvious.
"I ain't stupid, laddy. I'm preddy good at readin' people." Donngall laughed heartily, clapping Wulfstan's shoulder with some force, though it didn't jolt the boy – no, he was a young man now – at all. Both of them continued to stare out into the fields, Leofric barely a dot on the horizon. Ifa was vanishing out there too, out to bring her boy back home for food. "I get yah, I do."
"Really?" Wulfstan looked over at Donngall now, his brows furrowed in confusion, but the other man continued to watch his son in the fields. There was a misty, far-off look in his eyes, but Wulfstan couldn't understand it.
Nodding, Donngall grunted in affirmation. "'Course I do. Yar curious about where yah came from." His hand was still firmly on Wulfstan's shoulder. "I can't stop yah from goin', nor can I make yah come 'ome. But I 'ope yah do."
Wulfstan didn't say anything.
"When yah wan'in' to go ou'?" Donngall finally looked at Wulfstan, a gentle smile on his round, fatherly face. His stormy-blue eyes were lightened in the afternoon sun, somehow softer and more welcoming than they usually were. It made it exceptionally hard for Wulfstan to remain steadfast in his decision as he saw the affection the old man had for him.
He knew he didn't deserve it.
"Tonight."
Donngall nodded. "Righ'. Yah don' wan' ahr Leofric knowin' do yah?" He paused for a moment but not long enough for Wulfstan to answer. It startled him, how astute the man was, coming to that conclusion so quickly. Almost as if he knew some of what Wulfstan thought of the man's son, as inconceivable as that was. "I'll keep it from 'im. Yah only needs a day or there abouts to ge' t'ere and another couple to ge' back – I'll tell tah truth if yar gone longer t'an a week."
Not sure if he could bring himself to smile, Wulfstan looked down at his hands curled together on his lap. He lightly pressed his sharp nails into the back of his hand, cutting the skin, making sure that he really didn't bleed. Once again, he didn't. Wulfstan made up his mind. "Thank you."
"Mhm. Stay for dinner."
"I will."
-
Wulfstan slung his cloth pack across his shoulder and swung his legs out of his window. No one except Donngall knew that he was partaking in this journey, and he decided to keep it like that. Ita would likely figure it out quickly if she didn't get the information from the horse's mouth itself – his parental figures were not in the habit of lying to one another. However, he didn't want to have to lie to Leofric or, God forbid, tell him the facts of the matter.
Dropping onto the floor, he began to walk out of the farmstead, heading for the road when he turned back for a moment. With a bitterexpression, torn between tears that could never form and a smile he didn't feellike showing, Wulfstan looked at the hut that was darker than the backdropsprawling behind it. "I'll be back."
He had no real idea if he was telling the truth but thatdidn't stop him as his feet started taking him down the road in the direction he remembered they came from five years ago. The path had been there, watching him, waiting for him to take it for all that time. An invite, a demand, telling him to go back to wherever he crawled out from. Whether that be the gates of Hell or the arms of a long-forgotten mother, only time could tell him. Wulfstan felt as if the distant shadows of the sprawling forest on the far horizon – his destination – were leering at him, mocking him.
It was laughing, the trees bending and jeering at his misery,scolding him for ever deigning to think he was a human. The woods would hold the answer to what he was. It had to; this journey couldn't be for nought. He had to learn something.
Anything.
As the moon, waning into a small sliver above the clouds, shone down, it's paltry light gave the impression that it was leading him to something closer to his real home. Perhaps it was all his imagination, that he was hoping, if he wandered long enough, he would stumble across things that looked like him. A group of human-like creatures that didn't bleed and couldn't cry but they were his as he was theirs. Wishful thinking, most likely, but theidea of a proper place in the world made the confusion and the discomfort of the life he could remember worth it all.
Setting forth, it did him good to make himself think of it as a great adventure, that his existence – he couldn't really call it 'life', could he? – wasn't on the line at all. Wulfstan did his best not to think of what he would do if he realised he was some horrendous beast, a spawn of something from outside of the light of the God he believed in. A God he didn't know if he could continue to believe in when he was so different to what wassupposed to walk the earth. It didn't matter because that had not yet come to pass; he could cross that bridge once he had laid some more stones and founded a base for his wondering.
Walking on and on, he passed by the last houses that ringed the edge of the hamlet that he lived in, marking the furthest he had been from the place he now called home in five years. Perhaps his destination would become his real home, and he would be saying the same thing a few days from now, when he would come back to say goodbye and leave the Smythe's, leave Leofric, forever. Head held high, only the stars guided him, though that was nothing but some extra beauty as the road was a well-travelled thoroughfare and his eyes could see a needle-hole from a mile out in pitch black.
Wulfstan kept hope in his heart.
Never feeling tired had always been a benefit to his strange condition so he didn't need to break as he kept walking, further and further than a regular human could in one go. Donngall had said the journey there would take him a day or two, but it would likely only take him a handful of hours if he tried. He could run the whole way there and back, no stopping for food orwater, and he could then continue on to do the same across the entire span of the world. All he could feel was the earth beneath his feet, the gnawing pit in his stomach he had long since learnt to ignore and—
Two hours away from home, perhaps 15 miles already passed at the relentless pace he was going, he suddenly stopped and clutched at the part of his chest that cradled his motionless heart. If he had one, considering he wasn't alive, and, potentially, not human. Unimportant.
That ever-present tight, tugging, pulling sensation that had lessened to be almost imperceptible background noise while with the family had been growing more and more obvious the further he got from the farmstead. Finally, it seemed to have come to a head. The sensation didn't hurt, not that he would know how to qualify what 'hurting' was, but it was unpleasant, insistent, and almost compelled him to turn around and march right back to the door of the Smythe's hut, never to leave again. His heart, if that's what it was, felt like someone had wrapped their hand around it in an impossibly tight grasp and was slowly pulling it through the back of his ribcage, telling him, urging him, begging him to go back to the Smythe's.
No, Wulfstan realised as he powered through what felt like a rope around his chest holding him to a stake, it wasn't telling him to go backto the Smythe's. It was telling him to go back to Leofric. He didn't know how he knew it, something guttural, so instinctual he felt like a mere beast, was screaming at him that he wouldn't survive if he didn't go back to that man he cared for so.
A monumental task was ahead of him, and he was tethered so thoroughly to Leofric that it felt like he was being saddled with holding up the sky all by himself. Using whatever willpower he had left that hadn't been ground to a quivering, self-conscious pulp mere days ago, Wulfstan kept putting one foot in front of the other and made swift progress to that sprawling, luscious expanse of trees. Towards the first place he could remember, he marched. Like the migratory birds that would swoop overhead every spring and autumn, Wulfstan was compelled forward by a power mightier than he, one that he couldn't know. One he hoped he would learn to understand soon enough.
Really, he was being pulled back and yanked forward. If Wulfstan was not so determined to find the answer of what he was, he could easily become rooted in place, crippled by indecision. Nothing would stop his pilgrimage to the epicentre of everything.
He could weather this: he had to.
-
About eight hours passed since he'dfirst started his journey and the forking path he had taken, which the Smythe family had travelled those years ago, was brush-covered and warped with the roots of the encroaching trees. Wulfstan couldn't remember it looking this overrun, it made no sense for them to have gotten a cart through all the shrubs and branches, but he knew he was on the right path. Twisted branches like gnarled fingers reached out to him, beckoning him further into this mossy ocean.
Past the incessant tugging in his chest and the growing pit in his stomach, Wulfstan knew that he was getting closer to something. The tips of his fingers seemed to reach out for an unseen goal every time he raised his arms, the soles of his feet tingled through his shoe soles as if desperate to feel the dirt of the path. Like everything around him, the mulch, the branches, the leaves, even the birds in the trees, were an extension of him. Everything sang to him, a frenzied chorus, relaying the glory of their long-lost brethren's return.
Wulfstan knew he could well just be going down the path of complete insanity, lost to the madness of enlightenment, but it was far more pleasant to think he was close to finding somewhere he felt normal. Even if he was imagining it, he felt complete despite the strangeness within him. All that was missing, the one thing going over and over and over in the forefront of his mind, the one thing he desperately needed to see was…
Leofric.
But he wasn't there. Wulfstan had chosen to run away in the night and keep this all from him, yet he yearned for the other man to be by his side, yearning for his presence in a way he was sure was a sin. Just like what he had done that night outside Leofric's room, Wulfstan knew his thoughts werewicked and abhorrent. Not of God.
Arguably, Wulfstan thought soon after, was he even a child of God, as he had always thought he was? Did it matter if he followed the doctrine of the Bible and the Church if he wasn't even human? What hold did those rules have on him now?
It was a thought for another day, once he had figured out the truth of his existence. If he was just a strange human, perhaps one already being punished by the Heavens, he would accept that he had a soul condemned to Hell. On the off chance, though, that he really, truly wasn't human, but he wasn't a demon either, Wulfstan could consider that perhaps he had done nothing wrong and, perhaps, that which was a called sin isn't really… wrong?
Wulfstan shook his head, knocking loose his strange thoughts. Nonsense. All that mattered was making it to the clearing where he'd woken up and attempting to trace his steps back to somewhere that made sense to whatever instinct was telling him this forest was his place. Or something else, a voice nearly familiar, whispered to him in the back of his mind, that it had once been his home, but it belonged to him no more.
Canopies of leaves shrouded the world, hiding the sun and bathing the forest in a dim green glow. Wulfstan couldn't tell what time it was, how far from nightfall it was, but it didn't matter to him if it was the afternoon or if it was midnight. Time passed unchecked and Wulfstan finally stumbled into the clearing that he had woken up in all those years ago.
A humid, syrupy quiet muffled everything. Not even an insect buzzed. All Wulfstan could hear was his own feet, barely making an impact on the ground, hardly rustling the leaves. It was a surreal unthinkable absence ofceverything he had never had the pleasure of experiencing before. Long had he been used to the overwhelming din of humanity around him that he could never escape.
If he could let out a relaxed breath, he would at that moment. It felt like the beginning of a new chapter.
If only he could ignore the foreboding cloud hovering above his mind's eye telling him the opposite.