Forester

A Story by Threader

There lived before, a fair woman of noble descent, who fell in love with a farmer. No matter how much love they have for each other, the girl's family vehemently disagrees. Yet, their love never falters. At the deepest parts of the night, they would meet each other in a small cottage inside a forest. But the girl's father, whose influence reaches far and his voice heard from both ends, caught wind of the trysts.

One night, he had them caught in the act of meeting. They refused to be separated, and in his indignant stupor, ordered the farmer to be killed. His servants pulled a long knife and sheathed it into the young man's heart.

Unbridled sorrow flowed out of the young woman's heart, and as if pitying the star-crossed lovers, the heaven decided to send an agent of death to claim the woman's life, in the form of a jagged bolt. Her lifeless body fell upon the young man's, as if to say even death will not part them. The father, waking from his drunk rage, realized what has transpired and languished.

The couple's bodies were burned on the spot, and everyone were forbidden to go speak of the event. Days passed, and the father was plagued with nightmares. Dreams of a young man and woman's burned corpses come to him to plunge their terrible hands into his chest. It did not stop until he, too, died of fear.

But it did not stop there.

The servants involved in the incident suffered the same fate as the master. And in the forest, the final resting place of the poor lovers, phantoms were reportedly seen frolicking. Faint figures of man and woman swaying hitherto. And those who give chase are cursed to wander the woods forever.

One day, a botanist wandered during noon. He doesn't know what had transpired in that location. There, in the woods, at the spot where the lovers laid dead, a new grass grew.

It was Mimosa pudica, the shy grass.

Perhaps a testament of the lovers' want to be left alone.