The Forager and the Skryty

One of the stories found the the Book of Trees commonly associated with the Ten Hundred Tales, the Forager and the Skryty is an ursa fable from before the Age of Fire. It recounts an ursa forager who frees an imprisoned skryty, a forest Horror, and wins his freedom, changing his fate as prize.

## The Tale

There was once a crumpled and wisen forager of the Sun who dug for roots on the northern slopes, braving the blackbramble patches four times each day. One day, he went down the slope and disappeared into the thorny patches, shutting his eyes tight to protect himself as he did so. He emerged the first time with a misshapen stump. The forager’s second effort found a armfulls of stained dirt. His third attempt unearthed chipped and gnawed bones, long buried and forgotten. Then, calling upon the Great Mother’s blessing, he dug under the blackbrambles a fourth time and returned with a large clod of stiff dirt. Breaking open the clod, he revealed a clay jar stopped tight with sealed beeswax. Overjoyed, the forager delighted at his find, for anything sealed with wax must surely be delicious and fit to a Crown. He turned tail to begin clambering up the slope home, but his curiosity won the better, and with one claw the forager broke open the jar’s seal.

No sooner had the wax been pierced, vines began crawling out of the jar’s darkness, as though alive like a multitude of snakes. While not well learned, the forager had been taught as a young cub how to act when encountering the unknown. The forager quieted his fear and Asked the coiling vines as they bound into a tall, lanky figure, and so the forager heard that the spirit was a skryty, a wild and powerful spirit. The forager was scared, for the skryty stood half tall as an old oak, through it seemed to pay the forager no mind.

Looking round, the skryty called for his hated foe, the Great Dire Koaldan of the Eyes, but finding only the forager, shook with joy and offered him which part of his body would not be eaten.

The skryty explained that after the first five ages of imprisonment, he would bring bounty and prosperity to whomever freed him. After his tenth age of imprisonment, he vowed to devour limb by limb whomever unleashed him. After the seventeenth age, he vowed to grant five Impossibilities to his liberator. After the thirty-first age, he swore to present the ursa who freed him a choice of which limb would remain uneaten, be it snout, paws, or tail.

The forager pleaded for his life, but the skryty was unmoved. The forager then decided a gamble. Warming and softening the broken wax in his paw, the forager asked the skryty how, with all its tall and majestic bearing as the greatest tree on all spires, he came fit inside such a small jar. Surely, a feat was the work the Great Dire Koaldan of the Eyes. Proud and arrogant, the skryty claimed it was his formidable powers and ability. The forger remained Unsure, scratching one ear with a paw as he finished softening the beeswax in his paws. Snarling, the skryty undid its knotted coils of vines and shrank its form, snaking back into the clay jar. The forager quickly spread the wax over the jar’s mouth and Heard that the ancient Ward still lived within the bee’s noble wax.

The forager turned back to the blackbramble patch, announcing his plan to return the jar and the imprisonned skryty to its place beneath the thorny thicket. Contemplating the blackbrambles with their catching hooks and sweet berries not yet ready to be plucked, the forager began to tell the tale of mother hua and the den father.

Hearing this tale, the skryty begged to be released, offering to help the forager in exchange for his freedom. The forger was wary, but Looked and Saw the skryty and so the agreement was made. The forager pealed off the wax seal, and the skryty emerged, taking the form of a snake of veins, leaves, twigs, branches, and coal black eyes. It slithered into the woods west of the blackbramble patches, bidding the forager to follow.

It led the tired ursa to a hidden pond set in a tight copse of eidelwood trees. The trees lunged and slapped at him, but the skryty Saw him as friend to the eidelwoods, his setting Sun fur now streaked with the black tar oil of the eidelwoods, and so the forager was free to pass under there blood sharp branches untouched. The pond shimmered deep vran at the copse’s centre, and the skryty before disappearing told the forager that if he would hunt among the eidelwoods, and dive deep enough into the pond’s depths, he would meet his Great Mother and Great Father.

The forager, humbled by his gamble narrow-won, instead dug up a bundle of bloomcap mushrooms that grew on the pond’s edge and returned home. There, he consulted with his mate, and though many of his den were worried by his new markings, he lived many long years, foraging in the reach of the eidelwoods, where none other dared venture.

The forager reared six more cubs following, his meeting with the skryty, and each bore the marks of the eidelwoods, and were in turn safe passing through the sword sharp leaves and boughs. At the forager’s end, he made one last trip into down the slope, first to visit the blackbrambles he had not returned to for years, and last to the hidden copse, where he at long last shed all he wore and carried, dove deep into the vran depths.

One of the forager’s cubs, Joza, would remember her one of her father’s tales of a clay jar found under the blackbrambles, find her father’s belongings not long after, return them home, and soon after come to be known as Joza Eidlemark of the Sun.