⚠️⚠️ this takes place after most of the actual otgw show finished and therefore contains spoilers please beware. Also there are very small mentions of blood and killing/death so proceed with caution if that kinda stuff triggers you ⚠️⚠️ The Woodsman’s Return The Woodsman looked out upon the forest that he had wasted so many years in. The trees were tinted with an angry orange and yellow, as they always were in The Unknown, and the path through them was equally as foreboding as the first day his family had moved in. He could almost hear the spirits of the trees he now knew to be lost souls, cowering away from the old axe he carried in his hand with sheepish regret. This would be the last time he would touch this axe, the last time he would venture in this forest, and his last moments between life and death, a state he had been in for an unrecognizable amount of time now. With his head hung, he started on the path through the woods that would take him to the river, the only one he knew about in all his years in this place. In the Unknown, you can travel for hours without really going anywhere. But this time, the Woodsman was determined to finish the job. He had spent so many years cutting down trees, lost souls of innocent people, just so he could hang onto the last memory he had of his daughter who was nowhere near this place. Only now he realized that that was a good thing. She was at peace, and he needed to follow her, not only for his sake but for the sake of all who wander the Unknown where a man such as the Woodsman does not belong. After what felt like a lifetime, the Woodsman finally reached the river. A few months ago, two boys had fallen from this same river and the Woodsman had found them, trying to warn them of what was ahead. But as it turned out, he was the one who was blind to the real dangers of the Unknown, and they showed him not only the truth of his daughter’s passing but also that somebody can enter a place such as this and leave as well. They freed him. But the Woodsman knew he was too far gone. Wherever he was in the world those two boys had rejoined, he could not come back; but now, after everything he had witnessed here, he was not scared of leaving--the other way. He missed his family tremendously, and he was tired of surviving in a forest filled with lost souls and his own guilt. The only thing he can do for these souls is leave them alone, especially after all he had done to them; and although he deserved many punishments, he didn’t need to become one of them. Nobody deserves that. He was decided. The Woodsman held out his axe, which carried the blood of so many innocent people. He whispered something, which the trees heard only as the wind carried it away from his sorrow and up to their branches--“I’m so sorry.” He dropped the axe into the river and watched as it sunk away into nothingness. Then, he removed his hat and his coat and looked up at the branches above him one last time. For the first time, they didn’t seem fearful or scary, but rather beautiful, like clouds passing by, slowly but surely. They would have a new beginning, and so would he. “To new beginnings,” he thought, as he fell into the water of the only river in the Unknown, welcoming its cold grasp for the first time. The Woodsman was going home.
The thumbnail is a scene in the actual show, and the writing is completely mine :] This is a really short piece of writing based off of a semi-popular theory that the woodsman was in a coma in the real world and thats why he’s been in the unknown for such a long time. His wife and daughter have both died and this is a precursor to the scene in the show where we see him with his daughter at a house, which is, in this theory, after they have both died and are living peacefully together now, which is why I called it the Woodsman’s return. Feedback is appreciated, I have to submit this for an assignment so I want it to be as good as it can be :>>
