They said there were 7 ghuls that lived in the Blood Woods and should you encroach on any, it would ascribe your certain death, unless it were the Purple ghul, or the Green ghul, lord of boons, who would grant your greatest desire first, before following the same result or something much less desirable.
These 7 ghuls followed little logic, and had not a king, nor cared for laws, but were so powerful, and lived in such a barren land, amongst trees that never bore fruit and whose sap was inedible, but which grew up like weeds each from one root to another, that no monarch could bother to subdue them.
The moment she'd seen these woods she'd taken her gamble, yet those that pursued her had also dared to follow her into this recalcitrant, unruled domain, and the wounds she had gotten along the way had compounded one to another until she could feel the thundering of hooves of their steel-toed carfe horses, and still tasting the spiked pain of the arrow to her back from that masked archer and the drip of warm blood flowing from it, had lost all hope when she spotted those white fields. She knew what they were-everyone knew the ghuls. They were the stories parents told their children to keep them from wandering out at night. Their morals so desolute they could find no land to accept them but these woods who had no purpose, whose red wood wouldn't even burn, but only churn out bad tasting smoke, nor was strong enough to hold up a house, nor was soft and flexible enough to carve, and whose sharp, unmaliable bark was always splitting to allow bright red sap to drip down from above, coating the ground in the somewhat toxic liquid so that no grass nor crop could grow. Only black mirch moss that was prickly and stuck to ones cloths and skin if it should brush it, infecting any open wounds immediately. This was where the 7 evil ghuls lived, who used their mastered crafts not for good or honor but for greed and evil. These white fields however, belonged to the white ghul, the lover of beauty, cleanliness and innocence. These three are things of excellence, and yet this ghul, the mother's do tell, has twisted them to be things of reproach. Innocence is good, but it is only so because there is a time to place it behind oneself. Cleanliness is holy, but to remain too clean for too long, will keep your hands from the dirty work all must endure here on Yenth, for if one man is clean, it is only because another carries his filth for him. Beauty is to be admired, and then its beholden respected when it passes, because beauty is made to fade, cleanliness is made to dirty, and innocence is made to wisen. This is the way of the world, this is the way of Yenth until one passes into the Beyond. And such the mothers warn their children of the white ghul, since the white ghul, as a lover of these three, was also, therefore, a greatly jealous ghul. No one who entered could be clean or innocent or beautiful or they would not just die from the flowers like the rest, but he would plant his flowers inside them, keeping them alive from the poison and would slowly torture them to death, squeezing out their blood into his red, sharp, 3-petal flower vines that would consume their flesh, leaving their vitals till last, until they passed away, and the white ghul would take their heart, their kidneys, their stomach and their liver and would eat them raw; they said the blood of the beauties and innocents he killed stained his lips red, but because of the toxns from the flowers he lived amongst his skin was as pale as snow, and his eyes were bloodshot, and yet, no one doubted he was a great beauty. Because one so obsessed with it could hardly let themselves look far from what they desired most. And so she had no idea what to expect when she ran onto his field, or how he should present himself to her. Merely her eyes stuck steadfastly on the obscure whiteness of the center, dragging her failing body with her, even as blood trailed from old and new wounds, even as another arrow hit her back, certainly into her heart if it had been located in the left side, even illusions danced before her eyes, as her loving father's hand reached out for her, begging her to stop, to leave the flowers, to spare her life.
"No, daddy," she mumbled as she pulled one foot in front of the next. "No daddy," the last time I saw you, you had no eyes or breath, why are they hear to speak and see me? Why are both your hands intact? Leave me, you belong in the peace of the Beyond now, if you came back for your body parts, don't, the beyond will have new ones, "go daddy," go, leave me, I don't need you anymore. Tears fell from her eyes mixing with some blood that had gotten on her face, she finally stumbled, tripping on a coil of roots cusping the surface of the earth.
She lay there for a moment, before struggling to the side, thrusting her elbows beneath her, and rising to her knees then back to her feet, she glanced behind her, following her father's desires, along with the little butterflies that flew around her, but the torches that had followed her this far had finally disappeared. She heard other voices, a strong face entering her view, begging her to return to him, but she knew it wasn't him either, because he would never beg her anything, and she finally stepped forward again, deeper into the mist.
Each breath of the thick, sticky air seemed to cut painful scars into her lungs, and she could already feel her body beginning to shake and convulse a little from the toxicity. The nerves in her brain already made it near impossible to think with the pain they sent up her skull, but she merely stopped thinking, the voices and images around her becoming gibberish and kept going, huddled over, one step at a time, eyes on the floor of flowers, watching them softly breathe beaneath her feet, keeping herself going forward merely one step after another until she suddenly was greeted with a white garment in her eyes, coaked all the way down past the ankles onto white feet, set in well-braided sandles, but whose toe nails were trimmed to perfection, with narry one defect, as if the one that used them to walk had not stubbed his foot once, nor ever dropped a tool on them, nor had stepped in any substantial dirt. She immediately dropped to her knees, not bothering to look up, she knew who it was.
"Lord of beauty." She coughed. The moment he had appeared, the scent of him had cleared her mind well enough to send away the illusions that encroached on her reality and the shivering from the poison had fallen to bearable levels. "Spare my life."