Butcher of the Forest
The Butcher of the Forest is a 2024 dark fantasy novella by Premee Mohamed. Veris Thorn is brought before the Tyrant, the brutal ruler who conquered her homeland, after his two children, Eleonor and Aram, wander into the Elmever -- a cursed forest bordering the kingdom that few who enter ever leave. Veris is the only known person to have ever rescued a child from it. She has a single day to bring the children back, or the Tyrant will destroy her village and kill everyone in it.
Armed with a handful of magical trinkets and hard-won knowledge of the forest's rules, Veris bargains her way through a gauntlet of uncanny, dangerous creatures -- an antlered spirit, a duplicitous unicorn, a fox that plays dice for memories -- trading pieces of herself for information and safe passage. Each exchange costs her something real, and the novella builds its tension less through spectacle than through the mounting price of survival.
Mohamed's prose is spare and unsentimental, treating the forest's fairy-tale logic as genuinely dangerous rather than whimsical, and using Veris's bargains to explore what people are willing to give up to save children who aren't their own.
The only known person to have rescued a child from the cursed Elmever forest, forced to do it again under threat to her village.
This is a standalone novella and does not require reading any other works to understand the story.
The work was honored with the 2025 Aurora Award for Best Novelette/Novella.
