Epilogue

Winter came.
The plants, the beasts, the humans were all equally exposed to its harshness.
Many lives greeted their ends, becoming provisions for the next life. For the sake of the spring that would someday come. The seasons shift. Life and death cycle over. And the times move forward.
Ten years flowed by.
In that time space, there was a great war. Tragically defeated, invaded, the kingdom became a colony. With deep connections to the late royal family, the Grant House forfeited much of its wealth to the occupying country and fell to ruin before long. The new lords imposed a heavy tax on the common citizenry, and poor villages crumbled one after the next. No longer able to endure the pains of starvation, the villagers of Clamberra finally set foot into the forest where they say monsters lurked. They returned with no issues. The villagers entered the village to hunt and gather while plants, yet the monster of rumor never appeared. The village somehow managed to avert its destruction.
One time, a single hunter grew lost in the forest.  He wandered a night, and the next morning, he finally made it back to the village. With his limp, exhausted face he said this. At midnight, in the forest depths, he heard the song of a man and a woman

“There must be faeries living in this forest.”

It must be a pair of loving fairies, the villages gossiped. For it was a happy song they sung.