by J. Thorn
The twins slumped against the trees a few paces away, yet the girls bled into the murk. Several trees away, another whippoorwill sang to the night, a shrill ringing that frightened Sarra.
The trees seemed to close in and merge with the gloom, their contours melting into the night air until they could barely be identified. She shivered, thinking any one of those shapes might not be a tree at all, but one of the monsters hunting her family since Droman Meadows.
Sarra sighed, knelt down against an elm and faced the twins. Her skirts pooled out across the ground, disappearing into the murk like the surrounding woods. The evening air became moist and soon dew would glisten the forest. From several paces away, she couldn’t see Krea’s face. Sarra could barely make out the shape of her body, but she could feel the younger girl’s eyes watching and weighing.
Please just go to sleep, Sarra thought. If we could just make it through the night…
Then what?
Find their parents and younger sister? How did she plan on accomplishing that?
She knocked the back of her head against the elm’s bark, thinking there must be some way to reunite the family. She saw nothing but black inside the forest as well as inside of her head. She was lost and her parents could be miles away by now.
They wouldn’t have continued up the road without us. But how do they know where we entered the forest, or if we entered the forest at all?
Sarra decided she would lead the twins back to the west once the sun rose, out of the forest near where they entered. But as she craned her neck toward the deepening blue sky, she realized she had no idea which way was west.
Chapter 18
Krea’s hair appeared silver in the moonlight, but the fiery color of her locks emerged through her disposition. As she watched Sarra sleep across from them, she blamed her older sister for getting them lost in the woods. Sarra rushed them into the forest. Sarra led them in a circle and lost track of their trail. Sarra outright refused to continue the search for their parents.
But whose fault is it that you were separated from your family in the first place?
Krea bristled at the voice in her head. The voice of the guilty.
She watched the unmoving forest for the next hour, wondering why she wasted her time. No watch was required. As far as she could tell, nothing lived within the woods. The monsters did not pursue them. They lost the dread wolves at the forest’s edge. Wouldn’t it make more sense if they slept through the night so they could be fresh for travel by morning?
She leaned her head back against the tree and closed her eyes, the lure of sleep impossible to resist.
***
The interior of the forest felt like a crypt, except for the thickening humidity. The woods remained fixed and silent. Now and then, a branch would snap and crash to the earth deep in the woods, causing the girls to stir and mumble in their sleep. But they walked for two days on little food and even less sleep. It would have taken a much louder noise to rouse them.
The silence of the forest, which seemed absolute, dissipated. Something moved within the trees and the girls did not wake when the dead leaves covering the ground crunched like brittle bones.
The glow of the moon lit the sisters’ faces, the light dappled and misshapen by leaves and gnarled boughs. The moon flooded the forest floor in a soft blue, as though underwater. The eerie light shimmered and spread toward the blackness congregating beneath the trees.
A shadow appeared and disturbed the moonlight.
It slithered black and dangerous across the ground, the soft crumble of desiccated leaves the only break in the silence. The long and gangly outstretched arms might have been cast from a dead tree, had it not moved.
As the girls slumbered in a semicircle, the dark shape slipped through the trees, coming toward them. Its shadow drew nearer, touching Sarra’s legs and sliding up the girl’s torso to her face. Sarra shifted in her sleep, feeling the unforgiving chill of winter seep into her skin. She shivered, muttered something indiscernible and pulled her shawl tight to her body.
The unseen figure turned, and as its shadow drifted across the twins, they writhed in their sleep as though touched by the same dream. The forest did not make a sound, for it, too, dreaded the dark presence. As the figure crept closer to the sleeping girls, its shadow slithered up their bodies, past their faces and along the rough contours of the trees until it drowned them in blackness.
The temperature fell by several degrees and the chill washed over the sisters. Still asleep, Jasmine rubbed at her arms with her hands.
Sarra shivered and her eyes sprung open. She thought she saw a monster more horrible than the dread wolves—an unspeakable evil existing only in nightmares—bending over the twins. She heard the gurgling death rattle of the dying and felt the hands of corpses upon her body.
She blinked.
The camp was empty. Silent. Deathly silent. The moon shone down through the trees, the bright blues harsh to her eyes. The trees towered against the azure backdrop, appearing frozen. Even fearful.
Sarra dismissed the trepidation as a nightmare.
But why do I have the feeling eyes are on me?
Krea shivered, eyes glued shut and teeth chattering. Sarra noticed Krea’s closed eyes and became angry her sister fell asleep on her watch. But she softened, watching the twin draw her knees up and curl against Jasmine. Sarra sighed and removed her shawl, draping it over Krea’s exposed legs.
“Sleep well, little sister.”
Sarra cupped her hands to her arms, rubbing the chill out of her skin as she sat back against the tree facing the twins. Krea’s shivering ceased. Jasmine turned over, her legs pulled up to her chest. She wore the hint of a smile and Sarra smiled back. They all deserved a moment of happiness, even if it was only in a dream. Sarra wrapped her arms around her knees and peered between the trees and into the distance for as far as she could see.
She shook the disquieting feeling that they were being watched and waited for her body to adjust to the night air. Soon the first gray of predawn would show itself overhead.
It would not be a long wait.
Chapter 19
When dawn broke gray and desolate over the forest, Thom bolted awake. His breath came in short gasps. As he felt for Kira and Delia, who lay huddled against him, he tried to remember his dream. It was the most terrifying sort of nightmare—not of demons and monsters, but one of disturbing visions he could not interpret. One which opened the doorway for his subconscious to imagine a deeper horror.
He dreamt of his missing daughters, sleeping in the same forest in which he searched. The dream shifted and he saw the house of smooth stones standing in the forest clearing. Though the house had no doors, it opened and something terrible he couldn’t quite see slipped past his vision and into the trees.
He saw his slumbering daughters again and as a frozen panic spread down his spine, he wanted to scream out to them. He feared that what came out of that house was coming for his children.
A thrush twittered within the trees as the blue dawn seeped through the gray. Thom listened transfixed, waiting for the thrush’s call to be answered, waiting for some sign of life within the forest. The lonely call continued optimistic, then desperate and then ceased altogether.
“Where are all of your friends?” Thom asked the bird.
Behind him lay two mammoth oaks, fallen in a long forgotten storm. To his side sat a gray boulder appearing as out of place at dawn as it was the prior evening when they made camp. No cliffs or mountains were nearby, nor was there a gaping hole in the forest floor through which the boulder might have popped out. Though the land tilted at a slight incline in this part of the forest, no other rocks such as this sat upon the hill. The boulder could have dropped from the sky as far as he could tell.
It provided a fine shelter and they made camp in the bosom between the oaks and boulder, knowing they would be well hidden. As the first light of the day seeped down the trees, he noticed scratches and markings on the gray boulder. Thom
rubbed the sleep from his eyes and peered closer. Strange, interconnected diagonals and circular symbols covered the rock, looking like an ancient system of writing. But as he studied the symbols, his flesh prickled. The writing seemed...alive. He felt an energy pulsing forth from the markings, something vile and forbidden. Just looking at the symbols disquieted him. He recalled his nightmare and felt the queer sensation that the markings on the rock and the presence he felt in his dream were related.
Thom shook his head and tried to be optimistic. However, as relieved as he was to see the girls evaded the dread wolves, his consternation grew over his inability to pick up their trail.
The girls are nearby. I can almost feel them.
Even in his dream, he knew they were close. But in woodlands so dense, his daughters might be within a hundred paces of him and he would not see them.
Thom woke Kira and Delia. After fetching them a breakfast of bitter burdock leaves and dandelion, he planned to search again. The sky turned a deeper blue and Thom sensed it would be warmer in the forest today.
“What do those letters mean?” Delia asked. She stared at the boulder, her fingers running along its smooth edges.
Kira turned toward her daughter’s voice and the boulder seemed larger. It towered above Delia like a sleeping monster. Kira knelt next to her daughter, feeling the urge to pull Delia away from the rock, fearing at any moment the boulder might shift and roll over them both.
“Are you sure they are letters? They just look like scratches to me,” Thom said. He bent over Delia’s shoulders to study the strange markings.
“No, Daddy. They are letters and whole words.”
“How do you know this?”
“I don’t know,” Delia said, shrugging. “I just do.”
“Maybe you should finish your breakfast,” Kira said. She pointed at the bitter weeds, attempting to steer the conversation away from the strange boulder. As she led Delia away from the rock, she held her breath, half-expecting the boulder to lurch forward.
After leaving the camp, Thom removed his cloak and loosened his shirt, knowing soon he would be sweating in the still air.
How is it summer exists within the forest when winter still grips the entire kingdom?
As he studied the direction of the sun’s rays against the tree tops, he determined east was directly behind him. But as he led Kira and Delia west toward the forest entrance, hoping his missing daughters would have found their own trail back to the meadow, the woods grew denser and blocked his view of the sun. He struggled to maintain his sense of direction. Thom knew that by late-morning the sun would have moved too high in the sky to use the rays as a reliable compass. He pressed forward, intent on finding the meadow before noon.
“If you were the girls,” Thom said to Delia, “where would you go?”
Delia wrinkled her nose, thinking hard about the important question her father asked. “I think I would try to find my way back to where I entered, because that is what you would try to do, too. Is that the right answer?”
“That is as good of an answer as I could hope for,” he said, ruffling her hair. “Let’s hope your sisters are as smart as you.”
“Thom?” Kira asked. “How is it that it is so much warmer within the forest than it was on the trail?”
“The weather was changing as far back as Drake’s Pass, if you remember. And it was warmer still once we passed Arameth and the River Merith.”
Kira removed her shawl and rolled up her shirtsleeves.
“Yes, I remember. But it was not this warm along the Mylan Road when we lost the girls, was it? Why do the leaves grow thick on the trees as though it was summer, when there was not a bud to be found along the road?”
Delia was looking up at her father for an explanation, too. Thom didn’t answer. He had no answer. It seemed to him the forest was full of nothing but riddles, the largest being how to find his way out of the woods.
Despite the sun’s slow rotation and the towering trees blocking the rays and challenging his navigation, he managed to keep the sun at his back. But after an hour’s walk, they appeared no closer to the meadow than they were at dawn.
He knew they should have reached the entry point in a half hour or less because he attempted to track the girls from north to south the previous evening, never straying too far from the edge of the forest. At one point, Kira stopped and pointed toward a familiar cluster of mulberry bushes.
“We’ve been through here before. Are you certain we aren’t walking in a circle?”
“I don’t believe so. The sun has not changed location in the sky.”
“But the ground,” she said, pointing at matted grass and leaves that seemed to be their own tracks. “Aren’t those our tracks from earlier?”
Thom furrowed his eyebrows. “It’s possible I lost the sun behind the trees a short time ago and we backtracked.”
But Thom didn’t think he backtracked. The mulberries looked similar to the bushes they picked from earlier, and there did appear to be tracks running westward. But to have walked in a complete circle would not have been possible without having made multiple egregious errors. Thom was certain he had not lost sight of the sun for more than a few minutes at a time. The general direction was westward, always westward.
An hour later they passed a gurgling brook that cut down an incline.
“I wonder if the brook deposits in Merith,” Kira said. “Should we follow it?”
Thom shook his head. Though he did not doubt several brooks ran out of the east toward the Merith River, he didn’t recall seeing one along the Mylan Road where they had walked. If they followed the stream only to find it eventually circled back on itself, they would have wasted hours of travel and gotten themselves more lost. For now, he still had the sun to guide him. But as he walked he couldn’t help think about coercion.
Coercion.
The word kept gnawing at him like vermin at moldering cheese.
I am being coerced.
He didn’t understand how it could be possible, but he began to believe the woods tricked him. Misled him. If he could fly as high as an eagle, he would not be surprised if his bird’s-eye view showed the forest expanding eastward as fast as he walked.
Why did the girls enter this forest? If they had stayed near the entrance—
“We should have reached the edge of the forest by now. Are you certain we are headed west?” Kira asked.
Thom turned his head. The sun still touched the tree tops behind him to the southeast. “Yes, I’m certain of it. The meadow cannot be long ahead.”
Yet another hour’s walk found them surrounded by the same ancient pines, oaks and ash. He had the feeling as though the ground pulled them eastward as fast as they walked to the west. When they crested another small hill, the sun’s rays broke through the leaves and glistened silvery along a stream cutting into the terrain.
“That’s the same brook as before, Thom.”
“This cannot be possible,” Thom said. His knees shook and he cast aside a spell of vertigo. As insane as it seemed, the forest had no beginning or end and they appeared to be walking in a circle.
“We’re lost, aren’t we?” Delia asked, sniffling against her mother’s leg. “We’ll never find them. We’ll never get out of the forest.”
“Shhhh.” Kira pulled Delia close and stroked her hair. “Don’t say such things. We will find your sisters and we will make it back to the road. Together. You need to believe we will. Can you do that for me?”
Delia nodded her head, her eyes red and puffy.
“Good girl. Let’s keep walking.”
Thom trudged westward with Kira and Delia pressing close, the rough sound of their shoes cutting through leaves and echoing off the trees. Soon the sun beamed from directly overhead. They walked from dawn until noon and came no closer to the western edge of the woods.
Do not deviate from the path.
The sorcerer’s admonition boomed as loud as thunder in his mind. He was warned not to leave the road. W
as this the danger Marik foresaw? If so, why hadn’t Marik told him?
“I had no choice,” Thom said to no one, causing Kira and Delia to eye him cautiously. “I had to follow them. They’re my daughters.”
They ignored their tired legs, hunger and muscle pains while walking westward until the sun sank lower in the sky and shone in their eyes. Thom grew skittish, his eyes haunted as though he saw ghosts peering at him from the trees. Kira watched him from the corner of her eye. He talked to himself, muttering something about Marik and the road to Mylan, his voice choked in desperate tones and his eyes wrought with confusion.
Kira looked at her husband and shuddered.
The sun dropped below the forest, lighting the infinite, unreachable horizon beyond the trees in blazing marigold. Thom fell to his knees and screamed. His voice carried into the forest in a frenzied elegy, echoing off the trees and returning to him in maddening concert.
Kira put her hand over her heart and closed her eyes, expecting to see the torn carcasses of her missing daughters bleeding out on the forest floor.
She opened her eyes slowly, the diffused light prying open her lids. Thom began to laugh. Kira felt too frightened to open her eyes all the way, afraid that what she would see would drive her to the same madness. She forced herself to look, as though ripping a bandage from a wound.
Before her, a gentle slope meandered past two fallen oaks. Illuminated in the dying light of day, a boulder with strange markings bordered the oaks. Their morning campsite appeared as though they never left.
Kira pulled Delia close, brushing her hands through the girl’s hair and soothing her. Thom sobbed. Kira began to cry, and as soon as she did, Thom broke into convulsive laughter. As the day rushed toward extinction, the forest seemed to laugh back at him.