It was supposed to be a leisurely trek back through the Keziah Woodlands, back to civilization. Alma had traveled this path dozens if not hundreds of times, for secret rendezvous with her friend. It should have been impossible for her to get lost. But something felt off the moment she brushed past her friends in order to lead the charge back home. A change so imperceptible that it was almost non-existent. A shift in the air of reality. The trees surrounding her looked no different from usual, albeit with a dark sheen that seemed to stick to the outer layer of the leaves. As the young sniper moved unaware, the surrounding silence became deafening, forcing her to stop in her tracks.
The ex-soldier, with bated breath, turned around slowly. Her two companions were nowhere to be seen. There was an odd reluctance, as the girl made her way toward the spot she had last seen them standing. With every step, a hissing sound. There was a vague, almost unnoticeable pulpous feeling to the ground she walked on that hadn’t been there a few moments ago. As she observed the tracks she left behind, in each one there was a fine gray dust where dirt had once been. The ash marred her finger as she touched it, sliding it along the ground and leaving a visible path in its wake. There was a strange quality in the area of forest she was in, of something beyond death. Something she couldn’t even begin to explain.
Her attempt to call out for her friends was considerably in vain—the echo of her voice reverberating in an odd way that frightened her almost enough to cease from repeating the action. She paused for a while. Simply standing in place, marking her surroundings without the usual insistence of moving. She wondered if maybe she had ought to wait for them to come to her. A contrasting, frantic thought in spite of her role as the guide and navigator.
And as she waited for what seemed like several minutes, she found herself increasingly afraid of sitting down to rest. Hesitant to destroy more of the earth surrounding her. As time passed, her legs began to ache and the churning in her stomach only worsened. After finally building up the courage, she decided to make her way toward a nearby tree and took note of the permanent shadows coating the leaves that left the impression of a burned-in chiaroscuro. There was a dreadful feeling of what came next. A wish not to know, but of what she had to do. She reached for a loose hung leaf, attempting to yank it away with her fingers.
An action that ended in failure, as the moment her fingers touched the sensitive epidermal tissue of the charred foliage, it all came apart in her grasp.
Repeatedly, she reached for one leaf, then another. Each time, it would be eaten away by the touch of her hands. In her frustration, a punch landed square into the trunk of the tree. But instead of the pain of solid splinters cutting her hand, there was only a soft thud as her fist left a crater of fine ash in its wake. There was a faint scent of burnt wood.
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Terrified, the girl ran ahead, dashing through the maze of dead, ashen trees of a perilous forest that was now unfamiliar to her. Endless prints of gray chased behind her as she attempted to escape the ominous feeling sending shivers down her spine. On the edge of her vision, a slight shifting of shadow against the fallen wood, that against her better judgment caused her to finally come to a halt. A human figure had stood momentarily between the glancing thicket, that she believed must have been one of her friends who had finally found her way.
Directly across from her, skirting around the end of the horizon, a humanlike shadow was roaming through the grassy void of the forest. Seemingly undisturbed by the vast maze of wooden pillars surrounding them. Afraid of being alone, Alma ran toward the only other presence she could see. Every loose shoot and twig dissolving into powder as she brushed past them. The shadow stood frozen.
Salvation, at last, had begun crossing Alma’s mind. She was afraid that if the sun had set, all would be lost for her. But the light remained burning in the sky, casting its unbearable heat through the canopy of trees and projecting her savior’s shadow among the shade that she had been chasing after. It stood out, curiously darker than all the rest, and when Alma finally got close enough, the shadow itself seemed to turn to face her.
The young sniper’s elation turned quickly to horror as the realization struck that something about the lightless figure was not quite right. The girl could find no source for the shadow, no matter how hard she looked. Before her stood a living mass of darkness standing several feet higher than her. It did not move in the way a shadow normally moves. It crept in swift, erratic motions and seemed almost to project itself against the empty horizon instead of spreading along the ground. As it moved toward her, she noticed its proportions were also slightly off in a way that was impossible to describe. Finally, when it seemed almost to engulf her completely, its face—which had been completely featureless until then—suddenly grew what appeared to be a grotesque set of eyes that formed an incomprehensible expression the girl was unable to read.
Alma stifled a scream and remained paralyzed until the swaying of trees knocked her to her senses. And although the girl could not recall the feel of any wind, the dancing branches had caused the surrounding leaves to scatter and dissolve swiftly in mid-air in a beautiful display, leading to a strong smell of burning that engulfed the area around her. Backing away, the ex-soldier reached for her pistol and drew it against the living shade. And as she fired what she had, the entity remained unfazed to the feeling of searing bullets passing through it that cratered in the soft pillows of ash and clouds that they kicked up as they bored deep into the surrounding trees.