At first Ardwyn thought maybe he had looked in the wrong direction. He looked to the left and then to the right. Even up and down for some reason, which didn’t make any sense. The house was gone. Simply vanished into thin air. He scanned the clearing with his flashlight.

Nothing. Just an empty clearing surrounded by woods.

And the toolshed? The toolshed was gone also. Not even a trace of the foundation. No trace of anything.

All of a sudden cold sweat ran down his neck. He tried to calm himself by taking deep breaths. He looked up. The moon was still there. The trees were still there. But the house, gone.

What about the flashlight? The flashlight was still there. He carefuly examined the flashlight, the shape, the make. It was the same exact flashlight he had pulled out of the drawer back in the house. Why had the flashlight remained?

Had some sort of cosmic vortex opened up and swallowed the house?

Ardwyn suddenly realized that he was out in the middle of the woods by himself, and real terror gripped him. He felt trouble swallowing in his throat.

He frantically started to shine the flashlight around him. The wind picked up in strength and the trees bent and swayed under their weight, as if all watching him.

He spun around and scanned the other side of the edge of the woods. And then staring directly in front of him, from somewhere deep in the woods, the two green eyes.

The same voice came from the woods but it was a lot louder than before. Ardwyn. Run for your life!

Ardwyn instinctively listened to what the voice told him to do and ran. He didn’t have a lot of time to decide what else to do being out here in the field exposed. He ran as fast as his feet could carry him, gripping the flashlight for his dear life. The sharp twigs of the bushes cut into the skin of his legs, pricking him, but the pain was just a momentary distraction.

Ardwyn shone the flashlight on the path ahead. Here in the deep of the woods, everything was pitch black. He found a narrow path between the trees, and with his flashlight scanning the trail, he tried to find the straightest path out so that he could just keep running. He didn’t look back. He didn’t want to find out what was chasing him, nor who the voice belonged to. He just needed to get out. Get to some highway, some remnant of civilization.

He wanted to wake up. As if it was all some bad dream. But he knew he wasn’t dreaming. The difference was that in a dream you might not know you were dreaming, while in reality you at least knew you were not dreaming.

This was not a dream.

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Ardwyn ran despite feeling out of breath. He tripped over a branch and fell into the sharp undergrowth, the branches piercing his skin and what seemed like blood, dripping onto his leg. He quickly wiped the blood away with the palm of his hand.

Behind him, somewhere back there in the dark woods, came the rustling of a creature moving through the thick undergrowth, chasing him. The way the brushes cracked under the weight of the creature seemed like it had to be something big. A deer didn’t make noises like that. A bear perhaps.

He got up to his feet, the stabbing pain shooting up through his body. He was disoriented with the pain. But he had to keep moving. His heart pounded as he raced through the woods, his flashlight shaking in his hand. He had to avoid obstacles, move around bushes, avoid the trees, just keep moving forward.

The branches whipped his face, more blood streaming down the side of his cheek. His breath came in ragged gasps, visible in the cold night air. The forest ahead seemed to darken, the trees growing denser, out of reach of the moonlight.

The creature’s heavy footsteps grew closer, accompanied by an otherworldly growl, and the sound of splintering wood.

What was that? That was no bear. Something much bigger.

Ardwyn’s flashlight beam caught glimpses of a massive, shadowy form moving between the trees. It was right there. Just a few hundred meters behind him, closing in on him.

Ardwyn tried to run faster, but he couldn’t. He was running as fast as he could for what seemed nearly half an hour. He couldn’t tell time anymore. He was tired. Was this how he would end up dying? Was this the end?

He heaved in a gasp trying to catch air. The trees cracked behind him. The creature wasn’t able to move as agile as him through the forest, because of its size. Maybe Ardwyn could find some tangled patch of the woods to crawl into and hide.

He continued to run and then stumbled onto a clearing, momentarily exposed in the moonlight. Great, he thought. Totally exposed. The creature could surely catch him out here. Ardwyn considered the distance of the clearing, maybe he could make his way across, and then move into another more overgrown patch of the woods to evade the creature.

He looked around. The heavy crunch of the trees came from the distance, getting closer with every moment. Without further hesitation he jumped into the clearing and ran, tripping over something. The pain grew and he felt the darkness enveloping him. The stone was large, and he had not seen the form in the heavy undergrowth of the weeds and bushes. He got up and checked his knee. Blood and more pain. He hit his knee hard, and felt the impact of the stone on his knee cap.

Run. Just get up and run. Forget the pain.

He groaned and tried to raise himself up. Get up. He winced in pain.

As he got up, pushing himself upward with all of his willpower he noticed glowing blue marks in the stone. A writing of some sort in a language he didn’t recognize. The glow came in waves, pulsating in the moonlight.

And then a few feet from this stone, hardly noticeable in the darkness, was another large stone, also overgrown with weeds and shrubs. The other stone started glowing too as if woken up by the first stone. And then another adjacent stone to the side, and then one by one, a series of seven stones lit up around him, all with strange markings.

The air shimmered around him, in the center of the circle of stones, distorting the view of the forest behind him. Ardwyn, startled, reached out to touch the shimmer. And then a burst of light exploded between the stones, into hues of blue and sparkles of green, an orb glowing between the stones.

Behind him the noises of the creature started to grow much closer than before. The creature was closing in on him, almost catching up with him.

He looked back in fright. In desperation Ardwyn lunged toward the shimmering air of the stone circle, and felt an intense pull and stumbled forward, passing through the portal.