Nothing changed. The forest was quiet, and Kane still held the red tome in his hands. He had read and reread the words in the book many times, but he did not know what they meant.

Mark his soul? It sounded like the kind of thing one wanted an instruction manual for, and certainly not the kind of thing one just knew how to do.

Kane had flipped through the book but all he had seen was page upon page of blank marble white “paper.”

Kane had also expected something to happen upon the trial’s start. He had thought he would be transported to an obstacle course or brought in front of a godlike entity to be judged, but as time passed and the forest remained quiet and the book sat weightlessly in his hand, he began to feel a suspicion coming on.

Perhaps this marking of the soul was the trial in of itself or at least a part of it.

But that was ridiculous. He had no information about what he was supposed to do, no direction in which to push himself towards. At the very least, he wanted an example of what a marked soul actually was.

“This is some bullshit.” he muttered to the empty forest.

Eventually Kane decided that he was getting nowhere sitting on log and staring at blank pages and decided to explore the forest.

Perhaps there was something in the forest that had changed and would maybe give him a hint about what the fuck to do. Floating stone totems at the edge of the forest, holding ancient memories, maybe. A dilapidated library holding tomes instructing new recruits of a mystical order on how to mark their souls... something like that.

As Kane walked through the forest though, his vain hope soon faded to nothingness. There was no change apart from the now commonplace disappearance of his parents and all of their, not to mention his, belongings. After hours of walking all he saw was tall oaks and evergreens, spotty sunlight, ferns, and dead leaves.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

This was what he thought...until he did notice a change. The tree he looked at seemed to look faded compared to normal ones. In fact, all of the trees, and the ferns, and the leaves, the sky, and EVERYTHING looked faded, except for him.

It was like a very small amount of the color had been sapped from everything. Kane suspected that everything had been growing more and more faded the farther he walked, but the effect had been so gradual that he hadn’t noticed until now.

If this pattern kept on repeating...

“Won’t they disappear?” He whispered aloud, starting slightly at the sound of his voice in the silent, faded forest.

He kept on walking for hours and the landscape grew more and more muted until he noticed that the he could see through the trees. It created a peculiar overlapping effect. Like when one overlaps the same came color on low opacity on a drawing app.

“This isn’t the same forest, is it?” He said, hardly even noticing.

He thought he knew what had happened now. He had been put in a copy of the forest when the trial started but he hadn’t even noticed it. Only, the copy was just a segment, not the whole forest. The copy grew less “real” the farther he went from where he started until he reached...nothing. His segment of forest was like a drop of dye dropped into the ocean, the middle vibrant and colorful, the edges faded, wispy and indistinct.

If he followed that metaphor did that mean the segment would fade as it was dispersed into the proverbial ocean? What would happen to him then? Kane didn't want to think about that, and besides he was jumping from one unsubstantiated hypothesis to another.

What he knew was that he did not want to go to the edge of the forest and see what happened when the trees grew so faded they stopped being there at all.

And another thing. He may have just been imagining it, but Kane thought he felt strange in this faded, translucent place. It was a very slight feeling of being in a dream, like nothing was real. It could just be the oddness of his environment affecting his mind, but it was so odd. He had never felt it before...

Abruptly, Kane turned around and strode back toward the unfaded center of the forest. With his cancer eating at his energy, he wanted nothing more than to sit down on a tree and rest; but he did not want to see what happened when he stayed in this place for a prolonged period of time.

~

It should have been dark when Kane got back where he thought he had started, but the sun was still shining, bright and steady in the same spot he remembered seeing it before. Kane didn’t bother to be surprised, this place wasn’t real so why bother to make the sun rise and fall. The creators of this place didn’t seem to give two shits about making him comfortable

Kane slept all the same, back against a tree, tome floating beside his shoulder as it had been all day, eyes covered with his baseball cap. When he woke, he was hungry.