Beautiful Secret

Paradise

Ella had been walking for half an hour through the forest.

Her senses had grown accustomed to the eery sounds of the empty forest, and the only thing that reminded her that she was still walking was the crunching noise of dead pine needles and sticks snapping under her All Stars.

She thought about how stupid this was.
Deep down in her heart, she had only agreed to meet up with Euri and the others because she cradled the smallest hope inside of her that Ander would cross her path. She was now acting like the many ignorant love-struck teenagers that she had despised all her life.

And it landed her up in a cold creepy forest of death where she would probably die of hyperthermia before she managed to even get remotely close to civilization.

She trudged hopelessly through the thick snow, her ankles and jeans getting wet in the process. After what seemed like miles and miles of walking, Ella decided to take a break and sit down on the unwelcoming forest floor. This was hopeless, and she'd then made the decision to give up and head back home after she'd rested for a little.

Sitting in the silence, Ella could hear a soft trickle.

It reminded her of a small river that she used to play in when she was a kid. Back in Cali, it was now considered sacred territory by all the teenagers because everyone went there for their romantic milestones and small social events that you were only invited to if you were popular. She'd had her first kiss there, with a guy named Chad Mason who was an international participant in some strange unheard of sport that had originated in Transylvania. Her friends used to call him "Drac".

It only took Ella a few seconds after sitting on the snow to process the fact that she'd heard a trickle. And that trickle had reminded her of a river. She stood up and followed the soft sound of moving water.

She kept walking until the water got louder. The trickle now sounded like a waterfall.
Ella still couldn't actually see any water, she was trusting her hearing.

The forest grew thicker as the sound of rushing water grew louder. After tackling through dense snowy coated vegetation, she came to a small clearing where the thick snow was replaced with frosty soil. She knew the source of the water was just ahead of the clearing. She could feel it.

Ella's path was obstructed by an enormous rock that was deeply embedded into the earth. Next to it grew dense thorny brush that was coated with frozen ice particles that bunched together and formed sharp little shapes. Walking through it would be like walking through a thousand needles. It was natures mini iron maiden (a torture device in the medieval era in which a person was enclosed into a small chamber with spears pointing outward.)

Ella knew she should have just turned away and tried getting out of the forest, but her curiosity was exceeding her logical rationing at this point. So she wiped her cold wet hands on her pants and looked for a chink in the stone to start climbing from.

There were four dents that she could possibly use but the rest were too shallow to be of any assistance. Ella dug the tip of her right foot into the lowest chink. From there on she had to do a lot of improvising until she remotely reached the top. And once she did, what she saw now was breath-taking.

The land had sloped downward significantly from the front of the rock, to its backside, so Ella's view on top of the rock was far and wide. There was a large river that was nestled parallel to the rock. It was a young river because there were several waterfalls that were present from the sudden drop in ground. There were large willow trees which she'd realized weren't actually indigenous to this habitat, that snaked along the sides of the river, some so close to the water that their branches leaned in and touched the surface of the rushing water.

What Ella found so strange about the magnificent scenery in front of her, was the gushing water of the river. In this area, the average temperature in winter was too cold for a large amount of water to still be in its liquid phase. Most of the water froze, and yet here in front of her, lay a mighty river with gallons of water beating down its banks, like blood rushing inside a major artery.

She didn't dwell on the thought because she was faced with a new problem.

When she looked down, she realized that the drop from where she sat on top of the rock to the ground by the river was high enough that if she tried jumping down, the impact would probably kill her, or if she was lucky, only break all the bones in her body.

Ella didn't want to give up. She wanted to get to this magical side of the forest and explore it, but the challenge she was faced with now was impossible at the moment because she had no outward support or equipment. She would accept defeat for now, but vowed to herself that she would find this natural gateway again and next time be prepared.

Ella turned around, carefully sliding her body down the smooth rock, making sure that her feet utilized the same chinks from when she'd climbed up. In the last meter, she lost her grip and scraped her stomach mildly. She now needed to find a way out of this forest because looking for a tree with a blue scarf in a forest filled with hundreds of thousands of trees, was close to impossible. So she turned in the direction that seemed the best, and just started walking.

Ella thought about what she'd just seen. The thought of spending hours in the little paradise she'd discovered seemed to comfort her restless frustrated soul. She felt a small tinge of excitement and hope surge through her body.

She hadn't realized how much progress she'd made through the forest because all the plants and trees looked the same. They just seemed to be like an image stuck in time, never changing.

It was then that she spotted something in her peripheral vision.

A deep blue scarf tied tightly around the lowest thin icy branch of a pine tree.