Silver Leaf

Dream

I've never really been interested in dreams, I didn't think they mattered. They're only your mind making up weird visuals and storylines that don't make sense.
Well that's what I used to think, at least.

It was a cold fall evening, a few days before Halloween. I went to bed at around 1 AM, which had become my new routine since I'd been out of school. I had trouble sleeping that night. It was very cold, colder than fall in Greece would normally allow.
When I finally did fall asleep, I found myself in the forest near my home town.

I had a feeling of needing to go somewhere, as you often do when dreaming.
I passed some familiar sites, the campsite, the tree with a bark shaped like a scowling face, and the clearing with a single birch tree in the middle.
I ventured deeper into the forest, deeper than I'd ever been in real life. The scenery changed, from largely flat terrain with a well-kept path to an unmarked trail leading into the hills.

I walked until dusk fell. The sky became light green and purple. I walked with bare feet, sometimes scraping on a stray rock.
I then approached a fork in the path. At the end stood a figure. Just looking in my direction. Everything fell silent, not even the leaves dared make a sound.
I got pulled to that figure, and dropped right in front of it. I felt scared.
She wore a dark green dress, with long sleeves, and she had brown boots. The girl had wavy chestnut colored hair and ghostly white skin.
But she didn't have a mouth, where it would've been was only a patch of her ghostly skin. Her dark brown eyes emoted, they wore a terrified expression. Staring off into the distance, just past me. The girl seemed to register me, and her expression shifted. It changed into a look of utter desperation.
And then, I suddenly realized, that it was the girl from the photograph. My stomach sank. I remember as a kid when I stayed over at grandma's, she would sometimes look forlorn at that picture, for minutes on end. It showed two girls, my grandma and my great aunt.
There was an old story about those girls my mother used to tell us.
The story warned never to go into that forest. Because of something my grandma and my now missing great aunt had experienced. Everyone in my family has been told about it numerous times. And so everyone knew not to go into that forest, at all. The story went like this:
On a warm fall evening my grandmother, Odessa, and my great aunt, Kassandra, went out to play in the forest. They must've been 9 or 10 at the time, just like in the picture on the mantelpiece. They were gone for a long time, and my great grandfather began to worry. He was thinking of going into the forest to look for them. Then Odessa returned, she was shaking. She had scratches all over her body, presumably from running through the underbrush. She kept mumbling that she didn't dare save her. My great grandfather told his wife to look after Odessa, and then he went into the forest to try and find Kassandra. He didn't find anything, not a trace of her. My grandmother has never said anything more about what had happened.
She told her kids to never go into that forest. She wanted to protect them from whatever was in there, she was scared. Her kids passed that feeling on.
I was pretty scared of the story, too, when I was younger.
But as I got older, the forest became more of a hangout spot for me and my friends.
But still, I dared not be in that forest alone. And never truly felt at ease.
And now Kassandra stood in front of me.
With one pale hand she pointed to the ground, where there was no grass growing. There was written:

FIND ME