Your name is Alec. You're just a boy. Your eyes are grass green. You and your friends all fell in love with the beautiful forest that hides your family's home. The overgrown forest. Roots and thorny bushes render the terrain impassable for most. Vines hang from every branch of every daunting tree. Even the grass is dangerous, growing up to knee height, obscuring the roots and prickles. Your friends are all beginning their training as rangers in the far away city. You on the other hand, have been wandering the vast forest since you could walk. Whenever you all get together, you play tag. But once every year, the simple game of tag becomes "Hunt down Alec" every Christmas without fail. At first hiding was enough. You'd ask your father to help you scout for the best hiding places and would disappear for hours when that year's competitive game arrived. But your friends are all training, learning from professional teachers. So when they found you hiding spots, you turned to your mother for help making camouflage. The following year your friends had all gotten strangely effective when tracking you, so ran and lost quickly to the others. All year you pushed yourself, suffering from the harsh forest terrain, but you would become the fastest. Your friends learned pack tactics, hunting you as a group but suffering from the terrain. Again you push yourself, running daily through overgrown landscape until you had an affinity for it. The game changed. Your friends now wield weapons during the challenge. Dulled, non-lethal weapons that can only injure with the worst of intentions. "Its not fair! You'll all get me and hurt me" Your friends disagreed.
"Alec, this isn't a game. It's a test. We use this annual challenge to gauge how far we've come with our training. Country boy, versus city boys. What do you say?" You don't even have to consider it anymore. "You're on, you're all on! Besides, those things will only slow you down." You're confident that the weapons won't change anything. Your friends are all careful not to hurt you, not more than you can shrug off. The hunt feels real now. Not long after their magic grew. Besides the tracking they'd been using for so long now, they could also create fog, jump longer distances, disappear and reappear somewhere else in a puff of smoke. You worked harder than ever during your final teen years. You sharpened your instincts so much that you could sense the arrows as they flew towards you. That year you fell. You found a mask... A mask? But how? .....
There is no mask.
YOU ARE READING
The Hunter's Mask
ActionAlec and his friends are playing in the forest as usual. But something happens that'll change their lives forever. Something dark and violent... Credit to @grc22877 for her contribution to the story. Providing character ideas, plot points, descripti...
