Spiked Embrace

1st Chapter: Starless Night

~*~ The haunted woods will gobble you up. Flesh and soul, child.
No use to scream, or plead for mercy.
They won't spare your life; they are hungry of your naive smile, raven-blue curls, amethyst gaze, fair skin, gentle touch.

The emerald jaws of evergreen branches will draw you in; once you stepped over those mossy portals over which time is frozen and immortality is sipped in Graals made of air, there is no way back to normalcy.

You've been warned, stranger.

You can only proceed onwards toward the center of the tangled labyrinth dotted by danger at every turn, and cross fingers the blind goddess is by your side.

~*~

Trailing young white fingers along bare boughs and ancient oaks, your childlike delight leaves faint haloes of aroused curiosity in the air. You cannot spot them. You got no clue.

Your eyes are but human, afterall.
Limited.
Imperfect.
Endangered.

Other creatures may spot them, though.
Might be the death of you.
Footsteps trampling lightly upon crunched nuts and pine-needles tossed around the untrodden paths of the enchanted forest, your straw basket swinging from East to West, mirrors an ecstasy you cannot quite hold back as you should.

There are eyes that can swallow you.

From behind.

Without being noticed, savouring your innocent unawareness.
Some beings are closer than you think.

The nearing twilight streaks peach-gold fingers across your slice of sky, chasing away white cloud-tails from its mauve-blue surface.
A bouquet of coulours some heavenly gardener wrapped just for you, love.
For your crystal stare, worthy of a thousand sunsets.

Do not turn around, now.
It is but too late to change your mind, or trace back your way home.
You got so far deep into the heart of woods, you may as well play on its heartstrings and test its primeval sound.

Your violet hood, such a melancholic hue, now shaken softly by a summer breeze, cannot tame all your glossy spirals of rebel hair. Some twist outside, their curiosity may kill them.

You brush distractedly your hair and are mesmerized by a gurgling river on the far east end of the trail, bending its dutiful course toward the sea outside the path you follow.

It takes but a moment to let temptation siege your heart.
Afterall Wilde used to say the only way to resist a temptation is to yield at it, right?
There you go, headfirst into the raw core of the unknown.

~*~

As soon as your leather boots touch the soft virgin overgrown moss cloaking the undiscovered region of the forest, your senses breath in suspense, perceiving a hush of unspoken vertigo they had no idea they were able to experience.

Footsteps gradually turn into rushed walking, to bend swiftly then into a light inevitable run, as if invisible silver threads are eagerly pulling you toward the epicentre of your overwhelming curiosity. No use to resist now, just let your soul guide you, trimming the edges of the compass of desire that has but started to tick inside your biological clock, framed in that unwritten pentacle of virginity, haloed by an innocence you travel with both restrained carefulness and instinctive passion.

A gentle humming, like a hushed childlike laughter, wraps your every movement, as your love for discovery builds within your veins, rushing toward your heart, fuelling emotion, and diverting toward your brain, providing more oxygen to your lungs.

Suddenly you stop, the improvized halt almost crashing you to the ground, you manage to hold balance by an angel's hair. And thanks the heavens for that.
In front of you lies a splintered precipice, stabbing mercilessly in two the evergreen valley amid the mountain woods.

But the river knows no fear, nor sense of danger: its gurgling sound undergoes metamorphosis as it turns into a shattering dizzy scream whipping the nude rocks spread along its headfirst dive of a hundred meters toward the heels of the opening.

Your awestruck gaze wanders ever so carefully over the mossy edges of the sublime, admiring with neverending awe its rainbow refractions, at the dawn of twilight.

Yet you have no cue as to why and how you were led there exactly...was it for some specific purpose, overseen by your raging ecstasy for the unknown, clouding your reason and distracting your mind from other creatures following your course in the woods?

Unseen predator eyes frame ever so slowly and precisely their unaware prey.
They got no hurry.
As all wordly, or otherwordly, creatures they have all the time in the world.

~*~

(To Be Continued...)