All I wanted was the crown. Or so I thought. Years ago on a cold winter night I sat reading in a dark corner of my room, thinking of ways I could steal the crown from my ‘beloved sister’ Cassandra. If I was born only a year earlier, I Siri, would be the one wearing the crown, and my sister the one having to celebrate me. It was so unfair. Cassandra didn’t even deserve the crown with her stuffy and spoiled attitude.
As the clock struck one in the morning, Rook gave a loud hiss and dashed out of my room and down the hall. Rook was my only friend, and was so dear to me, that I couldn’t even call him a pet. No one knew what species he was, with his fox-like appearance and his small, squirrel-sized body. It was strange that he was getting up so late; he was usually as awake as a dead slug at this time. He also never hissed unless he was protecting me. Curious, I followed him down the hall sliding my feet into my old slippers. I found him at the palace door, trying to find his favorite hole to slip outside. He slinked through the crack and I hurriedly followed through the door. I was annoyed to see that it was pouring and Rook was still on the move, gravitating towards the nearby forest. Running fast trying to stop him, my mind started recalling all of the rumors surrounding the trees.
It was said that when people left the forest, they came out never telling a word about what they saw, and had many of their nightmares come true. That is, if they came out at all. Of course, I thought it was all codswallop. No one had visited the forest in living memory. But for the first time in my life I was scared of it. I had to catch Rook.
As soon as I stepped into the utter darkness of the trees I remembered something. I had been in the forest before. When I was only five years old, one of the village boys were taunting me, calling me a coward because I wouldn’t put my hand in his spider collection. Of course I denied the insult, so he told me to prove myself by going fifty feet into the forest. My stubborn five year old self accepted the offer, and went in bearing an ornate knife I had stolen from my mother’s bedside. As soon as I hit the estimated fifty feet mark, I started to hear whispers. Whispers calling for help, whispers asking for mercy. With a piercing scream, I dropped the knife on the ground and ran. A week after the incident, I realized, according to the rumors, I was the only person to escape the terrors and nightmares of the forest. From then on I believed I was imagining things, and the rumors were bogus. But here I was now, remembering the whispers and thinking maybe I only survived then because I was walking in the warm, safe light of the day.
Plucking up a bit of my courage, I wandered in. Even if there were no specters of any sort, this was a forest. Rook was tiny and could be eaten by any larger animal, and there was no way I was going to let my best friend be killed.
After walking for a while, I walked into a clearing, and realized I recognized the place. It was very vague memory, but there was a gnarly and tortured tree that was impossible not to know. It was the tree where I heard the whispers. I timidly called for Rook, with no reply. And then I heard it again for the second time in my life. Whispers. Trying to be calm I told myself that I was just scared and hearing things. Until the scream. It was my scream from when I was a child. There was no mistaking it. As fast as I could I started looking for the knife. I knew the chances of it still being in the forest were slim, but no one besides me had been here in years, and I needed all the protection I could get. Seeing a gleam in the forest floor, I crawled over to grab whatever it was, but as soon I got there, a shoe stomped on it. I wasn’t alone.
Paralyzed from fear, I couldn’t look up at the owner of the shoe. Then suddenly I heard a hiss and a growl that could have come from no one but Rook. Jerking out of my paralysis I looked up to find him. Standing above me was a small girl with sunken eyes, wearing a nightgown and dangling Rook by his tail. But something was not normal about her. She seemed to flicker in the night.
