One Word Prompts 2020

Slippery - The Forest of Alaris

She walked deeper into the Alaris forest, her heart pounding in her chest. At her waist she wore a long dagger, a cold comfort against the beasts said to slink through the depths of the dark.

It wasn't really dark yet. Not really. Not the way the Alaris forest could get dark.

It was only a little after noon now. The sun's rays trickled through the forest canopy, dappling the forest floor in gold and shadow.

Of course, just because it could be darker, didn't mean the forest was well lit. There was no shortage of deep shadows. A surplus of pools of inky darkness that no amount of squinting could make clear.

And just because she wasn't that far from the village yet didn't mean it was safe.

Given her way, she'd never delved deep enough into the forest as to lose sight of the exit. Actually, given her way, she'd never so much as step into the forest at all.

But her nephew, her sister's kid, had gone missing. He was a mischievous kid at the best of times. Always slipping in and out of trouble. If there was trouble in the village, he usually had a hand in it. But he was still her sister's only kid.

And he hadn't come home last night.

He knew better than to enter the forest. All the village children did. They had all heard the stories. Wolves that hunted man for sport. Elk more territorial than badgers, with antlers for impaling and hooves for trampling trespassers. And those were the "normal" animals that stalked the dark.

There was no shortage of ghost stories surrounding the old woods. Tales of men chased to the other world by old gods. Men whisked away by spirits to join them in never-ending games. The damned dragging the unwary into the depths.

They were all just stories, she knew. Just stories, she told herself, taking a deep breath, trying in vain to slow her racing heart.

Of course, that didn't change the fact that men did disappear in these woods. Disappeared, never to be found.

She shook the image of her younger brother—a boy she still remembered as a child barely older than her nephew was now—from her head. She would find her nephew. She had to.

That was why she was here. Why she'd set out at dawn at her sister's request. She wasn't alone out here. More than half the town was out looking for the boy. Men twice her size armed with twice the blade as her were out here too.

She could have left it to them. She could probably have stayed with her sister, searching the fields on the other side of town. Could have followed the river downstream. Could have helped interview the rest of the town's children again.

She didn't have to be here.

But she did.

Because she knew he was out here. Knew he was out here the way she'd known her brother had been out here.

She shook that thought from her head. There hadn't been anything she could do then. But now... She could do something now.

So she stepped deeper and deeper into the dark, pulled onward by a certainty she could not explain if she tried.

Around her, the trees seemed to press inward. The shadows seemed to hang heavier. The light dimmed with every step she took. A step she knew at an instinctual level was further from the safety of her home and closer to the beating heart of the forest.

Closer. She could feel herself getting closer. To what, she couldn't say with certainty. The center of the forest, she might have said if pressed. The center of the world, perhaps.