THE STRANGER The Shadow Wood The forest spoke of eerie adulations of un-bespoken cries of anguish. Fearful glances about, as the bedraggled stranger could sense the very worms in the soil with benevolent smirks of doom. Sensing the strangers presence, the worms flew from the ground, each had rows of razor sharp , tiny teeth. Teeth gnashing, they flew out and bored into the eyeball of his mind. The stranger screamed. For three days he had run, stumbling and tumbling through the forest, scratched and shaken by thorny brambles and brambly thorns, the stranger grew ever so weary. The witch sisters never mentioned it would be this painful, the hallucinations. Or were they? Scrambling and grunting the stranger picked himself up and continued to run, the worm in his eye blinked away. On and on he ran, the spirits of the dead climbing their way to the surface and shrieking and screaming ran at him in translucent glory. Each time, the stranger seemed to scream louder. The sisters were forever in his thoughts, but to get to the end, to achieve the unachievable spoke volumes of his determination. Driven by fear, pushed by loathing, the stranger needed to keep going, needed to survive. Glancing about again, he saw that now he was in a clearing, with a path leading to a small cottage that had a single candle burning like the sun in one of the quaint windows. Maybe the occupant was home? Salvation? Redemption? Hope? All these thoughts and feeling burned through the stranger’s mind that he might be at an end to the perpetual torment. Willing his tired and slashed legs to obey, the stranger half hobbled, half ran along the path to the cottage. Only twenty feet. Or was it two hundred feet? The cottage seemed further away, then further away, and so on and on the stranger kept running. Stopping dead. The carnivorous worms, poking through the spectral shades eyes, shrieked ever closer behind him. Closing his eyes, the stranger knew that the cottage was only a short distance away. All he had to do was reach out and…. Opening his eyes, the cottage was right in front of him. Grasping the door knob as if death itself stalked him, the stranger flung the door open and leapt through. The shrieking was getting louder and louder and….the door slamming shut, the shrieking stopped. The stranger was standing in a modest room, with a roaring fireplace, a bearskin rug, wine, food and fruit were on a table in-front of him. Warmth flooded through him like a wave off the Bay of Storms. The stranger was home, safe. Secure. The scene faded, replacing the cottage with a ramshackle hut. No fire and no fruit, dilapidated and ruined, it looked as though nobody had been here for a millennium. Since before the Cataclysm. A figure in front of the fire turned. A blood zombie! Why was this happening? The sisters had deceived him! There was a great explosion, the stranger was knocked to his back as the hut disintegrated around him. Fear threatened to overwhelm him and cause him to recede into the depths of his psychosis, where darkness and despair reigned supreme and he but their lap dog. Something though, deep down, stirred. A spark. The spark grew and spread, igniting inside his soul, the light of the soul fire purged the fear from the stranger. Warmth and joy replaced the cold. Standing there in majestic glory of righteousness and strength. There was nothing this world could do to him now, any-more that would bring him to the same dark place he had just encountered. The wailing spirits, the blood zombies, the eye gouging worms. On this, inaugural day of change, initiation and no doubt a day that would become famous, it was the day he was born again. ‘You have not beaten me” The stranger proclaimed with the light of justice burning bright. The stranger stood there, soul fire shining bright, spreading out the sisters shrank from it. It was bright and gleaming and glorious. Fear and dismay were vanquished. “Very good. You have passed the test, you’re Majesty”. The sisters replied. At that very moment, the world as the stranger knew exploded. The Stranger woke up. END Excerpt from The Grim Sisters’ Anthology of the Mysterious & Macabre By Lendrick Dawnfire, noted scholar of Brittany Lord Commander Knights of Novia
