The sun had long ago taken refuge, the skies above no longer cool shades of blue, but deep shades black, with sparse speckles of bright white; yes the stars had come out to play, but the moon remained half hidden. Shy. But in time it would become confident. It would come out to play, just like Abigail had.
For three nights straight she’d been following a trail. Chasing after what most others considered nothing more than fiction. Fearsome stories created to scare naughty children who didn’t want to sleep at night, Nightmares to share around a camp fire before retiring to a night of tossing and turning in a tent. But Abigail didn’t see it like that. It was no nightmare, but a fairytale, she was following the trail of breadcrumbs to her awakening, not to her death.
Fallen autumn leaves crunch noisily beneath leather clad combat boots with every step she takes. If it were her first time in the forest, she would have been more careful to keep quiet. But she knew--at least, she thought she knew--that the dangers of the forest were low. Never had she been greeted by anything more than a wild rabbit, every now and then she’d come across a stray dog, or a bird nest but nothing that could harm her. Besides, she knows the curling path like the back of her hand, even when she steps off the path, and clambers up the side of a pile of toppled trees amongst upturnt soil, she is confident she can find her way back. So confident in fact, that the toppled trees don’t raise alarm bells like they should do--there’s nothing big enough in the forest to take down a tree of that size, nothing strong enough, at least, not that she’s seen.
It’s only when she stands atop the pile and catches a glimpse of someone or was that... something else moving through the branches that her heart begins to beat that little bit faster. There’s a crunching of leaves beneath feet that aren’t her own, snapping of twigs in the distance, and despite all the signs telling her she should turn around, leave and never look back, Abigail instead ventures off further into the forest, following the breadcrumbs, piece by piece, until she stands at a clearing.
She hadn’t noticed before but there are cuts that decorate her porcelain skin, tears in the fabric of her clothes, she was out of breath too. But she has no time to catch it, she has to slip down behind the trunk of a tree and clamp her hand over her mouth to keep herself from being detected. Still, she was scared her racing heart would give her away.
