Myth Breaker

33 | Midnights Darkness

The forest darkness looms over me making the trees tall and overpowering until I'm sure I've been walking in the wrong direction for hours. In truth, it's only been a few minutes. I feel panic rising in my chest and just as I'm about to turn away a glimpse of light flashes through the trees ahead of me.

I take a deep breath and follow the direction. Taking each step carefully to not twist my ankle and end up lost, alone and hurt. Two out of three is hard enough.

I follow the light through the dense forest, every time I think I lose it and I'm officially lost it shows up again in my perpetual vision and I spin around following it once more. Minutes pass quickly until I'm sure the sun is going to come up any minute.

A loud sigh leaves my chest as I pull myself over another fallen tree looking ahead where I'm sure the light had just disappeared through but once again I don't see it on the horizon.

"What am I even doing?" I ask myself my voice ragged and cracking with dryness. I should have drunk some water before I left, no I should have waited for sunrise so I knew if I was heading in the right direction.

I set carefully over a small sharp-looking bush and squint into the darkness. No lights still.

I continue heading in the same direction hoping to find it again eventually, trying to keep my brain preoccupied so I don't start panicking.

"That cottage must have been the house of the forest witch myth." I only think about it for a second before images of Lucian pop into my mind, of him walking me through this forest telling me funny myths about witches, vampires and werewolves if I had only listened to him I might not have been so shocked when I found out all of them were real.

Then my mind goes back to the last time I had seen Lucian, god it hasn't even been 24 hours and it feels like so much has happened. In a way, I guess it has and now I'm starting to think maybe he was right to be afraid for me.

Someone is coming, there's going to be a fight and if my dream is right in any way I'm probably going to be killed.

"But that doesn't mean he was right either," I tell myself as the finest glimmer of light comes from between the trees ahead, very far away. "I'm not going to run, I'm not going to leave them to defend and protect me. They all matter to me too much."

Annie, Lucian, Cedric and Nathaniel are more family to me than my mother ever was and I won't lose that now that I've finally found it, if they won't run neither will I.

Just as I think that I find myself pushing past the last of the underbrush and stepping into a clearing.

It is so dark here that it takes me a moment to release where I am, the field behind the school. Above me, the school looms all lights are off, eerily dark.

I look to the cottages to the right but even they seem cold and empty.

"Where is everyone?" Panic shakes my voice as I step out of the shrubs scratching at my legs.