When I woke up I was ready for anything, soon I realized I could not handle everything my little village brought me. The morning was full with the sun’s smile going across the entire village. The village was located in the middle of the woods. Nobody knew why our founders built a village in the middle of nowhere, but we chose to stay there. No one in the village wanted to stay, but they feared the world beyond and in the woods. Travelers rarely came through, because the woods we lived in was possessed by a much greater being than any of us knew.
One day as I walked through the town, for what seemed like the thousandth time, I felt this cold breeze go across my entire body, like ice had frozen over me. I tried to ignore this strange phenomenon, but I could not shake this strange feeling I had. All that day, I kept thinking of the woods that had surrounded me my entire life. As a kid, our parents were supposed to tell us the town stories, but my parents did not give much detail about the stories because they had to work to support our family of seven; I had three sisters and two brothers. Most of the time I was either taking care of my siblings or trying to stay alive myself, with slim pickens in the town and me being the eldest gave me more responsibility than the others.
As well as bedtime stories, there was a myth that shook the parents more than the children. The myth was that the eldest child is more in danger of the woods taking them, the woods we lived in always had this darkness that scared everyone, like a dark shadow over the town. The only time I remember hearing about the darkness of the woods was when a young girl of the age eighteen mysteriously disappeared from the town in the middle of the night. This was on a night with a full blue-blood moon, this is when the moon is dark red with a dark blue rim around it. The worst part is that no one knew the pattern of this cycle. What if the blue-blood moon came and took me in the night, what would happen to me? Over the next few days, my mind could not stop thinking about this myth, I began to notice the moon getting full in the sky, this made my worries begin to thicken.
A few weeks later, my mind had drifted away from the subject, and I had no worry in the world. Then one day when I was walking through town, I began walking towards the woods. The dark aspect of it kept pulling me in closer and closer. This time the moon had come out much sooner than times before, and the sky was a darker blue. As soon as I stepped foot in the woods, my mother came running to me and kept yelling,“What are you doing! Get out of there or you’ll be gone forever!” I soon felt a hand on my arm pulling back to the village. “What happened?” I asked with complete confusion. “You walked into the dark woods, did you not process any of what just happened?”a towns person asked. “No, I didn’t, I thought I was walking through the town like I always do in the morning.” I said with the look of confusion. No one knew what had happened to me, especially since they didn’t see the blue-blood moon in the sky. My parents didn’t know what to say or do so they locked me in my room for the day. It was awful, I felt like an outcast, not just by the town, but by my family too. How was I supposed to survive in that town if everyone I knew and loved hated me? This was all because they didn’t understand what was going on with me. They thought that there was something wrong with me and that if they shut me away from the outside world that I’ll be fixed.
That night, once the entire town was asleep, I picked the lock on my door and vanished from the house. As I walked down the streets of the village I could feel some form of darkness pulling me towards the woods. I could see the bright beautiful moon, it shined down on the road I was walking on. Then I got to the edge of the woods, I felt too much tension to resist, so I went into the woods. As soon as I went in the woods I felt fine, I felt a sense of relief, it was like I didn’t have to worry about my life or whether or not I could go back to the village. If I were to go back, how would I know how they would react to me going into the woods and coming back out alive. They might have exiled me.
As I walked through the woods I could feel an icy cold breeze blowing across my entire body. I could hear small animals stepping on the fallen leaves, and I could smell the fresh pine trees all around me. Walking through the woods felt so calming and natural, I didn’t understand why everyone was so afraid of it. Then out of nowhere a dark shadowy figure appeared in front of me. At first I didn’t know what to do, then somehow I felt safe. It’s like I was meant to be in the woods, but because of my village I could never see this part of my life. The dark figure then asked me to pick a side, “choose a side, your village or the woods.” I definitely didn’t want to go back to the village, at least not until I saw why they are so afraid of the woods, so I said with a brave face, “I choose the woods.” Suddenly I felt, what I would imagine was power, transfer from the dark figure into my body. It felt like I could do anything, I could take over the world. Then I fell to the ground, when I woke up the next day I realized how my sanity was starting to slip away into nothingness. At that moment I decided to try to control my new found powers. In the following days I practiced the powers, and saw their limits and mine. This was going to take awhile, good thing I had all the time in the world.