Private Tales The Red Forests Woe

Her eyes fluttered awake basked in shadow of a forest with a crimson glow. She looked upward towards canopy, what little could see through the trees was sky of blood red. Beneath her where there should be snow was the damp underbrush of leaves and branches that poked into her back. The air was thick with a smell of cedar, dew and a slight smell of a fire off in the distance.

It was eerily silent though now sound of birds, insects, or even the creaking of trees in a swaying breeze. It was a deafening silence, the kind that drove the lone mind insane if you stayed too long. The air had a slight cold chill to it but not as cold as the frozen plains she had last remembered being in.

Instinctively she reached to her right shoulder where the hunter had stabbed her. Yet there was nothing there, not a wound, no blood, not even a scar where there should be one. She then sat up and looked around, confused by the forest with a red crimson glow that now surrounded her. Her Blonde locks intertwined in leaves and bramble berries as her Golden eyes looked around.

She did not know where she was, nor could she tell what time of day it was. Maybe sunset or sunrise due to the red glow. It was too strange and weird for the light to be coming from the sun. This place wherever it was, seemed to defy time she realized as she looked at the leaves on the ground around her. They were shifting between a state of decay and life, constantly in flux like the seasons were passing over them in an instant.

She pushed herself up to her feet and steadied herself as she looked closer at the trees. They too were shift between barren and leaf covered in constant flux. This was a place between worlds, a dreamscape or maybe a nightmare. Maybe it was her purgatory, a young girl unrealized in life, this was the afterlife for those who did nothing of note. Maybe it that hunter had killed her and this was her doomed fate.

That smell of fire off in the distance hit her nostrils again and she made the choice to follow it. If this was her fate, then she knew she must face it head on. Her small feet, she realized were bare now and she was wearing a white dress began making their way towards the smell of fire. The crimson glow encompassing all the land around her.


Carmelea Nosfir

The ground became grayer and more desiccated as she walked, and the trees started to fade away as she neared the center of the forest. Her bare feet, feeling the soil beneath, turned ashier as her eyes first caught sight of the flickering fire. It danced and bounced like a tiny little dot at first orange with that strange red glow that filtered the air around her.

As she got closer, she saw a dark-haired woman sitting on a stump at the fire. Another stump sat across from her, as she approached her footsteps slowed. Something felt weird or off about the woman sitting there though she had not yet figured out what it caused her body to tense up.

The words wisped from the strangers’ lips in a teasing tone without even glancing back. The words caught the girl off guard as she stopped in her tracks. Looking down she noted her own heigh, wondering if she had shrunk somehow? For her age she was average unaware yet that the magick she had used had forever stunted her to this height.

“Who are…..?

Before the question was finished the woman turned and the girl noticed those piercing cold blue eyes. That porcelain skin contrasted by that raven hair, the woman seemed to be stuck in a timeless youth. Eyes old and wise but she did not look it.

“You?” She finished as her eyes looked to the tea the woman offered her. Suspicious, the girl was not a trusting person. She did not move from the ten paces she had stopped from the woman on the stump.

“Am I dead?”

Carmelea Nosfir