𝐎𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐑𝐄𝐃

chapter sixteen - the game begins

A week ago, the wood and stone house in the wheat field was occupied by a young man named Enoch King. Just like everyone else in the Yellow Plains, he was Gifted. Specifically, he had the ability to trap people in paper. They would take on the appearance of a rough sketch of themselves, and while they couldn't see, hear, move, feel, smell, taste, or speak, they were still conscious. No one in the Plains dared to ask Enoch if he still had anyone trapped with his Gift out of fear of it being used on them.

Fortunately, no one was subjected to that terrible fate. While he was very blunt and disliked speaking, Enoch got along fairly with everyone on the farmland. He would join them for meals, help out with work in the Plains, and it was his job to hunt and gather food in the woods surrounding the Yellow Plains.

But one day, something happened.

While Enoch was known to mostly keep to himself, it wasn't like him to be unseen for an entire day. When Claire went to his house to check on him, he was gone.

"Now, you'd think that we wouldn't rest until we found a clue of where he'd run off to, but that wasn't the case," James said. "The next day, it was as if everyone has completely forgotten Enoch even existed."

"Suspicious," Sophia noted after sipping some tea James made.

"Exactly," James said. "But that didn't apply to me. Enoch's sudden disappearance irked me out enough to take on the case myself. Guess everyone else didn't like that, though, 'cause they ended up shutting me out from their fun 'lil micro-society."

"So that's why we didn't see you at the dinner last night!" Lucas exclaimed.

"Yup. That's also why I didn't know that you guys moved in here."

"So you just didn't question the person sleeping on the couch when you came in here?" Sophia asked.

"To be honest, you were just so small, I didn't see you."

Sophia pouted and sat back in her chair beside Lucas. On Lucas' other side, Jalen was jotting down notes using a black piece of paper James pulled out of the floorboards. "Small culprit?" was the latest thing written.

"We don't know that for sure," Lucas told him.

"At this point of the investigation, we need to consider every possibility."

Lucas shrugged and turned his attention back to the papers strewn across the table in front of them. "So these are all random notes written by Enoch before he disappeared?"

"Some of them. I took other papers back with me already, but I think someone destroyed a handful of his notes," James explained.

"Some evidence possibly destroyed," Jalen wrote. Then, out loud, he asked, "Was there anything of interest in what he wrote? Or said?"

"Yes, actually," James replied. "Early on during the week he disappeared, Enoch spoke to me, claiming that he spotted a golden wolf at the edge of the forest. He said that he saw it from the window over there the night before."

James pointed towards the only window in the room. Sophia, being the closest to it, looked out at the crater-like holes dotting the perfect field of wheat. At the edge of the field and surrounding the entirety of the Yellow Plains was the same forest Sophia, Lucas, and Jalen spent a night in.

"Do you think he went missing because he went into the woods to find the wolf?" Sophia asked.

"Maybe, but he never brought up the wolf again in his journal entries after he told me about it."

Lucas stood up. "He must have found something more interesting than a golden wolf in those woods! Let's go check it out."

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