Creatures

The Gargoyle

Iris looks down at her feet. She's stepping on black and cold soil. It feels wet and disgusting, nothing like the soil of Lystheria forest grounds that she was always used to. She finds herself surrounded in black smoke clouding around her, thick and heavy; and when Iris steps forward to find a way out of the darkness, she stops in her tracks and finds everything around her burned; destroyed as if acid and fire had rained down on the forest. She starts to panic and looks around however, instantly regretting it as she sees corpses everywhere. Bodies dried up as if their souls have been sucked out of their being.

In shock, she takes a few steps backward but unfortunately falls into a pile of bodies which have turned out to be a pile of dead wood sprites. The collision had caused a dead body to fall and it hangs over her. It's face bloody and aghast, too familiar that she breaks down in tears.

"H-Hyunwoo?" she's sobs. Everything was too much to handle. How did it end up like this? "Hyunwoo!" she screams his name and as if it heard her, the corpse of her friend opens its eyelids with bloodshot eyes.

Iris sits up and finds herself back in her hollow. She's sweating and panting hard but there is a shrilling shiver that still runs down her spine although she realizes it was another one of her eccentric dreams.

"Hyunwoo?" she says to herself. She's fully awake now, but the image of her dead best friend is still there and it still feels so real.

"You're so noisy even when you're asleep."

Iris turns her head to the opening of the hollow and finds Hyunwoo peeking in.

"Wake up, sleepy head. It's my turn to patrol the outskirts of the forest." He leaves as soon as he relays the message. Still groggy, she shakes some sense into her head. It was all just a dream. She convinces herself for the second time.

When Iris leaves her trunk, the sky is already bright although the sun has still yet to come out. She walks down the village where other wood sprites are just about to start their day. Although a wood sprite herself, the others here never really took much interest and most of the time avoided her due to some rumors that she had grown up with. She didn't quite understand it though. Iris grew up with no parents and was always under the care of Hyunwoo and his family, who were the only people who were ever nice to her. Being always condemned by the sprites of Lystheria, she learned to ignore these rumors and as they often denied her existence, she did quite the same.

When Hyunwoo was on guard duty on the outskirts of Lystheria, Iris took it as a chance to come along and spend some time outside of the forest. She would usually hang out by the river until Hyunwoo finished his guard duty so that they could go back together.

"You had another nightmare?" Hyunwoo walks ahead as Iris skipped over rocks after him. He doesn't even stop to turn around to see if she even responded.

"What was it this time?"

Iris immediately stops because she is instantly reminded of the image of Hyunwoo hanging upside down over a branch, dead. Hyunwoo also stops in his tracks and turns around when he realizes that Iris is not responding to her at all.

She never really understood why, but she had always had these dreams. Sometimes they would recur in her sleep and most of the time they would happen in real life; however thinking that they might just be a coincidence, Iris never took them seriously.

She always asked Hyunwoo about it, and although most of the time it sounded like he was interested in these dreams, other times he would just brush them off telling her they were just silly.