Alone in the Dark

Hunted

Tom kept his seat, clinging to the horse's back as she spun and bolted back down the road they had come down. Nerini threw one of her throwing knives into a tree at the right side of the road to mark it before she whirled after them. They raced around a corner until Tom finally managed to stop the horse, though she pawed at the ground and trembled from fright. Gone was the brave mount that charged into battle without hesitation.

Cassidy wouldn't move back down the road, ears pinned back and eyes wide.

"Ok. Stay here with them, ok?" Nerini dismounted, handing him Cocoa's reins as he joined her on the ground, looking a little white himself.

"You're going back alone?" Tom watched her cautiously, frowning and glancing up the road, then to Cassidy. "Something bad happened, you know it did, up there."

Nerini smiled as confidently to him as she could manage. "Yeah. If anything weird starts happening, or doesn't feel right, listen to your gut. Leave Cocoa here and head back. I'm not going to be long, if I can help it, but make sure you get home before dark."

He nodded slowly at her words, frowning until she winked to him, though he didn't say another word.

Nerini smiled at his responding blush before she turned and jogged back toward where her knife was, losing the sound of the horses after rounding the bend in the road. And in the silence, Nerini felt a crushing isolation, worse than any alien land she had ever journeyed in. She had never had a problem with shadows or darkness, or even these dark forests, having grown up on estates with woods that stretched in every direction for days.

This was still her family's provinces, she should feel home here, but it did not feel like it belonged to her family. Or Aupana.

Stopping to pull her knife from the tree, Nerini paused and looked to the left, before turning and making her way into the woods on the right side of the road. She moved slowly, her eyes scanning in all directions as they started to become more accustomed to the dark of the wood. Every few steps she would stop, hearing the trees creaking above her, their green needles blotting out the sun, branches reaching out to one another.

It sounded like movement. Though the enemy never materialized.

The silence of the wood played with her mind, making her hear movement surrounding her like a platoon of the enemy, sending her heart rate racing. Despite the constant occurrence, every time her ears picked up the echoes of her movements or the trees, she would freeze for long moments before continuing on.

Deep into the forest, Nerini spotted a large, jagged claw mark gouged into a tree above her head. She stopped, frowning at it for a long time before she crept forward and inspected the odd damage. She felt the sap frozen against her fingers, hardened from where it had bled from the tree, weeks ago. Nerini had never seen an animal that could make a mark that was wider than the length of her hand and nearly carved the tree in half, had never heard of any such beast.

She turned to look back the way she came and immediately noticed another set of claw marks that she had walked past, as they were on the opposite side of the tree. She frowned and bent down, digging through the snow until she reached the ground, taking a step back to take a full appreciation of the large clawed footprint frozen into the dirt.

It was double the size of the largest bear she had ever seen, and looked oddly human in shape, despite the long, deep claws that tore into the earth.

"Easy..." She murmured to herself, looking around and shivering again.

Nerini knew that she needed to stay focused and calm, to keep her imagination from running away from her. Telling herself that there were no such things as monsters, she started back toward the road, stopping every so often to dig up the tracks frozen in the ground and muttering. "He would have gone missing right around the time things really started freezing..."