Forbidden Woods

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 As the darkness sank into her veins, Victoria felt the chill of its malevolence crawl through her, numbing her feelings but heightening senses. The moon, obscured by fleeting dark clouds, cast an eerie glow on the woodland. A sighing, cool wind whispered secrets through branches gnarled and broken, which loomed like silent sentinels in the moonlit night. An owl hunted in deadly silence while small mammals screeched in the terror of death.


Victoria stumbled through the dense woods, the black shadows of the night chilling her to the bone. Her footsteps, sometimes quiet, sometimes loud as dried sticks cracked beneath her tread were the only other sounds to be heard. The ominous darkness played tricks on her mind, conjuring phantom whispers and elusive shadows that slithered through the undergrowth.


A distant howl pierced the silence, and the wildlife seemed to sense the encroaching malevolence. Her heart raced, as if it were a paradiddle from some unseen drummer calling from the abyss of hell.


She arrived at a clearing bathed in an ethereal glow. Victoria hesitated at the edge, sensing something. Something unknown, fearsome, unfriendly. Dangerous. Crossing into the clearing, the air thickened, and the oppressive darkness surrounding the space intensified.


An immense, deeply gnarled tree stood like a twisted ziggurat, a strange sigil pulsating on its bark. Victoria felt an irresistible pull toward it, her body moving involuntarily. As she touched the trunk, the sigil flared with an unholy light. A guttural chant started up, echoed around the clearing, bored into her consciousness, rising as Victoria convulsed.


"As the darkness sank into her veins," a voice echoed, "she became one with the ancient evil beneath the Canker Tree."


The whole deep, darkness of the woods seemed to sigh in malevolent satisfaction  as the wind suddenly dropped to dead still silence, claiming another soul. No creature stirred. Victoria was now an unwilling participant in a nightmarish dance between the living and eldritch forces lurking in those forbidden woods.

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