"Chapter One: Into The Night"

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• Sorrows Of Blackwood: Solemn Graces
• "Chapter One: Into The Night"

Grace shot through the woods on the back of her horse, Ravenstorm. It was almost night time now, and she'd be lost if she didn't find where she was going, or at least some place to make camp. But where, in these haunted woods — these trees where so many had gone missing before, and so many like her could still go missing after?

The woods had already begun to change. When she had departed the town of Wicker Creek, the trees and the underbrush was dry — verdant and full of life, yes, but dry — and things were starting to go to rot now, the further she went out, as though a bag of lawn clippings had been left in the sun all day, for about a week straight.

She hadn't seen much quite like this since her time down south, in Erimë's Cradle, the swampy regions surrounding the ancient dragon most in Inglenook would prefer to insist simply wasn't real in the first place.

The similar feeling filled the air, too — a tingling, a buzzing, a sense that something in all the particles and all around her just wasn't right — that the world had been changed here, on a fundamental level, and that, if she stayed long enough, it wasn't just possible but entirely probable and fully likely that she herself would be changed on a fundamental level too.

In the swamps down south, that feeling was the alteration of natural reality by the corpse's dragon-blood, its scale oil seeping into the environment all around it, transforming the world from the inside out into something new, something different, something completely other and alien from what it had been before.

Was there something similar here?

Grace couldn't be sure; she was sure that Ravenstorm didn't like it, being that the night-dark horse had begun to falter just so in their ride together, but she wasn't sure of much of anything else right now at all, and kept urging Ravenstorm forward for so long as the horse would allow — which was about five seconds after that.

In the distance, a hollow cry rang out, which was enough and more than plenty for Ravenstorm to finally stumble just so, toss Grace off the saddle, and take off in another direction, shooting through the night and leaving Grace behind in a heap upon the moistening, swamp-like moss and brush.

It really was an interesting texture, but there was to be none of that for now, as Grace recovered herself and faced the decision yet to come: venture after Ravenstorm, or pursue the call of the cry that had left her here in the first place, just moments before?

Well, obviously, Grace chose the call of the cry she had heard just moments before. It was, actually, the direction she had already been going anyway; further into the woods, away from the civilizations of Wicker Creek and the Kingdom of Inglenook, and toward whatever wild unknowns might lie in the destination of her path at this point.

However, she was here to investigate missing persons cases — strings of them, entire swaths if you knew the right place to look, which Grace normally did — and if there was even the slightest possibility of a strange and scary monster gobbling up campers and hikers in these woods, Grace would have to take that seriously and do her due diligence as a witch and as a detective.

Because clearly the Wicker Witches aren't doing it for me, or for anyone else, was just one of Grace's many possible thoughts as she headed for the call, away from safety, and further toward whatever site she might soon call home — or, at the very least, a campsite for the time being, just long enough to recover herself, regroup, and move on elsewhere toward clues she might actually be able to use.

She didn't find a campsite; but she did find a clue: the torn tatters of a black jacket, hanging stuck from a tree branch, as though it had ripped from someone's back as they were dragged past it.

Grace tilted her head and furrowed her brow at the tatters, and decided there might be something in these woods after all. Well, her thoughts continued, as a friend of mine once used to say, it's time to set a trap and catch our stray beast.

She went to work at once, digging out a set of enchanted ropes from her pack and stringing them up along the trees and around their branches, and covering it with brush in just the right places. If that beast came by here once, she silently reasoned, it's likely to come by here again, along the same or a similar path.

Not satisfied with just the trap, however, she continued her search into the woods and kept a weather eye out for anything that might resemble a suspiciously-missing individual from a place like Wicker Creek, or Inglenook in general.

The beast arrived only an hour or so later, its heavy steps clombering at the ground like an elephant or some other appropriately-large-sized beast of some description. It was big, and it was heavy, to put it bluntly.

Grace wasn't in the immediate vicinity, but the trap pulled up the beast in its ropes and made quite a bit of clattering to do it, the trees shaking and shivering, and crowds of birds taking flight in sanctimonious instinct to find some other trees with less of a sudden muchness in them, and all of that drew Grace's attention even from the mile or so away that she was.

She raised her brows upon returning to the trap site, and seeing the monster for what it was. "Aren't you a sight..." she said of the beast, whose body was large and as black as a shadow; not furry, not just simply dark, but apparently comprised of shadow, like a great, dark cloud of thick, black smoke and sludge and burning oil all at once.

But it wasn't cold, and it wasn't ephemeral, like a cloud. It was physical, a presence that existed in the world, a heaviness Grace could touch and sense and feel with her palms and her hands on the thing.

She just hadn't seen anything quite like this thing before.

It had four legs, no arms, and a bestial snout, as well as eyes that reflected an angry red in her torchlight, like a stop light or the rear lights of a car that's suddenly halted in front of you, forcing you to halt too, spilling whatever was in your hands all over the front seat and yourself along with it.

Most importantly, its stomach was bulging and full, as though—

Grace pressed her hand to the stomach, and could sense the contents even from outside. Her sensitivity as a witch was at an all-time high, especially during nights like tonight, and the tinges of spiritual energy still shining inside the creature were bright and unmistakably human and unmistakably, stubbornly alive just as well.

She took a knife to the thing. It was a shame to do it, but there was no other way to perform her rescue. Out from the contents of the strange beast's gut came a young girl, a redhead in fact, who shivered in the night air — a big difference from the heat of the beast's interior cavities, and all that.

When she was back to her senses, to a certain degree, the girl looked at Grace, and said, "Who are you?"

"I'm Grace," she said. "Grace Morgan."

The girl's name, it turned out, was Miranda Morrow, and she had recently gone missing from the town of Wicker Creek.

Just the latest in a long string, Grace thought, as she guided Miranda back to town.

There was still no sign of Ravenstorm, Grace's horse, but she had faith there would be eventually. She would never be fully out of contact with that horse at this point, anyway, so there wasn't all that much to worry about.

It just meant Grace and Miranda had trouble getting back to town without walking the entire way, or flying on a broomstick as Miranda apparently expected Grace to do. (They tried for a few brief moments, but unfortunately it was much more uncomfortable in reality than imagination, especially with the addition of two people instead of just one. Maybe if there was just the one of them, but alas.)

Miranda's parents thanked Grace, and gave her a reward (which she turned down, but was coerced into accepting anyway), and Grace continued on toward the next steps of the mystery.

She returned to the forest, where she had been before.

The beast was still in its trap, hanging from the trees, no longer moving. She still couldn't tell what kind of beast it had been, but it was obviously a hungry threat to the countryside, and this would've happened at some point anyway.

She went about cutting a few steaks of flesh from its guts (in case she couldn't find a decent source of food or a campsite later), placed them in paper sacks from her pack, and moved on, sure to ask whomever she saw later on what that beast might have actually been in its life.

After that, she moved on toward the direction it had emerged from, and determined herself to explore why the forest had suddenly shifted so drastically into this rotted and honestly horrible state — which led her, ultimately, to the bridge.

It was a covered bridge, built over a flowing creek that seemed as though to flow backwards, and on either side was a well-trod path, although it was considerably more well-trod on the opposite side of the bridge from where Grace had approached the thing.

She crossed it. She wasn't a vampire or any sort of folkloric creature, so she had no trouble crossing water in such a manner; and to her knowledge, her witchliness had no affect on the affair one way or the other, although she did tend to have a connection to the night time that others in the day time tended not to have quite as strongly as she did.

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