Art by James Fenner (@JMFenner91 on Twitter)

I leaned against the boulder, gathering the last shreds of strength I had left in me with slow and quiet exhales before I finally turned to the forest and walked towards it.

The dark mass of trees loomed over in the distance, its ominous presence weighing down on me with each step I took closer to the border. An explosion of Red Drops bloomed all over the grass, their sweet floral fragrance lingering in the air, so dense and poignant, it was almost dizzying to the senses.

A tall shadow stood at the forest's edge, waiting patiently for me, and when he saw me drawing near, Erebus walked up to me, opening a path in a sea of Red Drops. The fragrance emanating from the flowers became even more poignant when he stepped over them, delicate petals pressed underneath his feet. The scent filled up my lungs, coating me in red from the inside.

The trees in the background distorted as if they were pulled in by an invisible force, like a black hole sucking everything to its core. The air suddenly had a different smell to it, something that seemed foreign and familiar at the same time.

The moonlight glowed in unsteady waves over the canopy of the trees and the sound of the wind along with the crunch of grass and leaves on the ground suddenly were amplified. I think I could even hear the forest breathing, the trees swelling and constricting inside their trunks, in sync with the pulse of a beating heart...

Was it my heart that I was hearing, thumping so loudly inside my chest?

The whole world felt like a fever dream, wild and surreal.

As I walked to the forest's edge, something glinted on the grass, making me stop. I kneeled on the grass to inspect it and found the same knife that I had been stabbed with, in the night I was attacked by the boy from Jeff's Dirty Gang. A morbid curiosity made me pick up the blade.

Dry, caked-up blood was still on the blade. Old blood. My blood.

There was blood on my hand too, I realized as I held the knife. Slick, red, and new. I had been pressing my hand against the wound in my chest for a while. I was still bleeding out.

For a moment, I thought about ending my life. The means to do it were right here, in my hands. I could plunge this damn thing right into my heart... It would be swift and quick, I wouldn't have to worry about being chased out of my village or people accusing me of being the devil and coming after me with torches and pitchforks. I wouldn't have to worry about anything anymore.

With this knife, I could end it once and for all.

'Why would you do such a thing?' Erebus' voice prickled into my head, startling me. I glanced up, towards the forest's edge as he stepped forward with his mantle of flowing shadows.

'This is what you choose? The thought of a life away from your village is so horrible that you'd think ending your life would be the best thing to do?' He inquired, looking puzzled. 'They have forsaken you, Aydan, turned on you on a whim, fast as the crack of a whip. They were thirsty for your blood, fabricating lies that could justify killing you in good faith. Is losing your human world more important to you than losing your own life?'

I gave him a tired smile. "Yes, I've lost my place in this world. Wherever I go, people will see that there is something wrong with me, just like the people in my village saw it too. It's lost my human world and I can't get it back, I know that. I'm not worried about this. It's losing my humanity that worries me." I tried to explain. "Losing myself to the dark. To the shadows of this forest. Losing myself to the evil that lives here. I worry about what I'll turn into."

'Evil.' He mused with an amused scoff. 'Humans have a strange way of seeing things. It's all so... crude and overly simplified. Shallow in depth and meaning. Childish, even. It is all black or white. Dark or light. Good or evil. To be, or not to be...' He reached out as if he was holding something invisible in the palm of his hand and for a fleeting moment, I thought I saw the faint outline of a skull there. His slender fingers had rings on them, dark-thorned, intertwined wicker rings, a stark contrast to his white porcelain skin. 'Nothing is one thing or the other, though. In this world, or another." He continued saying. "Every living thing has a multitude of truths, waiting to unravel, wishing to be unveiled, yearning to be discovered... You are very clever, Aydan. And yet, you still like to think everything here is only dark, and black, and evil, when you know it isn't so. Why? Why do you insist on believing in such a silly notion?'

I stood up slowly, with the knife still in my hand, and gave the few remaining steps to reach the forest's limit.

"It's not a silly notion," I said, raising my chin. "It is dark and evil. Maybe it's so ingrained in you, and has been for so long, that you cannot see it for what it really is anymore." I argued stubbornly. "But you do remember all those men that were killed, don't you? I didn't imagine it happening, I'm sure of it. I remember how you murdered them with such glee and delight, right in front of my eyes. Picked one by one, like rotten fruit, and squashed them with your bare hands. Without mercy. Without any regret. Or even remorse. Dark. Evil."

Erebus stood only a couple of feet away from me. He wore an intimidating crown of black thorns on his head. A beautiful obsidian stone held a long mantle by the crook of his elegant neck. He looked regal, powerful, and terrifying, a force unlike anything I've ever encountered, a void with menacing purpose, a Dark Prince and ruler of Redwood's shadows.

"I am evil because I killed those men." He stated out loud, instead of inside my head like he'd been doing so far. "Those men, to which your sympathies are bestowed and laid for, my dearest Aydan, were planning to murder you in quite a gruesome way. But before that, they were going to torture you and make you suffer, slowly, deliberately, and purposefully. They would bask in your pain with much enjoyment, as they had done to many before you. Do you reckon they still deserve my mercy? Or my remorse and regret?" he asked, his tone sharp and cutting like the blade I had in my hand.

"H-how do you even know what they were planning to do with me?" I asked in defiant denial.

"They had darkness tainting their hearts and souls, they were drenched and soaked in it, it was dripping from every pore of their beings. I didn't even need to reach into their minds to see it. It was as plain and dark as a world of nights." He spread his arms wide towards the night sky and his mantle moved as if underwater, floating effortlessly in the air. "Humans seem to act on the worst you have in yourselves. And you think I am the vile, evil monster in this story of yours?"

I glanced at the ground, unable to meet his eyes.

"I'm sorry, I... I shouldn't have called you evil." I retracted, seeing that I might have offended him. "It's the forest I'm talking about. It has an evil soul, and it has a hold on you. You've been trapped in there for so long, you don't realize how much of it slithers into your mind, rotting your thoughts from inside. It affects your will and clouds your judgment until you no longer know the difference between what it's you, and what is not." I tried to explain, but when I looked up at him, it was visions of dead men's faces splattered in blood that I saw. They still haunted me even when I was awake and the sounds of their screams plagued me endlessly in a maddening loop inside my head. I couldn't forget them, no matter how hard I tried.

"You think the forest's influence made me kill those men. And that the killing made me evil, for it is an evil act." He commented, still with an edge to his tone. "If killing is the limit where your morals choose not to trespass, I wonder what you might think when killing happens for a reason." He said, watching me with interest.

"I-I don't understand..." I stammered, confused.

"What if killing is done to avenge a terrible wrongdoing?" He asked, dark eyes boring into me. "What if it's done to get justice? Or in self-defense, to survive? What would you think, when killing is done to protect someone you care deeply about? Someone you... love."

The last question hovered in the air, ringing loudly in the dead silence of the night. "Yes, I have killed those men, Aydan. You were begging me to save you, in your mind, do you not remember? Am I evil for answering your pleas?"

I shifted guiltily and stared down at the blade in my hand, which I had been gripping tightly since I'd picked it up.

"Is that for me?" " He pointed to the knife.

"Yeah," I murmured and quickly added when I saw the flicker of disappointment in his hard stare. "I was planning to ask you to use it. On me." I explained and his stare softened. "I thought about doing it myself, but... turns out I can't. So I thought I could ask you. It's a coward's way out, I know. But I'm running out of options here. I don't know what else to do."

He regarded me for a moment in quiet thought before replying. "You trusted me before, Aydan. You crossed over the edge, so I could save you. Maybe you can trust me again." He proposed in a tentative way.

"I don't think you can save me this time, Erebus," I told him quietly.

"You do not need saving anymore," he replied, eyes glinting eerily in the dark. "You only need to take a few steps towards me. To start your new life."

I glanced at the shadows at my feet, marking the limit of my soon-to-be prison, if I so choose it to be. "I'm scared," I murmured to the dark.

"Of me?" He asked, sounding hurt.

"Not of you," I replied in earnest. Of my future. Of my fate. Of myself. Of what I would become.

My vision blurred, tinted with red, then something dripped down my nose and I whipped at it with the back of my hand. When I glanced at my hand, there was fresh blood smeared all over it. I heaved and coughed up, an acrid, metallic taste filling my mouth before I spit it on the grass. Blood was pouring out of me, from my eyes, my nose, my mouth, from everywhere, all at once.

Death was an inevitable thing that couldn't be avoided, ignored, or escaped.

"Your body is breaking apart. It cannot hold it in for much longer." He explained to my panic-stricken face. "There is no reason to fear what's ahead, Aydan. You are clinging to what used to be, but this old version of you is dying. There is no going back to that, there is only going forward now." he said, taking one final step and stopping at the very edge of his domain. "But here, you can become something else. Make yourself anew. You have a piece of my power inside you, it's yours for the taking. But you have to cross over, where this power can be harnessed and put to use. Anywhere else... it will wreak havoc and be the cause of your demise."

I stared at the knife in my hand as a forlorn melancholy invaded my chest, disputing space with the blood that was slowly flooding my lungs.

"How foolish of me... to think I had a chance to escape. From the first moment my eyes caught sight of you, I had fallen for you, hadn't I? I was trapped in your hold, without even realizing it. I've never really left your side, ever since that first night we met, have I?" I said to him and let out a faint exhale as understanding dawned on me. "I've been trapped here with you all along. Never left."

He glanced up, eyes as dark as the night sky as he spoke in a somber tone.

"We both have fallen into traps made unwillingly by each other, it seems." He told me, dark eyes sucking all the light around us, like an insatiable black hole. "I was not the only one playing with traps and lures, my love. I too have been ensnared by you. It took a lot of time, and much of my pride, to realize this." He confessed, seeming embarrassed for a second.

"A mortal human has possession of my heart." He announced to the forest, moving his arm in graceful acknowledgment. "How foolish of me, to think I had a choice in the matter... To ever think that my will was not bound to yours. How could I've known that on the very first time we met, that I too, was doomed?"

He pulled his mantle close to his body, enclosing himself on it, hiding within its darkness. "We can say it was an occasion driven by fate but... fate is a fickle thing, playing tricks on us for its amusement." He glanced down, looking somewhat tired and sad, but also unexpectedly unburdened and relieved as well. "We still have a say on what we do with our lives, Aydan, despite the tricks and games that fate plays on us. You can still choose."

I placed a hand over the wound on my chest, my fingers sticking to the blood-drenched shirt. The cut was still bleeding, profusely, never stopping... My heart was beating so fast... I could feel it at the tip of my fingers.

Its beating felt erratic, strange and... not quite right.

I looked up and for a flickering second, his face switched to the butterfly-winged creature with a dozen bright eyes spread through the wings, all attentively watching over me. The wings fluttered ever so lightly, as if getting ready to take flight, but never doing so. I blinked and his face was back to the stunning dark-haired man with porcelain skin and soft inviting lips. His starlit eyes bore into me, burning like the sun.

He placed a hand gently over his own chest, and my heart skipped a beat.

I frowned. It still didn't feel right and... not quite my own.

With wide eyes, I gasped softly, hand clutched to my chest.

'A mortal human has possession of my heart', he had spoken.

Was he... being literal? Was it his heart that I was hearing, thumping loudly inside my chest? Was his heart the part of himself he had put in me? Had he... given me his actual, beating, heart?

He was smiling at me, as if proud that I had finally understood. And even though it was a small, quiet smile, it lit up his face like a full moon, and it shone brightly through his eyes, turning them into newly born stars. It lifted the pain from my heart and eased all of my sorrows.

I dropped the knife on the grass. I had no need for it anymore.

I reached inside, into his heart and his eyes sparked with renewed light when he sensed what I was doing.

I was tentative, cautious... I meant him no harm, I only wanted to know what he was feeling. Without hiding, without any deceit. His heart felt strange, not human, full of darkness... but I could sense the feeling inside. Fear. Fear of what I might do. Fear of what I would choose.

There was another feeling there too... bigger, darker, overwhelmingly stronger, and infinitely more powerful than the fear... it occupied almost everything. It pulsed and burned inside, taking in everything. I smiled when I recognized what it was.

Erebus was right. There was no going back, there was only going forward now.

So I took the last step that I needed to take.

To his last snare.

Back to him.

...

The End.

Art credit: ShaDow_SD2190392804 at twitter