Creative Writing: The Woods

The forest is still. Silence weighs upon the trees like thick precipitation - it hangs from every twig, and lies in every shadow. A whisper winds through the quiet, seeking the ear of a doe who stands motionless in a clearing, watching. The whisper reaches her, and, hardly audible, pronounces her fate.

She bolts from her post, lurching away from the knowledge so carelessly bestowed upon her. Recklessly, she launches into the woods, leaping over downed logs and ditches, trees blurring as she passes them. Around her, the trees begin to thin, morphing into unkempt fields and unseen rocks. She did not mean to come here. She did not want to come here. Yet, it is here that she stops, frozen, for a moment, as she had been in the clearing.

She is afraid. Before her, a structure of wood stands; the grass leans toward it as though to hide it, but it cannot hope to grow tall enough to disguise the building. The doe, as though hypnotized by some specter, begins to approach the old wooden shape. A being moves inside, so minutely that the doe does not see it - the thing slinks nearer to a break in the side of the structure; it is waiting.

The deer enters through a hole that may have once been a door, and stops once more. There, she sees it. A single, cylindrical object shining from the ground; an nigh imperceivable whispering flows from it. The doe comes closer, seeking to understand - she keeps edging closer until she is nearly touching it, a mere breath away from the shining object which calls her. The other creature draws closer, too, to the item; it, too, hears its call. Neither being notices the other, too entranced by the whispers, which grow louder and louder until they are more akin to a thunder than a voice; the doe and the other realize their shared mistake - the other make a silent wail before fading into nothingness, simply vanishing from this plane, and the doe, too, keens before crumpling to the floor, incapable of escape. The thundering noise continues volume raising even further until it is as though the universe itself is howling in the wooden