The Forgotten

Chapter 2

As if the skies shared his grief, darkness covered the last of the light, letting out a torrent of rainfall. It had only taken minutes for the red stains on the white wolf's coat to be washed off, though to only be replaced by splatters of dirt and mud.

The sun had set and the clouds put the woodland into complete darkness, even hiding the moon's rays. As the two ran, the horrors of the forest were waking. Celer heard the distant screams of the Vespers beginning to echo through the woods.

Shimmers of mist appeared to rise in the distance, in the centre stood a figure of a tall, slender man with arms shaped like scythes, though before any detail could be made out of his face or what he wore, he disappeared back into the fog.

Rendall was still in a trance, not knowing the slow loss of light or the noises of the demons that closed in on them. It would be completely dark by the time they would get to his home if they would get there at all. While Celer was a natural hunter of the night she was not the instinctive predator that she should have been and was wary of the Vespers. Scared, Celer refused to show her emotion to Rendall as he was in enough pain. She ran on with him, aware of the dangers of the forest. Her silver eyes looking over the surroundings but always keeping focus on the mist. The wolf's pointed ears made her hearing supernatural, able to sense the slightest movement from nearly a mile away and while her silver eyes did grant give benefit to seeing in the dark, her hearing was far superior.

Rendall had always known the way back or at least the direction. He just had to follow the river upstream to his childhood forest where they would be able to travel without issue, even with a somewhat fractured memory.

Walking it would have taken around two to three day to return to his home, not a terribly long journey for someone who had spent years in the woods on his own. However, Rendall was not walking, he was running fast. In the first few hours, the boy had covered fourteen miles through hilly and wooded ground with no signs of letting up. Having barely realised he was running at all, Rendall reminisced on his time as a child, piecing the memories together. Remembering the lazy evenings they would have around the fire making shadow puppets, the cold winter mornings where he and his mother would go out and split wood while his father would set new traps hoping to catch animals, though rarely being successful.

Memory after memory flooded his mind, tears streaked down his cheeks and his face. His arms pulled him over old trees strewn across the forest floor while his footsteps perfectly landing on solid ground, always missing the roots, mud or uneven terrain. Celer was bewildered. She had never seen him run and move so quickly, his breath was steady even though he ran with the speed of a wolf. She was struggling, suffering after hours without food and running at his pace. They had been running for four hours and she was starting to tire. Unsure what was happening Rendall was usually the one to stop after two hours or trying to stick with her, but now he was moving faster and much, much longer than he had before.

Darkness had long claimed the forest and screams of those dead and dying grew louder. In their path before them, a ghostly white figure who towered eight feet tall with the outline of a deep black cloak floating in the fog around it. The horror that Celer had seen earlier, she was now close enough to see the figure's face. A face lacking eyes, a nose and a mouth. But it held an endless void that was covered with hundreds of sharp, pointed teeth. It was a Vesper, it had caught them, no matter how far they moved. Tales had told the screams Vespers let out are those of their victims, dammed to a state of endless torture at the hands of this creature.

Rendall had stopped, the creature jolting him out of trance. He only just realised the sun had set some time ago. Frantically, Rendall looked around searching for Celer though not far she crouched low next to him, aggressively growling at the being.