Shadows

Chapter 1

Where it all began

She was brought before the king by heavy handed guards that forced her to her knees.  She glanced up at the throne before her and saw the man seated with a scepter in his right hand. His left hand resting on the arm of the throne.  He looked at her with no particular emotion.

There was a man next to the king that held a rolled out scroll before him.  He read the charges to the king.  

She knew if she was found guilty, she would be executed.

***

I can never remember where it began.  That day the morning air was cool and world had a slight green tinge, with called to the early spring.   It was a hundred years ago or more by now.   I remember the hour I decided to go into the forest.  The reason I wanted to go.  I remember not telling anyone where I was going.  It not like the forest was dangerous.  But then the wind changed and I could her a woman calling to me it was faint but I follow the sound anyway.  This was where it all went wrong.

I made it home that night with scrapes and bruises but I without something I didn’t yet know what it was.  

A month passed and I went out on my own again and not long after I journeyed into the forest I heard the call.  This time the voice was more distinct and although it disappear every now and again it was leading me very deliberately to the egde of forest walled by a mountain.  It was claimable but I didn’t have any gear.  I was about to turn back when I shimmer in my peripheral vision lead me to a cavern the lead strait to the other side.

I got home that night with a cut in my leg so deep that it needed stitches and a sprained wrist.  

Four more times I tried to get passed the mountain wall.  Over or around or through, it was always the same and each time I got home with more life threatening injuries.  

Someone wanted me to find something on the other side of that mountain and yet I was being deterred.  

I could not give up though.  The longer it took the more urgent the tone of the voice calling to me became. 

It was then, on that day. That cool morning that something changed.  I was on the roof looking out at the forest contemplating.  The voice had called in the night.  It was the same woman and this time she appeared in my dreams as well.  Wearing a long red dress and holding her hand out to me in the darkness.  “Come to me Artimira, come and find me.”