Prologue

On a crisp fall morning, a young lady could be seen tearing through The Redwoods. Barefoot. Scared. The cold, early morning air chilling her limbs as she jumps over fallen trees and boulders, her frozen feet aching with every step. She reminds herself that collapsing is not an option as another wave of exhaustion rolls over her, and she drags another lung full of air down her raw throat, heart hammering her rib cage. Her hair flying behind her like wildfire. Phenom Falls flashing in and out of view through the trees ahead.

Soon the lady finds herself in the middle of a clearing, the two-month-old in her arms beginning to stir. The clearing isn't very large, a cliff on her left going up and one in front shooting down, restricting her options down to two, left or right. About thirty feet down from the edge of the cliff are pools of crystal water, known to be so calm they reflect the sky above as if pieces of the sky had fallen and landed there. The waterfall spirals down the side of the cliff and slides into the pools with barely a ripple. The woman doesn't let herself get distracted by its beauty for too long and soon enough she's moving again. She doesn't head right instead she heads left toward the waterfall and the cliff that climbs up and up and up. She quickly unwraps a part of the sheet she had swaddled the baby in and uses it to secure the baby across her back. With both hands stretched above her head she braces her foot on a jutting rock and pushes upward. With a few slips and cuts, she pulls herself over the edge minutes latter and flattens herself down in the tall itchy grass on top, pulling jagged breaths into her lungs.

Not a minute later, black tendrils spill into the clearing below, sucking the very light out of the air and plants around them as they search for any trace of her. Soon they are inching up the side of the cliff, pushing through the roots of the few plants growing there, sending rocks tumbling backwards to the ground. The woman is on her feet and backing away before she knows what is happening. Once she's far from the edge, she pulls her baby into her arms, but finds herself caged in a rather tight situation. The trees that line the lake's edge, had grown into each other making a ring around the lake are too thick to climb through and the lake too wide and the air too cold to swim without surely finding death.

She was out of options. She was trapped.

A twig snaps nearby, just beyond the tree line barely 20 feet away, and the woman jumps before she thinks to crouch in the tall dead grass. Pressing as low to the ground as she can without falling, she watches the trees for any sign of danger, of the black tendrils coming up the cliff. A tree far to her right quivers and then; nothing. For a whole minute the woman waits but nothing, not even a breeze of wind, only silence. Then the tendrils come sliding over the cliff, each second revealing more.

The woman runs. She knows she has nowhere to go but she runs anyway, not ready to give up fighting just yet. The same tree twitches again, more violently, now only a few yards away. The woman falters for a second; there's no wind, and these aren't the tall, old, cursed trees that the Redwoods were known for. These are thick maple trees; something's in that tree.

Something catches the light; something silver hanging from the tree. Not having any other idea of how to get out of here, she changes directions, a prayer hanging in her mind. Let this work, please, let this work. Out of breath and dizzy she looks up into the tree but nothing is there. The woman swears. She had seen something catch the light, she was sure of it, but nothing was there. Taking a closer look at the tree she realizes it is nearly dead, split down the trunk by some unknown force. It was just barely hanging onto life. At the end of the split was a hole just big enough for the baby to fit through, and in that dark crevice glowed two bright green eyes. They would have blended in to the few leaves if they hadn't been bitten by the cold killing force of winter already.

The eyes blinked twice and disappeared. Replacing them were two well worked hands, the fingers long and boney the skin white and sickly. It had to be one of the hundreds of woodland fairies who live in these woods. No other society has hands like that. The lady understood what the fairy was trying to do and untied the baby from her chest. Passing her carefully through the small break and into the fairies' hands, refusing the tears that tried the rush to the surface.

A horrible grief pulses at the woman's chest as her child is pulled farther into the darkness of the tree; pulled to safety. How could some random woodland fairy be safer for her own child then she was? But then again, this is not the first child she has had left behind for the same reason. The other one, the boy, had been left behind with the midwife. There was no time to wallow in her grief though, because the monstrous creature was now over the cliff and inching closer.

It was smaller than before, and still shrinking smaller as it fully emerged over the cliff. Taking a human form, a familiar one. The form of a short hunched old woman with long thin grey hair, long chipped nails, and dusty robes soon stood tall in front of the woman, or as tall as she could, a wide smile on her face. It was the witch that the woman had journeyed to see in the beginning of her pregnancy, the one that told her of her children's fate. Of what they were destined to face. For months, the woman had nightmares of what was to come, of the monsters her children were to face. She would have ended it then, stopped it all from ever happening to them, if she hadn't somehow known that things would be okay somehow, in the end.

Betrayal didn't flood her veins when she saw the witch, she had known the risk she was taking when she had shown up on her door step nine months ago. The lady knew this was the end, and she embraced it.

"Lady Karen, I suppose you are smart enough to know that you aren't getting out of this forest with your life." The witch's voice felt like ice in Lady Karen's veins. She watched the witch glide over the ground without a sound. Though a witch's individual powers weren't usually their own, they were still considered some of the most powerful beings on the planet; with the long lifespans of the Fae and the Dark King's magic in their veins.

"Please don't do this..." Karen knew there was no point in pleading with her, that it was cowardly to give in so easily, but she simply didn't care anymore. Something had broken in her when her daughter had vanished through the break in the leaves. The part of her that wanted to live just snapped, she had nothing left to go back to. Her family wouldn't take her back and there was no way could she face Robert after giving both of their children away. Not after he had looked at her with such fury that she hadn't been allowed to stay in the castle afterward.

"Now Karen, don't plead... stand tall like the two-faced bitch you are." The witch snarled. With a flick of her wrist one of those slick black tendrils came sliding out of her skin, floating toward Lady Karen. She ran. She ran because she couldn't stand there and wait for that thing to slice into her skin. She didn't make it more than 3 yards before the tendril wrapped tightly around her ankle, easily cutting through her skin. Lady Karen screams in pain as she tries to take another step but falls to the ground. The tendrils connected to her ankle arcs and splits in two. Pulling at her ankle, Lady Karen tries to get free and it only tightens its grip on her as the second tendrils slips around her neck with a gentle, lover like caresses.

"Where are they?" the witch inched closer, another tendril hovering around Karen's head mischievously waiting for her next command. Karen pulls against her restraint again but still couldn't get it loosen, and bit back a scream as it tightened and hit bone. She would not cower in her final moments.

"You'll never find them. They're long gone." Karen's voice wasn't nearly as strong as she wanted it to be but still, the witch let her composure slip just enough to do something stupid. She slashed deeply into the lady's side with tendrils she summoned in seconds, sloppily formed with jagged edges. Faster than Lady Karen had ever seen blood spreads across the side of her tattered white dress making it stick to her skin as she doubles over. Hands pushing into her wounds, unable to go against the instinct to try to stop the bleeding.

"I will find them Karen," the witch snapped, her rotting teeth orange in the rising sun light. She takes another step closer to her, more tendrils slipping out of her skin as if the confinement of her old wrinkled body was their cage, "I promise you that. They will be dead before they reach their destiny."

"You're wrong." Lady Karen said through a smirk. "I think they will live to fulfill the destiny they have been gifted. I think that one day they will kill you, and they will stop whatever plan you and your allies have cooked up." At this statement, you could practically see the steam coming off the witch's body, could almost feel the heat, as her power boiled her blood like her rage boiled her mind. So close to losing control, so so gloriously close.

"How dare you presume something like that. Someone with no extraordinary abilities has no right to predict such things." Now Lady Karen was getting somewhere.

"I might not be able to see the future witch, but I can tell when something is a losing battle and yours is. You will lose this fight, and you will burn for the trouble you have caused." The witch lost control, her tendrils drilling through Karen's stomach, leaving a gaping hole where they had burned their way through. Blood slips out onto the ground around her, staining the brown grass red, cursing the ground. The witch strides forward and crouches over Karen's ghost white face just before her heart stops.

"You didn't think I would let it end that, quickly did you?"

No one will ever know the truth about what happened in the forest, but they would know her daughter's name, it would be found in history books in royal libraries and in legends people would be told around fires, recounting her adventures with awe in their voices.