Sleeping Beauty: Chapter One

Chapter One: The Forest of Death

Her lungs seared with each heaved breath. Her muscles shook with fatigue from running for the past ten miles. Her body screamed at her to rest, if only for half a second, but she ignored the negative signs her body was trying to send her. She hadn’t rested in seven days, and she was not going to start now. Not when she was this close to rescuing the Prince.
         
The forest of her bedtime stories loomed in front of her, more terrifying than she had imagined it countless nights as she attempted to sleep in the crowded bedchamber at the orphanage. Her seven-year-old’s image of the gnarled, moving, living forest filled with thorns and sand traps and tree limbs that grabbed people and swallowed them whole was terrifyingly accurate.

The forest was not a proper forest, but a dense wall of impassable black trees. It was as if the trees had been sown from rotten seeds and the decay had seeped into everything around it. Beyond the trees, all she could see was blackness. The ground, the air, the thorns, the trees were all black. There was not a speck of green in the entire place. No beautiful, green mossy floor like that of the wooded area where she and Red had played as children. There wasn’t a shred of life in the forest.
         
Yet, it was alive.
         
She couldn’t actually see the branches moving as she dreamed she would as a child. It was always out of the corner of her eyes. Every time she looked because she knew she saw something move, the area was still, and the trees appeared deader than ever. It seemed impossible to think that wood that looked so dead, so much like stone, was capable of moving, but she knew it was.

It didn’t matter that the movement was just out of sight, not really. She knew the forest was alive without seeing it move.
         
She could hear it breathing.
         
It didn’t breathe as she did, one inhale and one exhale, no matter how ragged they might be. It wasn’t even a sigh or the slow, even breathe of someone sleeping.
         
It was being held, sucked in, and then released in only the tiniest increments, as if the forest was trying to hide its presence. It was breathing like someone who wanted very desperately not to be found. Or like someone who wanted very desperately not to alert its prey to its presence.
         
She gripped her sword tighter, her fingers curling around the plain hilt. A lifetime of stories of all the foolish men and women who had tried before her to defeat the forest and rescue Prince Briar from his slumber came rushing back. The forest had defeated them all.
         
She and her best friend Chloe kept a running tally at the School for Dragon Fighting of who they thought would be stupid enough to try and rescue the sleeping prince.
         
She had never told Chloe to add her own name, Elsea, to the list.
Elsea took only one moment to collect herself. She closed her eyes, took one deep breath in, and slowly let it out.
         
It was time to rescue the Prince.


Elsea had no idea how long she had been in the forest or even if she was moving in the right direction anymore. The blackness she had witnessed from outside was more profound once enshrouded under the canopy of the trees. No streak of sunlight filtered through, and her compass had stopped working three steps into the labyrinth of trees.
         
Elsea swore under her breath as her leather boot snagged on a root. She quickly slashed at the root trying to claw its way up her leg, her sword glowing blue for the briefest moment. She didn’t have a moment to spare to send up a thank you to the fairies who enchanted her sword just outside the school gates. Another root tried to attack her other foot while a branch from above opened the skin on her cheek.
         
Elsea jerked her foot free while slashing above, feeling the warmth of her own blood running down her face. She leaped over what she knew was a sand trap noting the lighter edges of black around the edge, disguised as the black ground.
         
She screamed as she landed, but no sound came out. The oppressive, thick black air of the forest swallowed her voice.
         
A mere ten feet away was the tallest and roundest tree she had ever seen. It was the first thing in the forest she had seen that wasn’t wholly black. The tree was glowing red, but that wasn’t what stopped her.
         
The tree wasn’t a tree at all, but a tree shaped creature made entirely of human bodies. Only the base looked like bark, but even at the glowing red bottom she could see the people in the tree, the bark molding onto the shapes of the human bodies.
         
Her grip faltered on the sword.
         
There was a voice coming from the tree: an undeniably alive, human voice, pleading for her help.
         
For the first time in her life, Elsea was paralyzed by fear.
         
She had faced six grown men, head on in a fight, without any weapons, and won. She had fought in the jousting tournament against the man who had killed his past six opponents and defeated him in one move. She had killed thirty dragons who were all at least fifty times her size and hadn’t batted an eye.
         
Now, with someone trapped in the tree of humans that seemed to go on forever, reaching high into the endless black above her, she couldn’t move.
         
She could only stare at the monstrosity of the tree, taking in each decaying face, the eyes open and unseeing, each body piled on top of the next. As she stood, trapped by her own fear, the bark moved upward, spreading upward and outward like a spill of black ink on a white cloth, plotting all color that once was. As soon as the black bark touched the body, a hiss echoed through the forest, and Elsea had to hold her sword for support as something, she didn’t know what, tried to force her toward the tree.
         
The bark entombed the next foot upward of bodies. The hissing was relentless, growing louder and louder with each inch the bark ascended, sounding like every nightmare Elsea had never dreamed and more that she never knew existed. It seemed like an eternity yet like no time at all when the hissing stopped as abruptly as it started and the forest grew oppressively silent.
         
Except the pleading, human voice.
         
“Please,” the man’s voice begged, ragged, hoarse from lack of use. “Please, save me. I don’t understand what’s happening to me.”
         
Elsea lifted her sword out of the mud, gulped in a breath, and immediately choked. It tasted like sulfur and spoiled milk. Sweat began to bead on her forehead while her arms broke out in gooseflesh. She dragged her foot to the right, pulling herself around the tree, but refusing to step any closer.
The man’s voice pierced her heart, but she knew it was a trap.
         
This was why so many people died, why no one came back.
         
They tried to help a helpless person, to be a good samaritan, and the tree swallowed them whole.
         
She spotted him at last, the man who was alive, the one begging for her help.
         
He was about halfway up the tree, squished between another man on bottom, a woman on top, and more people at his head and feet, but the bodies were too long gone for Elsea to know that they may have looked like alive. The man’s hair might have been brown once, his skin darker than the pale white it was now, illuminated only by the red glow of the black tree.
         
“Please,” he pleaded, “save me. If you save me, you will save all the rest also. Once one escapes the tree, we all escape.”
         
Elsea could count on one hand how many times she had cried in her life. The first was when she was about three and a boy at the orphanage had told her that no one would ever love her. The second was when she was seven, and the nicest, kindest man and woman had adopted her. The third was eight months ago, two days after her sixteenth birthday, when the same man and woman had been murdered by one of the last living dragons, burned to death.
         
Today, in the Forest of the Death at the Tree of Humans, marked the fourth time that Elsea remembered crying.
         
The man sounded so sincere, so sure of himself, but Elsea couldn’t dare to believe him.
         
The man wasn’t really alive.
         
His eyes were blank, unseeing.
         
She had seen desperation. She had honored the wishes of dying men and women, burned by the dragons who had ravaged their lands, burdened by the disease that had spread quicker than the dragon’s fire two years ago and killed a fourth of her city.
         
This man was not desperate.
         
This man was not desperate because he wasn’t alive. He now existed only for the tree, for the darkness ruling the entire forest. His only goal was to ensnare more people in its trap, to continue building the tree of bodies because it knew those on a quest wouldn’t pass up the chance to be a hero.
         
Whether it was from a true desire to help someone, to save someone, or from wanting bragging rights back home, the forest knew no typical person seeking to rescue the Prince, safely tucked away in his tower, could resist the chance to be a hero.
         
Elsea’s hands shook as she shoved her sword into the ground and withdrew her bow and arrow from her back
pack. She loaded the bow, willing her hand to still, closing her eyes, and blocking out the sound of the man’s cries. When she opened her eyes, her hands were still, and her aim was true. The arrow flew strong and straight, directly between the man’s blank eyes.

His voice stopped, and his body slumped, melding into the others around him until Elsea couldn’t decipher where he ended and the others began.
         
Seizing her opportunity, she ran faster than she had ever run before, swinging the sword in front of her, chopping blindly, praying to whatever deity might be above to get her out of the hellish forest and away from the Tree of Nightmares. Branches snatched at her, ripping her clothes, slicing any exposed skin. She slashed down and upward, cutting through anything that stood in her way. Her sword glowed eternally blue, the hilt growing warm in her hand from the magic of the fairies’ enchantments.
         
It took Elsea three seconds to realize she wasn’t in the forest anymore. Her sword still slashed, and she ran, propelled by her own momentum. Her legs slowed, and her sword stopped while she stared in confusion at what was in front of her and beneath her.
         
Colors and sound, birds singing, green grass, the sound of a creek, the dull thud as she fell to her knees, her own ragged, hitched, breathing echoing back to her. Her heart was racing, and she had no choice but to collapse onto the ground, her shaking muscles no longer able to support her.
         
Elsea leaned her face against the cool, prickly grass. Tears, sweat, and blood mixed and ran down her face, but she didn’t care. Nothing mattered now.
         
She had done it.
         
She had escaped the Forest of Death.

Fueled by adrenaline and determination, Elsea raised her head enough to see the castle, perched high on the hill. It wasn’t a grand castle, small by anyone’s standards, and rather plain looking. Three square, stone buildings were at the bottom and there was only one story above. The castle was circular with one tower jutting into the sky from the center of the building. The tower was covered in vines that twirled around the stone facade, overgrown from years of disuse.
         
There was only one obstacle between her and rescuing Prince Briar, the last creature guarding the prince.

It was time to kill the last dragon in existence.