Shadow Forest- The Complete Series

by Eliza Grace

  Sleep here in the forest of shadows.

  Live inside the land of your dreams.

  For tomorrow embraces your darkness.

  As the light in your soul dies and fades.

  I wonder what the words mean, what tomorrow will truly bring. A noise to our right draws my attention. Beneath the bark of a nearby tree, a glowing ember fluctuates. Mom sees me looking. “A fairy trapped.”

  “A fairy…” Matthew told me… fairies and trolls, trapped inside trees… It was hard to believe, that such a thing could be possible.

  I walk to the trunk and place my hand against the light beneath the gray-brown wood. Heat emanates from the glow. I close my eyes tightly. Behind me, my mother’s voice sounds. “Wish it free, My Little Witch. Wish it free.”

  With every fiber of my body, I will the bark to crack and the magical creature’s prison to let go its hold. At first, nothing happens. I have no power. He has taken all my power. “He has stolen your power, but you are bound to him through blood. That opens the channel both ways, dear one. Force your magic back to you. It will only last for a moment, but that will be enough.”

  I focus again, but this time, I think of M.H. I think of how he has tricked me, taken what was not his, and then I see him—he is sitting in a café, watching people pass by. He is enjoying freedom. I hate him. Anger wells up inside of me until I do not think I can contain it. At the exact moment I know I will explode my eyes flash open in time to see the blaze of golden electricity—now tinged in crimson for some strange reason— fly from my hand and shoot into the tree.

  The power is gone quickly. It is like a rubber band that can only be stretched so far and for so long before it bounces back. But mom is right though. I only needed a solitary moment, a second of strength. The bark is splitting and blinding-white light pours forth in an arc, like a diamond rainbow.

  Then the fairy is flying about me. It happily dances through the air, its transparent, lace-like wings glowing in the lantern light. I say nothing; I do not want to interrupt the pure joy that I am witnessing. It is wondrous, beyond anything I have ever seen.

  And I realize that though I have lost much to this prison, I might also gain experiences that are outside reality. Here in the forest of shadows, living might be entirely, unbelievably magical.

  SPELL TRICKED

  SHADOW FOREST, BOOK TWO

  A Fairy Light

  -Tilda-

  Time is a changeling.

  Time is different here. I can feel it, like the ticking minutes of clocks in the outside world are flowing through the barrier into the forest and pressing against my skin, reminding me that somewhere out there, the moments are passing, events are happening, the world is changing. I cannot focus on that though. I can only focus on my mother and the fairy that flies in front of me. I can only focus on what has happened and what is happening around me.

  If I think of the world outside, if I think of the possibility that I may never see Jen or Hoyt again, I might die of sadness. So I stand a little straighter. I feel the firmness of my legs supporting me like pillars, strong and purposeful. There is that, at least. I am walking and not in my wheelchair. I wonder, in passing, if I will once again find myself crippled when I escape the woods. It will be no small thing to give up.

  “Does it have a name?” I stare at the flitting flash of light that has not been still for more than a second since its release.

  “She does.” Mom walks over, bridging the small expanse between us. She places her hand against my right shoulder and it is so real feeling, so concrete and absolute, that I feel I must cry. I feel that if I do not cry, I will burst. My skin will rip apart and the emotions bombarding my insides will escape into the air around us. We’ve only been together again for a short moment in time, a single inhalation. Our togetherness is a dust mote in the air, catching light for a blink and then disappearing into night shadow. This is a fact, despite how she tries to assure me otherwise.

  “I love you, Mom. I love you so much.” I push into her body, pressing every bit of myself against her so that I can confirm and reconfirm that she is here. “I keep thinking I will wake up, having nodded off in my wheelchair, and you’ll be gone.”

  “I love you too, Tilda. More than you know. And I’m not going anywhere.”

  “For now,” I finish for her, because the words are hanging unspoken in the air.

  She says nothing, but her hand leaves my shoulder and I feel pain shoot through my heart like a bullet. The removal of the hand is a validation. Of that I have no doubt. Mom looks at me, her mouth a soft line and her eyes full of understanding. “Her name is Arianna.” She redirects my attention to the brilliant and small light. It is no longer moving and, as the rays of gold fluctuate, I can see the outline of her. Beautiful curves and long ochre hair.

  “How do you know?” I smile now, putting the potential brevity of my reunion with mom out of my mind.

  “Because she told me.”

  “She told you?”

  “Yes. Only seconds ago.” She turns to face me and, at the same instant, Arianna begins to move again. Mom’s hands raise and form cups on either side of my head, her fingers barely brushing my ear lobes. And then she is whispering. Strange words that I cannot make out. A heat begins to build inside my brain. It warms and warms until I am hot and unyielding as Greek fire.

  Then I hear it, though. A tinkling sound that increases in pitch and volume as the flame subsides. “Tilda. Tilda. Tilda.” It is a chant-like chirping, reminding me of the baby chick my brother and I had lovingly nurtured, after Easter ended, some years ago. A lifetime ago. When we were both alive. “Tilda, Tilda. I know you. I feel you.”

  “I can hear her now!” My lips part in a wide grin, the wonder of it pushing the remaining morsels of sadness and regret from my mind, and I stare at the fairy in wonder. Her light dulls until it is a soft glowing and I can see her fully—she is beautiful. Breathtaking.

  “Tilda, Tilda. Blood of her that protected us.” The voice is pure joy, pure music. It is an orchestra of one, a hundred instruments married perfectly.

  I gasp in awe as the six-inch figure darts down quickly to brush tiny fingers against my left cheek. She is then once again far above our heads. As quick as can be, a firework shooting colors into the night. Lifting my hand, I touch where she did. She has left a tingling behind, much like the sensation I feel whenever magic enters and exits me. “Her voice is like music and she’s so pretty.”

  “Yes, she is.” Mother’s head tilts upward, also taking in the sight of Arianna’s flight.

  “What did you do so I could understand her?” I’m watching Arianna’s every movement. She has dipped low again and left a trail of sparkles in her wake. They are close enough for me to trace fingers through the star-like stream.

  “Cast a spell. A small one, only words and the power of intent. But often that is all you need, especially when a fairy is involved with all their bright light and soulful energy. It was her mostly, Arianna’s will and power. It may not last though, my love, so enjoy it while you can.”

  “I thought you didn’t have any magic? You said you could teach me, but you didn’t have any magic.” I know I’m being repetitious, but it’s so hard to concentrate when the beautiful creature is flitting about wildly. And I want to understand. I need to understand, because otherwise everything is a stupid dream. And mom isn’t here. And my legs don’t work.

  “None of my own, darling. All borrowed. From the ground, the trees, the air, the ancestral spirits you cannot see.” She closes her eyes, tilts her head towards the canopy above. “Can’t you feel it, Tilda? There is so much good here. It was never just a holding cell for the witchfinder. Once, this place was a home. A home in every sense of the world.” Her eyes open, wide and trimmed in impossibly-thick lashes. I’d often wished I’d inherited that trait, but instead, I’d gotten my father’s sparse version. They are so thin that layers and layers of mascara barely make them thick and presentable. “Close your eyes, My Little Witch
. Try and feel the truth of this forest.”

  I do as she says. I close my eyes. “I don’t feel anything. Just… moisture, like it’s going to rain. Something heavy in the distance. Dark. I don’t feel goodness.” Shrugging, I begin to open my eyes, until Mom’s voice stops me.

  “Try harder, Tilda. This is your birthright.” Mom’s voice is kind, but insistent. I realize, as I concentrate harder, that the way she speaks now is different than when she was alive. It's as if death and being surrounded by magic has altered her. Or perhaps this was who she was before she abandoned magic. Perhaps, I am seeing my mother for the very first time—not hidden behind truth-laced bedtime tales whilst she hid her real self in the daylight.

  “You’re not focusing, Tilda.” Another gentle push—balanced love with the authority of a teacher, a teacher urging me to do my lessons and fall into line. I should be excited to learn more about the magic, to become immersed into the wonder of it all, but there is something holding me back.

  The witchfinder has my magic.

  My spirit, along with my face, has been altered. Which is funny, because I didn’t think anything else in this world could damage my spirit more.

  And maybe… a tiny part of me doesn’t want to learn enough to break the spell that binds me here—here where my legs work and my mom still lives.

  I want to please her, though, so I step over my hesitation and I force myself onward towards the beginning of understanding.

  And it starts as a hum.

  The whistle of a bird in the distance. The scampering of some small creature across the leaves and foliage littering the forest floor. The hum builds. I feel someone. Many someones. The feel of them surrounds me, although I do sense a few outliers on the border of my mind refusing to come near. I explore the spirits and they explore me. It is a strange sensation, like walking through a fog that you can feel, like a cotton candy mist hanging in the air that brushes your skin so softly that you think angel kisses must be similar. But then there are the ones in the distance that do not seem a part of the approachable collective. “There are… there are so many. What are they?”

  “The dead, my love. Magical and non-magical. Those with ties to this land that cannot be broken, even by death.”

  I open my eyes. Moisture has built within them, like the presence of the spirits has affected me to my core. I swipe away the first tear to slide down my cheek. I feel the wrinkles marring my skin. I remember the greys in my hair. I want to forget about the loss of my youth, just for a short time.

  “Is there any way to…” I swallow, smooth the wrinkled blush-hued material of the gown that covers my body. Several of the crystals are missing from the cap sleeves. I hate that it is ruined, but what is a dress now? Nothing.

  It is nothing. Like me.

  “You are still you, Tilda. Still my beautiful daughter. And, once your magic is back, so will the years be also.”

  “I don’t want to stay this way. I don’t want to look like this. Not even for another minute.” I look at my mother with pleading eyes and I realize, with my aged physique, that I am more her twin than her daughter. The thought makes me shake, the tremors running the length of me—from toes to head. Feeling the quake in my lower limbs, I long for my wheelchair and for my crippled body. I long for my youth. Again, it is something I never expected… to actually wish for my brokenness back.

  “I’m sorry, Tilda. That is beyond what I can accomplish with flashes of borrowed magic.”

  Another tear escapes my left eye. I hug my body, arms crossed firmly. I am trembling, on the verge of sobbing. Then, a shower of golden glitter which catches lantern light as it falls so that it is mesmerizing and impossible to look away from, falls toward me. It creates a sphere at which I am the center. It pulses and shines and then it fades into nothingness.

  Mom smiles, turns from me and walks some feet away and retrieves the ancient-looking music box that lies on the ground next to a particularly large tome with yellowed pages. When she brings it to me, she lifts the lid to reveal a mirror speckled with black imperfections. The haunting tune that greeted us when we’d first entered the ‘room’ in the woods plays again. One line stands out to me now—For tomorrow embraces your darkness.

  I do not like the implications.

  But then I am looking into the mirror and seeing the face of a girl and not a middle-aged woman. Gasping, I glance at my mother and then back at my raven-dark hair that bears no greys to punctuate the dark strands. There are no crow’s feet crowning once-bright eyes. I am Tilda.

  “How…” I stammer out the word.

  “Glamour, glamour, glamour.” Arianna’s sweet voice carries to me from where she has alighted on the post of the tarnished brass bed. It is strange to see her perfectly still.

  “Glamour?”

  “Arianna has given you a wonderful gift, my love, but you must understand that it is not permanent.”

  “An illusion.” I feel slightly deflated, knowing that the image I am seeing is not real.

  “A beautiful illusion.” My mother admonishes, reminding me that she has called the glamour a gift and I am being ungrateful.

  Looking at the fairy, I force a smile and I hope that it is large and genuine. “Thank you so much, Arianna.”

  “Free, free, free.” She sing-songs the repetition, launching up into the air again and recommencing her tireless flight. “She protected us. We protect you. Free, free, free.” With wide, graceful arcs, she rises and falls in the air.

  “How old are you Arianna?” I’m not sure why I ask the question. She looks so young, perhaps a teen like myself, but I do not know what time means in a fairy’s biology. The fairy doesn’t respond immediately and I wonder if I have broken some etiquette, like asking an older woman her age. I am new to magic, she is my first encounter with a magical creature… is there a handbook for knowing what to do in these situations? How to Talk to a Fairy. Questions to Avoid When Conversing with a Werewolf. What to Do When a Witch Hunter Comes to Dinner. Perhaps there is an entire library somewhere detailing everything I’d need to know about this new life of mine.

  Maybe.

  But for now, I’d have to rely on my mother and the fairy that wouldn’t stop flying. So lost in thought am I, that I am startled near to heart attack when Arianna finally answers my question.

  “Never, never, never.” She laughs at the end of her words. It is a bright and happy thing that dances across my skin in a musical way.

  Mother laughs. I cannot join her, because I am confused. Never is not an answer, at least not one that makes sense to me. Perhaps Arianna didn’t understand my question or, in her delayed response, she’d forgotten what my question was.

  Seeing my expression, mother laughs again and explains. Or tries to explain. The more she speaks, the more I feel I should have paid better attention in Greek class. “Fairies do not age. They have no birth, no death. They simply are.”

  “But how do they procreate? How do they…” I struggle with the words, wanting the right ones to gain my answer. “How do they procreate if they have no birth?”

  “They mate for a lifetime and when they are ready, they have a child. They just do. It becomes. It grows and thrives and then it is.”

  This does nothing to lessen my confusion. “And then it never dies?”

  “Never of a natural cause.”

  I am still struggling with the concept of becoming and being and never dying.

  There is another question I want to ask, one I think will bring me clarity, but then without warning, Arianna’s flight becomes a frenzied disjointed thing. The intensity of it instantly causes fear to build in my stomach like a sickness. “What’s wrong with her?”

  Mom looks at the fairy and her eyes go wide. She pulls me towards the center of the small room without walls, its thick protective canopy is shielding us from a misty rain—it has just begun, dripping slowly off of leaves to plunk almost soundlessly against the foliage covering the ground. I stand behind my mother as she raises her hands abov
e her head and then brings them down quickly. She does it three times, each falling of her arms performed more quickly than the last.

  “Hurry, hurry, hurry.” Arianna’s tinkling voice sounds discordant, wrong notes plucked against a piano ruining the harmony of her normal speech.

  I grip mom’s night dress and try to close the space between us, but she whirls about to face me. It is then that I notice the hum of electricity surrounding us and see the blurring of the landscape beyond the sanctuary.

  “Something’s coming. The benign spirits and white magic aren’t the only things that exist in this forest. You must be quiet, My Little Witch. Absolutely quiet.” With those words, the lanterns extinguish and we are plunged into a darkness that shouldn’t be—the moon is nearly full tonight and even with the cloud cover, there should be some light filtering between trees and canopy. Even Arianna’s glowing is absent. And that, more than the absent moonlight, disturbs me.

  “Mom, wh—”

  “Hush!” Her low whisper is ferocious.

  I’ve never heard her voice so harsh. I hold my breath like my life depends on it and I find Mom’s fingers in the darkness. Her grip gives me no comfort.

  The Others

  -Tilda-

  Eternity in a moment.

  A moment of eternity.

  We are quiet, as silent as death, for what seems like an eternity.

  I want to speak, fill the space around us with my voice so that I feel less scared and so that hopefully Mom will speak back and assure me all is well. But she has told me to hush, that there are things in the forest that are not kind, not benevolent. That worries me far more than the silence eats at me. So I keep my lips sealed like they have been superglued.

  Silence.

  Silence.

  So much silence.

  Just as my mind is about to unravel and abandon me to the senselessness of insanity, I hear a scratching. The sound of a set of nails resting lightly against a tree’s bark and dragging downward over and over again. I stiffen; my hand on mom’s dress grips so firmly that I hear a tearing. It is muted and quickly swallowed by the oblivion.