Are you ready?

Are YOU ready?

No, like really ready?

Too late to turn back now, you are mile in already.

Come, this way.

This way, please.

Mind the gap, watch your step, and don’t bang your head!

That’s it, nothing bad will happen to you here… we are all watching you… very intently.

Now you have run out of time, and feel out of place.

Why?

Because you have, and you are.

Enjoy!

It is the curse that winds the stone into searing tar, you are sure of it. (After all you have heard many a tale, haven’t you?)

So, why does everything feel colder now that the sun has reeled back in its playful rays? A sly trick of time’s play, leaving a giggling note of invisible ink across the hung darkness; a reminder that nothing is permanent and the only certainty is the final fall of inky sky.

(Perhaps it is the negligible percentage of barium… that is it: the barium is doing weird stuff and the sky still holds up!)

Tiptoeing around the moth-marked trees, their bark peeling in avant-garde silky strips that waft in the ghostly breeze, which lift their malnourished roots from the poisoned soil you wait. You wait for the tap upon the knee, or the curling cradle around your throat… yet nothing comes to greet with a curious gesture glare.

Strange.

Strange…

Yes, very strange.

Below your pain marked soles, the curling carpet of decay crumbles under the tentative touch of uncertain toe. The mulch of partially digested once-upon-a-time squelches with relish beneath your uncut nails, which have turned an eerie shade of mustard.

(Those nubs of keratin weren’t that colour before, maybe the soil has tainted you with a chain-smoker’s habit.)

Silence drifts behind on wings of gossamer fine, coaxing the forest to still and to uptake the vow of muteness.

Despite being caught in an inebriated stupor, you can sense the tenseness of your surroundings… like a snigger that is being stifled and simultaneously smothering the gaseous exchange

You know it.

You know something isn’t right here.

But you cannot place what, or why.

As you stumble through the snatching fingers, and blundering arms, your mind fails to retrieve the all important directions for the way out. After all everything wears the same veil of powered ash, a guise that is so thick it reaches deep into your throat and absorbs the moist mucous greedily.

Parched, starved, and bewildered you spin wordlessly through the mellifluous song of the reticent night, which soothes your aching limbs with its numbing caress.

Until you sink with groaning joints, and you’re kissed with the toxic lips of empty regret.

Just as unconsciousness begins to glaze your eyes, you roll your head towards the crisp sound of hushed susurration. A thousand voices of the delirious mind… except you were sure that the words were marked by the steady crack of twigs… easily broken by the marching feet.

That eldritch echo hisses: “They did not live a happily ever after, not by a mile.”