Prologue

Ava-

Sitting on the muddy ground, I looked down at my bloody dress, the crimson red of my veins now stained my white dress and it no longer looked like what it used to.

Every inch of my body ached, pain, hurt, chaos.

I didn’t understand why they were doing this to me. This couldn’t have been normal. Was it normal? Did people who lived out there do this? Was this what I would experience if I left the woods? I didn’t want to experience this. It I didn’t want to believe that this is what I had been missing out on because this wasn’t what I wanted at all.

Lifting my foot, I pulled out a sharp branch that that cut into my skin, silently whimpering as I watched my blood linger down my foot and drop onto the ground before I reached up and tried to rub my neck, to soothe away the stinging sensations that was burning my flesh as the thick rope dug into my skin.

I was tied to a tree from my neck and the more I tried to get away, the more the rope choked me into coughing and gasping for air and as the night grew cold, I watched as the men got into their tents, some still sat beside the fire, warming their hands and drinking some sort of liquor that made was making them seem a bit all over the place. That must’ve been alcohol, my mother taught me about it, she said that people drank that to have fun. It made them distant from reality, it made them happy. I wondered if I drank it, would it make me happy? Because I couldn’t find happiness within me anymore.

Lifting my head and taking in the cold breeze, I indulged in the cold as it settled upon my skin, chilling me to the bone as I shivered against the cool air. I was used to all types of weather, I had spent all of my life in the woods, but tonight, I felt the cold more than usual, I felt fragile, weak.

Looking up at the sky, I made a wish on a star, wishing to get away from these men, wishing that they’d stop hurting me. I wished to never feel what they have been making me feel. I wished to be… free.

And when I returned my gaze to the present, HE caught and held my gaze captive, sitting by the fire, it brightened his face, making it look like he had fire in his eyes as he watched me. The longer he stared at me, the more uncomfortable I became, like he was looking into my soul, he was taunting me with his eyes even if he wasn’t trying to. Turning my gaze to the floor, I was afraid that if I didn’t stop looking into his eyes, I’d end up seeing him hurt me all over again.

And that,

I couldn’t relive that.

Ava-

It’s funny isn’t it? Even when you try so hard to stay away from people, they find a way of coming into your life.

Human beings. Wild and dangerous.

We are the chaos to our own madness. We are the reason why we keep backtracking, the world does not move forward from hatred and war.

Every sun that shines, every moon that awakens, every night that turns into day, the more the years go on, the worse we become.

Mama use to tell me that, that’s why we lived so far away from people. My father wanted to take me away from my mother and give me up for adoption because I was an abnormal child, I didn’t look the same as everyone else, I was what they called an Albino, white hair, light features, pale skin, he hated it. He said he didn’t want a freak as a daughter and so, before he could take me away from my mother, she took me and ran away, she ran to somewhere far away, somewhere he wouldn’t come looking for us.

In the middle of a forest, we built our life here, I grew up with the animals and nature, mama became ill when I was 13 and she died a year later, she taught me everything I know. She did her best and so, I’m doing my best to keep her proud. We have a little house here, we found it abandoned and no one ever came back for it so we just made it ours, mama would go into the real world every so often to get things that we needed but eventually that stopped when she passed away so then that job became mine, I didn’t leave the forest until a year after mama died because I was afraid to face the real world, she had taught me how to use money and she had a lot saved up but I was starting to run out. Though it didn’t matter, I didn’t really need the outside world, I was doing great here on my own, I knew everything about the forest so I could take care of myself but what I wasn’t expecting was to see humans.

Over the years, there had been the very rare few people who had come here for a few days and left, though I never let them see me, I usually tried to stay as invisible as possible. Mama said that humans could be dangerous and that we had to stay away from them so that’s what I did but after a very long time, the forest had guests again. A few days ago, I saw a group of men, they seemed to have planned to stay for a while because they had tents, a lot of food and supplies, they had… guns. I was afraid that I couldn’t stay hidden forever, that eventually, one of them would either see me or stumble upon my home. I wasn’t sure how to even communicate with them if they spoke to me, I knew how to speak but I hadn’t spoke to people a lot so I preferred to be silent.

Swimming in the clear blue lake, I swam deeper into the depths of the lake before going back to the surface of the water for air, laying there, floating above the water in my white dress, I let the sound of water and the forest sing me to sleep, I often slept here, just napping in the water, the peace and quiet of the forest always invited me in, the distant birds singing me a lullaby to sleep along with the rustling of the trees every so often, it was perfect. It was heaven.

I must’ve had my eyes closed for just about five minutes before I felt uneasy, like I was being watched. My eyes shooting open, I scanned my surrounding, looking up at the cliffs and through the trees, I was good at finding any unwanted attention, I had learned it the hard way with the dangerous animals of the forest, though, I had learned how to tame most of them without getting myself hurt but as I looked through every inch of my surrounding, I couldn’t find anything out of the ordinary except the awful feeling in my gut that told me that I wasn’t here alone.

Getting out of the water, I put my shoes on and let the water drip down my body, hair and dress as I looked around, waiting for anything unwelcome but came up empty. I didn’t want to go straight home because I was afraid that someone would follow me to my house so I began to walk through the trees, keeping my guard up in case I needed to defend myself.

Grabbing a sharp tree branch, I held it in my hand for security, if I needed to, I would smack it across any intruders head. Maybe it was nothing, maybe I was feeling paranoid because I knew that there were people here, roaming the forest and invading the privacy of the animals. Maybe that’s what it was, maybe it was an animal that was watching me but then again, I’ve always been so good at detecting them, I could always spot a wild animal from afar so why was it that this time, I couldn’t spot anything? Instead, I could just feel.

Hearing a tree branch breaking, I turned around and looked to where the sound came from and I could just about spot someone standing behind a tree in the distance, which informed me that,

I was being,

Watched.