Sarah lived alone in a dark forest. The forest was beautiful in the light; the bushy tree tops blurred into a green mass with patches that let pure rays of light fall through as columns at varying degrees depending on the position of the sun. In the light, Sarah could see the immense height of the thousands of tree barks that seemed to run into one another so high over her head and she loved to enjoy the view, resting in the backyard of the cabin that her mother and father built when they set out in the forest on their own after deciding to start a life together. The light was precious because there were parts of the forest where the leafy tree tops let no light through at all and the forest floor below only knew darkness and shadows. Those were the places Sarah avoided at all costs. Nothing beneficial grew there to eat and the animals she could hunt with her slingshot were wary of that darkness. Her father told her long ago that pure evil dwelt within the shadows and when he took her to forage for food, they would abandon the well worn paths that went through the patches of total darkness; the forest floor was thick with big tree roots and a blanket of leaves off the well worn paths but Sarah’s father showed her how to navigate the roots to avoid the leaves that contained hidden traps set by the servants of the Golem.
“Even if it seems like the way around a dark spot is longer than your whole trip, just suck it up and go around. That’s why the Golem is so big. People go in there looking for a short cut and the Golem’s servants are all over them,” Sarah’s father would say as she struggled to keep up while he jumped easily from root to root.
The Golem was the master of the darkness. Sarah’s mother and sister were eaten by the Golem, who was a giant that started out the size of a human baby many years ago when a man made him from a wad of decomposing leaves, but over time, as he ate the people of the forest whose numbers dwindled with each passing year, he grew stronger and bigger. “He’s as big as a tree now, but when he ducks into the darkness, he disappears and he waits for someone dumb enough to go in.”
When Sarah was a young woman, she lost her father to the darkness and from that time, the columns of light on particularly sunny days lost their cheerfulness and Sarah stayed inside, alone and bitter at the Golem who had eaten every member of her family. She’d wanted to find him, but the thought of walking into a pitch black column of darkness that was heavy like a curtain and hid trees and the creepy insects and spiders inside was too much for her. They would either eat her or take her to the Golem if they thought she was meal enough for him. Her father was meal enough. He tripped into the darkness and even though only a sleeve of his shirt barely dipped into that void, it grabbed him fast, as though something inside had been waiting for him and Sarah never even saw it, it happened so fast. She heard him struggle and she could tell that he was being carried away. And she could hear the things in the dark hissing at her.
That was the nightmare she often woke up from. And she had it enough times that one day she decided that she had nothing to lose. She would go after the Golem and end his life because he left her with nothing, alone in a dark forest. She would need to conquer her fear of the darkness, though, and her father told her that there was only one person in the forest who could navigate darkness and emerge unharmed.
PRL Serials 