Crone did her best to prepare Sarah for the conditions she would encounter once she stepped into the darkness. Sarah spent a lot of time with the lights off, and Crone had her work with the garbage men so that she could learn to ignore smells that most people found unbearable. Sarah walked around blindfolded for a week to sharpen her senses and tried her best to track a deer through the woods, though the week was hardly enough time to really master the technique.
Crone grew nervous. “This was a bad idea. Your father would kill me if he knew I was sending you to die.”
“I don’t plan on dying,” Sarah said. She went quiet for a second, confused by her own conviction. When she had come to the post in search of Crone, she was willing to risk it all because she thought that she had nothing to lose, but her time with Crone made her believe that she could end the Golem for good. If she had managed, then Sarah knew she could too. “I feel like I can do this, godmother. Its got to be done.”
Because the Golem was made of leaves, his body was susceptible to fire and everyone knew that to end him, a person must be brave and fast enough to get close and set fire to his body. Flaming arrows and other projectiles were ineffective because the Golem was surprisingly quick for a creature of his height and he could disappear into shadows in the blink of an eye. The people of the forest had no tool that could out move the Golem so they gave up the idea of killing him a long time ago.
Crone explained all this to Sara; she pleaded with the young woman that if she just took more time to prepare, she might actually be the one to finally kill the Golem. But Sarah insisted, “we’ll find a way to kill him before the full moon.”
Sarah spent more weeks with Crone waiting for the full moon, acclimating herself to the conditions of darkness, and listening to Crone’s stories from her time in the darkness.
“There was one woman in there,” Crone said, “she was as old as the tallest tree in this forest. She was generous but she likes to be left alone. She only talked to me because I fell into her home after I got attacked by a spider up in a tree. There are panthers in there too and one chased me up a tree and then I fell into a web and had to cut myself out and a spider grabbed me and I had to fight it off with my knife. And then I’m falling out of the tree, sure I’m going to die, but I hit something and then it crashes through and I’m in the old woman’s house. She cleaned me up, listened to my story. We talked like sisters. She taught me a trick.” Crone stood, she and Sarah were outside on a thick branch that was close to the window of Crone’s library. She closed her eyes and suddenly, Sarah heard thunder rip through the clear skies and then she saw a bolt of lightning strike along the sky.
“I can never bring them down,” Crone said. “If you can learn, you might be able to strike the Golem down.” Sarah agreed to try, but Crone knew the training would be dangerous to their environment if successful, so they ventured to the mountains where they could call the lightening without setting fire to trees.
The day of the full moon came and Sarah couldn’t control the lightening without watching and mirroring Crone as she did it, which Sarah knew meant she couldn’t do it at all.
“Maybe this won’t work,” Sarah said to Crone as they made their way back to the tram post.
“If you want it to, it can,” Crone said.
Sarah stopped on the large tree root the two navigated and turned to Crone, “I do, but…” And before she could finish, Sarah slipped and fell from the root. She rolled down an incline and Crone called after her. Before she was able to stop herself, Sarah saw that heading toward a patch of darkness that seemed to have emerged from nowhere. When she was inside, she learned that Crone had not been exaggerating about the smell and the atmosphere of the darkness. And it was so dark, she couldn’t see the ground she rested on. She was afraid to stand, afraid to move.
Then she felt something climbing and creeping over her, all around her, and she felt that something was spinning around her; she was being spun by a spider she could not see. And in her panic, Sarah jumped up and imagined Crone in the darkness before her, calling the lightening, and she mirrored the ritual. Sarah brought the lightning to the darkness that was heralded by a loud crack of thunder. It came down directly on top of her and burned through the canopy that created the darkness that had enveloped her. When the lightening hit Sarah, she was filled with the spark and radiated a light bright enough to eliminate the pillar of darkness.
Crone saw it all and she knew that Sarah was the one who could step any evil in any darkness forever.
Sarah would glow with the spark of lightning from then on and when she finally came face to face with the Golem, after eliminating most of the dark spots that the creature was known to haunt, the creature tried its best to run from her. But Sarah took pleasure in setting him ablaze and she was happy to set the people free from the monster that had terrorized their lives.
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