The Forest of the Forgotten

They had barely made it fifty yards from the clearing when Amnity stumbled, her canvas backpack suddenly feeling like it weighed a hundred pounds. The Glowing Imp Root pulsed inside its glass container, and with each throb, the forest around them seemed to... shift.

"Ellie," Amnity whispered, her voice tight with growing panic, her eyes glowing a deep red through the calming blue. "Something's wrong."

The trees were bleeding shadow. Not casting shadows—bleeding them, dark rivulets of liquid night that pooled and writhed at their roots. The shadows moved with purpose, reaching toward the girls with fingers made of crystallized fear and half-formed thoughts.

Why did you take what wasn't yours?

The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, a whisper that tasted like copper and regret.

Ellie grabbed Amnity's hand and pulled her forward, the voice seemed to get louder. "Don't listen to it. It's the Root—it's angry we removed it."

But the darkness was learning. It shifted and flowed, becoming the shape of Amnity's grandmother Elara, her face twisted in disappointment.

“You've failed, Amnity. I know I shouldn't have left you my cottage.”

"That's not real," Amnity muttered quietly to herself. Ellie looked up at the direction Amnity was looking and saw it, a shadow of something dark and menacing through her yellowing eyes.

“Elle, come home. Ellie we miss you”

Ellie closed her eyes and shook her head. The voices sounded faint but familiar like a lost memory of something she used to love being yanked on in her chest.

They ran, crashing through undergrowth as the darkness behind them grew more solid, more terrible. It became a writhing mass of every doubt, every fear, every mistake they'd ever made given form. The abstract thoughts of the Root's ancient consciousness pressed against their minds, whispering of worthlessness, of failure, of the inevitable moment when they would be consumed.

Amnity's breath came in ragged gasps, her golden-blue eyes wild with terror. The Root in her backpack pulsed harder, and each pulse made the pursuing darkness stronger, more focused, more real.

That's when they saw it—an ornate mirror propped against a massive oak tree, its silver frame tarnished but intact. It looked completely out of place in the wild forest, like something that had fallen from another world entirely.

"A mirror," Ellie breathed, and suddenly her hand was diving into her pocket, searching for the small pouch she always carried. "Amnity, I can get us out of here."

Behind them, the darkness roared—a sound like breaking glass and screaming wind and the last breath of dying stars. It surged forward, no longer content to play with them.

Ellie's fingers closed around the pouch of sand she'd carried since she was eight years old, the same sand from that first lesson with Eleazar. As she pulled it out, her mind flashed back to that day...

Ellie was so small then, standing on the beach with her bare toes digging into the warm sand. Eleazar knelt beside her, his weathered hands gentle as he showed her how to cup the grains in her palm.

"The sand remembers every shore it's touched, little star," he said, his voice urgent but kind. "Every world, every realm. Mirrors are doorways, but they need a key." He sprinkled sand across the surface of a small hand mirror. "Say the words with me: 'Specchio di sabbia, apriti per me.'"

Eight-year-old Ellie had been nervous, still unsure if she could trust this man who'd taken her in, but desperate to learn how to protect her new home. Her voice was barely a whisper as she repeated the words, watching in wonder as the mirror's surface rippled like water.

"Good," Eleazar smiled. "But remember—never use this magic in fear. Fear makes the mirrors... unpredictable."

Now, with the shapeshifting darkness mere yards behind them, Ellie threw the sand across the mirror's surface. "Specchio di sabbia, apriti per me!" she cried, her voice cracking with terror—exactly the kind of fear Eleazar had warned her about.

The mirror's surface rippled, but wrong, chaotic. Instead of the controlled portal she'd practiced making, this was wild magic, uncontrolled and dangerous.

"Ellie, what's—" Amnity started to say, but the darkness crashed into them like a wave of liquid nightmare.

Ellie grabbed Amnity's hand and dove toward the mirror, pulling them both forward as the sand-magic caught them and yanked them through the rippling surface.

The last thing they heard was the Root's ancient voice, no longer angry but almost... amused: *Let us see what your stolen prize brings to the world beyond...*

Then they were falling through silver light and crushing darkness, tumbling end over end through a space between spaces, until they crashed onto something hard and cold and utterly alien.

Concrete.

Amnity groaned and pushed herself up on her elbows, her backpack somehow still secured to her shoulders. They were in an alleyway between two impossibly tall buildings made of glass and steel, structures that reached toward a sky the wrong color of blue. Strange smells filled the air—exhaust fumes, hot asphalt, something chemical and sharp.

"Where..." Amnity whispered, staring up at the foreign sky. "Where are we?"

Ellie sat up slowly, her heart still hammering. The mirror was gone, leaving them stranded in this alien place. In the distance, she could hear sounds like nothing from their world—roaring engines, blaring horns, the cacophony of a civilization built on metal and speed.

"I think," Ellie said quietly, helping Amnity to her feet, "we're not in the forest anymore.”