Elena Vale's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Elena Vale threw out the last box today, and only then did she understand what she had done. Six years ago her mother walked into Blackwood Forest and never came back. Elena was too angry to grieve, so she gave away everything: the coats, the letters, the photographs. Now she stood in her empty apartment, wanting to trace her mother's last steps, and she had nothing left to hold. No note. No map. No clue to where the woman had gone or why. Elena drove to the one place that might still keep something. The old cabin near the treeline had belonged to her mother's oldest friend. Elena had not spoken to her in years. Raven Cross opened the door before Elena knocked. She was tall, nearly six feet, in a short black dress and worn boots. She leaned against the frame like she owned the whole forest behind her. "Well," Raven said, smiling slow. "You have her eyes. You always did." Elena kept her voice flat. "I threw out all her things. Everything. I have nothing to follow her with." Raven's smile faded. For a moment she looked older, tired. "You came to the right place, then." She led Elena inside. A battered hiking pack sat in the corner, straps frayed, canvas patched in mismatched colors. Dried mud still clung to the boots strapped beneath it. "That was hers," Raven said. "She left it here the night before she went in. Said she'd come back for it." Raven touched the pack, then pulled her hand away. "I never opened it. Couldn't." Elena knelt and unbuckled the flap. Inside she found a coiled rope, a dented canteen, a folded blanket. Then her fingers hit paper. She drew out a small notebook, its pages swollen from damp. She opened it. Her mother's handwriting filled every line, cramped and urgent. Dates. Sketches of the trees. The same phrase written again and again, harder each time, until the pen tore the page. "It watches," Elena read aloud. "It waits. It wears our faces." Her hands went cold. This was not the diary of a woman who wandered off and got lost. This was fear, page after page. Raven had gone still. Her fingers closed around a small silver locket at her throat. "She never told me what she saw out there," Raven whispered. "She just stopped sleeping." Elena stood. She had wanted her mother's belongings, and now she held them. But the notebook did not answer the question. It made a worse one. "She was afraid of something in the forest," Elena said. "Something real." Raven met her eyes. "Then don't go in there alone. And don't go without talking to Miriam Finch first. She knows things about that night the police buried." Elena zipped the pack shut and slung it over her shoulder. The straps settled like they had waited for her. She was going into Blackwood now. She just needed to find out what her mother had run from.