The woods were dim in the fading sunlight. Nolan was surprisingly silent as we trudged through thick briars and thick fallen branches. Flora had requested twigs, and yet Nolan and I had yet to catch sight of one.

"You know this is a test, right?" Nolan broke the curtain silence that had fallen around us.

"I figured since this path seems to go on forever," I replied curtly, looking for something, anything really that could start a fire.

"You're taking forever. These fairies are talking about some chick named Sleep and I want to go to sleep so could you hurry up?" I jumped, startled at the sudden sound of Fang's voice in my head. The dragon had been with us all day, then, just in the shadows.

"Dragon talking to you?" 

"Yep."

"You'll get used to it."

And Nolan once again fell silent.

We walked through a particularly rough patch of thorns when we stumbled upon a town. It wasn't unlike my home in the kingdom, except there wasn't smoke coming out of chimneys or light from candles coming through sheer curtains on the windows. The town looked and felt deserted.

"Flora doesn't want us to see this," I hadn't even realized I'd spoken until I saw the shocked look on Nolan's face.

"Obviously she does. Why else would she send us down this path that led here? Maybe she wants us to investigate. This could be my chance to prove I'm ready to actually hunt for a better specialty!"

Nolan's face glowed at the thought of proving his worth, and he set his gaze on the hill below us.

"Didn't you already find your specialty? Wasn't it wind? I thought that's what your training was for."

"It is," Nolan sighed and turned to face me, "but Flora and the others haven't really been helping me ever since Aunt Slepa left. She was the only one who really cared about finding me a different specialty, even if she did seem to think that I would be the next warlock of the cosmos."

"What's a warlock of the cosmos?" I blurted before I thought the question through. Yet another thing I didn't know. As we were speaking, the bright and cheery sun had slipped behind an island of dark clouds, causing the sky to darken into a bleak starless sky. It was just us and a lonely village at night.

Nolan chuckled, "I forgot that Flora wouldn't have told you. A long time ago, cosmo warlocks were common. They were the warlocks that could weave the fabric of time and align the planets as they wished. Before the Dark Days, there hadn't ever been a witch of the cosmos. Then, a girl names Rose became the foretold cosmo witch. 

When you're as young as she was and as naive as any twelve-year-old in the situation, you believe the things the adults in the situation tell you. The adult in her situation was an evil man, therefore intoxicating her to use her powers for evil. Flora, Heartea, Sanshe, Wintersea, and Slepa's three aunts were the guardians of the ancient scrolls, the ones that told you how to take a witch's magic. Of course, it's against the law, but Rose needed to be stopped. The only way to stop Rose was to take her power and lock it up. But the power was freed sixteen years ago to find the next witch or warlock of the cosmos. That's why Slepa thought I was the warlock of the cosmos. Because I was born the day the magic was realised. Flora is the only reason I actually haven't tried to perform cosmos magic. She says I'm not ready."

"Oh," was all I could think of to say, my brain not quite caught up with the entire story. So there was a type of witch who could control time itself. Not only would that be amazing, but incredibly dangerous. I was not jealous of the shoulders of the person that burden would fall onto.

"I want to show you something," Nolan said suddenly, completely abandoning the sleepy town and turning towards the forest. "But you're going to have to trust me. The way there isn't exactly the safest."

"And why would I trust you? Your greeting to me not twenty-four hours ago was less than cordial."

"I had to make sure you wouldn't run like Aunt Slepa. Now I know you won't. Besides, I wouldn't bring you to the garden of time if I didn't trust you."

I sighed, contemplating his offer. On one hand, I wanted to find the people of the obviously occupied in the village below, but I also wanted to find out what this 'garden of time' was.

"What if there was a compromise?" I said, slowly. "What if we went to the village to investigate and then go to the garden of time?"

"That could work, but we'd have to make the trip to the village brief. I don't want you to get in trouble with Flora."

Nolan's sudden kindness was a shock to the system, that I needed another second to gather my thoughts before nodding and gesturing towards the steep hillside. "How do we get down from here?"

"We roll," Nolan replied with a maniacal grin. He plopped down on the ground, familiarizing himself with the dust that settled around him, and rolled onto his side. With a joyous laugh, he rolled onto the hill and began rotating faster and faster.

I sighed and copied his former movements, but delicately. I felt partial to the dress I had chosen today; I certainly didn't wish to ruin it.

I rolled over and suddenly, I couldn't feel my stomach. 

I think I may have left my stomach at the top of the hill, because the second I pitched my body into a downward spiral, my senses were overloaded. Small roots poking out of the ground scratched my arms and clung to my dress, but I hardly noticed. The main thing I was focused on was the adrenaline running through my veins. The tumble was so incredibly freeing that I found myself dreading the time the ground would flatten out and stop my roll.

But all good things end, and my good thing ended with an elbow lodged in a tree truck.

"Ow, ow, ow!" I screamed, pulling my elbow out of the trunk and shaking it free of the extra wood chips that had found their way into my skin.

I hissed as small blood droplets appeared on my skin, and I knew I had at least ten splinters. That would not be easy to explain, though the story would be easy enough to craft because the entire reason we were in the forest was to find wood. But Nolan and I were far passed our deadline.

"Are you okay?" Nolan's voice came from somewhere on my left, I didn't know. All I knew was that I wanted the pain to stop.

"No," I barely managed a whisper, but when Nolan noticed my arm, he seemed to just know what to do.

"Let me see it," Nolan took my arm into his hands and felt around my elbow until he seemed to come to a conclusion. 

Nolan found some thicker twigs that weren't revolting and wouldn't give me more splinters and created a splint out of them with long grass.

"That should help the pain. There isn't anything else I can do right now."

"Is medicine a warlock specialty? Because if so, I think you've found your new talent."

"Medicine isn't a form of magic warlocks can master and call their specialty. That's a job for humans."

"You think they'll be able to find wood on their own?" I joked after the pain in my elbow resided to a dull throbbing. 

"Of course they will. They are five- sorry, four fairies who are more than capable in the art of conjuring. Like I said earlier, this was a test. You failed at the cost of curiosity."

I sighed at Nolan's logic, "I guess you're right."

His green eyes flashed triumphantly in the fading light and we continued on. We must have been quite a sight with his mused hair and dirt streak clothes and my splinted arm and beat up body.

But we were on the right track to figuring out why such a big town was so quiet at nightfall.

~o0o~

The small town at the base of the hill was deserted. The town's houses were all identical with white picket fences, red bricking, and perfectly groomed front yards. And yet, there wasn't a person in sight.

"This place gives me the chills," I whispered, afraid to make my voice any louder. There was a chance that all of the villagers had been eaten and the monster was still nearby and he or she could want to eat us-

I had to stop thinking like that. If I thought something like that would happen, it probably would I needed to keep a positive mindset.

"Aria, why isn't there anyone around? It seems like everyone picked up and left yesterday."

"It does. Do you think it would be rude to check a couple of the houses to see if anyone's home?"

"No, I think that's a good idea. But we shouldn't split up; that would be stupid."

I nodded my assent and followed Nolan to the nearest house, the only one with a wreath on the front door.

Peeling paint and dusty windows were obvious from the getgo that something was wrong, but the former wasn't as concerning as the later. Dusty windows were the bane of housewives' existence, and this house was the size of a family home.

Walking up the small, cracked walkway to the front door, I grabbed ahold of the brass lion head knocker and hit it hard against the surface of the wooden doorway. The echo resounded through the home, a hollow sound coming back to my ears.

"Would it be improper to break in?" I turned around and asked Nolan, taking notice of the weeds growing behind the supposedly perfect bushes.

"I want to know what's going on here, so I say we go in," he said after a moment of silent contemplation. 

"Okay," I turned to the door again before spinning back around, "I've never broken into a house before. Or anything, really. How does this work?"

Nolan grinned and pushed me out of the way of the door. A couple clicks of the lock later and the yellow door was swinging open to reveal a foyer that hadn't been cleaned in at least three days.

Three days.

"This place looks deserted," Nolan broke the silence in the house.

We continued on, wincing at every creak in the loose wooden floorboards. There was hardly any carpeting throughout the house, and that foiled our attempts at being quiet.

LIVE*LAUGH*LOVE was plastered all over the small kitchen, further influencing my thoughts that this was a family house. Framed black and white photographs were placed on a mantle in the dining room, showing a smiling group of men and women at the top of a mountain. 

We searched the entire downstairs before deciding to only check the first couple rooms we saw upstairs. Already in jeopardy of being severely punished, we didn't want to rub salt in our growing wound.

The first door I opened was a girl's room, decorated with paintings of sunflowers and pink clouds. The bed was empty but the sheets were rumpled; as if someone had just woken up to start another day.

The second door I opened held what we had been looking for, and I screamed into the empty night air in shock. Inside the threshold of the door was a bedroom. A master bedroom with a big bed in the center and two doors to the sides of the room leading out. But the normality of the room wasn't the thing that shocked me. The thing that shocked me were the sleeping bodies laying in the bed, their spiritual counterparts running around the room, laughing.

Laughing like the sun was shining through the window and there weren't bodies laying on the bed not two feet away.

Before I could yell at the moving figures to wake up, to come to their senses because this was so utterly wrong my thoughts were interrupted by a loud noise.

A deep and husky growl that could only belong to a monster.

~o0o~

Word Count: 2101

Sorry this took so long, I needed to find the right words for this chapter because I'm over 20k words and the book hasn't gotten anywhere. Thank you for reading, have a wonderful rest of your day/night. Thank you for generously giving your time to Aria's story.

It really means so much to me.

Really.

xx
C