2021-08-09 Writing in 3D Exercise
#1 of Writer's Crossing
This was a writing exercise for a Writing in 3D lecture on the Writer's Crossing Discord server, which is a fantastic place to get creativity flowing. We each came up with a location, an object, and a conflict or relationship, and swapped them around, using what we ended up with as a writing prompt. I shared a corn maze, a dog leash, and a conflict about health, and my writing prompt was about a primeval forest, a jar of almonds, and a shadowy figure who instills fear. This was as far as I got in the time allotted, and I had a lot of fun with it. Overall, today was a good day for getting writing done. I might adapt this scene into a series I want to write. It's a short read, nothing gets resolved, but I hope it's fun to read!
It was still early in the waning summer, yet I could see my breath in the night air. The loamy smell of the forest comforted me, and yet, here I was, two past midnight, directionless in these woods. I looked up, but could only glimpse a few tiny stars twinkling above the pitch-black canopy. Dread filled my heart as the cold, wet aroma of the forest filled my lungs. I must have begun to panic; I was spinning about, not looking at the invisible darkness of where I was going, and I fumbled into a claw of scratchy branches. I beat my arms at the air, but my footing was already lost; I plummeted down what felt like a small embankment. I sprained my ankle as my sneaker hit something hard: A rock. Water splashed onto my sock which did little to allieve the pain now throbbing into my ankle. None of the rest of me got wet, but I could feel prickers tearing the flesh of my palms before I landed on my elbows. I hopped back up almost immediately, but I don't think I got seriously injured; I stood with no issue, though limped on my now-injured leg.
I cussed at the darkness, my voice a choked sob, but I managed to regain my composure. Get pissed off when you get home, I told myself. No sense spending energy on anything but getting out of here. I could see lights in the distance between the trees, the indistinct windows to people who had the sense not to go trudging through an ancient and unruly forest in the dead of night. People who could sleep easy and had no trouble with the face of death staring down them like a grim spectre every time they closed their eyes.
Every time I looked into their eyes, that was what I saw, and that was why I was out here, alone.
And then the grim spectre became all too real.
A mist pervaded the ground ahead of me, and I thought I could see the shape of a tree rising up from the ground, stiff and straight, but something was wrong. Trees didn't have broad shoulders. They didn't just rise from out of the ground as though they, too, had an unspoken urgency to succumb to wanderlust. I could divest the subtle cues of this towering shade's preternatural ambiance in the strange, barely-visible spotlight that seemed to radiate around him, not so much as if he illuminated the surrounding area, but as if he sapped the quality of darkness from it. Like being blinded by headlights, except the opposite effect. I knew this thing was alive, and all I could feel was a stab of fear in my heart.
This figure's outline became more apparent to me. It had twisted, wicked antlers, branching to sharp points like a thorny crown. The rest of what I could make out seemed to be a ghillie suit of dead, black bracken all strung together. Its face I couldn't make out, but it seemed skeletal in appearance; or severely gaunt. Try as I might, I could not look it in the eyes, and any attempt to do so felt as if my vision blurred.
"Please don't kill me," I said.
The antlers canted at an angle. The voice which responded to my own quaver was wind and the quiet rumble of distant thunder. "I am Humbaba."
I saw the antlers twist and shift in the night's darkness, contorting themselves like the scribbles excising a child's drawing. I hesitated to respond. "I'm Eric." I was every bit as awkward as every bit of this felt strange, introducing myself to a strange, unnatural thing in the dead of night, deep in the primordial woods where no sensible mind trespassed. Some forgotten force of nature was here outside the fringes of civilization, and it was staring me smack in the face. Or so I thought.
A pair of elongated hands emerged from its cloak of dead leaves, from which dissipated a small flurry of embers. The nails were maybe two or more inches long, flat on the ends, but still promising death. In one hand, it clutched a shiny glass mason jar filled with something.
"Won't you take my gift?" Humbaba asked.
I screwed up my face as I strained to see in the darkness what it was. The answer presented itself to me. "A jar of almonds?" I asked. I was incredulous, but I had no way of knowing if this Humbaba thing could comprehend such an emotion.
"They are the almonds of wishes," it said, pouring each word with sap in its voice.
Wishes I knew immediately I didn't want, but couldn't refuse.