Untitled prologue

It was unusually cold for what had been such a bright Autumn day. The leaves were almost barely moving. The sun was setting and with the change of day to night the sky was darkening. It was turning quickly across a palette of strong vivid blues, before settling into the oranges and reds that licked at the tree tops and set the skyline aflame with their hue. The sun gone, the only light playing down from the heavens was the moons soft glow. Catching as it did the spider webs, the blades of grass wet from the dew that covered them and bathing the shadows in silvered lines, the natural mirrors to the stars above. Moans erupted from an old oak tree as its trunk shifted uneasily, the ground having soured recently. The tree was dying and would continue so for decades. Slowly decaying it would have bled its sap, dried out in agonising torture as bark chipped away exposing soft white flesh at its core. Its once proud crown of leaves would fall almost overnight and eventually it would be as if nothing had been there.

Sitting in the moonlight the child was a small shape in the gloom, illuminated with soft lines, his pallid flesh reflecting the poor glimmers of the moon and stars. He had played with the grass undisturbed for days, crushing the blades in his nimble fingered hands. Face obscured by a mop of hair it was still plain to see the face of the young boy, though angelic and smooth, perversely unblemished in any way, that the eyes of the boy reflected no moonlight at all. That his face centred around twin pits of malignant blackness, far deeper than the nights sky and far more sinister, wholly betraying and at odds with the rest of the boy.

After climbing the tree and having stood, looking out at the manufactured lights in the distance, the boy descended. His vantage point in the Oak tree had let him see where he needed to go next, and although not logic or reason guided him, a much more dangerous cunning and hungering need spurred him. Calmly he walked away, and in his wake lay branches, a rotten husk of a trunk and thousands of dry dead leaves.