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The boy’s footsteps shattered the silence of the dark forest. For the third time, he snatched a fleeting glimpse behind. Save the flickering hedgerows on either side of the muddy pathway, all was frozen in time. There was no sign of another’s presence.
No sign of them.
Still, an inner voice begged him to keep going. Keep running, and don’t stop.
Air—that held more moisture than oxygen—seeped into his lungs like warm phlegm. Every step felt more exhausting than the previous as his blue Nikes sank deeper into the quicksand-like soil.
He had no idea how long he had been following the solitary road. He peered around every so often, hoping to catch a sign. Something that told him where he needed to go. To get away from here. To go home.
But his surroundings appeared as reflections of itself. Above, all sunlight was blotted out by an emerald cloak. And at his feet, a veil of milky vapor submerged the forest floor. The fog clung to him like a second skin—its long, silver threads slithering between his bare legs.
With every gust, the forest groaned like the belly of an ancient creature.
Everything and nothing appeared familiar.
I wish I was somewhere else. Anywhere but here.
Without warning, he collapsed to the ground. A jolt of pain shot from his right hand. Gritting his teeth, he plucked out a shard of wood that had pierced the soft tissue under his thumb. A streak of blood spurred from the fresh wound. With his unscathed hand, he shifted to a seated position to examine his scrapped knees.
Squinting in the faint light, he spotted tangled vines protruding from the soil. He blinked, ridding the sweat that trickled into the corners of his brown eyes. Perhaps it was the dimness, but for a moment, he could swear that the tendrils were crawling—
Then, he heard it.
Shouts. From behind.
Run, he ordered himself.
His body, however, did little to obey. And he managed to limp three steps before the throbbing in his legs drove him back to the ground.
The voices grew louder. They were gaining on him.
Hide.
On his hands and knees, he scurried into the nearest patch of shrubs. Their leaves were thick and the branches pricked. Much in the same way a spider’s web ensnared its prey, thorns latched onto his sweat-drenched Disney T-shirt. Inch by inch, he ventured deeper. Pairs of jittery legs pricked his bare neck. A cold, glutinous body glided over his calves.
As the rhythmic footsteps came within earshot, the boy had stopped moving, his body swallowed by the undergrowth.
In the distance, a group of men rushed down the pathway. Efficient like trained hunters, their strides were long and precise—their gaze watchful despite the waist-high haze.
One man stopped abruptly—the touch of a strange object between his naked toes. It was not the common mush of rotten wood, animal dung and earthly soil. It felt different. Foreign.
Scanning the fog-covered jungle floor, it didn’t take long to find what he was looking for. The object was silver, round, and dangled from a metallic chain. The man examined the alien artifact. Like a pendulum, it swayed in his hand. Next, he twisted at a small knob…
Click.
Twenty feet away, the sound turned the boy’s blood as cold as ice. With surgical precision, he reached into his pocket for his last birthday present.
The pocket watch was missing.
A silent mutter escaped his parched lips and he cursed himself on how he could be so stupid. Angling his head, he peeked through a gap in the foliage. There was just enough light to make out a foot here, an arm there.
Murmurs emitted from beyond the shrubs. Minutes seemed to stretch to hours as the boy laid in wait, counting the seconds before the footsteps continued.
Sweat ran down the curls of his dirt-matted hair. He held his breathe… and listened.
Are they all gone?
A rustle of leaves sank all hopes.
In the mist, a silhouette—armed with a machete—marched through the bushes. Pale light illuminated the hunter. He was powerfully-built and dressed only in sown-together leaves that covered his most intimate region. On his bare chest, painted in white, was a pair of wings. Thick veins struck out of his arms. With hasty swings, the man slashed at the bushes while his eyes scanned the forest floor.
A shriek escaped the boy’s throat.
At the last second, he covered his mouth to muffle the scream.
Had he heard him? He didn’t know, but by the crunching of leaves, he knew his pursuer was marching towards him.
The high-pitched slash of the machete continued.
They weren’t far apart now. Roughly four steps separated them—five at most.
The boy wanted to escape, to run. But terror petrified his body, binding him to the ground.
Three more steps.
He closed his eyes and tried to calm his trembling body. His breathing, now a cannon fire against the crackle of insects, came out in short puffs.
Two more steps.
He moved his hands to his chest to dampen his thrashing heart.
Please don’t find me. Please don’t find me.
One more step.
A soft sniffle escaped. Tears ran down his cheeks. Fear and confusion dominated his mind.
Dad, I need you, please come help me. Please.
Submissively, he waited for those monstrous hands.
These never came.
Instead came a crunch like snapped branches.
The boy slowly opened his eyes and saw the hunter loom above him.
His vigilant gaze was not towards the ground, but rather to his left. A flicker of doubt bared his dark face. More twigs snapped in the distance, enough for him to take one last sweep before tracking after the novel sound. In a matter of seconds, his silhouette was devoured by the dense mist.
The boy remained motionless. His gaze still cast on the site where the hunter had stood. His heartbeat roared in his ears. He didn’t sense the smothering humidity, his craving for water, or the scurrying of critters on his skin. For what seemed like an eternity, he laid on the jungle floor.
His thoughts trailed to his mother, father and his younger sister, Anne. He thought of his mother, and how she had teased him with the story of storks getting her baby mixed up and ending up with him: an almond-brown haired rascal in a family of blonds.
A smile crossed his lips at the memory. Are they looking for me? Have they told the police?
For the next few minutes, he rested. His mind drifted in and out of consciousness.
A low hum pierced the silence and he opened his eyes. Sitting upright, he brushed off leaves and chunks of dirt from his injured hand. The blood had crusted to a streak of crimson down his arm.
The hum arose again. It sounded like that from a large machine—a vessel— a ship.
A tremor of recognition struck him.
The cruise ship near the beach!
The boy leaped to his feet, his attention seized by the epiphany. He listened carefully, slowly turning in a circle to pinpoint the sound, and then a second time to make sure.
There, from the left.
Fueled with new energy, he marched through the bushes—his wounds sedated by lifted spirits. Any lingering sense of fatigue evaporated.
His march turned into a jog, his jog into a sprint. With the hum as his tour guide, he scurried through the greenery—a trail of destruction at his wake.
The hum was definitely getting louder.
Just a little further.
As he ran, he noticed the bushes began to thin. Fragrances of flora sifted through the air accompanied by an orchestra of birds. Rays of sunlight gradually unmasked the forest’s true colors of reds, blues and greens.
Then, in the blink of an eye, the landscape shifted its scenery. The endless labyrinth vanished.
He stood at a clearance under a cloudless sky. Before him was a steep drop of one hundred feet. Beneath, the azure ocean shimmered, carving a meandering outline into a golden beach. Sloshing of seawater on stone cliffs filled the air. And at a distant pier, dropping off a group of travelers, docked a cruise ship like the one he had been on a few days ago.
Hands on his knees, the boy inhaled a breath of salty ocean air. Tension washed from his face.
“Almost home,” he uttered to himself, his eyes in search for the quickest descend to the beach below.
“I’m almost—“
Foreign fingers pounced at him from nowhere, closing swiftly around his mouth. Before his mind could react, a powerful arm wrapped around his chest, and anchored him to a stone-hard frame.
Terror rushed in his veins.
The boy kicked and squirmed, desperate to pry off the iron grip on his body. Thrashing his head left to right, he felt two bulgy fingers lose their grasp and slip into his mouth. Mercilessly, he bit down, his teeth sinking into flesh.
He tasted blood. It was stale, warm and mixed with the bitterness of foul dirt. From behind, his assailant let out a grump but restored his grip instantly.
A pricking stab in the boy’s neck, followed by a rush of drowsiness, ended the short skirmish. His body felt like lead as the herbal mixture took effect. Arms that pounded seconds ago now dangled frail at his side. Too weak to resist, he slumped into the assailant’s arm.
The sight of the warm beach and blue sky still lingered in his mind as he surrendered to heavy eyelids and drifted into infinity.
End of chapter
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137,946 Literary Works • 672,071 Reviews
This is amazing! You're definitely made for writing! The descriptions are so realistic you can almost imagine you're there too! I absolutely love this!
Wow! I've just read through this and I think it's genuinely amazing ! You can seriously write! Loved it! So basically I'm going to do you a review and list my observations. As this piece is soo good , any criticisms are genuinely just nit picks and purely my opinion so xD .. Hope I could help!
..
. Don't worry if not!
Right, let's start with your description! So beautiful!..."Emerald cloak "..."Veil of milky vapour "
.."Fog clung to him".. Wow! This is what I love to see in writing , and of course use in my own.. This is amazing imagery built of the setting and i can really picture it . Well done !
Near the beginning there are two short sentences in a line that I feel could be clumped together like this ..
"I wish I was somewhere else- anywhere but here."
I must say, I really admire your varied sentence style and paragraph length - really keeps it flowing. Well done!
Next, I would alter this sentence "Run, he ordered himself" - to make it more dramatic just put "Run"
Next thing, I find these sentences don't flow as well as the others
-"His body, however, did little to obey. And he managed to limp three steps before the throbbing in his legs drove him back to the ground."
Personally, I would change it to something like this
-"As he limped three steps, a throbbing pain surged through his legs and drove him back to the ground."
I love this by the way "boy’s blood as cold as ice"
My next critique, I feel like you have new paragraphs too often and start them unnecessarily. If there is a change in time, place, topic or person start a new one! I remember it like TIPTOP! But yeah, you might want to look over your work and remove some of the "new paragraph starts" or whatever ya wanna call them
"Pale light illuminated the hunter. " -sentence doesn't seem to fit. I'd personally add to it to make it flow better with the rest of the paragraph
"Foreign fingers pounced at him from nowhere".. I don't feel like pounce is the right verb to use .. Maybe you could say the hands pounced and fingers snatched or something like that .
Overall, I really loved the plot of this.. The dramatic chase and the feeling of not really knowing what's going on! Please notify me when you have more- I'm really interested. Also, if you ever have the time would you mind checking out my story Watching.. I feel like your advice could really help me out
I hope I could help you
Keep up the good work!
Hey Semper,
So, the beginning of this hide and chase scene I was a bit confused. Due to the prologue and the bolded bit as I'm reading, I'm framed already thinking into the first sentence that there's this notion of "powers". So, we are introduced to this strange imagery in the story and I'm wondering in what kind of magic-hole the main character (we don't know his name! D:) had fallen into. The air is seeping into him like phlegm (great visceral line - that made me go EWW out loud xD), he is seeping into this sort of quicksand ground - and the branches and things around him seem to move and want to kill him (or shield him?) It's very unclear and hazy, and probably intentionally so?
One thing that probably I didn't like was, we find out that there are people or hunters chasing after him. So, here, I understand the danger is not so much the quicksand as the people after him. Ok, I can buy that. But the whole time up to the end, I wasn't sure if MC was trying to hide in the undergrowth, if he was underground, or if there was some strange magical power that made him camouflage --some places were ambiguously written so that it wasn't exactly clear where the MC was or what he was doing.
I thought in the beginning he was absolutely stuck, because the wording described the trees and things as grabbing at him and holding him in place -- When it's stated that his body was motionless even though he tried to run, or when it stated that they held him like he were ensared in a spiderweb - I was imagining that he was literally stuck inside some magical forest quicksand and he couldn't move, I literally thought he was underground or inside the tree or something o-o I think the confusion comes from there being a lot of description from the point of view of the forest and the interaction between the boy and the forest -- but not enough from the boy himself.
For example, my suggestion would be to write some of the boy's thoughts, his thoughts on how he is going to get out of this situation -- and maybe include a line about how he sees an opening far ahead and so then we get some idea as to where he is running to. Also some thoughts on what the boy is thinking who these hunters could be, what they want with his life, where he is, where he is going. These sort of thoughts could also help us get to know him as well. We don't really get a sense of who this character is, we are only focused on the chase at this point, and like I said, we don't even know his name!
And then a little later, the hunters appeared and he starts taking steps? But steps into where?
Then there's a scene where the hunters are above him and he gets away because they're not looking at the ground. That line was very strange. All hunters look at the ground/surrounding shrubs and things because that's how they track people. By looking at footprints and ripped up branches and things. It didn't seem realistic that they missed the spot he was at because they didn't look at the ground.
Also, is the forest supposed to seem like this kind of magical, otherworldly place? It seems like it is in the beginning, but at the end, it seems like it shifted to more realistic imagery, so I'm unclear on this.
Anyway, these are my thoughts while I was reading. Overall, definitely a tense-filled chapter and there were some deliciously descriptive lines I loved. I want to see more of the character and some clarification in parts where the action slows down so that the reader can orient themselves as to what is going on!
I hope this helps.
~ as always, Audy
Hey! This prologue is absolutely, positively amazing. It's so descriptive and imaginative. I love the way you talked about the running through the forest and made it all seem so real! It was so cool.
Can I just say, that the last sentence is gorgeously awesome? I love it. I haven't read the rest of the story, but based off of this awesome prologue, I definitely will. You have writing skills I didn't know existed in a person. I really felt like I was in the jungle with the boy too.
To put it simply, it was amazing. Great job!
Hi, I'm so glad you like the prologue but more importantly the last sentence. It took me quite some time to tweak it so I felt it fit just right. Thanks for reading.
Hi! It's Sarah12 here to review.
Loves: the description! It's beautiful. Well, I mean, beautiful as in colorful and vibrant and perfectly balanced with the rest of the story. I also like how the prologue gives a taste of excitement, which, I assume, is going to be explained more in the rest of the story (I haven't read it yet, but I'm going to as soon as I finish this review).
Nitpicking: Paragraph 5, the first two sentences both start with "he". It's probably not all that noticeable, but my brain loves to pick out all things repetition, as I'm both a novelist who uses a lot of alliteration, and a poet who loves repetition. In this case, though, it's a little distracting. 3rd to last paragraph, you say grump. I think it would sound better if you said grunt, as it doesn't quite make sense in my mind.
Wishes: none. I like the basis of the story and the way it's structured. Good job!
Anyways, that was my review. Great job, and always keep writing!
Sarah12
P.S. Can you notify me when you post new chapters? I'm going to catch up on what you have posted, so I would like to follow the story. Thanks!
Hi Sarah,
I have posted other chapters. It'd be great to get your opinion on them.
Honestly, the title didn't caught a lot of my attention but for some reason I clicked the link of your story. Your story was good, you leave many questions or mysteries in the readers mind to keep them read it. Your descriptions helped a lot to make this a worthy read. I like the way you describe each scenes it felt like I'm watching it in my own two eyes. The good point in this prologue was the readers can relate in the character even if it's not written in 1st person. Finally, I liked the ending and I'll read the chapter 1 for sure. Good Job mate
Thanks, I'm glad you like it.
Hello, its me!
This is an excellent prologue. Once I started reading I couldn't stop. It kept me interested from the beginning to the end wanting more.
I didn't see any grammar mistakes, which is great. Though I suggest reading through it once more just to be sure. Better safe than sorry.
The way everything was described him running through the woods was impeccable. i could see the story as if it were a movie. Something that is important to remember though is that it's good to leave some imagination for the reader and I think you did that. You weren't to descriptive.
Overall was in love with this prologue. It was well written and had a very nice flow to it. I can't to read the rest of your novel. I plan to review and read the following chapters in the near future.
Goodbye, Have a nice day !!!!!
This story is really good! I love the suspense when you describe the boy running through the trees and everything else about the story.
The only rough part is when you say; "Fueled with new energy, he tore through the bushes—his wounds sedated by lifted spirits. Any lingering sense of fatigue evaporated.
His march turned into a jog, his jog into a sprint." His pace confuses me. before you said 'he tore' meaning running but then you say he was marching in the second paragraph. If you find an alternate word for 'tore' it would make more sense.
So, yeah I love this and I'll continue to read more of your work. Keep me posted!
~NympheaLily
Thanks for pointing that out. Those are exactly the kind of inconsistencies that I miss when I proofread. Will definitely change that. Glad you enjoyed it.
Hi, so I really liked this. It caught my attention rather well and kept it through out. I like how you set up the environment without blatantly saying it. Your descriptions were amazing and not overdone, I feel like.
Your character is what caught my attention. He made me ask questions like who is after him and why does he have to get away. All a very good thing for a main character to do. And it makes me ant to read on to find out more.
Grammer wise I didn't find anything wrong bug I'd just advise you to read over it, you may run into something
Keep writing,
Tulip
This was good and grabbed my attention right away! But, I'm not sure about the part in italics before the majority of the writing. I like it as a summary of the book to come, something that you would put on the back of a published book, but I don't think that it fits here. I would just do the prologue alone- without the italic part. But, it is a good summary on its own.
I love the imagery and figurative language that you use; it is amazing! I literally feel like I am there alongside this boy- and you don't even give us his name! I was feeling his feelings, his sadness, fear, and seeing the forest and sea that he passed. This is so well written; I don't even see that many mistakes!
I agree with decco6226... update?
Thanks for your suggestions. As you said, the italic part at the start is meant as an introduction. Most of my novel is complete, so I included that so people know what they're getting themselves into. I'll update as soon as I can.
Oh my gosh. First off, I got to say - wow!
Amazing! The suspense never ends! Are you always writing like this? Cause it's awesome. I love the part where he wants to run, but physically can't. I've had that terrible experience, and know what it's like. The scene where he's hiding gets me too, as well as when he's thinking of his family. It really shows where our minds can wonder at our minute of death.
I was really shocked at the ending. JUST as he's about to get away, they catch him. The finger biting scene was a nice touch too!
All and all, I think this is an awe sine prologue! This alone makes me want to read the next chapters!
Update?
Thanks for the review. It took me a while to structure it this way. Update will follow soon.
Oh my gosh. First off, I got to say - wow!
Amazing! The suspense never ends! Are you always writing like this? Cause it's awesome. I love the part where he wants to run, but physically can't. I've had that terrible experience, and know what it's like. The scene where he's hiding gets me too, as well as when he's thinking of his family. It really shows where our minds can wonder at our minute of death.
I was really shocked at the ending. JUST as he's about to get away, they catch him. The finger biting scene was a nice touch too!
All and all, I think this is an awe sine prologue! This alone makes me want to read the next chapters!
Update?