Warning: This work has been rated 16+ for language, violence, and mature content.
PROLOGUE
The creature awoke, all 5 senses hitting it every angle. Initially, it was sheer agony, the creature writhed around on the ground, as if it were being assaulted by some invisible force. After what seemed like an eternity it was able to open its eyes. It was laying down on a bed of leaves, the moon shining down on it from a small clearing in the otherwise very dense leaves. The shining beam of moonlight scalding it’s skin. It flipped over and scuttled away from the piercing light like a crab.
In the cool darkness it slowly rose up from the ground, in a strange, puppet like manner it walked deep into the forest in, what seemed to humans to be pitch black night. But not for this creature, for it was not human in nature. It could see every twig, every piece grass in perfect detail. Then it saw the lights.
Do you ever get the feeling that even when your surrounded by people, people that you can trust and rely on your never really safe?
I'm going to preface the story by saying that after these events I have not and do not plan to ever go into the woods again.
Earlier this week my friends and I finished college and decided to pool our money for a special trip we had been planning all year. Near the small town my friends and I live in there’s a forest. We decided that the celebrate our achievement by going to spend a couple weeks hiking down and setting up camp on the northern side of it. Now, I’m not the type you would find hiking around in the mountains, I’m more the kind of person you would find booking a forty eight hour stay in an internet cafe. But despite my reluctance my friends convinced to go. I had an old sleeping bag and tent I had taken with me when I moved out of my house as well as a 22. rifle and a hunting knife. I packed 5 sets of clothes and plenty of fresh water. I also bought two packs of iodine tablets (a tip I had read on the internet).
We met at an old gas station on the edge of the forest, the oldest in our group, Kurt ran in to grab a bottle of beer and we were off. We hiked for around 5 hours before we decided to settle down for the night. We lit a fire and sat around it drinking and laughing. The person closest to my right, Ric nearly threw up and he hobbled of to go lay down. The we heard it, the sound of something dragging an object. A very heavy object. We brushed it of at the time, probably because our judgement was flawed after going through three six packs collectively.
At around one o'clock we decided to go to bed so I walked back to my tent and lay down. The moon illuminated the clearing we were in, and made it impossible to get any rest. And so I lay there, just staring out at the moon. What happened next made go completely still. A large, lean creature walked directly in front of my tent. It walked as if being manipulated by a puppet master, its limbs twitching in odd directions and contorting in ways that weren’t humanly possible. Then it raised its head up to look directly at me. It’s eyes glinting with an intelligence I had never seen before. I sat there, staring back, unable to do anything else and paralysed in fear. Then it put back it’s head and screamed, it sounded as if a human's voice had been partly taken over by an animal. After what seemed like forever the thing walked off. I waited until I was sure it was gone and then lay down. At the time, I guess my brain wasn't able to comprehend what had happened so I went into shock.
The next morning I was woken up by the sound of someone screaming. I sat up and walked out of my tent to find most of my friends in a circle huddled around something. I heard a lot of frantic whispering and so I approached the group. And then I saw Ric, or what was left of him. “Holy shit” I silently breathed. Ric was lying face up on a soft bed of grass, he had been split down the middle and gutted. His arms and legs twisted in a morbid fashion. I’ll never forget his face, his eyes were open and his mouth was contorted into a permanent expression of shock.
As soon as the overall shock died down everyone started to go apeshit. Dan, the one who first found him ran back to his tent and started shoving everything in his bag. The youngest of our group, matt, got out a rifle and started to rally everyone around him. As soon as he was surrounded he asked for people that brought guns. As a whole, only four people had guns, and two of them only had pistols. He proposed that we “kill the fucker that did this to Ric”. a couple dudes got really riled up and started to march off into the woods. Dan, the guy who was packing his bag said we needed to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible.
One of the guys in our group, Hue who was probably the most outdoorsy of us all said he had hiked this trail before, and that there was a ranger station only a couple miles away. This was the plan that most of us agreed with and so we set about packing up and getting ready for the hike. I grabbed my rifle and loaded it, this was the first time I had actually done this and the sense of fear I had felt since this morning immediately disappeared. I walked out of the tent and we got organised next to the edge of the field. I tried to brush off the events of last night as just something brought on by all the beer I had but a part of me knew that the creature had something to do with Rics death.
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125,018 Literary Works • 672,857 Reviews
Hello, shaniac here to review your piece!
Usually, prologues, from the ones I've read, are a bit longer and give more of a background as to what will be happening in a scene later on down in the novel. To prologue or not to prologue this topic can help you more with the subject of the prologue and whether or not to write one! It has helped to figure out if I should write my prologue for my upcoming novel, and I think if you give it a quick read, it may give you some helpful tips about how to make a prologue longer or if you should write one.
Now, if you wanting to continue this prologue, I kind of hinted at it but I do think you should add a bit more to this prologue. You want to grab your reader with a hook and keep them guessing with what is happening in the prologue. In this case, I do think you should work on the beginning. I want some sort of description to the creature and where it may be at. And with grabbing your readers, you could just start off with some action. Maybe some guards are running after the creature or switch what you have at the end and place it in the beginning, going from there.
You keep using the word 'it' a lot throughout this piece. A suggestion that I have is you can use the word 'creature' in place of some of these. You don't want to start off with 'it', also. There should be a diverse range of sentence beginners that way the reader will keep wanting to read on.
My English teacher told me when you have numbers in a sentence, you should try to write them out because it just stands out and when you write it out, everyone can understand that it is a number or something. Also, instead of 'it', it should be 'at'.
This sentence is a bit wordy. By that I mean, you could easily expand more onto how the creature looked like when it walked and cutting off the sentence into two different parts. Like, for example, right after it gets off the ground, you can begin to describe the creature more in-depth and as it lumbers through the forest. And you could also give a bit of foreshadowing as to what will be happening in later chapters. Also, puppet-like is one word.
To cap, I do wonder what is going to happen in later chapters and I like the idea that you're playing with. I do think that you could make this prologue a bit longer and show some description of what the creature looks like and how it may walk when in the woods. Have a good day/night and if you have any questions, let me know!
On the first sentence it should either be "all 5 senses hitting its every angle" or "... hitting it from ever angle".
"in a strange puppet like manner" - Here the old writers' trick of "Show, don't tell" would be great. Dond't just tell us that the manner is puppetlike, describe it a bit, how is it puppet like. Did the limbs twitch as if they were being pulled by strings? Did the joints turn in unnatural angles or snap into place and bend with odd timing, in a way that was not quite right?
The comma use in the first sentence of the second paragraph is a bit odd. I don't think that ", In a strange," requires either of those commas (before or after it).