#Chapter 225: Long Shadows

Nina My friends and I sat around the fire, listening quietly to the crackling of the logs and the sounds of the forest around us. It was so pitch black that we couldn’t see anything beyond the dim orange glow cast by the first. Everything else beyond that was nothing but inky blackness, despite the fact that the moon was full in the sky. It made no sense; there had to have been some sort of spell on this forest, as though someone was trying to slow us down or get us lost. We were all exhausted, but none of us felt safe enough to sleep. Every so often, we would hear some sort of strange sound in the forest and we would all leap up out of fear, shining our flashlights frantically into the darkness only to find that nothing was there. It felt like tricks were being played on us. Maybe, if we got tricked enough times into thinking that the sounds we heard were all in our head, someone would ambush us from the shadows. It was like the boy who cried wolf. “Um… Maybe we shou