The Briarwood Chronicles (New Book!)

Instructions

Chapter 1: The Weight of the Trees The sky above the Briarwood did not change with the hours; it simply bruised from a pale, watery gray to a deep, suffocating charcoal. Clara sat on the decaying trunk of a fallen birch, her breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps. She was twelve years old, and she was entirely alone. Two days ago, the wagon axle had snapped on the old logging road. Her father had told her to stay put while he walked back toward the trading post for a replacement team of horses. But then the mountain fog had rolled in, thick as wool, and Clara had panicked. She had walked just twenty paces into the tree line to look for him, turned around, and found that the road had vanished. The forest had swallowed it whole. Now, the panic was gone, replaced by a cold, hollow realization: no one was coming. She had to survive. Her canvas satchel felt lighter than it should. Inside, she had only a handful of dried apples, a small iron cooking pot, a wool blanket, and her grandfather's brass compass. She pulled the compass out now. Its needle spun in lazy, meaningless circles, completely broken by whatever strange iron deposits lay beneath the forest floor. With a bitter swallow, she tucked it away. It was useless. She had to trust her own hands now. The first lesson the forest taught her was about water. Her throat burned with thirst. She remembered her father’s warnings about stagnant pools, so she followed the gentle slope of the land downward, listening through the heavy silence. After an hour of tripping over hidden roots, she found a thin ribbon of water trickling over gray stones. It was clear and fast-moving. She knelt, cupped the freezing water in her palms, and drank until her teeth ached. But water was only the first step. The light was dying fast, and the temperature was plummeting. She needed shelter before darkness made her blind. She needed fire to keep the mountain predators at bay. Clara dragged her freezing limbs to a massive, ancient pine whose lowest branches swept the forest floor like a skirt. Beneath them was a dry patch of earth covered in a thick carpet of brown needles. Working quickly, her fingers scraping against the rough bark, she gathered fallen branches and leaned them against the pine’s trunk to create a crude lean-to. She piled armfuls of dry leaves inside to insulate herself from the frozen ground. Next came the hardest part: fire. She had a small flint striker in her pocket, but she had never built a fire by herself. She gathered a pile of dry birch bark—which she knew caught fire easily because of its oils—and surrounded it with a pyramid of tiny, pencil-thin twigs. Kneeling in the dirt, she struck the flint against the back of her small pocket knife. Sparks showered into the dark, but the bark remained cold. She struck again. And again. Her knuckles bled where she scraped them against the stone. On the twentieth strike, a stray spark caught a frayed edge of the white bark. A tiny orange eye blinked in the darkness. Clara held her breath, leaning down to blow gently on the spark. The bark caught, a thin ribbon of sweet smoke rising into her face. She frantically fed the flame with larger twigs, watching the shadows retreat from her small shelter. As she crawled into her leaf-lined bed and pulled the wool blanket tight around her shoulders, the forest around her came alive with night sounds. Owls screeched, and far in the distance, a long, low howl echoed through the mountains. Clara clutched her pocket knife to her chest, her eyes fixed on the flickering embers. She was terrified, but she was alive. She had made it through the first day. Somewhere out beyond the ridges, there had to be an outpost, a town, or a road. She just had to stay alive long enough to find another human being. (To Be Continued)