I believe in people lying

I believe in people dying

I believe in people flying

I believe in people crying

Keep living

Keep living…

(Lyrics from the song EXCESS by Tricky)

Once upon a stitch in time, there lived a young girl that people whispered about behind closed doors, and told stories about in the dark of night. In their small mountain town, hidden deep in the woods far from frozen dinners, department stores, and the supreme ruling lust for the material, superstition and Olde Tyme religion still ran deep in the blood of the townspeople. Wives tales were taken as truth, all things were seen as a 'sign', black cats were avoided, and anyone who showed a preference for "difference" was shunned. This was why secrets and rumors abounded about the girl: how she could see things that others could not, seemed to know what animals were thinking, and when she was hurt she healed very quickly. The girl seemed to know about plants and what herbs helped which ailments just from instinct, and she could use the rocks around her…they said. The creatures of the farm and of the woods were drawn to her, because she could talk to them…they said. And in the small town of Sayvelm, she was thought to be a witch…and thusly she was feared.

In truth, the girl was special, and she was not like others. Her grandmother, who had passed away when she was but a toddler, had been a healer, and not the kind who had gone to school for years to get a PhD. The old woman was feared, but respected for her ability to restore good health to even the folks that the city Doctors had given up on. Yet all her vast knowledge of healing with plants and herbs and crystals was not enough to cast a ring of protection around her grand daughter, from the suspicious glances of others. When the old woman crossed over, the girls parents kept her safe from the accusing glares and name calling. They kept her happy and blissfully unaware.

For people like to believe what they wanted to believe, and leave the facts alone. And so they did.

The girls knowledge of healing came from books that she read including journals left to her by her grandmother. At a young age she had learned to read, and from then on she voraciously tore through tomes like they were nothing more than grade school readers. She had a natural affinity for the creatures of the world and could communicate with them on a base mammalian level because she empathized with them. It was not that she understood their languages, and heard them as she would hear any other person, but because she watched and listened.

People like to talk, and so talk they did.

The girl did not see things that others could not because she was psychic, but because she was very perceptive, more so than the average person, and with that perception came intuition. She was extremely intelligent, and believed in the mystical things, the powers of auras and colors and nature. In this way she was a magical child, just not the kind that the townspeople believed her to be. They saw her as the witches that stories of old portrayed, the kind that only existed in the imagination. The girl did not have a long wart covered nose, nor did fire shoot from her fingers. She did not wear a pointed black hat and buckled shoes nor ride a straw broom through the night sky cackling to the heavens.

She did have haunting pale gray eyes that while beautiful to some, were terrifying to others. She did like to lay under the full moon light, watching the Luna moths as they flitted through the air, and listening to the hoot owls talk to each other in the woods. She did enjoy good music around a bonfire, laughing with her parents, and making up songs to sing to the skies.

She was different and that did not bode well with the villagers.

One a dismal night in March all things came to a stop for the girl. The Spring had been unseasonably wet, and there was a late snow on the ground. The girls parents were on their way home from shopping when their ancient pick-up hit a patch of slush and slid off of the Winter Bridge, where they were lost to the raging waters of the dark swollen creek rushing underneath.

The town constable showed up at the front door of the once happy cottage nestled on the edge of the woods. Her Aunt answered the door, and a mere three minutes later, the child's world fell apart. Grief crushed down on her like the weight of twenty boulders and for a long agonizing moment she forgot how to breathe. As her Aunt placed comforting arms around her to hold her when the tears came, the girl shoved her away and ran out into the freezing dark. She fled blindly into the dark woods, sobbing loudly, running as far as she could until a stitch in her side brought her crashing to her knees at the foot of a large tree. She gasped for breath, her chest hitching as the mournful wails echoed in the hills. That was were she cried until her small frame could take no more, and she fell into a dreamless sleep. That was where they found her in the early hours of dawn, curled up in a fetal ball on the forest floor.

Her Aunt had expected to find her dead, frozen to death or at the bottom of a ravine. But what she and the others found, was far more baffling. The girl lay under a tree, with a large jet black dog that no one had ever seen before. The dog was curled around her, keeping her slight frame from freezing in the chilling temperatures with the fur and heat from his body. As the townspeople approached, the dogs hackles stood up, and just for a moment his emerald green eyes seemed to shine with a hellish light. He growled low in his throat, showing white sharp fangs.

A lone man stepped forward and un-shouldered his rifle. "Dog's mad," he said.

"That's no dog!" someone else cried out. "Didn't ya see his eyes a glowin'? I will argue with any of ya that can tell me that isn't something straight from the pits of Hell!"

"It's her familiar!" another voice shouted.

The cries of "Witch!" and "Demon!" rang out into the forest, spooking bird and beast alike. A flock of crows, startled by the noise, arose from their perch in a nearby Ash tree and took to the sky, cawing and squawking. The towns people called it a sign.

The girl awoke to the den, the cold replacing the warmth of her furry companion. She rubbed her silver eyes as the sounds of the people shouting, crows screaming, and the dog snarling and backing away into the woods pounded in her ears. The man with the rifle had raised it again and aimed at the dog's heart.

"Stop!" she screamed, throwing herself at him. The shot when wild and merely took a small amount of skin and fur off of the dog's back. He ran into the woods away from the cruel people, and disappeared among the trees and brush.

There was no discussion as the people took the girl away. Her Aunt merely hung her head in cowardice, not fighting with the others who called the girl such horrible names and deemed her a product of Satan…a creature the girl did not even believe in. They placed her in an asylum in a large neighboring town, where she was kept nearly catatonic, the drugs inducing strange visions and vivid dark dreams...until one day, three years later….when she awoke.

The smell of pine and dirt was the first thing that registered to her senses. The next was the sound of birds in the trees and insects scuttling along the ground. The lack of light and a cool dampness began to seep into her skin, and she looked skyward seeing a dense veiling of low lying storm clouds. The air was thick. One of the birds screamed overhead, and she whipped her head around in time to see a strange two headed creature swooping down toward her. She threw up her arm and rolled away.

Everything she encountered here was odd, like nothing she had ever known before. The plants, the animals, even the air she was breathing seemed other worldly. As the day ebbed, the girl began to look for a place to sleep, a place away from all this strangeness.

It was nearly dark when she found it. The remains of an old stone cottage up on a brambly hillside. The roof was sagging, the door was nearly destroyed and hanging from rusted hinges. But there were heavy wooden shutters on the windows, and a dust covered table in the middle of the room. She heaved with all the might in her young body, and managed to turn the table on its end and shove it against the door frame. The ancient chairs broke in her hands when she tried to move them, and finding matches in a cupboard on the wall, she used them to start a fire in the round stone hearth. The smell from the moldy wood was horrid, but at least she finally was beginning to feel warm again.

There was a musty cot in one corner of the room. The girl shook out the blankets from it, silently willing any spiders to disappear, and finding none, she made a bed in front of the fire. Her heavy lids were just easing shut when she heard something at the makeshift door. A scratching…a low moan…

The shutters were drawn and latched, and she was too frightened to open one to see what was out there. More groans came from behind the cottage, and then a vicious growl and the table shuddered in the doorway. She shrieked, looking wildly around the room for something else to brace against the table. The one room building was very sparse, but a heavy looking cabinet sat to the left of the doorway. She pushed against it, but it wouldn't budge. The table shuddered again as something shoved against it, and the moans and growls intensified. Pure adrenaline surged through her body, and with the urging of her shoulder, the cabinet began to move. Painfully slow, she eased the cabinet, its legs scraping through the dust motes on a floor that had been unused for twenty years or more….and as she finally pushed the wooden beast home, the door of the cabinet popped open, and out fell a book.

The doorframe rattled as whatever was outside slammed into the table again and again. A putrid stench had found its way into the room, a smell like decaying flesh and rotten innards. The girl bent to retrieve the book, gagging at the odor of death long past, and then fled to the fireside, clutching the tome against her heaving chest. Her breath hitched, sobs broke free, as the stench at her door began to recede along with the moaning.

Nails or claws scratched against the shutters and what was left of the window glass, making an ear piercing noise akin to fingernails on a chalk board. She dropped the book to the floor and covered her ears, willing the noise to stop, silently casting protection around herself, tears streaming down her cheeks. She fell to the floor, back on her blanket in front of the putrid fire, exhausted, when finally sleep took her into its dark dreamless embrace.

The cold stone floor seeping its fingers into her bones stirred her awake. The fire had long since died, the sounds of the night gone. A dreary light seeped in through cracks in the stonework and in the shutters, telling her that it was day again. Hunger surged through her belly like a whip crack, and her mind traveled back to the book. It was bound in a strange wrinkled and age cracked leather, the pages a yellowed parchment. The words were written in pen and ink. It was the first line on the first page that grasped her attention : "This is a strange land, these Dark Lands. I shall call it the Other World, since I know not how I arrived to be here, or where here is exactly. I do know this, beware the night, as the dead are restless….and they are hungry."

The gnawing pain in her belly was forgotten. The girl sat back against the hearth, horrified, and proceeded to read what appeared to be a journal. She read with rapt attention until once again night claimed the land, and she sat in the dark, no fire, no food, waiting cross legged in the middle of the floor with her new found knowledge, for the dead to rise and walk the Dark Lands in search of precious life to destroy.

In search of her.

A/N: Next Chapter is all Loki..I promise ;)