Hey, guys! So this is like my first ever try at writing anything for a public other than my friends or teachers, hope you all enjoy something about it. Good day/night!

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TWILIGHT FANFIC_

_for : the Storytellers: _GARRETH

* I do not possess ANY of the known characters in this story, neither an extensive knowledge of Meyer's work. This is done purely for entertainment purposes.

PS: I came to know of this contest by a friend who is also participating, I am a cinematography student, more specifically a camera woman. As I am not a writer, nor have previous experience writing anything other than school papers, this is a considerably new and unexplored territory for me. What I am in fact is an avid reader and these things I'm sharing with you are in order to apologize firsthand for any unclear or confusing thing I might show in the following pages. After all English isn 't my mother language! ^_^

Thank you!

Att, Lela Ohki 3

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New England, 1780

I had been traveling with a small platoon of companions for long hours now, from one war zone to the other.

We'd barely survived the last battle but still, as good Americans that we were, we felt a profound pride to be capable of saying that we 'd 'survived another day to fight a little longer'.

After the heat of the battle passed and we discovered that our lieutenant had died during a burst of bullets, I was left in charge of the company. We were told to move on to the next recon point and await there for a much larger force so we could join and move on to make history.

Hopefully we would even get to meet one of our great leaders against the Brits and their bloody war! I could barely contain my excitement thinking about the possibilities.

Of the twenty men we had been at the beginning now only nine remained. Nine and me. At first when we were given our orders it felt odd, only us ten against only the God above knows what. A whole company of Brits? Indians? Traitors? To me those last are the worst, a nasty pack of cowards who refuse to take sides on become a real citizen of this wonderful country (in the making) or go back to England with their tails between the legs as the pitiful dogs they really are.

It felt odd but either way I did as I was told. My rank wasn't elevated in the least, but I had a duty and it was my responsibility to fulfil it honorably.

It felt odd to have only nine men to travel into the wild, to fight against whatever odds that come forward for us. But the way I had been taught to see things: to hide ten men is easier than hide twenty. Maybe that was why our lieutenant was

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now being buried in a shared pit for the lack of any volunteers to deliver his body back in the city for his family to grief and I was here looking down at him as they filled the whole with other bodies and soil.

Just a pair of hours after I was given our orders and our lieutenant gone forth the next life, I gathered my companions and we left.

Another good thing about traveling with a small group, we can move faster. My job as a leader was to keep t hem organized and focused. Also I was the one in best shape, one of the few that weren't wounded or hurt. We decided as a team to cover as much ground as possible and in order to do that a few hours of resting would need to be sacrificed. I thought it a good idea, the faster we could join the larger force, the faster my compatriots could get some safety for decent rest, food and most importantly, the medicines we lacked. We also wouldn't need to worry about the blasted Brits cutting our throats as we sleep or the God-forsaken Indians, hiding under every leaf.

As we traveled with haste, the night fell on us and the group asked for a few minutes to gather themselves. One of our boys had a nasty wound in his torso, nothing he couldn't keep walking with but it had started to smell and it worried us all. While he tended himself, the rest ate on some moldy cheese and hard bread. My share I swallowed dry, wanted to save as much water as possible as long as we didn't cross a stream. A few miles and we hadn't even seen one. One of my friends, a handsome lad with lively eyes and strawberry blonde hair, passed me a flask with some homemade liquor. Moonshine he said it was, made by his momma herself he added with pride. I took a good, long sip.

The damn thing tasted just like I imagined hell would.

The liquid went down my throat like a rock goes down a silky lady 's sock. It burned me! My eyes watered and most of my comrades, if not all of them, laughed at me heartily.

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I did too, nothing better than a bit of humor to keep the morale up. We needed that in a wood like the one we got into. All cold and dark; so cold sometimes as we spoke we could see our breaths out of our mouths and so dark the only light that came from the moon shining down on us allowed us to see our faces but not passed the trees. Nasty trick of nature, if you ask my opinion.

I kept eating my stale bread, wishing I had magically kept a newly baked piece of the apple bread my mother made the morning I left to join the army months ago, when I saw one of my men get up and loss himself in the darkened bushes.

None of us gave it thought…

…until we heard him scream.

A high, guttural, full of fear scream.

We jumped on our feet and took our rifles at hand. As we did this, I noticed how a darkness, a supernatural kind of darkness came over our tiny camp. The noises of the woods went silent, the cold night became freezing and all of the sudden the moonlight was nothing but looking down on us like a motionless witness to our possible future demise. Closer and closer we came to each other as the screams of our friend kept on going. I ordered not to go into the woods for him, it was simply too dark and we didn't knew what was at him. God have mercy on his soul. I couldn't simply risk one of us, or all of us, for the sake of one.

I still sometimes ask for forgiveness for this, even today.

And then, just the same way he'd started screaming so loudly, so wildly, he stopped forever. Elbow with elbow and back with back, we were in a circle, all eyes as big as plates trying to see the sightless spot from where our attackers could be preparing to attack next. As I started hearing my own heartbeats in my ears, another of my men -a young

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boy who's just joined the ranks and had shown great promise in the battle field- got pulled into the bushes by the foot. As if the night himself had taken him, he slid on the grass until two fully grown men took him by the arms and pulled back. The boy screamed in pain as he felt the two sides were going to shred him apart in half. The rest of us shoot at the darkness behind him, but it did not let go. I myself fired the last, only to have the dark answer with a piercing growl. As the two men realized their strains were futile, they let go of the boy's hands relentlessly.

Sometimes I see his eyes staring back at me, begging me with tears and fear to help him, as I try to sleep.

I ordered the remaining men, my last seven men, to run off into the woods and make haste. My only hope was to reach a clearing we've come by a few miles behind in order to see our attackers clearly and in the meantime make a plan on how to fight back. Make a stand, defend ourselves, instead of having us been taken one by one… Off they went and I followed, stayed behind to see if I saw anything at all but I didn't. All that I could feel was the feeling of having someone staring back at me, all of me, from the depths of darkness. The darkest, most blackest and foul thing I 've ever crossed in my life.

I ran after them through the trees, saw one of them been taken up into the air up and high towards the upper branches and fell. My foot had been caught up with something. The boy that had shared his moonshine with me laid lifeless in the ground, with blood oozing from a huge open wound in his neck and his eyes looking back at me blankly. Got up and kept running. I didn't noticed rapidly, but one of the men had come back to help me to my feet. We both ran and as we did so, a body got smashed against a tree truck that we just passed. We clearly heard as his spine broke and saw the blood running down his neck from his mouth, rapidly the body ran off vital energy and it fell back in the soil with the worms and the dry leaves. The man, I can 't even recall who he was, told me to keep moving.

All of the sudden I had been reduced to a follower, me! Who 'd been a natural born leader all of my life!

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Three men had made it to the clearing before us, they called for us and shoot at the darkness to whatever point they saw anything suspicious. We called back at them as we came closer, a faint ray of hope lighted in my heart as I saw them closer and closer.

We came face to face with each other and then it all ended.

From nowhere in particular a dark figure arose from the ground, a man no older than sixty and all elegantly dressed in black came before us. It would have been a sight to calm our nerves; a sign that help somehow had come our way. Hell, I would have even accepted that good old Death had come in to take us, if it wasn't because of the bright red blood that ran down his mouth and stained his white shirt. The man smiled, long pointy teeth and eyes as red as the blood in his mouth. He smiled and a shiver ran down my spine and filled me with fear. The soldier next to me raised his rifle to shot, but the bloodied man swiped it away with a slight move of his hand. Took me soldier by the throat and kicked me away from him in the stomach. I went straight towards a tree and fell down in deep pain, as if my guts were on fire. I looked up and saw how the tree men shot at the creature. Several wounds after, when they needed to reload, he turned and walked towards them with my soldier still at his hand. Two of my men refused to shoot with a friend so close to danger, but one of them didn't hesitate. The bastard creature used my soldier, the one that had saved me, as a shield against the gunshots and then dropped him in the ground like a sack of garbage. With inhuman speed he moved towards the tree, one of them -the lucky one, as I remember him- died with a broken neck. Fast and clean.

Only two remained and with demonic influence he pointed at one of the man's rifles. He began begging for mercy as his arms raised the weapon towards his friend, the creature only laughed. The man in between the rifle and the creature dropped his own rifle and ran off the other direction; certainly he thought his friend wouldn't kill him. And so did I, until I heard the rifle go off and the body falling to the ground motionless.

The creature laughed out loud and the man cried, asking what had he done and how could he make him do such thing. The creature walked closer to the

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broken man and went at his throat with his mouth in a wild, animal-like way. Never before I 've seen such thing in my life, except maybe when I see dogs or wolves killing their prey with savagery.

I called for Heavens above and used all of my little strength to get back in my feet. Into the woods I went, dragging my feet and praying as hard as I could. Everywhere I looked, only shadows stared back. As I felt getting away from the scene I dared to believe I was safe from harm. Only I had survived from the horrors of tonight, only I had been witness of the atrocities of the night.

As I begun to decide what to do next, go back home and move away to the farthest point in the colonies, a lump in my throat came up when the figure of the man came towards me from between the bushes. He looked at me plainly and evilly. He stared at me and I stared at him. For the longest time we didn't move, didn't spoke. Just stared into each other 's eyes. His eyes were red and bright, spoke of the millions of evil things he must have done in his life. Red, bright and empty. Empty as the darkness in which my platoon had been indulged by death.

I often wonder what he saw in my eyes.

Fear? Cowardice?

Anything at all?

I gathered my strength, my bravery, and asked him one thing: "What are you?" I said. "Where do you come from?" "I'm one of the shadows in the Valley of Death" he answered in a deep, rich voice. European I guessed, but from exactly where I couldn't tell.

Again we fell deep in a mysterious silence, so many more things I would have liked to know but as I gathered myself again to ask, he came at me the same he'd done to that poor man back in the clearing and took me by the throat. His teeth pierced my skin and I felt as my blood gauged out of me to him. I felt my life abandoning me slowly as I looked up at the moon.

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The perfect beautiful moon, which will keep the secrets of our deaths forever and ever.

One last breath I took and the darkness of death covered me. But somehow I didn't die completely. I waited for the tunnel and the light, for my grandparents or my dog to come get me and guide me into Heaven, but none of that happened.

I woke up one night covered in fresh soil and I crawled my way up the hole.

I dig myself out but I was no longer me. I could hear everything, like the flies next to the uncovered corpses in the cemetery. I could smell everything, like the undertakers taking a small break and getting drunk at a corner nearby. And I could feel everything, like a hunger I 've never felt before in my belly and with fear -and curiosity- I somehow came to realize what it all meant.

I came out of the whole, still wearing my uniform. I looked around and saw a small, makeshift cemetery and a headstone with no names on it. It only said 'unknown soldiers' and a number ten. "At least they had a proper burial " I made the sign of the Cross, the way my mother had taught me when little. Kissed my ground stained fingers as I supposed to and went off, only to come across an open grave with a young girl 's corpse just a few steps away from my mound . Poor thing, she couldn't have been more than thirteen. So sweet and pure, with her long, red wavy hair and her freckled ivory skin. Only that her purity had been clearly taken, and by the looks of it, right after death.

I kneeled next to her and touched her leg slightly, ever so delicately as if to not disturb her sleep. A faint layer of dust lay over her skin, but a greater quantity of dust and soil seemed to be placed on the fabric on which she lay. Anger, which is very uncharacteristically of me, came over my whole being as I started tying the knots of what had happened to this lovely creature. "Oi! Who are you, lad? Why you here at this late hour?" one of the undertakers called behind me. His friend was next to them with a shovel in his hand ready for me, but I did not care. I neither cared I was standing on Christian ground, what they had done was lower than any of the things I was about to do to them. Which were simply easing my hunger and cleaning the world rid out of parasites

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like them.

I got up and turned to face them, as I did this I felt my teeth grow in size. Felt them with my tongue and noticed the sharpness of them. The undertaker 's eyes grew in size and they apparently noticed too.

"I am only one of the many shadows in the Valley of Death" I answer.