And as Red showered there beneath the waterfall, she thought she could sense something watching her, following her, like she had before, and when the full moon rose, she could have sworn she'd heard a strangled howl, as though it had been made in denial. Yet she still made no hurry to shower, adoring the cold of the water and midnight breeze against her naked body. Here she was one with nature, and that's just how she liked it. She just loved it.

There she stayed beneath the fall until the dulcet tones of the howl finished and all she could think of was that it was late, and that she really ought to be getting on to her grandmother's house. Not because it was dark and scary. Hmph! Scary? Not in her forest! But no she had told her grandmother she would be less than a day arriving, so that the cookies could stay fresh.

So leaving the natural pool she made her way to the edge of it, where her clothes where and where some sort of weird fur had been laid like a towel. Odd, did the woodland wolves actually see her as one of their own that much that they would shed their fur just for her? No it still seemed odd, for that would need a human brain to understand such human logic. So how had this been left? Red was convinced that she was surely right.

Having changed, Red started back for the beaten path, hoping that she could find her way back again. She dearly hoped that it was possible, she had never walked off the path before, had never been compelled to.

'Now where had I come out from before?' she asked and looked from the right and the left of the waterfall. 'It was the right hand,' she decided, unknowing that, that path would lead to a not so sweet and beautiful natural sight as the one she had found. Unknowing that that path would take her to her destiny, she followed it.

And as she walked further and further into the forest, she began to realise certain difference from her forest that surely couldn't be. For example, there was no more snow on the floor or on the trees at all. No birds sung in their nests, for there was none. No rabbits hopped daintily on the floor, their little noses twitching at they looked back to nod at her. It was just so different. Where the forest she knew, had been like a winter wonderland, this one looked as though the floors and the trees had been dipped in oil and then arranged together like it was supposed to be a forest. Yet she knew it couldn't be.

As she passed trees, she noticed that they made different shapes, some having gnarled trunks and branches that seemed to reach out like grabbing arms at her. Not only that but many of them seemed to also have holes in the trunks that looked like gaping mouths. All of these things should have made her feel unsafe, should have made her run in all kinds of directions, but they didn't. They too, like the snow forest seemed normal to her. She was still in the sense that she was safe here, that nothing would hurt her…if there was even anything within this forest.

No sooner had she been wondering about the state of the forest when there seemed to appear out of nowhere: bats. And one of the things that she had never told anybody in her entire life, not even Belle, was the fact that she actually loved bats, they were, after wolves her favourite animal. They were just so graceful, the way they flew, flapping their wings in synchronisation. And the beautiful screeches they made as they went through the dark just increased her attraction of them.

And when this specific bat flew just above her, she was overwhelmed with the need to reach up and catch it. Yet, just like the butterflies she had tried to catch as a little girl on the way to grandma's house, this bat evaded her, flying just a little further and a little higher in front of her than she could reach. And it screeched happily as though mocking her efforts, so she tried just that little bit harder, wondering if it could hear her every movement with its super hearing.

Red was concentrating too heard on trying to catch the animal that she didn't even see the dip in the ground, until she was rolling down the hill, the bat having flown way. It had left Red at the bottom of what looked and felt like a steep hill. One that she could not climb herself, for it seemed very slippery, with something that smelled very much like iron, but in the dark she could not see just what it was, and didn't want to make any assumptions.

Red, turned around and looked at the only way she could actually continue, into the darker forest where the trees seemed to get closer, and the holes in the trees seemed to grow actual teeth. Again she was not as scared as Belle would have expected her to be, and so continued without a hitch in her step or her breath.

And when Red reached the end of this supposedly creepy forest she sighed in irritation and whispered to herself.

'Not this again.'