Blood Red, Snow White

by Ardente

Beyond Blood Forest where mangled bodies of soldiers sleep uneasily, past River Black who's dwellers will snatch you among their midst, is the Kingdom Rhuin, where there was no such thing as happily ever after. Retelling of Snow White

1. Prologue

Blood Red, Snow White

Prologue

Magic creeps in when we least expect it. Slowly, over the progress of many many years, it seeps into the rivers, the lakes, the earth, and the trees, until it finally makes its presence known. It is influenced to be the kind of magic it is by past occurences on the place it has decided to live, much like a young child, who will be influenced to be the kind of person their parents were.

One such place was the forest that separated two powerful, bloodthirsty kingdoms that had been at war for centuries. Tradition was that the armies would cross their kingdoms and meet deep inside the woods, where they would battle on the centerline of their nation. Thousands of lives had been lost to that cause, slaughtered and massacred by merciless warriors, and thousands more lost in the woods when they had strayed too far away. That forest became legendary, and they called it Blood Forest, and countless wars had been fought amid its trees. Decapitated heads bitten and mangled by vultures stood upon picks along the paths that were overrun by poison ivy and stinging nettle, and the bones of the tortured lay under the dirt, whispering their sad stories, and their evil emotions to the trees. After many strange events, the wood soon retired from its post as battlefield. The dead were piling up faster than they could decompose, the trails draped with bloody carcasses, their ever feuding blood seeping into the dirt, and the survivors went mad from what they said they saw spectres, demons and ghouls.

Blood Forest became legendary across the world of Thaim, it was regarded as a secret, killing, bloodthirsty, haunted place, and none dared to venture in its midst, for fear of being attacked by the creatures that lived there or the tries that had demons within their branches, or even worse, getting lost and never being able to find their way out, doomed to wander through the horrors that none could even imagine.

No one put a step into the wood, and everyone began to believe that tortured trees of Blood Forest had finally grown peaceful and had forgotten their blood hunger, and abandoned hope of being able to grope their branches around one more quivering throat.

Yet they wereso very wrong.