I found out yesterday that Seabrook is a real place, so we’re just going to disregard that for this and say it’s a different place- ~ First: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/854964808/ Previous: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/873170541 Next: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/876896802/ ~ Age rating: 11+ (basically just as long as you're a mature reader) ~ Em’s hold on my wrist was warm, and I felt my cheeks flame up from the touch, but I looked down so that she couldn’t see the raw display of emotion. The Woods seemed to go on forever, an endless forest that didn’t appear to be nearly as lush as the place truly is. We passed row after row of trees — if you could even call them rows, because they did not quite have the perfectly even placement what I would think was required to make them that — and even while running past the leaves falling from the branches, it still seemed to go on and on and on. “Where are we going?” I asked her for what must have been the third or fourth time, after we had been in the forest for what felt like hours. Her reddish hair had danced in the breeze, and her eyes twinkled with excitement. “Don’t you trust me, Kaitlyn?” “Not really,” I had admitted, twisting a lock of my ink-black hair around my finger. Sure, I trusted Em for some things, but Em had been wild and dangerous, and being a worrier, I couldn’t help but to be unsure. Most of the heroes and villains are meant to be reckless and brave, at least the ones you read about, because they’re the ones who have won the Tournament, who have proved themselves in a landscape of fear. The people like me, the scared ones, the cautious ones, they hardly ever make it into the stories you always hear. Em had thrown back her head, her laughter echoing in the bushes. “Guess that’s a smart decision. I wouldn’t trust me either, if I were you.” I loved that I could make her smile, that me, Ravynne Caldwell, a villain and a disappointment, could for once be enough for someone. That maybe I didn’t always have to fight so hard to keep the little that I had and that maybe some things come deserved, rather than with a necessity to be earned. It was a mistake to have fallen under that illusion, a mistake that I was foolish enough to make again and again and again. I kept falling for it, right up until the very end. And still, even after that, I was blinded just like before. Em had turned by a thicket of bushes where there was no apparent path, but she found her way through the leaves, me following closely behind her. “Are you sure this is the right way?” I had asked her, hesitant to continue through the overgrown shrubs. “Positive,” she had said. “I’ve been here a hundred times before.” I couldn’t tell from her tone whether she was exaggerating or meant it seriously, but it wouldn’t have surprised me either way. Em was an adventurer. She always was. The view from at the end of the bushes took my breath away. The land after it dropped off into a cliff, but from the edge of it, you could see everything. The rest of the Woods, Seabrook, Solanine Cove, and the crystal lake that separated the two of them. Even the island in the middle of the water where the Tournament was held. “It’s beautiful,” I had whispered, and it was. It looked like something straight out of a painting or a fairy tale, but then, I suppose it sort of was. You could see the rocks under the water in stunning clarity and the wood on the roofs of the houses, even from so far away. But what I had loved the most about it was how small it was. Like maybe, just for once, we were above it all.
