The Woods

As I wandered across the woods on a cold, misty morning, a sound of breaking twigs on a hard ground caught my attention. Frozen with fright, memories of a Werewolf movie in the woods that I had watched a fortnight ago echoed in my mind over and over again.

I felt like a boneless, sliced salmon fish lying on a cold pan, praying that the pan wouldn’t get hot at all.

The only thing I could use as a weapon at the moment was a deafening scream and a piece of stick, which looked so weak to hurt a toddler. Calculations on my self-defending moves were cut short by an eerie feeling in my gut; a feeling that someone or something with breath was right behind me. At that moment, the energy to scream was as dead as a dodo.

Imaginations of my blood splashing on the ground as I watched, and a very unwelcoming growl close to my eardrums, was all my mind could carry at the moment. A feminine whisper cooled my adrenaline right when fainting was the next predictable move for me. Slowly turning my head behind my back, I saw a woman who had such beauty that made me wonder why she was allowing herself to be like Little Red Riding Hood in such a place as this.

She looked so vulnerable to be walking in the woods unattended.

“What’s your name?” I asked her. “Eris”

That name took me back to Greek myths in History as my favorite subject. Eris as I remember was the goddess of discord and destruction. She always had a golden apple with her.

“What are you doing in the middle of the woods?” It was as though the trees, birds, and crickets were waiting to hear the answer, for there was deafening silence.

“I am looking for the Pandora’s Box….” she replied. The silence in the air suddenly turned to loud laughter, which echoed between the trees. As I laughed, I saw a serious face staring back at me.

Suddenly, my laughter stopped when I heard a deep growl from behind. Eris and I weren’t ready to find out the source of the growl. We ran away as fast as we could, with safety as our only destination.

“That’s a half-scorpion, half-ogre!” Eris said. Her voice was shaky as she ran, making me to question whether it was the running or the anxiety or both, that made her voice shaky. We tightly gripped each other’s arms, as we ran away from hell-bound monster. I swear I could feel Eris’ sweat flowing from her palms. “That monster must be chasing after her!” I thought to myself.

There was something strange about Eris, besides her flawless beauty, and being in the middle of the woods alone. My instincts told me that she had a great insight to where that monster had come from.

After running for about a mile or so, we decided to have a rest near a crystalline pond.

“Does the Pandora’s box have anything to do with the creature?” I asked her. Tears and sobbing were the only reply that I got. According to Greek myth, I knew that the Pandora ’s Box carried all the evil that you could ever imagine. Some Greek diviners even went on to say that the evil that was in the Pandora ’s Box was much heavier than the wooden structure of the box itself!

“We will have to destroy the box!” I proposed. “Someone opened it . After getting out of it, evil cannot allow you to destroy it. No rosaries or shamanic rites can save anyone or the world from what is coming….” she replied. “The four horsemen of the apocalypse have already started crumbling the four pillars of the world; Earth, Water, Air and Fire!”

Everything that Eris was saying reminded me of a Greek prophecy that I once read on a wall in the Parthenon, which said that an Avatar would be born, who would fight the four horsemen, and return them back to the box. “The Avatar will be aided by the one who carries the Golden Apple; the same person who opened the box” the prophecy read on.

I was so astounded and frightened when I connected all the events and prophecy together. My mind couldn’t hold these mind-boggling mysteries together. I could feel my eye balls touching my eye sockets!

There was nowhere to run or hide. Beside me was a future helper who had exposed me to a blood-thirsty monster, that defied nature’s law of evolution. I also had to face the monster, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and the Pandora’s Box, if I liked it or not….