Her headbeams caught its eyes as the car began to sink beneath the marshlands at the edge of the forest. She wouldn't be found, presumed to have run away to another country under another name and forgotten by most of her loved ones within the year.
She would become a warning story for her younger cousins, if you try to run you'll never be heard from again. You won't make it to your destination, you won't even make it past the forest before the land pulls you back to its dark, muggy heart for good.
Of course she'd been told the exact same things by her family and in her final moments of clarity, before panic set in and she used up the last of her air trying to escape the sunken car, she understood what was keeping everyone in the village of Nopwater on the isle of Haggleton in the centre of Haggle's Lake.
It was more than stories, it was the land made physical. Every gardener she'd ever met had always said that the ground had a mind of its own, refusing as many crops as it accepted and governing their lives right at the source of life itself - food.
She didn't see anger in its eyes, those wide brown eyes that reminded her of every ploughed field and every well-trodden pathway she'd ever seen. All she saw was disappointment. It was giving them everything it thought they needed, every ounce of sustenance was provided by the land and all it wanted in return was to keep them there.
And she'd tried to break free from that.
One in every generation tries.
The rest of the world still doesn't know they even exist.
She would become a warning story for her younger cousins, if you try to run you'll never be heard from again. You won't make it to your destination, you won't even make it past the forest before the land pulls you back to its dark, muggy heart for good.
Of course she'd been told the exact same things by her family and in her final moments of clarity, before panic set in and she used up the last of her air trying to escape the sunken car, she understood what was keeping everyone in the village of Nopwater on the isle of Haggleton in the centre of Haggle's Lake.
It was more than stories, it was the land made physical. Every gardener she'd ever met had always said that the ground had a mind of its own, refusing as many crops as it accepted and governing their lives right at the source of life itself - food.
She didn't see anger in its eyes, those wide brown eyes that reminded her of every ploughed field and every well-trodden pathway she'd ever seen. All she saw was disappointment. It was giving them everything it thought they needed, every ounce of sustenance was provided by the land and all it wanted in return was to keep them there.
And she'd tried to break free from that.
One in every generation tries.
The rest of the world still doesn't know they even exist.
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