Midnight Path

Your paws have led you deep into this forest, a trek filled with ravenous roots hungry for lost little pups, trees with branches that yearn for your pelt, and silent enemies lurking around for revenge. You notice this area's vegetation was knotted together quite tightly, removing the already scattered sunlight and any notion of comfort you possessed. From nose to tail-tip you feel encaged in these haunted woods, but your efforts to turn back are futile for a gnarled oak- you swore that hadn't been there before- almost rotten with age blocks your path. Eyes glint from dark crevices around you, menacing and foreboding to a fate you really don't want to discover, and it almost appears that for every moment you break eye-contact to blink the ghosts move ever closer. 

Terror clenches at your lungs, stealing away that little piece of rationale you promised to hold on to, pulsing in rhythm to that steadily encroaching pitch in the corners of your eyes. Breath comes in pants while those eyes grow larger into wide white orbs you latch onto,  focusing with a dying desperation. Oh...

Instead of looking at the whites of mindless beasts coming to devour you whole, a realization strikes you that those terrible spirits are in fact lights! Lights that whisper to you quietly, unnaturally, 'Your paws have set you on the Midnight Path, do not keep it waiting for long." 

A cold serenity blankets you and your mind, panicked movements smoothing out into a graceful trot leading you further into the depths of the woods. No longer do the shadows take the shapes of unspoken fears, nor does the nature around you feel so monstrous rather than unnerving in its wildness. Absently, you notice that there are Lights dotting the flora that accompanies your path and under your paw-pads. Sensations are hazy, but with stark clarity you realize that these Lights feel warm and right. 

Perhaps you should find it odd that the need for thought leaves you entirely for instincts that trust in the unknown.

Time seems to slip away from you in this state and only a few slow blinks later, the monotonous features that once guided have entirely disappeared in favor of this clearing before you. Messy brambles and roots begin to break into the neat woven grooves that decorate the forest floor, trees no longer sink into the ground but tower into the sky with vines for leaves that brush kindly over your fur, and do you know the most relieving of all? A white moon covers itself in the royal silk of the sky, stars greeting you warmly and it feels like you have ascended in this ethereal clearing.

It isn't long after this sight that your dream-like trance breaks abruptly . As you whirl your head around like a newborn pup whining for the lost warmth of a mother, a dark wolf approaches you respectfully.

"Welcome to the Midnight Path."