The Forest

-19-

Ronnie jolted awake.

The boy sat up with a gasp and was immediately dazzled in a flood of white light. He recoiled into himself, shielded his eyes with one arm and steadying himself with the other.
He blinked in the glare. Slowly his eyes adjusted to the harsh lights, painfully his pupils grew back to their normal size. Squinting through his fingers was the best he could do for a minute.

He knew at once the forest must be someplace far away, because he opened his eyes to a scene violently unlike home. Everything from floor to ceiling shone. Dirtiness was something homely and familiar, it was mud on his face after expeditions and grit between the creases of the trees, and here there was none of it. Here there was no moss, no dirt, no dust or cobwebs. No home. The world seemed to have been sterilised of little life.
A great windowless door stood opposite him with its handle narrow as a spearhead, bleached by the over-powerful lights. Even if he had the strength to move the great wad of metal, which he definitely didn't, he had no way of crossing the ravine that separated him from it. There was the floor, but it was somewhere deep below, off the edge of the table's ledge. He was on a table... a cold realisation. The shadows around him were not only darker than the night and contorted to strange shapes, they were all bigger than him.
The world was huge.

A sound he had no name for got stuck in his throat. Ronnie didn't dare turn his head, he scarcely breathed.
He could remember the trap, the human, the slip of his consciousness as he was dragged out of the bars. Now all he wished was that he hadn't fainted. The human had brought him to a lair, someplace vast and looming. Someplace with walls far stronger than a tent.

Ronnie looked around again, his eyes flitting. The door, opposite. Windowless walls encasing him. A light, buzzing and white, directly overhead and seeming as far away as the sun. A drop. A very, very deep drop, just off the end of the table. The table itself— grey, smooth, long. He glanced off to the left. Then froze.

Knives.
There was a rack, made of thin, dark metal, and each rung was loaded with knives. The blunt ends faced the ceiling while the points were left to dangle freely, like icicles or stalactites. A row of silver teeth was grinning at him. Each of them were unmarked, unscratched... maybe unused. They were all as big as him. Some were bigger.

The boy's heart throbbed against the front of his chest— and he frowned. He even forgot his panic for a moment. Ronnie slowly lifted his shaking hand and held it to his chest. What he felt was warm skin.

He snapped his head down with a gasp. Gone were his heavy animal furs, his scout cloak, even his top. No horn or knives on his belt, they had been taken too, the loops where they usually sat hung empty. No shoes or gloves either. The only thing the boy was wearing was his baggy, mud-spattered trousers.
What in the blazes..?

There was some kind of thin, shifty paper beneath him, slightly off-white. Ronnie realised he wasn't directly on the table, rather he had been laying in a sort of metal tray, on top of the paper. Dread washed over him. The last thing he remembered was fainting in the human's hand...
Fleur. Everything came rushing back to him, and the fact that he was lying half-naked on some giant table no longer seemed that important. He looked around himself again and found exactly the same thing as before. And no Fleur.

"You're awake."

Ronnie jerked to the source of the voice.

There sat a human, his arms folded on the table, gazing down on him. How Ronnie had failed to notice immediately was a mystery— maybe it was because you didn't expect that giant shadow in the corner of your eye to be a person. His entire body seized when they locked eyes. A whisper of a smile played on the human's face, but the boy couldn't be sure what the look meant.
"Hello." The voice throbbed. It was brimming with a hushed excitement, and he felt it shudder through the marrow of his bones.