This fantasy was inspired or suggested by a music video you might recognize along the way. It's a very loose adaptation. The video's imagery was only my starting point.
1.
She would scream if she could breathe. She would fall down on her face and weep like a child. Except no, she's too angry for that.
What she really wants is to fight. To turn and stand and fight, and kill these beasts. Slash them to pieces and burn the bits to ashes. Only she knows she can't do those things. It's simply not feasible. She's weaponless, and she's only a girl. Nothing now but a girl. Powerless. Prey.
She runs. She runs. She runs and runs and runs.
All she can do is keep running. Even this is a useless waste. She's wise enough to know it won't do her much good, not for much longer. It won't save her, not in this place. Yet she can think of no better plan, no other option. She can think of practically nothing at all, nothing useful, nothing coherent. There is only emotion left. Terror. Rage.
Surrender never occurs to her. That is probably for the best. Surrender won't save her skin.
She is alone. All alone now—except of course for her pursuers. There are many. So very many. And they are beasts. Monsters. As for people, none remain. None! They're all gone, everyone, her entire party. She is the last alive.
If the creatures catch her—or rather, when they will, she doesn't think they'll slay her like the rest. That's not what they want. That's not what they're after. She feels it, instinctively. They want more from her than her life, her blood. Much more, and much worse.
This happens to be the very first moment she can remember in the whole twenty one years of her life when she's been unaccompanied, unguarded. It's also damned rare for her to be outdoors. The only outside places she's usually permitted to visit are gardens and courtyards—and those are always enclosed with high walls or at the very least sturdy impenetrable hedges. Going out in them is not truly going outside.
Now she's in the Wood. Yet still she's not really by herself, not properly, thanks to the presence of the monsters. Which is almost amusing. Never a single solitary moment.
A princess is always carefully, continuously sheltered. Suspended inside two fixed fundamental concentric circles—first her handmaidens, and then beyond them, the ring of her soldiers. Every day, every night, every moment. When she sleeps she has the privacy of curtains 'round her bed. When she bathes, and changes her underthings, painted screens are enfolded around her to hide her from the rest of the room. But her women never actually leave those chambers; she never has less than two attendants within reach at any moment—more often eight or nine, and often several more than that. While soldiers stand outside every door and every window. Her whole life, this is how it's been. How it has to be, when you are royal.
Until this day, the end of it. The end of everything. Dusk. Her coach was attacked on the road as it was carrying her to the great ball to be held at midnight in the castle of her betrothed. There would be no dancing for her tonight. Furthermore, she would probably never see her betrothed again. And Princess Swift found she felt little disappointment at both those realizations. She was not very fond of dancing—not in the cumbersome, overelaborate gown she was required to wear, and with shoes that pinched her feet. Nor had she ever successfully developed any great affection or respect for the man she was meant to marry, in the coming summer. Not having to endure the tedious and indeed agonizing formalities of both those events—the ball and the marriage to follow—was a relief, in fact. A huge, nearly ecstatic relief. Yet she was ashamed of herself for accepting it so. The appalling cost of her escape—which in the end would be no real escape—all her soldiers, all her servants, all had lost their lives. All! Trying to protect her, and failing, falling. Mutilated and devoured. Her coach had been escorted by fifty armored horsemen. All those men and all their weapons—they proved useless.
Perhaps that was unjust. They had given her time to flee. Only moments, but enough for her to slip clear. They had managed that much.
To the right of the road were open fields. To the left, on the other side of a very deep ditch, was the Wood. The Shadowed Wood. Not an ordinary forest. Forbidden ground, enchanted, or else haunted, it was unclear which. Deadly, in any case, either way.
She could not go into the fields—it was from the wheat that the attack had come. The creatures had been crouched amidst the stalks, waiting for her coach and horsemen to pass. Princess Swift had to enter the Shadowed Wood, instead. She did not consider the implications, not until it was too late and she had already committed herself. She jumped the ditch and plunged into the trees with all the speed she could muster from her legs.
She is still running, deeper and deeper into the Wood, into its chill mist, its tangled roots, its hungry darkness.
It was quite a jump she made. An impossible jump. In fact the distance across was far wider than any human being should have been able to leap. The ditch had been dug as wide as it was for that very reason. Princess Swift had assistance, however. She wore an enchanted medallion, a gift from her grandmother.
The talisman had never demonstrated its power before that instant. In fact the princess had never fully believed it contained any. Her grandmother (a strange, moody woman, usually very quiet and shy despite the hawk-like fierceness of her face) had promised her it would deliver its magic at need, without being able to specify what or when that need would be, or might be. It had never granted the princess any of the wishes she had tried to make upon it, from time to time. And in fact she had not thought of it before she made her jump across the ditch. That was an act of pure desperation. She had fully suspected to land in the bottom of the ditch, and perish, her body shattered by the impact. Then, midair, she felt the little golden medallion tingle against her chest, and recognized that its mysterious power must have at last awoken to give her aid. Acting of its own accord.
What else could it do for her? Could it increase the speed of her running?
Sadly, that did not seem to be the case. Perhaps the extension of her jump—three times at least the distance she should have been able to accomplish with her own natural strength—had already exhausted the limits of its ability. If so, it seemed a wasted effort. A poor joke. Mere moments after she pulled off the stunt, the monsters copied it, every one of the beasts leaping the ditch without trouble. Furthermore they seemed to do it gleefully. The high-pitched yips they made as they jumped were like laughter. And now the whole ghastly pack remained hot upon her heels, panting and slavering. Drool dripped from their teeth, and made little puffs of steam whenever it struck the snow.
They were going to catch her! Her courage was evaporating; the armor of her anger. Left only with despair, a whimper escaped her lips. She had never learned to patiently endure the most minor discomforts, let alone real pain—there had never been the slightest need. Those jaws! Those teeth! Oh God! Oh God!
What would it feel like? How bad would it be? How loud would she shriek? Or perhaps she would have no time, or else the torment she experienced might turn out so utterly overwhelming, it would render her voiceless, incapable of uttering a final exclamation ... That had seemed to be the case for many of her handmaidens, and for her hapless soldiers, when she saw them brought down, one after the other. Watched them slaughtered. Only the horses had screamed, for the most part. Unless their screams, together with the hideous roars and cackling laughter from the monsters as they attacked, had covered other cries.
And beyond that, there was the other, darker possibility—that if or when they ran her down and pinned her, it would not be for the purpose of eating her, like they'd done to everyone else ... For her, the wicked vile beasts had another purpose in mind. Another darker form of hunger. How did she know? She just did. She could feel it in the depths of her being. And when she glanced over her bare shoulder at the creatures, though it was only for an instant, she had noticed something about them, something she hadn't seen before. Something that hadn't appeared or emerged until the creatures followed her into the Shadowed Wood. What she saw was their genitals, their penises. All of which were swollen and jutting, the arrogant testament of their nightmarish lust, each and every hairless, moist shaft very visible in contrast against the monsters' dark and shaggy bellies.
Oh God, it was unspeakable. This couldn't be happening. How could this be happening to her? Oh God, what if they caught her? What then?
The snow stung the bottoms of her bare feet, and with every single pounding step she also felt the sharp points and edges of frost-stiffened leaf-litter as they crackled and crumpled beneath her weight, for she had discarded her impractical, ill-fitting shoes, and neither hose nor stockings covered her legs. She had chosen not to wear them beneath her ball gown, knowing from experience how hot and itchy they became under such a ponderous and many-layered costume. How scandalized her maids had been at the idea! Such furious argument. In the end she had managed to have her way, with the rationalization that her great billowing ball gown would never allow the slightest glimpse of her legs or her ankles; no one besides her dressmaids would have known or could have guessed she had neglected that final pointless layer of close-clinging coverage for the skin of her legs.
Except now that unthinkable exposure had come to pass. Her bare legs were entirely revealed to the chill night; it was not her fancy shoes alone she had left behind. Her ball gown was gone, too. Torn completely from her body, half by the wind when she made her impossible leap over the ditch, and the rest of it bit by bit and layer by layer, due to the branches of the trees and the thick tangled undergrowth as she shoved through them, heedless of their clawed grip. The Shadowed Wood would only permit her entry at the price of her garments. Not quite all of them, thankfully, but most. Her gown had contained an elaborate wickerwork scaffolding to support its broad sweeping shape. A hateful cage strapped to her waist and shoulders—the grasping limbs of the Wood made short work of it. Like her shoes, she was not sorry to have it ruined, pulled apart to countless pieces. A delightful, encouraging sensation, in fact, to feel herself free of its confinement and weight. Allowing her to increase the speed of her flight. Allowing her to take deeper breaths. It was like her lungs could inflate twice as much as before. It made her giddy.
She'd had a jeweled tiara—the trees also snatched that from her, and loosened the snug coils of her hair in the process, allowing it stream full length behind her head. Her hair had not been let loose to blow wild in the wind like that since she was a small child. It was only unbraided when it was time to be washed and brushed, then immediately and diligently rewoven as fast as possible by the nimble fingers of her servants.
She was a princess no more. Just a girl, just ordinary. No tiara, no ballgown. Nothing to set her apart from a peasant. Well, nearly nothing.
