The Legend of the Dark Forest

A long time ago, there was a sprawling land called Glost. Glost was a center of trade for many regions, with their markets and ports always in demand for buyers and sellers alike. The region’s vast cities with their playhouses and forums were the envy of many a nation. However, not all was well in the land. Many outlying villages were deprived of the basic items needed to live a health life. Food was scare, drinking water was often dirty, and those citizens in the villages had no hope of ever improving their lives. With their daily struggle to even survive, none could afford to even leave their home village and move to one of the glorious cities that they heard of from passing travelers. Everyone knew that being born in a village, meant dying in a village; and that death could come at any time if they failed to find food. This is the story of one villager's perilous journey trying to find a way to help his family, and his realization that some legends have a basis in truth.

In the village of Klaberg, the situation was especially dire for its citizens. Klaberg was located far on the south coast of Glost, an area that was widely regarded as most abandoned by the Glostian hierarchy.
While some of the villagers closest to metropolises received some food and water aid on behalf of the Glost national church, any towns further than several miles away were considered permanent slums, where none of the higher-class dare tread. Even though living in villages held only despair for most, several citizens still held out hope for a better future.

One day, Heinrich Javert, a citizen of Klaberg, decided that he would escape from the practical imprisonment of his village, and make his way to Glost City, the capitol of the land. Heinrich was a portly man, with large broad shoulders and strong arms. He frequently wore a tattered brown shirt which had been hemmed together from various bits of cloth that he had found around the village. To accompany his shirt, he wore a worn and stained pair of blue pants. He did not wear this outfit out of a particular love for the clothes, but because he could not afford any other clothes to wear.

Heinrich had been born in Klaberg four decades prior, and had never once set foot outside of his town during his lifetime. The man not only wanted his own life to improve, but the lives of his family as well. Maria, Heinrich’s wife, was seven month’s pregnant with their second child. The couple already had one child, a sixteen year old boy named Gabriel. Heinrich’s main occupation in Klaberg was lumberjack, and his wife worked as a seamstress until complications with her pregnancy rendered her too sick to work. Fearing for his family’s well-being, Heinrich enlisted his son as an assistant in his wood-cutting profession.

In southern Glost, there existed a dark legend which all children were told at a very young age. The legend stated that any who enter the dark forest of Pelhaven would suffer a terrible death and despair. Although most high-class individuals in Glost wrote off the story as a silly superstition which was meant to teach children obedience, there were many other people in lower outlying communities who believed the stories to be true. Heinrich himself never believed such superstitions even as a child, and thought that the woods were nothing to fear.

Mere weeks before his wife was to give birth, Heinrich thought of an idea to save his family while lying in bed. ‘I can travel to Pelhaven and chop down some of the trees there. Even though the journey would take almost a day, the wood in Pelhaven forest is supposedly quite rare and it would fetch me quite a lot at the market. If Gabriel and I are able to fell several trees, we should be set for a while. We could probably even pay for special medical care for Marina to make sure the baby’s ok.’ The man then closed his green eyes and slowly nodded off to sleep.

The next day, Heinrich prepared to set off to the far forest, hoping that he would be able to make quick time with his horse and wagon. He left his shoddy wooden home on the outskirts of Klaberg and planned to set out towards Pelhaven. Heinrich had wanted to bring his son, but he decided that his presence would be better spent at home, tending to Maria. ‘I hope I bring enough supplies with me for the trip,’ he thought as he loaded his wagon with what little food he could spare from his family. As he prepared to leave, he wished his son and wife goodbye and set off to Pelhaven.

The trip to Pelhaven took half a day, and as Heinrich neared the outskirts of the forest the sun hung low in the sky. 'I did not expect the trip to take so long,' the lumberjack thought, exasperated. As he approached Pelhaven, the dense brush and foliage coupled with the coming night began to hinder Heinrich's navigation, causing him to mark trees with an X once he passed them as a means of staying on the proper course. Once he entered the forest proper, he was surrounded by trees on all sides, and set up his wagon so he could quickly fell trees and load the wood. 'The sooner I can get a full load of wood, the sooner I can get back home to Maria,' Heinrich thought. 'Two or three trees of the rare Pelhaven wood should be enough to lift us out of poverty, and I can fit those in for sure in my trunk.' Within twenty minutes, he had readied his large axe and began to swing at the nearest tree.

After several blows from his axe, the medium-sized tree fell to the ground, and Heinrich started to portion out the trunk into carry-able chunks. When he was nearly finished with diving up the tree, Heinrich heard a twig snap behind him. The lumberjack quickly turned, with slight panic in his eyes, hoping to discern the origin of the noise. However, when he looked around in the direction that the noise came from, he found nothing. "Hello," he called out loudly, "is anyone there?" The howl of the cold night wind served to be the only response to his query. 'Come now Heinrich,' he thought to himself. 'you can't go imagining silly things at night time. What would Maria say if you started to believe in that rabble about this forest being haunted, eh.' He smiled to himself and finished his work of diving up the first tree, and then loaded the logs into his wagon.

His gaze then fell on a second tree that was nearby, and as he started to swing his axe into the tree, he heard a deafening scream cry out, the sound so close that it sounded like it was coming from the tree itself. Heinrich gasped and quickly recoiled, nearly dropping the axe into his foot out of clumsiness due to the fright. 'No no,' he thought to himself, 'that was just the wind, it had to be. Or someone else screamed nearby in the forest. There's no way that trees can really be alive or feel pain.' Awestruck, he lowered his axe and contemplated his choices. 'Part of me just wants to get of here,' he thought, 'but I can't just go back with wood from one tree. That would surely help out financial situation, but it would not be enough to help Maria on its own. My duty as a father both to Gabriel and my unborn child forbid me from leaving before the task is completed.' He steeled his resolve, and continued to chop into the tree, undeterred by the wails that sounded with each axe strike. After the second tree fell, he divided it up just like the first and loaded it onto his wagon.

As he turned trying to locate a third tree of adequate size, he saw a strange creature next to his wagon. The creature had a small, wispy black body, two small stubby black arms with no visible hands or fingers, and two large, red oval eyes. Over its face, like some sort of mask, it had what appeared to be a tree stump, with a pair of branches on the sides of its head, where ears would normally be on a person. The branches had several leaves on each of them, and there was a round slit cut out in the stump where the creature's mouth seemed to be. On top of its head, its wispy body extended upwards above in a tuft of black.

Heinrich yelled as he saw the creature, and readied his axe in an attack posture. "Don't come any closer, you monster," he shouted. But, as he blinked for a millisecond and opened his eyes, the creature was no longer next to his wagon and was nowhere in sight. 'Ok Heinrich, you're really starting to lose it,' he thought to himself. 'You can't afford to lose your cool now and actually fall into all that garbage that the other commoners believe. Just keep your head on straight and chop down one tree and then you can leave this silly forest. There's no such thing as monsters or curses or anything like that.'

He found a third tree of suitable size and began to chop it down; breathing a sigh of relief when no sounds of screaming accompanied his strikes. When he was almost finished chopping down the tree, he heard the sound of rustling grass behind him. He turned around to see what looked like trees walking towards him on their roots. Each one of the trees had a large x-shaped mark across the front, the same mark that Heinrich had made when he marked trees to avoid getting lost. The man was unable to keep his composure, and he dropped his axe and began to run away from his wagon. He continued to run wildly for several minutes, until he looked back and no longer could see trees chasing him.

'What is going on,' the old man thought. 'There's no way that trees can move, no way that trees can feel pain, no way that any of this is acually happening. This is all just in my head, I just have to get back to my wagon, cut that last tree down and get it into my wagon and leave. Then I can put this whole trip behind me and make Maria's and Gabriel's life better.' He sighed as he began to turn around to head back towards his wagon, only to find that he had lost his way. 'Wait,' he thought as he tried to track his path using his footfalls, 'I can't find my tracks anywhere. There's no marking of any kind in any direction on the ground to give me any indication of where I came from. Normally there would be foot impressions or trampled leaves or something, but there is nothing; as if I was just dropped into this spot from the sky.' Puzzled, he continued to try to track his route when he heard a familiar voice on the wind.

"Father," the voice yelled, "It's me, your son. Mother sent me to come and bring you home. It's nearly Midnight Father and we don't want you to stay out overnight."

Heinrich looked around, trying to find his son, but he could not locate Gabriel. "Gabe," he called out, "I can't see you, it's just too dark out. I have to go fetch the wagon and then I can leave the forest with you."
"No Father," the voice implored, "don't worry about the wagon. We can come and get it tomorrow, just follow my voice and I'll lead you out of the forest and back to Mother. She's been worried sick about you since you were expected to be home by now."

Heinrich stopped for a second, unsure of what to do. 'If I leave the wagon, it's possible someone else could come along and take all of the wood I gathered. But, if Maria really is this worried about me, I guess it would be best for me to go to her.' He pressed on in the forward, following his son's voice. Unknown to him, the small black creature from earlier was sitting behind a nearby tree, using its powers to emulate his son's voice, smiling gleefully to itself as it did so.

Heinrich traveled for days and weeks in that forest, continuing to be implored by his son's voice to keep moving as Pelhaven's exit was only a mile or less away. The woodcutter never left the forest, and his wife Maria was forced to have her baby at home, with only Gabriel to assist in the delivery; he was able to work through her complications and she and the baby lived peacefully and happily. She implored the local militia to send out search parties for Heinrich, although they were all unsuccessful and gave up after two month's time. It is still said that if you dare venture into Pelhaven Forest you can still hear Heinrich begging his son to lead him out of the woods, as well as hear the ghostly voice saying that the exit is only feet away.


Trying to get: Phantump (10-20k)
CC: 12,119

Note: I thought about including more exposition or background, or having more hallucinations, but am trying to make sure that I focus more on the plot/action aspects than focusing on background information.

 

I'm about to go off and have no internet for a few hours, but I'll claim this as well

#nopendingstories2015

edit: oh wow that makes a real hashtag lol!

 

Completely unrelated, but every time you mentioned dark forests, I thought about Redwall. It was pretty great.

Also, gonna say this up front: you mentioned somewhere in URPG Chat that you weren’t getting enough feedback in some of your grades/you wanted to improve your writing for higher level captures, so I went a little ham on this. ALL IN THE NAME OF IMPROVEMENT I SWEAR. The level of feedback that I’m about to give is probably a bit above and beyond a Medium-ranked capture, but I figured you’ve been around the block here a few times (after all, this is like your tenth story, counting the ones from last year, and I’ve graded at least four of them, so I figured you and I know each other well enough to get into the grittier mechanics by now). I probably went back to my old habits of being overly-criticizing again, and I’m sorry in advance if anything I say discourages you, because that’s definitely not my intention lol—the takeaway from this grade should be that your writing is good, and you (and me I guess lol ^^) want to make it better.

That being said, let’s dive in.

THE INTRODUCTION STUFF

You open this story like a fairytale, and I liked that: reading through this, I was reminded plotwise of something from the brothers Grimm (the actual versions, where everything dies and there’s a bunch of gratuitous gore, not the Disney versions), so starting off all fantastical is a great stylistic choice.

However, I think you get a little bogged down as you start talking about the socio-economic struggles of Glost. We transition from this nice fairytale opening to what feels like an excerpt from a history paper—you’re basically summarizing a bunch of information about this land. There’s nothing terribly wrong with diving into worldbuilding straight off of the bat, but it’s a little bit situational, meaning certain stories are more suited to having an introduction like this (of the “BAM, THIS IS HOW MY COUNTRY WORKS!” variety) than others. I would argue that your story probably isn’t one of these stories, largely because of the role that Glost’s economy/their ports/their socioeconomic struggles play in the rest of the story. Which is a very small one.

The introduction is a very valuable portion of the story, and it serves two major purposes. First, it needs to hook the reader, which we’ve talked about a lot before and which I think you’ve got covered pretty well here with the fairy tale opening. Second, it needs to (for lack of a better word) introduce things, such as characters, settings, and themes. The extent to which you introduce any of these three categories (or really, any topic of importance that you feel is major enough to put in the first few paragraphs of your story; don’t feel limited to three just because I could only list three off the top of my head) largely hinges upon the role that one of those categories plays later on in the story. For instance, a story that is largely character-driven (focuses on the development of character(s) through smaller events, with less plot) would likely have an introduction that focuses on introducing the characters, while a story that is plot driven would focus on plot points, and so forth.

It’s really up to you to decide what you think the most important element of your story is, and I can’t say for sure what I’d think the most important element of this story is. However, I can say for sure that it’s probably not the world of Glost: short of the fact that Heinrich is poor because Glost has poor people in it, the land of Glost contributes very little to the plot. Also, in case this worries you, there’s nothing wrong with having a setting that doesn’t contribute much to the plot: however, it feels kind of out of place to give so much up-front attention to the setting only for it to play a minimal role in everything else that follows.

I think the most pivotal emphasis on why this historical/economic focus is awkward is in the final sentence of your first paragraph:

It reads a bit like a topic sentence (which, ironically, fits nicely in with the history paper-like feel we were getting when you were describing Glost, heh)—“AND THIS IS WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN IN MY STORY NEXT.” Also, it feels a bit like an awkward segue between “this is all about this somewhat unbalanced country” to “and this is the main character!”. The rest of the story that follows focuses nearly exclusively on the antics of Heinrich, not the development of Glost, and the first paragraph sort of just floats around like a vague attempt at worldbuilding that really didn’t go anywhere.

Also, on a slightly different note, this sentence kind of spoils everything: no matter how much you try to convince us in the next few paragraphs that Heinrich is going to have a peaceful walk in the woods to get lumber for his pregnant wife, we already know that it’s a “perilous” (ie fraught with peril/danger/someone’s probably gonna die/get maimed/bad things) journey. Furthermore, no matter how much you try to convince us that the legends of the haunted forest aren’t true, we already know that they are, because you literally just told us that Heinrich figured that out.

Major/condensed takeaways:
=try to avoid blatantly spoiling your story in the first paragraph of your story (unless, of course, you spoil it and then psych you actually lied in the introduction, although that’s an entirely different can of worms)
=try to keep the focus of your introduction in line with the focus of the story: if you spend most of your time in the body of the story describing Heinrich’s actions, it’s probably best to spend the introduction, a vital part of your story, doing something similar
=there will be plenty of time to throw in worldbuilding in a less obtuse way later in the story! Don’t feel pressured to do it all up front, and then just stop addressing it because you think you’ve gotten it out of the way

THE PLOTTY STUFF

^This will make a ton more sense in a couple of minutes; bear with me for a second or two haha*
*******PS THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT: THIS IS PURELY FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES AND IN NO WAY REFLECTS MY OPINIONS OF YOU AS A WRITER THIS MESSAGE IS IN BOLD SO THAT YOU GET THAT

Again, the fairy-tale vibe that you set up was pretty nice, and you definitely followed through in the end. I thought this was an interesting take on a pretty spooky Pokémon, and you definitely did the creepy Pokédex entries justice with this number.

Structurally, this is pretty solid and straightforward: a father wants to care for his family, and he goes into a forest, and then bad things happen. No real plot holes to speak of here, and it was an entertaining read with enough plot to keep the story going for the length that you had. Good work here!

(Actually, reading through this section again, I remember the one plot thing that didn’t really make sense—how did Phantump know how to emulate Gabriel’s voice just from stalking Heinrich?)

That being said, I kind of want to dive into the thoughts behind the idea of a fairytale, rather than just the surface plot. Again, I normally wouldn’t do this for a grade of this rank, but in grading this work I noticed some similarities between this story and your other works and wanted to point it out then, but decided not to because I thought that it would be too deep analysis for a Medium-ranked capture. I bring it up here because you’re an experienced writer now)

Somewhat subjectively, the point in a fairytale fable (I’m not sure what the exact noun-age is here, but I’m referring to the creepy grimdark ones, ala Grimm Brothers/Hans Christian Andersen) is the same as that of any other story: to teach a lesson. Fairytale fables were originally told to children mostly to scare them into not-doing things: beware of open waters and the ocean and also your father is kind of a douche (“The Little Mermaid”), don’t trust strangers or they’ll try to eat you (“Hansel and Gretel”/basically everything), do your chores and eventually things will look up, and also your sisters will try to cut off their feet to fit in but don’t do that because that’s nasty and unhygienic (“Cinderella”). A lot of characters here may die/get their fingers cut off/be baked alive/end up seriously maimed, but the ones that survive end up learning a lesson, and the children who hear this story are supposed to learn that lesson as well.

Your story doesn’t need to have a moral, and it may not even have one, but the vibes/takeaway from this story that I got are kind of expressed in the following list:
=if you’re poor, you can try to fix it with hard work
=however, if you try to fix it with hard work, you’ll probably get fucked and leave everything worse off for everyone else than before
Heinrich sets off to make a better life for his family, fails, and is trapped forever in the titular dark forest. There’s no improvement, no character growth, nothing. He makes one mistake, life screws him over, and then everyone is fucked. That’s it. Heinrich haunts the forest forever and it sucks. The end.

A tip that I learned from a very good grader is that a plot should be more than a string of events: a good plot, really, is characters developing as a result of a string of events. The true crux of a story really isn’t in what, but why/how: we don’t care so much about what happens as we do with why it happened and how people will react to it. It’s a lot harder to care about events than it is to care about characters—events are only things, and it’s hard to relate to them if we haven’t experienced them (and, given that I don’t think any of us live in forests haunted by Pumkaboo, we haven’t), whereas characters are people, just like we are.

And, especially in a fairytale thing like this, a lot of those why/hows can be answered with who learns from whatever big mistake caused the horrific stuff that came before. And this is kind of a hard question to answer, and one that you as a writer might want to mull over a bit: what do you want your characters (and, slightly by extension, your readers) to learn from the events that happened here? How do you want them to grow? As your plot stands, there’s no room for growth. Heinrich is permanently punished before he really even has a chance to make up for his tiny mistake (as was Alice in TBD, or even Ash in “Tales of a Blank City” if we’re going to reach waaaaaay back for throwbacks lol), and then boom, the story ends. No message. No learning. No development. Nothing.

To wrap things up, let’s revisit that thing I put up at the very top of this section (because i'm so meta even this acronym). The elements of a grade are there, and I tell you a bunch of things that happened, and if I really wanted to be a dick I could’ve chewed you out more and just ragged non-stop about bad things. And that would’ve been a terrible grade that wouldn’t have helped you at all, because there was no learning. There wasn’t even room for anyone to learn, because I was so busy listing off reasons for [x] that I didn’t even give you a chance.

The end.

THE MECHANICAL STUFF

Regarding grammar mechanics, you’re mostly spot-on with everything and it’s only minor details to fix. I know that you and VoltaireMagneton are embroiled in some epic war regarding punctuating thoughts with italics versus single quotes versus not having them, but my take on the situation is that there’s no real convention because directly typing out thoughts is rarely used in writing, lol. Basically, it’s so uncommon that there’s no strict rule on it, so I’m not sure how to offer advice there.

On the other hand, this keeps popping up, and I know that there are some actual rules addressing this, so:

is always spelled

You can use the military abbreviation of

if you really want, or you can use the all-caps version

but ok is not okay/o.k./OK.

If someone is addressing someone else directly, you need a comma to offset that name from the rest of the sentence, so it should really be:

It’s not terribly noticeable here, but to get an idea of how disruptive that comma/lack thereof can be, imagine:

Cool I leave you with that mental image forever.

THE PRETTY STUFF

I liked a lot of your forest descriptions—you really helped make things ominous and kind of foreboding as Heinrich walked through the forest. In particular, you used some pretty good creative adjectives and verbs to demonstrate just how ominous this forest was, and that definitely lead to a nice payoff when all of the bad stuff you’d been hinting at finally happened.

Something that I know you’ve heard a billion times before (and I think in at least three grades from me lol) is that you need to show, not tell. I don’t even know how else to reiterate this in a way that you’ll choose to incorporate this into your writing, because I’ve said it so many times to you before, but hopefully this will help?

This is a pretty good example:

(describing Heinrich’s wardrobe)

A lot of the time, your words actually say a lot more than you think they do. For instance, the first two sentences are pretty good at getting the idea across that Heinrich wears ratty clothing out of necessity, not by choice: that’s the idea that I get from the “tattered” shirt that’s been “hemmed together”—he’s wearing scraps, which, when coupled with the idea that a lot of people in Glost are dirt poor, definitely implies that Heinrich is dirt poor, which then implies that he’s wearing shitty clothing because he’s dirt poor. Again, the first two sentences get this idea across quite well: they show it. You don’t really need to have the third sentence, which tells us the exact same idea, at all, and it’s actually kind of annoying because it blatantly states what you so nicely showed two sentences before.

THE FINAL STUFF

Oh I forgot, length seems okay. A bit on the short side, but I think the pacing and practical length of your story was definitely fine.

I feel like this has gone on enough, and I hope that there’s enough constructive stuff out of here for you. Largely, you have enough of the foundations of a story here for me to say Phantump captured; most of the things I pointed out are definitely in the upper reaches of a Medium-ranked capture, and are things I wouldn’t point out had you been less experienced/written fewer stories.

tl;dr: you definitely had a great base for a story here, which got you your capture. The rest of this grade is largely stuff that I think would help you in your future endeavors.

ps happy new year