MAYA’S POV
The night began to close in on me as I rode for what felt like an eternity. The hooves of my black horse pounding against the earth in a rhythmic manner that seemed to match the beating of my own heart. The wind whipped through my hair, and the moon cast an eerie glow over the landscape but I barely noticed. My thoughts were consumed by the events of the past few days, the weight of my decisions bearing down on me like a physical force.
As the hours passed, the trees grew closer together, their branches tangling above me like skeletal fingers. I knew these woods. I had been here before, though I had tried to forget. This was where my mother had died, where her kind heartedness had turned against her in the end and the most painful of it all was that the very person she died sa
