Perry looked at the writing with a strained look on his face; Amanda looked at it another single tear dropped to the ground. Perry reached in his back pocket and pulled out a second wand… -----“Yours…” He handed the wand to Amanda. -----“What does this mean…where’s Charlie?” _”It means that no one else ever defeated Death.”_ The silence in that moment was deafening. The trees, though swaying slightly in a distant breeze, the night creatures of insects, birds and few other unknown beasts were drowned by it. In this moment, every thing had ceased…even the fast moving creek had its moment of silence and respect for Charlie. -----“What does that mean? Is he not coming back? If he has to be defeated to come back and no one did…” _”He will come back…but not here. We’ll have to find him; to remind him of who he is.”_ -----“But…” _”LOOK! The laws..laws that govern. They say that if no one defeats Death, at the end of time, the true entity of Death returns to claim its place…releasing the one who defeated it. Therefore, Charlie will still return; the catch to that is, that for Death to reclaim his realm, the one defeated still returns to his own time but…as innocent and ignorant as a child.”_ Another silence, though not as deafening as the first… -----“Soooo….we’re looking for what? A ten year old Charlie?” Amanda sighed…as anyone who knew as much as she did would. _”He comes back just as he left, age and all. Except he won’t return to anywhere he had ever been in life up till then and when he gets there he literally won’t know anyone…including himself. He won’t know anything other than the basics…talking, eating, walking…the basics.”_ -----“So, where the hell do we start looking?” There was a distant and drawn out, low howl. _”Not in here.”_ Looking around, it was evident that this was no place to linger. The moon was high above illuminating the area. Where the cave entrance was is now nothing more than a rocky outcrop in the middle of a small field. The dewy grass reflecting the moonlight seems to brighten the area even more. A small stream winds its way around the rocky outcrop, a foot wide at the largest, inches at the smallest. Tall beyond tall and ever so dark trees surround this small knoll…the trees…an evil place…so dark, Deaths chamber could only be more pitch black than that of the tree line. Things…live in there…creatures so evil…so old, they have no names that the history of the world remembers. These forests hold beasts that keep the normal evils of man at bay, for these beasts are ferocious, unforgiving and unfeeling in their evil. One could find werewolves on the very most outskirts of this wood, for they fear to venture too deeply; vampires do not even enter the heart of the wood, for their coffins block less light as the trees there. _”This place reminds me of when you, me, Charlie and Jenny camped in that valley…”_ -----“I DON’T want to hear about that…I remember all to well……” And in a voice barely audible-----“you were his first…his first and only…..” Perry turned and looked at his sister. She now had tears streaming down her face. _”Yeah…likewise…..but he won’t remember it…not now….”_ -----“Uh…to change the subject before it gets too weird; It took me and Charlie almost two years to get here…getting out may take a little time…and I wouldn’t start the trek at night anyway.” _”While Charlie took care of the creatures and traps in the cave for the both of us, I can still leave here with immunity.”_ She pulled down her lower eye lid to show the black ring around the green of her eye. _”As long as you stay close to me, nothing in there will hinder us.”_ Looking off at the distant trees… -----“Sis…it’s good to have you back…” _”It’ll be good to be back, once we find Charlie…and I missed you too…come on.” _ It took two weeks to get back through the forest, a much shorter time in contrast to Perry and Charlie’s trek. -----“Damn…I wish it would have been that easy the first time we went through there.” _”It helps when you ain’t fighting something every day.”_ -----“And night.” Reaching the edge of the forest, you could see that it was on top of a rather large plateau. Looking down you could make out a small town in the distance. It was late evening now and the horizon was on fire with the setting sun. -----“What are the odds that he’ll be there?” _”None.”_ -----“Figures. Once we get rested and supplies, where should we start looking?” These silences were occurring far too often since Charlie won his little enslavement. Not a silence of awkward discomfort, but one of deep and longing thought. _”Not sure. Was there ever a place he said that he would never go? Or maybe a place that he hated? It’s gonna be something like that. Some place that he wouldn’t be caught dead at.”_ They both walked down to the small town in silence; both pondering where it would be that they would need to start looking. It was quite late when they reached the edge of town. The moon shown brightly in its crescent state; here the creek from the above plateau was now rather wide and flowed with much greater speed. The chimneys were bellowing columns of smoke; all slightly aglow with the orange and red fires churning in the hearths below. Another howl from the above forest rang out…the werewolves were on the prowl again. -----“Think we’ll have to go back in there to get him?” Perry gestured over his shoulder to the forest. _”God…I hope not.”_ -----“Well, you’ve got that free pass. It shouldn’t be too hard…” _”You’re wrong. I’ve used my ‘get out of jail free’ card.”_ -----“Huh? You…..” _”That was only to get out of there. Look..”_ She pulled down her eyelid to show her eye. The black border that encompassed the green had thinned considerably. _”The thickness of that circle matters. Now…I’m marked. If I go back in that forest, the creatures there will try to return me to Death. You think it was difficult going through there with Charlie…it wouldn’t be nothing compared to going back in there with me now.”_