Isn't it odd how, in fairy tales and folk-tales everywhere, there's almost always a deep, dark wood? Today, we tend to think of the forest as a cheerful, beautiful place, full of lovely woodland flora and fauna, but some of us know that that wasn't always the case.

As with every good tale, the fiction had to come from somewhere. Maybe, once upon a time, there was a deep, dark wood which the people in the nearby villages lived in fear of. It wasn't always a place of such nightmares, they say. Once, it was beautiful, too.

That was the case with its inhabitants, or, rather, inhabitant. Many, many years ago, when the earth was young, the forest was a lovely place, with flowing trees and dappled sunlight. In all of the wood, there were only three people: a mother and her two daughters.

The younger daughter was a beautiful thing, like a flower in the spring, with fair skin and copper-colored hair. The elder was just as elegant; her hair was as dark as the night sky, and her eyes were the color of the ocean.

Their mother loved them very much, and, for a while, they lived in peace in the wood. One day, however, shortly before the elder sister's nineteenth birthday, their mother grew very ill. Now, this woman was well-practiced in the medical arts, and she knew the plant that could provide the medicine to cure her, but she was too sick to get out of bed and find it. Her younger daughter volunteered to fetch it for her. Her mother provided the best description of the plant she could and sent her off.

When she returned, the elder daughter took the plant, made a poultice of it, and gave it to their mother. All three expected her to become well again within days, but her affliction only grew worse and worse. It occured to the elder daughter, finally, that her sister had used the wrong herb, and had put their mother in even more trouble than before.

She dashed to the room where her mother lay, hoping to get advice on how to cure her, but she was too late; her mother was already dead in her bed.

The grief only lasted a moment, to be replaced by bitterness and anger toward her sister. In a rage, she screamed and yelled at her, causing the younger girl to sob, until the elder girl shoved her sister backwards. Her head struck against the corner of the table and she immediately stilled. Two of the three women had passed in less than an hour.

The shame, guilt, and sorrow that the girl felt watered the seed of darkness that her feelings of rage had planted in her. Her mind snapped from the weight of her feelings, and, for years, the girl roamed the forest in agony, the shame of what she'd done hanging over her like a dark cloud. She wanted to die, if only to see her family again and apologize for what she'd done.

But the forest wasn't done with her yet. She was to live out a cursed life, a half life, wandering the wood for all eternity. Before long, the darkness that had grown in her began to consume her, and next, everything around her. The girl's curse had become the entire forest's.

The villagers living around this cursed forest will tell you that all of this is a legend. They'll tell you that it's an old wives' tale invented to try to explain the shadow that seemed to hang over the place. But, every few years, something will happen that they can't explain. The cursed girl of the wood will show her face, if only for a moment.

She has been quiet for all these years, but now, something is stirring...