Out of the Darkness

There are no rats hiding in this cabinet, fool! Don't disturb me!" screamed the goblin at Mark.

A Christmas Wish

It's Christmas time, and a lot of magical things happen during this season. There's that story about a stingy, mean, old man that was visited by ghosts. There's that Glee episode where Artie, a paraplegic, was able to walk. I've even heard my mother say that most of her wishes come true during this hallowed season. These are all merry things, hence the greeting, but magic can also have its opposite, terrifying edge even if it's the Christmas season.

Belief

Most of the time, we believe what we want to believe. We believe that we’ve been betrayed, loved, or ignored. We believe that we’ll get rich if we follow some superstition or experience a bout of bad luck if we break them. We will believe anything that will tickle our fancy, and we’ll hold it as truth no matter what happens. Sometimes, we even believe the most unlikely of things, and with the amount of energy that we’d put into it, we give rise to concrete manifestations of our belief, and ultimately, create self-fulfilling prophecies. Myri and Nikki are exactly like that; they have different personalities, but each hold on so stubbornly to what they believe that they were both proven right in the end.

Dryad

"Mark, are you seeing what I'm seeing?" asked Jason.
"Look, there's a woman hanging on the side of that big tree."

"What are you talking about? It's just a big moth,"
Jason irritatingly replied as he tried desperately
to look for the path that they were supposed to follow home.

Nemesis

Sometimes, we are enamored by our own brilliance. We tend to over-estimate ourselves and tend to underestimate others. This is what the Greeks called hubris. Sadly, hubris also leads to nemesis. While thinking about these concepts, I chanced upon a scenario where one person was betrayed by what he thought was a brilliant plan.