Once upon a time, in a forested land, there lived a young woodcutter who lives in a cabin in the woods. Every day he would start the day with a well-thought-out routine. He would wake up in the early hours of dawn, eat his morning meal, clean himself, and would set out to find trees to cut down. And after the daylight passed over the tall mountaintops, he would collect the freshly cut lumber, go back to his little shack, eat his supper, and take a good long night’s slumber.
And every day when morning comes, the same routine happens once more. He wakes up, eats breakfast, which is porridge with potatoes, cleans himself, and then do his good work on the trees outside his home. He would bring back the lumber, and maybe use the wood to make his own bowls. This was his simple life, as it is every single day.
One day, the woodcutter woke up on the hours of dawn, just early enough to watch a sunrise. He set his eyes upon the window, expecting the graceful hues of orange, pink, and lavender in the sky. Strangely, however, it was quite dark outside. And to see that there was no sun in the sky, the woodcutter wondered to himself if he woke up too soon. He had no other way to tell the time, as we do now with our clocks and watches, and now that there is no sun to tell him how far the day has gone worries him quite a bit. Despite this peculiarity, he still went off to eat his meal, clean, but instead of setting off to the wilderness outside, he decided to wait for the sun a little more.
He sat down on a bench of the porch in his wooden cabin and looked to the East. “The sun should be here by now,” he thought, and he waited for a while for the hints of oranges and pinks in the sky.
However, there was none. Only darkness waited with him.
The woodcutter stayed for half an hour, but it began to feel like the half of a day. The questions in his mind began to cloud his thoughts, like a pale hand had started resting on his head. He cannot do anything, other than wait, for fear of the wolves and other beasts in the forest had always made him stay home after dark.
He stared longer into the dark East, but still no sign of the glorious rays can be found from behind the alps.
He waited for the day, and the darkness waited with him.
'Maybe it’s still night?' he thought. It is quite possible that he may have only slept for a few hours. But he had always woken up to sunrise for so long that it is impossible for him to wake up so soon.
“Maybe I’m dreaming?” he pondered. Another possibility, as he does dream of strange things such as this. And with that, he pinched his cheek, and gave himself a firm slap on the face. Yet he only felt pain and realized that he is not dreaming.
And as fast as the pain had come, the sense of dread also began to cloak his mind. He now knows what time of the day it truly is.
The crickets were silent, and the fireflies were dead.
It was not night, and the sun had not risen.
As he thought of this, a small group of glowing bulbs slowly became visible in the distance. They danced slowly, each blinked one at a time. The woodcutter saw this and took a deep breath, relieved that the fireflies are, truly, still there after all.
But the glowing lights have only begun to come closer to the woodcutter. And seemed to visibly be bigger the closer they came. At a certain distance, it seemed as though they might as well be as big as his eye.
They floated ever so closely to the woodcutter and vanish into the dark. Something was not right.
The woodcutter gazed up to the East once more. And as sudden as the glowing orbs had disappeared, the light glared from the peaks.
The sun had finally come.
The woodcutter raised his head and narrowed his eyes as his pupils constricted from the bright rays. He smiled softly, welcoming the warmth. The sun had risen. But now, a new set of mountains started peeking out from behind the shadowed silhouettes of what was supposed to be the mountains he so expected, and the ground he stood on began to feel wet and tilted, like standing on a boat, alone in the middle of the ocean.
Stranger yet, where those alpine mountains were that appeared slowly and strangely, the sky did seem much brighter and bluer than it should be, akin to how looking out a cave would be like if you had come out during the midday. The floor began to feel wetter and sloppier, and the air had become much warmer, moister, and fouler than it should be.
As the woodcutter gazed above, a silvery droplet, like rain, slowly dripped from the abysmal darkness. The sharp, shadowy mountains began to gradually inch upwards, meeting another set of jagged edges from above that seem to also crawl downward. The floor had begun to shake, and it was as though the whole world was being swallowed whole.
With what seemed like the jaws of a bear trap slowly closing, the sun and sky had once again disappeared.
The maw had closed, and now there was no escape.
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