"Hey you!"
 Red, red flowers were once white. A heart, painted white on tan fur turned red, liquid, flowing, sanguine.
 "Hey you!"
 Angry voice, dead, death, darkness, blank, soul-less, red, noise.
 "Snap out of it!"
 Tears rushed to Annabelles eyes as her scattered mind regathered and composed itself.
 ...A few minutes into her walk the path had narrowed to the size of a deer path and by the time she decided to turn around she found exactly how many forks she hadn't seen while coming from the other direction. She was utterly lost...seconds and minutes that felt like hours, haunting her, passed...crying in an unknown clearing... startled- from the bushes a deer,a heart on its flank, suddenly dead... 
 When she was finally able to speak again, she sputtered. "You, you hit me!"
 The young man standing over her reached out his hand to her as he scowled. "You were about to faint."
 "It is more natural for a lady to faint than to be struck!" she retorted as she rose to her feet. The world was still spinning, but it wasn't the whirlwind chaos of before.
 The young man laughed. "What lady? All I see is a scared, lost little girl panicing herself out of her mind."
 "How dare you!"
 "Besides," he continued, moving back toward what Annabelle was still refusing to accept as a carcass, "you would be worse off if you had fainted. I can't carry you and my trophy at the same time and would gladly abandon you here and be on my merry way, leaving you here to wake up dissoriented and even more lost than you are now. You should be thanking me."
 "Somehow I find that difficult at the moment... What are you doing?"
 "Disembowling."
 She could hear the smirk in his voice, then the sound of his blade sliding down through the skin with one quick motion. Then it was all over. The glistening puddle spluttered onto the ground with a slurp, sending Annabelle's still empty stomache into a frenzy.
 The man cut down the deer from where he hung it on the limb. How easily he shouldered it sent Annabelle doubts about his prior claims of inadequacy.
 "Are you about done yet?" he asked after one more bout of retching. She knew she shouldn't have looked at the pile of entrails or the blood on the flowers. Quickly flushing her thoughts of all such things, she spat.
 "Yes, I'm done."
 "Well, then," he said, turning, "this is good bye."
 "Wait! I'm lost, remember?"
 Barely pausing in his retreat and only partially turning back toward her, he called, "My memory is perfectly fine- it's my sympathy and compassion that are lacking. I'm sorry, but you're going to have to find your own way back."
 "You could help me!"
 "Sorry," he smirked again.
 "Don't be sorry, help me find my way out of this forest!" she shouted, launching herself past the steaming pile she consciously ignored and tailing behind what she had decided to call 'the lummox,' at least in her mind.
 "I'll give you a clue, in case your frantic feminimity has denied you this little piece of logic: if you continue walking in one direction, you will eventually find your way out again."
 "Yes, and when I reach the edge of the forest where will I be?"
 "That would depend entirely on which direction you chose to walk in."
 "And which direction would I take to make my final destination the Baston estate?"
 "Not this way."
 "I didn't ask for the myriad of ways I shouldn't go. I asked which way I should."
 "I've never heard of the name Baston. Again, sorry, but I can't help you."
 "Ignoring the fact that you could have said so the first time I asked, where is it that you live?"
 "I live on my own."
 "Do you think that you're funny or are you simply dense?"
 "Neither, stop following me."
 Annabelle smiled. "But this is the direction I've chosen."
 "Choose another."
 "I'm quite sorry, but I'm afraid I can't help you."
 
 A mile away, a hart lifted its reddened muzzle and dashed away in fright. It could hear, in the distance, strange creatures calling with strange voices. Footsteps echoed against the trees, twigs broke and all the animals scattered, adding their own brief shrieks of complaint to the cocophany. 
 For a moment, one man stopped to lean against a tree. Tap-dancing on his shoulder, a disfigured imp in gold tassels whispered in his ear: "This is all your fault. You saw where she was going. Why didn't you go after her, you buffoon?" But, of course, the imp was merely imaginary: something the young man created as a child and never learned to put away. After a moment to collect himself, he started out again more intensely than ever.
 "Annabelle!"