THE CALLING
A long time ago, there was once a village that had its people come every night to sacrifice one child to hear a sweet call. This call was something that the villagers would regularly hear, and it would put any living creature hearing it into a trance, compelling them to follow the sound to its source.
The sound felt like a mother guiding her child back home. The voice would lead them to a very large tree that had an entrance in it. Once they had gone into the tree, they would be shown their deepest wishes and desires, and would be presented with a choice: either they could leave the place and never hear the call again, or they could have all their wishes and desires granted to them, but they would have to sacrifice one child every night for their wishes to be fulfilled. The villagers saw it as a necessary sacrifice since their wishes would be granted. Every night, they would take one child through the forest, and once they had reached the tree, they were asked to leave the child there and return to their homes and wait until it was sunrise. Once they had done that, their wishes would be granted to them.
The villagers did exactly as the voice told them and waited until sunrise. But as they waited, they heard the haunting screams of a child echoing through the forest. The scream would not stop until sunrise, and once it was sunrise, the villagers would receive the wishes they had asked for. But this would make them hunger for more, so they would continue every night, and the screams would only get louder and louder until the villagers stopped receiving their wishes from the voice, and the call they would hear would stop altogether. This led the villagers to wonder why it had stopped, and they concluded that they had angered the voice because they had been doing it too slowly. So, they kept on doing it, but since they did not wish to anger the voice, they would do it faster every night. But no matter what they did, the voice would not respond to them, and the children they had brought there would remain unharmed.
They would soon come to the conclusion that they would have to sacrifice themselves, not only the children but the grown ones too. This would actually lead to the return of the call, and their wishes too, so they would continue doing this every day until there was only one villager left. Since there was no one else to sacrifice in the village, the voice would then tell the villager to come to the tree and lay himself on the ground and wait for his wish to be granted to him. Once the villager did as the voice said, he would then lose all his vision and would be grabbed by large spiky claws, at which point he would feel large sharp teeth tearing through his skin slowly, and his screams would echo through the entire forest throughout the night and stopped once it was sunrise.
The moral of the story is to never give in to greed unless it will destroy you and others around you.
AREH KODINNA JUSTIN
