• I didn’t know how long I had been sitting there, watching, waiting. The fear rumbled endlessly in my chest. The pain was shredding my courage. I had to close my eyes, I had to look away. I couldn’t bear it any longer. It came at me at full speed, roaring like a raging lion, burning like a black fire. The fog thickened with every moment, sucking up every inch of the Earth before me. The waves, the island, the sea, the sand, the trees. That’s when I started running.
    I ran faster than ever before, I ran with every inch of strength I had. Surprisingly, I had more courage when I wasn’t looking at the fog, the black thing. I sprinted faster than any other human ever had but it still wasn’t fast enough. The Black Thing doubled my pace, getting closer and closer every moment. Suddenly I was surrounded by it, engulfed in nothingness. I couldn’t see anything, couldn’t hear or feel anything. There was no happiness, no sadness, no anger or fear. There was nothing. Without warning, a circle of clear space surrounded me, I could see in front, beside and behind me. There was nothing at first, but as the circle widened, there were bodies lying around me, scattered across the field of what used to be nothing. These people were total strangers to me, but they looked so familiar, like they were my family. Then it hit me. They were dead. The Black Thing killed them, stole their souls. Their bodies were empty, lifeless, loveless. That’s when I came to my senses, my feelings came back, this time multiplied. I felt no longer fear but loss. The loss of every person, I wished I could have gotten there sooner, ran faster, saved them. I felt alone. My knees buckled under me. I laid there and cried.
    After what seemed like forever, I couldn’t cry any longer. The fog was still there, as was the circle where the fog wasn’t. I looked up and saw that the fog reached past the stars in the midnight-blue sky. Where the fog was, there were no stars. But where the circle of blue remained, the stars did, too. The stars were moving so fast, in patterns and shapes my mine couldn’t comprehend. They brought back my soiled courage. I got up, off the hard packed dirt. I had wounds from where my knees had been for so long. I couldn’t even feel the pain of the open wounds, though. They seemed almost minor compared to the gash that the Black Thing had left on me. But I didn’t have time to think about the Black Thing now. I had far too much work to do now. I stepped forward, toward the man on the ground in front of me. I lifted his muddy head. I put my hand on his forehead and gave him the courage that I had on my side, draining mine away until I had none. His tired eyes silently opened. He thanked me with his eyes and slowly got up of the ground. He did the same as me and the next woman, and the next boy, and so on until we had awoken and saved seventy-seven people. I looked up again, we all did. We had done so much, the sky was so much bigger, the fog a little smaller. But we still had a lot more to do. We marched on and spread the love and courage to every inch of land we could.
    At first I thought we wouldn’t be able to help these lost people. With the wound from the Black Thing, It seemed almost impossible to stand up, nevertheless stand up the person next to you and the person next to them and so on. On and on it went. Every time we would feel weak or want to give up, we would look up to the circle of stars, our stars, the ones we saved, and our courage, strength and will to go on would increase and we would push forward. Saving the world, one star at a time.