~ Okay so yeah, fair warning, this does have implied character death and I guess sort of @.6use? So if you can't handle that stuff please don't read!! It also doesn't have a happy ending oop Maybe I'll make art for this later lol ~ ~ Once upon a time, there was a hedgehog. He was very unlike the other hedgehogs, however. Although he had the same spines and pointed nose like all the others, instead of being the pleasant dusty brown speckled with white, he was a deep, pitch black. His parents were horrified at his dark color, and cast him away as soon as he was weaned. It's because of this he never got to know them, or his three sisters. He wasn't named before he was banished from his birthplace, though the hedgehog settlement had collectively named him Tenebrosity. Fear of the unknown kept him close to his former home, and he often would lurk on the outskirts of the village that had refused to name him, searching for scraps of fruit and small animals. The village had a ready supply of this, but the land surrounding it did not, and so he was often hungry. But just as he feared the shadowy forests that lay on the horizon, so did he fear the scornful and even disgusted countenance of his fellow hedgehogs, so he never dared go and ask them for food. The lack of food wasn't the only problem hedgehogs outside the village faced. Predators were in no short supply on the outskirts, and they often scoured the forest floor for prey when Tenebrosity would least expect it. Owls were his main source of fear, and he'd spent many nights trembling in various patches of thick shadow to hide. Luckily for him, his ebony spines concealed him well enough, and he lived to see his first winter. This would, of course, invite problems to his doorstep as well. He was sent into a state of panic one day as he awoke from his slumber to ice glazing his fur, freezing him to his core. Activity in the village had greatly decreased, and the frogs and insects he managed to find and eat had become even scarcer than they normally were. Winter was coming, though he didn't know what it was, nor did he understand it. All of the hedgehogs of the village had already taken shelter in their burrows that had been prepared during the warmer months. Since Tenebrosity was not raised among his kind, he had had no idea that these would be necessary, and had not dug out any shelter. Even now, as some instinct begged for him to hide away from the piercing cold, the ground was too hard, too frozen, to do anything. He was stuck for the winter. And suddenly, his dark color was no longer an asset in hiding. When the hedgehogs of the village would come out the next spring, emerging from their hibernation with cheerful aires, they would not give a second thought to the absence of the small shadow in the woods. They would not notice that the scourge that had once cursed their land was gone, not until the next generation of hoglets came and stories would need to be told, stories with morals and themes. And when they were thinking late at night at what to tell their young, they'd remember that shadow of a child, who was cast out yet still dared to stick around. They'd spin the tale this way and that, twisting his image into a deceitful monster who only made trouble and felt no guilt. They'd say that if the young were too cruel, too mischievous, they'd turn dark as well, and they would be exiled in turn. And so, the story of Tenebrosity was crafted, out of small truths and immense lies, to be told generation after generation, to the end of time. ~
