Kids & Fables

by Scribes Stories · 7 min read · 4 views

The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark Everyone in Willowmere Forest agreed that Percival was, without question, the most unusual owl any of them had ever known, because Percival, an owl born for the night the way fish are born for water, was afraid of the dark. It had started, as far as anyone could tell, on the very first evening he left his nest, when the sun sank behind the tall pines and the forest around him folded itself into shadow after shadow after shadow, each one deeper than the last. Every other young owl in his family had felt a thrill at that first true nightfall, wings itching to finally fly the sky they had been born to rule. Percival had felt something closer to dread, small and cold, curling up somewhere behind his ribs. "It's ridiculous," said his older sister Marigold, who had never once in her life hesitated at the sight of a shadow. "You're an owl. The dark is our home. It's like being afraid of your own bedroom." "I know it's ridiculous," Percival admitted miserably, tucked into the safest corner of the old oak tree he called home, watching the last edge of daylight disappear beyond the horizon with something close to panic rising in his chest. "Knowing it's ridiculous doesn't seem to help very much." For months, Percival tried everything the other owls suggested. He tried flying with his eyes squeezed almost shut, which mostly resulted in him colliding with several unfortunate tree branches. He tried following closely behind Marigold, matching her confident path through the dark, which worked for exactly as long as she stayed close enough to see, and fell apart completely the moment she darted ahead after a mouse and left him alone in the shadows. He tried simply staying in the nest entirely, hunting nothing, going hungry rather than facing the fear, which solved nothing at all and left him thinner and more miserable with each passing week. It was old Bartholomew, the ancient gray owl who had lived in Willowmere Forest longer than any creature could remember, who finally found Percival one evening, curled up and shivering at the base of the old oak instead of soaring above it where he belonged. "You're the young one who's afraid of the night," Bartholomew said, settling onto a branch nearby with the slow, unhurried movement of great age. It was not a question. "Everyone knows, then," Percival said miserably. "The owl who's afraid of the dark. It's humiliating." "It is unusual," Bartholomew agreed, "though I wonder if you've considered that unusual and humiliating are not actually the same thing, no matter how closely they seem to sit together in your own mind right now." "What's the difference?" Percival asked. "Everyone laughs either way." "Some do," Bartholomew admitted. "Foolish creatures often laugh at what they don't understand, rather than taking the trouble to understand it first. But tell me something, young one. What exactly are you afraid of? Not the word darkness. The actual thing itself. What do you see when the sun goes down that frightens you so badly?" Percival considered this for a long moment, something he had never actually been asked directly before, having spent so much energy simply trying to hide the fear rather than examine it. "I don't see anything," he finally admitted. "That's exactly the problem. Everything disappears. The whole forest just vanishes into this enormous nothing, and I feel like I could fly forever in that nothing and never find my way back to anything solid again." Bartholomew was quiet for a moment, considering this with the patience of a creature who had lived through many, many nights. "That is a very reasonable thing to be afraid of," he said finally, surprising Percival considerably. "The fear of losing your way entirely, of the whole familiar world disappearing all at once. That is not foolishness, young one. That is actually one of the oldest and most sensible fears any creature can have." "Then why doesn't it frighten the others?" "Because the others have learned something you haven't yet," Bartholomew said. "They've learned that the dark isn't actually empty, the way it looks to a frightened eye. It only looks empty because you're trying to see it the way you see daylight, with your eyes doing all the work. But an owl was never meant to navigate the night with eyes alone. Come. Let me show you something." Bartholomew led him higher into the branches, until they perched together at the very top of the old oak, and asked Percival to close his eyes entirely, difficult as that felt against every instinct screaming at him to keep them open and watchful. "Now listen," Bartholomew said quietly. "Not with your eyes. With everything else. Tell me what you notice." At first, Percival heard only silence, and beneath the silence, his own frightened heartbeat. But slowly, as Bartholomew waited patiently beside him, other sounds began emerging from beneath that first surface silence. The rustle of a mouse three trees over. The particular whisper of wind through pine needles, different from its whisper through oak leaves. The distant call of another owl, far across the forest, and beneath all of it, the steady, ancient breathing of the forest itself, alive and present even in complete darkness. "I can hear it," Percival said slowly, eyes still closed, something in his chest beginning to loosen. "I can hear where everything is." "That is your true sight, young one," Bartholomew said. "The sight you were actually born with, the one that doesn't depend on light at all. Your eyes were only ever meant to be a small part of how you navigate the dark. The rest of you, the hearing, the feel of air currents against your feathers, the ancient sense every owl carries for exactly where the ground sits beneath you even when you cannot see it, that has been ready this whole time. You've simply been too frightened to trust it, because you kept insisting on seeing the dark the way a daylight creature sees, instead of the way an owl actually experiences it." Percival opened his eyes slowly, and the darkness around him looked, for the very first time, slightly less like an enormous empty nothing and slightly more like a forest he might actually be able to trust, full of sounds and currents and signs he had simply never learned to properly notice before. "Try flying," Bartholomew said gently. "Not far. Just to that branch there, the one you can hear the wind moving through. Trust what you hear more than what you fear you can't see." Percival's wings trembled as he launched himself into the dark, every old instinct screaming at him to turn back toward the safety of the branch he knew, but he forced himself to listen instead, following the particular whisper of wind through the branch Bartholomew had pointed toward, and landed, shaking but genuinely triumphant, exactly where he had aimed to land. "I did it," he said, astonished at his own success. "You did," Bartholomew agreed. "And you'll do it again tomorrow, and the night after that, each time trusting your other senses a little more than the last time, until one evening, probably sooner than you expect, you'll realize the fear has simply worn thin from disuse, the way most fears eventually do once we stop feeding them with our own avoidance." It took Percival many more weeks of small, trembling flights before the fear truly loosened its grip, but loosen it eventually did, replaced gradually by something he had never expected to feel about the darkness at all. Not fearlessness exactly, but a kind of quiet trust, the trust of a creature who had finally learned to rely on the full range of senses he had been given rather than only the ones that failed him after sundown. Years later, when young owls in Willowmere Forest found themselves frightened of their very first true nightfall, it was often Percival they were sent to speak with, rather than Marigold or any of the naturally fearless owls who had never once understood what the fear actually felt like from the inside. "I was terrified once too," he would tell them gently, watching their small trembling wings with the deep, patient recognition of someone who remembered exactly how enormous that first darkness had once seemed. "The fear isn't foolish, and you're not broken for feeling it. You've simply been trying to see the dark with only half of what you were given to navigate it. Close your eyes. Listen. The rest of you has been ready this whole time. It's only waiting for you to finally trust it."