The forest rose like a dream
from the mind of Chaos’s lonely daughter
and the sun fell heavy and thick
Aeneas does not mean to leave. It seems a foolish thing to think. He knows this. How can one not mean to leave?
If he were confronted—and he is certain he will be confronted—Aeneas already knows what he will say.
I was missing father—I… I needed to see father.
And someone might think, you are far too clever a boy to end up in Delumine when you ought to be in the dunes of Solterra—. They might even go a step beyond thinking it. Perhaps they tell his mother.
But those whispers will come too late to make much sense of. Those whispers will come after the relief of finding him, after the relief of knowing he is all right, the relief of recognising he did not mean to run away.
Not really—at least not to the point of never being found.
But isn’t that exactly why you chose Delumine? he asks himself. It’s the forest he loves so. It is the forest that, in his study, he gestured at with uncharacteristic enthusiasm. It had taken his tutor aback. Why yes, on the map that large green region is the Viride. It is the forest that fills him with whimsy and boyish dreams—he hopes, he thinks, to find a monster. He hopes, he thinks, to find something to make him feel brave.
Even the name Viride evokes a primitive chill, a primordial fear. That sounds like a place where boys go to get lost.
Not found.
By the time Aeneas begins to doubt the romanticism (because it must be romanticism, and not some kind of desperate plea for his father’s attention or, or, well any number of childish things) he is already deep within the trees. The sun is already setting. His goddess—or his mother’s goddess, whichever it may be—is already leaving the sky. The haze between the trees becomes dusky purple; opaque and faded. The trees themselves become disorienting, dancing in the clear winter’s air. The branches are leafless and bare, clawing at the sky and at his face as he presses through, deeper, into brambles and roots. In the true fashion of the naive, Aeneas does not follow a set pathway, or even a deer-trail. Instead, he finds himself deeper and deeper into a forest nothing like the storybooks he reads.
It is all enough to remind him that, at base, he is nothing but a boy. Not a prince. Not a hero of fables. A boy.
Aeneas feels afraid, when the last blinking light shuts out on the distant, obscured horizon. The trees embrace him into their darkness and soon, very soon, they begin to howl with the creatures of the night. The colt cannot keep still; he begins, first, to trot in hope of breaking some imagined barrier—he thinks if only he quickens his pace he might find an end, somewhere, to the endless trees—
But that brisk trot becomes, then, a canter. From the canter, he gallops with all the ungainly grace of a child; crashing through brambles and knee-high, yellowed grass. There are snowbanks deeper in the shaded regions between roots and beneath the larges trees, crusted overtop with ice and debris. Aeneas crunches through them as if he is walking over broken crystal; and further, further, surrounded by the hoots and bellows of owls and other beasts, he swears, yes he swears there must be a wolf on his heel—
In the darkness he sees the descent too late. He runs off a small ledge and into a dry stream-bed. The descent is not easy. The descent scratches his cheek and bruises his knees and, when he lands at last at the bottom, all he can think of is how badly he wants his mother back in the warm comfort of Terrastella. He feels the hot betrayal of tears building in his eyes but even here, even in the dark, he will not cry.
Or so he tells himself. But as the hours pass and he finds it impossible to stand, the night around him grows darker, deeper, even more impressive. He hears what sounds like a great and terrible beast snuffling through the undergrowth beside the stream-bed, and Aeneas does all that he can to make himself small, and quiet, his wings curled around his shoulders like a delicate veil.
to warm the blood of a world
not quite ready to live
but so tired of its own imagination
