I
think I am in love with the forest because it is not the sea. When I go to sleep, I must listen the sea as it breaks upon the rocks outside my bedroom window. I dream of it, each night, as the white stallion and I stroll down the long black stretch of sand. I awake to the crash-and-lull of the same waves day after day after day.
Perhaps its the monotony of my life that breaks me; the morning breakfast; the classes; the quiet of Terrastella; my visit with the monks when they tell me, so quietly, that I must continue my meditations or else risk something terrible.
And today—it is not often, but today—these things accumulate into the unbearable. I do not intend to leave. But when I begin to fly, I do not stop until I cannot hear the sea.
And then, I keep going.
I go until the fields give way to sporadic trees; and then those trees become a forest.
The Viride.
I look it up in books, again and again. I admire it from afar in the gilded pages of Novus: A History, or a chronicle of the Eira fables. I study it, obsessively, on the map in the citadel war-room that stretches the entire floor. I remember, of course, the actuality; how it night it becomes a frightful place and as a boy I might’ve died there, if not for—
If not for fate, or destiny, or a girl named Isolt.
I visit a different forest, today. When I land amid a small clearing—one nearly obscured by towering, formidable trees—the birds are alight with life and the grass underfoot is vivacious. It crushes beneath my hooves, and the air is perfumed by the distinctive odor.
The winter hunger is gone, replaced by late spring’s warmth and blooms. I walk through the clearing, into the trees, and soon find myself devoured by the depth of the forest. I know I should remember my fear, how quickly I became lost… but I no longer feel so helpless, so haphazard. My wings are strong, now, and where I walk I illuminate the darkness with my own ethereal glow.
After a while, I stop; and I stop because carved into the wooden face of an ancient oak, the branches gnarled out around me, is a deity I do not at first recognize. I close my eyes. The energy of everything, the threads that weave this place together, is nearly overwhelming.
I am praying, when she finds me.
The lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves.
