0. Prologue:
Prologue:
The Woods squirmed with movement every time my lamp's light disturbed the sensitive quiet of the night. The trees stood, cast in deep shadows, looking like bearded giants. My footsteps sounded loud, and cavernous, and vulnerable. The Woods make no noises. The shaved crystal over my eyes kept fogging up, but I did not wipe the beads of moisture away, for fear of missing something around me. Millipedes scurried around my feet - huge ones - two or three qubits long and the thickness of strong sailing rope. I had been walking for hours, I began at sundown, at the edge of The Woods, with my traveller's satchel, lamp and sling pressed close to my body. It was hot then, the day's sunlight had warmed the ground. It had rained the day before. When night fell, it got very cold, very quickly. It was the night of the Eten Dance - a new moon. I normally never missed the festival, yet, today, I had. My leather boots let in water every time I stepped in a puddle or stumbled into a bromeliad. The ground was soft, mushy in strange ways I could not quite understand. It seemed to change consistency, shift often, play with your thoughts. The Woods at night are a dangerous place. My flame was dying, so I added in some more oil, and coaxed the flame awake again. I could not let that flame die. I had decided on my forest trip more or less on a whim, drawn by some strange attraction I had developed over the last few weeks. My mind wandered while I walked. I thought of the dancing that would be happening in the village, the food, the drink, the people. I thought of the dark allure the woods has always posed to me, deep inside my stomach somewhere was the Lodestone that The Woods attracted. It had always been there. Twigs do not snap under my feet, the rains have softened the once strong wood of the trees, and left the bits of the giants for the fungi to clear up. My legs have become tense and it hurts if I bend them too much. I looked around for a while, and found a small cluster of boulders, dry and protected, in a small clearing in the forest. I sat down. I took off my boots and saw the blisters on my feet. I dried my feet off with a patch of moss, and left them out in the air for a while. The rocks are cold. They snatch the heat away from me, and leave me with a slow, viscous cold that takes its time creeping to my core, and will take its time creeping back out again. I took a sip of some tea I had in a small pouch in my satchel. It was not warm, and only gave me more of the same vegetal greenness that The Woods had imbued into me in the hours that it had had its grasp on me. I had entered through its mouth, lured in like an inquisitive calf, walked down The Wood's gullet, slowly getting deeper, and deeper, and deeper, into the abyss of The Woods. The hours I had spent in The Forest had been melding into a grey hum that lived in the back of my mind. Each tree looked the same, I had been forgotten by the rest of the world, I understood know. As I stumbled along, wholly lost, I entered further into the entrails of this great beast that eats all that enter it. The Woods lies there, silent, mocking me, laughing. It laughs at my stupidity, my hubris. I thought I could conquer it, me: a small, useless thing, tiny to the trees, tiny to The Woods. I was incomprehensibly worthless to The Woods - it did not care, It was immortal, It was Everything. Its air kept me alive, it made me blind. It Laughs at me, still.
I stopped again, I barely knew how long I had been walking for this time. Though I did not remember it, my pouch of tea had been drunk. My lantern's flame was fickle, and I did not have any more oil in my small vial. My eyelids kept slipping down, and nudging me towards sleep, but I knew that I could not go to sleep - sleep meant death, sleep meant letting The Woods Feast on me. I sat down, leaning against a small bush, covered in dark purple berries that smelt like ferrous blood. The flame danced an extravagant last dance, and receded into its wick, and eventually went out entirely. My eyes adjusted to the new darkness once again, and I clenched my teeth together. The cold felt colder now that the only source of heat that I had had gone out. I sighed and looked out into the darkness. My eyes invented amorphous shapes to fill the absence that the darkness around me brought on. Strange things, of colours I could never describe, moving and twirling geometric patterns. Then, in one of these patterns, I saw light. I heard the sounds of fast, powerful steps in the leaves, it sounded like running. All else was silent. A large dog-like creature exploded into my little clearing, running almost right into me, before stopping within a qubit of me. Its eyes glowed a deep red, and so did its black fur, streaked in places with the same crimson glow. It was completely silent, though its chest moved as if it was panting. Its eyes burned into me, I could not bear to know they were on me, but I looked into them, unmoving. I looked up at its face. It was wide and heavily-built, teeth curved slightly backwards, and serrated. Inside of its Maw, it held a small bundle of cloth, with something wrapped inside of it. The creature had long, muscular legs, like a Malhound and a flat, short tail. It seemed colder now that it was near me. It shook the small bundle, and then threw it to the ground. In the silence, I heard a small crying sound coming from the bundle. The creature went up to the bundle, and nudged it with its muzzle, then bit at it with its teeth, and pulled open the tightly-wrapped cloth that surrounded it. I saw my chance at an escape, and slowly stood up. I looked towards the bundle, still crying. The inside of the bundle was a deep red. The bundle had inside of it a young child maybe one or two weeks old. The creature bared its teeth at the child, and got closer. I had to leave. I did not want to see a child eaten by this thing. I crept backwards, but then stopped, and realised that if I did leave, I could not have fled anywhere - especially with this beast's speed and power. The creature stopped looking at the child, and looked straight at me. It began to laugh. It was a high-pitched, knowing laugh, and it angered me. I slowly pulled my sling out of my satchel, and looped it around my fingers. I loaded it with a small ball-bearing, and spun it. The thing was still laughing, wildly, and sadistically. It knew that I did not like it, but it did not stop. I released the sling at the creature, and the ball-bearing hit it straight in the eye. A trickle of glowing red poured out of the eye, and the creature's cackling got louder. It filled The Woods entirely. It filled my head; I could barely think. Struggling to function now, I loaded another bearing into the sling, and shot it again. This time, It hit the creature's other eye, which burst immediately. The creature slumped to the ground like a marionette. And everything was silent. The child in the bundle began crying again, and I went over to look at it. The child's arm had three small bite marks in it, and the child seemed very small. It looked up at me, with a face that showed only innocence.
I picked it up, looked back out into the darkness, and began walking.