--Epoch

Smoke like dragon’s breath rose from Wicked Forest in enormous, black plumes, veiling the dawning sun and cloaking the Killican hills and the River Portmouth and the adjacent kingdom, her stifled majesty portending the catastrophic age looming on the horizon. The cursed haven of phantasmagoric evil and unspeakable denizens had possessed itself of a brilliant and ravenous blaze sometime before sunrise, a mystery never solved.

            Some primordial ravage upon the meat of the Cosm, the ancients had written on the origin of the forest, some foreign stuff embodied of eternal hatred embedded itself as far beneath the land as the temporal core, where it took root and thrived for millennia, the living core’s endowments coursing through its ever-expanding form working its potent nutrients into every miniscule grain. The crop sprouting from that infested acreage, the miles of timber teaming with the abominable, are of that.

            The spirit of modernism had taken hold for some time now, and with it came the air of skepticism and ignorance of its ancient forebears, but the moderns and ancients, separated by centuries, could agree on at least one thing if nothing else—that the forest is evil.  “How” or “Why” is inconsequential. It just is, and that is the way of the cosm.