1. The Forest
The ground cracked, the sky fell in, the world ended, and the forest remained. Eternity was its nature, and like all things eternal it had no endings or beginnings but only events, happenings, moments in time. In one of these moments a vast empire had stood, and now it stood no more. Beneath crawling vines and deep layers of earth the forest reclaimed the gleaming city, a thousand years passing as its ruins sunk beneath verdant green eager to erase its existence. Once the city, too, had been thought eternal. Now it was ephemeral. No lips had spoken its name in centuries.
Nonetheless, something had changed since the breaking. Wrapped in the tallest of mountains erupting from the deepest of valleys, the forest had nonetheless seen life, and the story of it remained. As the remnants of the world rebuilt, it was spoken of not as a thing untouchable, but as a thing that had been touched, a place once known and again knowable. It was sought for by the dreamers: as a quests end, as a new beginning, as a home and a hope and a promise of eternity. It was paradise.
Leonard hated it.
2. Leonard
Leonard Dupont lived with his parents in a quaint brick manor – two stories, and a library underneath – in the middle of a pond located just a short distance from the forests center. He despised the house, the pond, the forest, the cliffs that bordered it, the local fauna, the food, his parents, and on some rare occasions, himself. He was sixteen.
Leonard was tall, gangly, thin and pale. He had coarse dark hair that was impossible to comb and sharp grey eyes that perfectly complemented his invariable grimace. He burned like fine rice paper in the sunlight, of which there was always plenty, and stuck mostly to the shade of trees, of which there was always more. On most sunny days he stayed inside the house entirely, but since the weather never changed, the days were always sunny, and lacking a better excuse he would frequently be forced out of the house against his own will.
On occasions such as this he would typically bide his time by throwing large rocks at the fish and glaring viciously at the other local fauna, which was friendly, herbivorous and sickeningly cute without fail. If his exile from the manor was of a lengthier time, he would swim the pond and venture out into the woods alone. There was no set destination in mind on these ventures; the forest was strangely resistant to trailblazing. For months Leonard had tried to mark the routes that he had used, but carvings he made in trees vanished within days, and other markings no matter how clever or subtle seemed to be swallowed up by the underbrush overnight. He had often speculated (and correctly, it turns out) that you could lose a city in this place, and he had to be careful It hardly mattered; though it was easy to be lost in the forest it was just as easy to find the only two destinations of note: his house, which was located where the trees were thickest, and the hundred-foot cliffs that he could reach by walking any other direction.
These were beautiful, in their own way. Majestic outcroppings of stone lined with thick vines and creepers that glistened in the light, they appealed to Leonard in more ways than one – but in all his sixteen years he had never managed to climb them. Once one made it halfway the vines dropped off and the stones sloped forwards like a cresting wave, forcing the climber to topple backwards if he dared to proceed. He'd fallen once, and though the brush had broken his fall, it had been such a violent and troublesome experience that he no longer had the heart to try. They were walls to his prison – but things that were left here stayed where they were put, and so Leonard came here to enjoy the one thing that he didn't hate about living in the forest, which was the books.
Where everything else about the manor was designed with a certain elegance in mind, the cellar had only one purpose, and that was to hold as many books as possible. It extended far beyond the confines of the manor itself, its walls composed of the same peculiar variety of stone that made up the cliffside of the forest – thick walls that never cracked or buckled or sought any form of repair, and which glowed dimly in the dark, defining passages and doorways. Each of these divided the cellar into some thirty-odd rooms, each one of which was divided again by two dozen shelves, stacked from floor to ceiling with thousands upon thousands of books.
The library was older than the house itself, and its contents contained the work and dreams of entire civilizations. He did not know who had collected them all but he was eternally grateful for their existence, as they described for him worlds far outside the scope of his tiny house on his tiny island in his tiny forest in its tiny crater. They showed him what the world outside was like, and he could not, for anything, hate it as he did everything else in his life.
Leonard read everything, he could get his hands on: histories, guidebooks, biographies, educational texts on every subject conceivable, philosophy and alchemy and mathematics. There were fictions, too, hundreds upon hundreds of fantastical tales: stories of stars that came alive and danced for mortals on moonlit nights, of beasts of terrible power and beauty and the heroes that came to fight them, of love that spanned the ages and broke all barriers.
Mostly, though, he read about wizards. Leonard was fascinated with wizards; he had been ever since the first day one had come to his house and set fire to his mothers rosebush.
