This is where it begins, a densely populated forest. Trees like thick and weather worn fingers reaching up to dip into the shadowed and syrupy darkness created by a natural canopy; sap running down the scaly and shedding bark like a bittersweet ambrosia. First upon entering, the silence expands and swallows; an overpowering vacuum of a weird and paralyzing stillness, as if a hundred invisible eyes watched over the woodland with a predatory alertness, a self-hunting ground disguised with a tense and disturbingly false peace.
Underfoot, a versatile aroma of moist earth rises; reborn from the cycling decay of many dilapidated years, encircling new life, loss, fertility, death. It is pungent. It is intoxicating. Upon the surface floor, an overwhelming and romantic hopelessness weakly shrouds and clings, attempting to disguise the deeper and far richer hunger, the ancient and instinctual drive for life. This is a ground that exhales a heady sense of trance and of dreams, like the breath of fermentation.
The forest is a stronghold of a great and versatile power, as it is also the high-walled fortress of an entire history and culture of weakness; a maze of conviction, of hope, of dreams, and of contradiction. Strangest of all, this woodland crypt is laced with an intricate web of packed earth, a labyrinth of well trod paths so coarsely made, so naturally intricate for it is the master craft of a wild creature, that not even the greatest mapper could trace one path from its head to its foot, for they trip and skip, winding like a meaning lost within a stutter...
This place is a probable ending as it is a beginning. |
Submission Name: Setting of a Misplaced Self
