The law of nature is entropy. Things fall apart. The world ever crawls towards the cliffs of chaos. And we value chaos, dear reader. We very much value chaos. Without it, you wouldn’t be able to tell where you are. You leave a line of destruction behind, however so minute, like a duck leaving morphed lines of a wake on the mirror like surface of a pond deep in the forest.

How can you tell where you are, if all that you see seems the same as before? Every path bends, every tree grows out like a pine, and snow drops in exactly the same way.

But you also cannot tell the difference in a completely random state. Can you tell where you are in a storm deep in the sea, without a compass, without clocks? No. The chaos of the ocean leaves only jarred sailors hanging on for dear life. It twists, churns, and crashes large, unpredictable, truly chaotic waves! Chaos, oh chaos! The time in the storm could feel as long as your own life. You are in front of the judges of nature, being tried at the hands of a law that stretches across all Universe.

It is only after a swift sunrise at the end of the night’s storm that you think that, “Oh! I’ve survived!”

How capricious you are, Nature. How cruel a teacher that gives the test before the lesson.

You, dear reader, exist in between two cliffs of perfection – order and chaos. You exist in the flow of things, able to tell the difference between their states based on where they lie in this ragged edge of life. For, both utter perfection and utter chaos are your enemies.

This forest, as I’m sure you’ve gathered already, was not natural. Something worked to keep it as unnavigable as possible. Every direction looked the same, and every straight line somehow curved no matter how straight you thought you were going.

Even my hearty moon had forsaken me. It had gone up and up as the night progressed and now it too seemed to be part of perfection – near the zenith. Its shine was lighting up the forest floor in a maze of spots of darkness and light. That was no good for me. I simply walked on, listening.

Sound too changes in a forest and the snow was not helping. Sometimes a large chunk of it fell down from the high branches; sometimes muffled little avalanches came off the trees, sounding like padded footfalls of a creature. Where was the snow coming from if the moon was out? I don’t really know! The forest is weird and strange. The smells of the forest were muted and, unfortunately for me, completely useless. I tried Fangira’s method of smelling my direction but for the life of me (which I don’t think I have any to begin with) I could not figure out what I was smelling. Wasn’t it just all forest?

Forest, forest everywhere, not a single place to go. I walked on.

It was not long before I heard the first differential murmurs floating in the wind. An angry, upset murmur. I turned towards it, swivelling past unruly branches and turning past tricky roots.

The voice grew louder – that of someone berating somebody else for something or another. Yes, okay, I left it vague because I can’t be bothered to remember every last complaint every other human makes. I have enough complaints within me to stash an entire bookshelf – no place for anyone else. Finally, I reached close enough to see what was going on.

It was a host of people standing there, perhaps even as large as a hundred or more, and they all looked very much on the edge. And cautious, perhaps with good reason because I had seen what sort of monsters this forest hides. There was an obvious leader – all you must recognize is that human leaders love to strut around and fret about things they don’t have any power over. And he had a man being held before him by two overly armoured guards.

“I think you must show more respect to your betters,” he went on. “Or I do not care. Ranger, I give you orders, and you must, must, obey it!”

“We will not burn it, my Lord,” the old man replied. Stern and astute, his voice ringing with the finality of a fundamental law of physics.

The Lord looked rather astounded. He threw his arms up and looked around incredulously towards his yes-men. I mean, his officers.

“Melsonnen, you hear this man? Am I stark raving mad for giving you a good solution to this monster infestation? Tell me, Melsonnen, am I. STARK. RAVING. MAD?”

There was a pall of silence – the yes-men behind him looking at each other to find the word ‘no’.

“No, Lord Teliel.” Ah, the big moustached fellow had found it. He was the leading positive reinforcer of the Lord-bubble, Melsonnen. Ask him anything, and he would agree with you. I certainly hope you like a nice pair of shiny boots, cause Melsonnen would lick them clean if only your name preceded with the title of ‘Lord’.

The Old Man was having none of it.

“My Lord Teliel,” he said, “before I was a Ranger, I was a hunter. The law here, the unwritten law of the forest, is that the forest must not be hurt. No fires, no axes on the trees.”

“Quiet!” Ah yes. It seems that is the favourite word of most of these people. The Lord Teliel went on to say, “I’m demoting you. You’re useless like the rest of the filthy hinterland Eborans. Always questioning authority. Do you know, Woottone, who I am?”

The old man gave a rather flat stare. “The son of the Duke of Glecia, my lord Teliel.”

“Exactly,” he strutted around. And he said a lot of other unimportant drivel, but the gist was that he was not happy with insubordination.

You should be happy I’m condensing this.

“Hit him,” Teliel told the two oafs holding the old man. And they obliged. Can you believe the cowardice? They held the man in their grasps, and had a go at him. Steel fists connected with ribs.

Out of the corner of my eye, then, I saw a Raven. It was looking at me, sitting on a branch near my head. Well, I looked at him back. Gave him a nice stare straight into those crimson lined black eyes.

“Who else did not accept the order of the burn?” Teliel continued. “Any other Eboran who thinks above his station? Prepare, the rest of you! As for you, Woottone, the hand of justice comes down hard!”

The Prince-Duke thought it to be an excellent show of power to slice through the head of a man kneeling from blows of his henchmen in front of him. He swirled around like a ballerina, with the pomp of a prima donna, and his sword flowed awkwardly through the air towards a very painful half-slice of a neck.

And then, it met steel.

A defiant young woman had leapt up, her blade drawn in quick defence of Woottone. The Prince-Duke stared as if someone had snatched away his ice-cream, crisps, and pop-soda with a berating lecture about decaying teeth, obesity, and of being a very naughty boy.

Even the erstwhile bullies of few seconds ago seemed to have forgotten that they were wearing armor, and stood there like the two clodhoppers upon the feet of a rather old bishop. It was only after the surprise abated, and the girl had thrown her sword far away in complete bravado, with a swift kneel of the left leg, her elbow on her right knee in subservience (a misguided subservience to a man with a turd for a brain), and her head bowed with her shimmering golden hair falling down to hide her face, did they and the rest of the guard move to arrest her.

“Now tell me why I must leave you alive?” Lord Teliel said, after he recovered. Or something to that effect.

I would not know, reader. I don’t quote the words of fools.

“My Lord,” the girl said, her voice firm like the hardest birch tree. “What you were about to do would have been a great mistake. I don’t fear for my life, but of my people. They will attack us now, for what you do. Please, I beg of you, Mister Woottone is a wise man. He knows the forest better than any of us. Killing him will not us.”

“How in the name of the Flame, Melsonnen, do we hire such ungrateful bitches amongst our ranks?” The Duke-Prince looked to Melsonnen, who mumbled something bureaucratic, like extending forms long enough so that no other ungrateful bitch would ever complete it enough to be hired.

“What is your name?” the Duke-Prince asked.

“Letitia,” she said, and when nothing else came from her, the Duke-Prince came hazardously close for his withering courage, and looked her in the eye. “My lord” she added, with great contempt.

“Well, Letitia. What you have done is every bit equally treasonous as this large country bumbler. I think I would rather punish you by doing exactly what you would not have me do. For dear, dear,” at this point I saw that the Prince-Duke Teliel getting fervent assurances from the guards holding the woman by her arms and shoulders that it was safe, only after which did he proceed to say, “dear Letitia.” And grabbed her chin with his fingers. “I am the only law,” he said, “that you need to know in this province.” And I quote. You think I would say or make up something this ridiculous?!

“Burn it!” he screamed. “Burn them all!” Many soldiers started moving about setting flammable pitch on the trunks of trees alight. For the trees that didn’t have the pitch already, men started to uncork barrels and emptying them, ensuring that the tinder of flame would burn through the wood.

It was not a smart idea. You know it, I know it. He wanted to burn the forest when it was snowing. People were going at full speed with axes and large crosscut saws on the other sides, hacking away at the trunks at the far end of this large clearing. It looked like they had succeeded because there was a path out. Trunks lay down to each side: evidence that they had already broken the law.

“I wonder what happens to the lawbreakers in the forest?” I asked the Raven in a hushed tone.

“Bad things,” it replied.

Of course. What else could happen to breakers of law.

Which reminded me of the matter at hand. “Oh?” I cried, startled. “You talk?”

“Of course, I talk,” it said. “Do I look like a pea-brained Ostrich?”

“No,” I said. “You look like a rather large crow.”

The grim line of its beak drew even grimmer. “Now, you’re breaking a twig off a tree too high up the trunk. I am no Crow. Are you a Crow?”

“I am a Crow,” I answered.

“I thought so,” the Raven fluttered. “You look like one. You even sound like one. You don’t mean what you say and you say what you don’t mean.”

“That is because I have a creeping suspicion that I am mad. And also, dead! Are you here, Raven, to take my soul and fly into the plutonian night?”

“Not quite yet”, the Raven grinned. A grin which leaked crimson hues from within its dark, pointy beak. “I have many souls to collect. Besides, you gave me enough in the southern side. Very thoroughly massacred. Wulfandr raging through the path. Delicious.”

“So, you mean to say that you are, in fact, real?”

“No,” it said, and latched onto my shoulder with that eye-piercing grin. “But why should that bother you?”

“You see, if you take two imaginary things and mash them together, they make something quite real. Or should I say surreal?”

“Reality is boring,” the Raven said. “In Reality, I could hardly say all my good lines. I could mouth something, but that is not becoming of a raven. Perhaps becoming of a rather befuddled little crow.”

A sudden jolt ran through my body. Flashes of memory. Or a ghost of a memory. Crows cawing amidst a serene beach beside a rolling sea under a swift sunset. Crows cawing, and a bright flash of harsh tube light. And a dark raven inside a darker room.

“Reality is very boring” the Raven said, as it hopped down to stand on the snow. “Perhaps if you could put Imagination and Reality like so—” It made two lines on the snow, perpendicular to each other, meeting at a point. “You walk on reality, boring reality, through here. And then, you walk your unreality, your imagination through here. Maybe it would all not be so boring, after all.”

“Hmmm,” I thought for a moment. “Perhaps, I am not the one that mad after all.”

“We are all mad here, Crow” the Raven said. “You see the things that don’t exist, and I exist the things that you don’t see. Now, if you will excuse me.”

It began to vanish. Fading. Like a cat living among too much milk. “I must go because the fun is just about to begin.”

Only the crimson eyes remained where the Raven was. “I would help you if you came back alive, Crow. But you are already dead. Good luck.”

The glow held there for a few seconds before it too was gone only to be replaced by a shaft of moonlight.

As that glow faded, I heard men’s gasps. Some groans, even, from grizzled soldiers. Of disgust and nausea, and follow by shrieks of fear. The commotion came from the farthest side where tall pyres of trees had started to burn to their brightest. I leaned out of my little hiding place, straining my neck to see what hell had broken loose.

Men covered with a red ooze staggered forward. The smell of thick iron rust rushed out to meet me: the smell of blood. Some were hale, and some looked as if someone had tried to peel their skin on a cheese grater, and only partially succeeded.

“That’s the third expedition!” someone exclaimed. “Arch Magus Carranock’s men! Lord Amadeus? Lord Amadeus, what has happened?”

But the men covered in that thick dark blood did not respond. They could not respond. They were too rank with the smell of death. For a moment or two there was a serene pause: some had their hands on their sword; some raised their wood axes up, unsure of where they should be standing; some moved their hands through their hair, wet with falling snow. Yet none of them had realized that the snow had stopped.

A burning tree winked out of existence. As if it were sucked out, devoured by something. The woods creaked, and a heavy thump sounded. Then again, and again. It came closer till the last tree yielded to it, and something stepped forward.

Just for a moment I thought it was some ferocious monster, but out stepped a rather muscular man.

The snow melted in front of him. He held a large halberd, and carried behind him a thick Zweihander, his ancient gauntlets shone pale with a gleam of fine polished steel, but the rest of him was covered with nothing but blood.

“The Bloody Knight!” I exclaimed.

A hundred pairs of eyes turned towards me, as many as those who spared it from the spectacle in front of them. Well, I guess my tone wasn’t matching the mood of the camp. But, since they all looked at me, I thought it was time to say something very important, very sagacious to them.

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” I began. The Bloody Knight roared, and his body began to bubble, steam burst from his skin, and it began to grow. A tentacle of steaming, hot blood shot out from him, catching two of three of the staggering men that came before him, and the Lord Amadeus got absorbed inside of him, clothes, armour, chain mail, and everything. The Bloody Knight roared, and the halberd became only a small pointy stick with an axe inside its giant fist.

“It”, I emphasized, “is the time to run.”