The Distant Prologue



Seed sat beneath the willow at the place where the river widened out into the pond, looking along the edge of the shore. He wasn’t composing a diary or a poem in his head – but he was hoping, a little. The water stretched out glistening blue, sleek as rain dripping off the soaking body of a deer. Seed’s eyes focused, scanning for a body that could appear. He focused on a group of rocks by the lakeshore, a depression in the mud. A collection of dragonflies circled over it casually. He sighed. Things were so much happier, once. But he had always said that, except maybe when he was a fawn. And if he had remembered then what he remembered now, would he have said it just the same?

“Were things so much happier then? Are you happy now?” A voice formed out of the rustling of leaves in the breeze. It wasn’t exactly a voice – it was just a pattern in the rustling, a feeling shaking its way down through his mind.

“I’ve been sitting here too long.” He stood up and began to walk his way through the forest.

“Are you…afraid of your answer?” The trees stood like enclosing walls around him as they asked that. It seemed to echo strangely, so he was asked again and again, “Are you afraid?” “Are you?” “ Afraid?”

He paused his trot and looked up at them. His eyebrows, hidden beneath the soft near-velvet of his mask, lowered. He tossed his head, shaking loose a few purple flowers. Then he picked up his hooves and dashed ahead in a flying leap. At once, energy flowed into his body as he became, to the green landscape, an equally green flash. He moved away from straight lines, the paths in the forest that seemed to stretch invitingly before him – he swerved and circled, running without abandon. The horizon greeted him in rosy, dawn-like pinks as he ran.

He paused only as the aching in his knees told him he had run too far – they locked in place, sending an ache running across his bones. He slowed to a trot and looked around. The area of The Forest he was in was oddly empty – he couldn’t even hear anyone in the distance, not even the low breathing of sleeping bodies. He glanced around, listening for the sound of the river. It was old forest, with its dappled floor that mixed greens, golds, and blacks across its bottom. He could feel a chill up his body all the same. He walked carefully, looking for some sign that anyone had ever been here. He came towards a structure like The Ruins, towards the hill with the mushroom circle. Towards the stack of logs where Payton had slept. He stopped and looked at it mournfully – it tugged at his ribs and ached at the muscles in his chest, but took his heart and trapped it in an iron grip. He came closer, almost against himself, head lowered. He breathed in deep for a sigh – and noticed that the scent of warm doe and poppies that, even if the rains had washed it away long ago, had always been a part of the place for him, the tangible memory that the first doe he ever loved, wasn’t there anymore. His lips turned up at the ends, but his eyes started to mist. He looked up at the trees, with their spiky, flower-laden branches – wait, flowers?

Seed stared up at the flowers. There were no flowering trees in the Old Forest – but in the Old Old Forest, the forest that he had been in before he was a fawn, a forest that was always Long Ago, that looked like the old forest only on the surface… It had flowering trees. He had been one.

And here he was again. “But what am I doing here?”

“Are you afraid of your answer?”