...you creep across my skull.

The world had a funny way of working. It had a way of surprising you, shocking you, scaring the ever living hell out of you. And then, after all of that, after all the nightmares, the bad dreams, the stories we tell ourselves to make sure we know we're not crazy?

It pleases us. It writes us a story, gives us a present, a gift, a something that just falls in your lap and lets you know you're all right.

Maybe you're not different. Maybe the world isn't as bad, as terrible, as cruel as we'd all like to think.

He'd looked this way for a long time. He'd had these scars, these horrible marrs on his face for longer than he could remembeer.

And in a way, it had made him fascinated. The forest was a place of lies, falsifications, because everyone here seemed to have something to hide. He could hide the worst of his horrors behind a mask that seemed to suit his features, hiding that which was his visage from the world.

That suited him just fine.

And there was one around here that he'd always wondered about. He'd always wondered what hid behind that mask, what could possible be beneath it, to make it look the way it did.

It was not easy asking. It wasn't some simple task. Because one didn't just march into Mordor, as the saying somewhere went. You didn't just strut right up to a throne like that, and you certainly didn't pitch perfectly innocent questions that way.

But he did it anyway.

It took him days. Days of working up the courage, summoning up his guts. Not to mention turning them to iron: that particular patch of the forest just smelled wrong. It was a wet, rotten, fetid smell, too many corpses collected in a pile.

The last stretch of it had been done on his belly, eyes watering and the bile trying to creep up his throat. By that point, it was a matter of pride that drove him.