Gwydion followed the rocky, pitted trail covered in dewy moss and withering leaves through the Forgotten Forest.

The despairing leaves scattered about in the chilly air and left behind a haunting view of Aderbaal.

A druid he was from the dawn of time and forever he would be – a great master who not only conjured the mundane but also knew the perils of the unforgiven.

He advanced with light steps for he had no reason to fear. The heinous schemes that awaited him at the end of the narrow trail were unknown to him.

The Forgotten Forest, this woodland of nocturnal darkness and malice, was his beginning and end. Every step he took led him to his downfall.

The malignant and savage spirits in the sapphire sky were proof of this. They watched over him and grinned with true grit as they flew across heaven and earth, cawing morbid lullabies of a legend bound to be lost in time.

The journey from the divine hills of Sawoldor to the Land of Men, also known as Aderbaal in some parts of this vast country, took longer than he expected.

The last time he was in Mazheven, a small settlement on the outskirts of Aderbaal, was when he was still wet behind the ears and almost half the age he was in the present.

The Forgotten Forest itself had changed. The trees were crooked, bent in half and naked, the bushes thin and as frail as maidens, the living things extinct and the grass withered and dry like the barren land of Sál.

He arched his bushy brows and reminisced something he should not reveal or recall till the trumpet of doom. A pang of ache tortured the deepest chamber of his heart, choking him as if he deserved not to breathe.

Something wicked happened in this very forest once upon a time. He lost a part of himself back then, on a day much like this when the leaves wilted and scattered about in the whistling wind like petals of the finest kind.

He baulked.

A wounded raven caught under his feet, moving about to free itself in no vain. It let out a chilling caw as he backed away.

It sounded like the weeping of a newborn thirsting for its mother’s bosom – louder and louder as if it was the end of the world, mayhem only known to it and no other.

Even the brittle and snake-like roots of the tress avoided him as he passed through the depths of darkness, so how did such a small thing end up under his feet?

He stooped and studied it. The raven was twice the size of any bird he had laid eyes on.

It looked celestial with its massive wings and doe-like eyes, which for the briefest of moments looked humane to him. Albeit he did not say this aloud or allowed himself to delve into it, for its eyes reminded him of someone from the past.

What the druid did not know, not at the time, was that he was right. The raven before him was no ordinary bird and, indeed, it was raised by the one he dared not speak of.

The pitiful wailing was only an act – an act the raven had done many times before to trap its prey.

Once caught in the trap, there was no return from it because so was the fate of those, who never paid for their sins and lived off of other people’s ill fates.

Surely, what the druid sow he was about to reap. That was his fate. But fate was only what you made of it and so it was bound to be tampered with, as was the case now.

Gwydion backed up and waited for the cawing to die out, still, the raven cried like it would never stop. He bolstered the hurt raven with a stick and made sure not to hurt it further by loosening his grip.

In a breath, the raven flew high up in the red sky and farther into the forest. The druid lifted his head and watched it fly.

It disappeared out of sight just as quickly as it appeared before him. He scowled, it was as if it was never hurt in the first place.

He continued his lone journey with the stick tucked under his cloak. It was not the first time he helped a poor soul. His sins needed to be paid.

Although it was not enough, he tried to help those around him who needed a hand as much as he could. This was the only way to ease the remorse, which ate up his mind and soul every single night since that… since that fateful day.

It was not long after this that he noticed the disfigured and stinking cadavers ripped apart at either side of the main trail.

Some corpses had their abdomens slit open, and the guts were either missing or torn into savage pieces all around.

It was as if the beasts had eaten the poor humans in the open and left evidence of their gruesome murders to set an example for all to see.

He crouched in front of a poor soul with a missed torso and closed its hollow eyes. He whispered a prayer and then stared up at the darkening sky, which had witnessed the horrors of the gruesome night.

He needed to reach Broga Mountain before nightfall and end his quest. The Forgotten Forest was not a place to seek shelter.

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By then he knew that there was something utterly wrong about this place, which kept horrid secrets about the heinous spill of blood in the darkest hour of the night.

The rumours were true.

The callous ogres wandered through Aderbaal without permission and hunted for prey. But what for?

Sál had been loyal to Salwodor for hundreds of years – the ogres even aided the deities during the Alfen Wars, so what could be the cause of their betrayal?

He picked up the pace. There was no time to waste. Isaldor, the capital of Aderbaal, was in great peril, and only the heavens knew what the ogres were up to.

As he trekked through the Forgotten Forest, the trees that were short on leaves arched down to thank him for paying his respects to the living and the dead.

They had witnessed savagery and unjust slain for as long as the hideous ogres and cunning trolls existed and felt great gratitude to those who saw the beauty in the depths of eternal darkness and paid their respects.

The ogres, in particular, were beasts in nature and never cared for anything but their growing hunger.

Whether it be a pregnant woman or a child lost in the forest at night, those brutes bent on murder never let go of an opportunity to evoke great chaos and fear.

Worse than the ogres, according to the ancient legends and scriptures, were the trolls who fed on children. They lured the lost spirits to their caves in the outcrops and chewed on their flesh riddled with yellow fat, while they were still breathing and far from taking their last breath.

Gwydion came to a sudden stop and looked around him. A peculiar croon filled the spellbound forest, which came alive and twisted to the cadence of the macabre hum.

The concord of bird calls merged with the swaying flora. The whistling wind hit his bared skin like it was made of ice and rooted him to the spot.

He broke free from the morbid enchantment and stepped away, the spine-tingling harmony letting up as if a sharp knife cut through the birds’ beaks and turned them mute for all eternity.

The strange clamour was replaced by a chilling caw that echoed throughout the vicinity.

The naked trees moved.

Gwydion followed their gnarly trunks as they penetrated the shadowy sky. He frowned.

A raven, the one caught under his feet, hovered above him only to settle down at his feet as soundless as a mouse.

He squatted and reached out for the black creature, but it stepped back as if it was afraid of him and shifted its tiny head to a fork in the distance.

Gwydion squinted and observed the meandering fork, which led into a narrow and fading trail shrouded in the murk. What did it want him to do?

He stood up and closed in on the fork while the raven followed him closely. It perched on a grimy and wilted bough as he came to a standstill in front of the narrow trail.

He hadn’t wandered in these woods for many years, but he knew that the locals called it the Forgotten Forest for a reason.

The last thing he wanted was to get lost and fall prey to the ogres lying in wait. But the raven tucked at his sleeves and cawed whenever he stepped away and tried to return to the main trail.

The raven then set out deeper into the depths of the forest, eagerly waiting for him to catch up to it.

“What do you want from me?” he whispered, his hushed voice barely audible.

It didn’t respond. It kept flying deeper and deeper into the forest.

He observed it with his keen eyes in the wake of the strange clamour that had breathed life into the forest.

As much as he feared what lay beyond the fork, he was also intrigued by the bird’s persistence.

Ravens were intelligent beings and they kept away from anything that walked on two legs because they knew not to provoke what they couldn’t defeat.

He shut his eyes and said a prayer for the deities to protect him before he followed the bird down the snaking trail shrouded in mystery.

The raven picked up the pace and cawed to tell him to hurry. His eyes wandered from the heavens to the darkness. The shadows were so thick that he could no longer see where he trod. But the raven guided him. That is, until it faded away and merged with the darkness.

He stopped and listened for a sign – anything, really – that would tell him what to do next. But the raven didn’t make a single noise or show itself.

He continued down the trail as his eyes adjusted to the dark, eagerly searching for the strange creature, but the raven was nowhere to be seen.

Amidst the shadows, just as he contemplated returning to the main trail, he noticed something in the distance.

It was a puddle and it was as azure as the darkening sky and as deep as the Sea of Gam’atron.

Gwydion raised his brows and stared at his feet, where the ground was dry and as hard as steel.

The blessed rain had not visited in untold weeks. The humans he encountered along his arcane journey all begged him to plead with the deities in Sawoldor to soak their dying crops. So, how come there was a puddle here?

He crouched and looked into the spotless, clean rainwater. His face looked oblong in the reflection. Two dark bags were under his eyes; he looked worse than he felt.

He hadn’t slept a wink ever since the deities sent him on this strange quest. He went far and wide in pursuit of the ogres, and besides death and calamity, he had not laid a single eye on those hideous creatures.

The stench of death, however, wouldn’t slip his mind so easily. He even heard the bone-chilling screams of the humans in Isaldor in his dreams. They haunted him.

How could he surrender to sleep knowing a bloodbath took place beyond Broga? Something told him these weren’t just dreams but premonitions.

It wasn’t the first time he had dreams of the future and it was not going to be the last, either.

He was born before the dawn of time and saw the birth of elves, humans, trolls, and ogres.

Even though the deities showed him only what they wanted him to know, there was more to these strange events than what he was aware of.

He had to reach Isaldor and—he squinted. He saw the reflection of something in the puddle. Turning around, he blinked repeatedly, not quite sure what he was seeing at first.

Perched on a bough, there lay a child, sound asleep and unbothered by the world below him. The raven was there too.

It inched closer to the child with a menacing glare. Gwydion rose to his feet upon realising its intention. The wicked raven cawed as loudly as it could right then.

The boy jerked up and lost his balance but managed to hold on to the bough in the nick of time and hung for dear life like a bat.

This wasn’t a sight the druid was accustomed to seeing, and he had seen many bizarre things in the vast land of Fayr, which was as old as he was.

He once saw a man who trapped himself inside the hollow of a tree while trying to pass through it and enter Sawoldor. It took five humans and one druid to pull him out before the tree digested him

He barely persuaded the tree to let the despicable human go, only for the greedy human to return a week later to try his luck again. When Gwydion visited the same tree later on, he found the man’s rotten head on top of a pile of bones beside the tree.

This was all proof of what thick-headedness led to.

But the sight before him at this very moment was bizarre in its own right. Not many humans dwelled in the Forgotten Forest – for good reasons – and certainly never slept on top of the naked branches in the cool of autumn, either.

He was so immersed in the spectacle before him that he didn’t even notice that another raven joined the raven that lured him here in the night sky.

As if they had accomplished what they had come here for, they flew away and disappeared into the suffocating darkness.