The cold, dry morning air swept across Godwyn’s face as he sat on the porch of his home, enjoying the quietness. He was thinking of his father — ”as long as you can find peace on your own, you need not worry about the others.” he had told him when he was younger. Those words had always stuck with him — filled him with a sense of comfort that at least he had understood Godwyn in a way no one else did. The thought also filled him with a sense of anger and frustration about how he had been taken from him. Why couldn’t he have stayed with me he thought. Why must the gods be so unjust? What reasoning led them to take from me the only one I loved? The only one who loved me. It was his father who had chosen his name — ’Godwyn’: a proud name for a firstborn. His father had always kept high hopes for Godwyn, working hard to give him the best life he could, but alas he is now gone and neither the gods nor Godwyn were in any position to argue.

Sounds from the house alerted him that he was no longer alone. He knew it was his sister who had woken up — she had come home the previous evening. He was reasonably certain she had found a mate somewhere in the village, leaving Godwyn to their mother.

In the corner of his eye he saw the door to the house carefully swing open, Matilda lightly stepping past him, off the porch. He observed as she walked down the road toward the northern, wealthier, part of the village. She passed behind a corner of another house along the road and his line of vision was broken. He kept staring at the spot on the wall where he had lost vision of her, as he sat there — absorbing the silence.

The sun was rising above the forest to his left — gradually chasing away the darkness as it, once more, brought safety to the lands. To Godwyn, however, it drove away the peace, the quiet of the early morning that he cherished so; brought with it only the waking of the people, a mass disturbance of the silent, peaceful solitude.

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He watched people exit their homes, gathering water from the well, as he rose from his seat on the porch and entered the house through the door beside him. Inside, he found that his mother, predictably, had yet to leave her bed, but he thought nothing of it and proceeded to grab some of the bread his sister had brought the day before, leaving enough for his mother to eat, lest she starve, and left the house, back out through the door. Chewing on a bite of bread he marched down the path toward the Everwoods. Blinded by the sun over the trees ahead, he stepped past groups of young folk, about the same age as Godwyn. He received plenty of foul glances as he usually did — ignoring them as best he could.

”You fleein’ out ’o the forest again?” he heard someone shouting behind him.

”Goin’ lookin’ for your daddy?” another one added.

Fucking demons, all of them, he thought — they didn’t deserve his attention.

Stepping into the woods he regained some of the comfort he had felt sitting on the porch, and the words of the others slowly drifted out of his mind. The forests here were tightly packed with growth and life, but sparse enough to navigate without much toll. A path had been carved out of the tightly packed, plant filled, mossy ground after all the hundreds of routinely walks along the same route – between the same trees, past the same rocks.

Strolling through the woods he felt a calming sense washing over him, filling him with renewed comfort, as the solitude of the forest engulfed him. He glanced around himself, saw little critters of the forest doing what they always do — a mouse making for its burrow with a piece of wild rootfruit, running to hide as if it had just pulled of the heist of its life; a birds nest full of hatchlings screaming their puny, vulnerable, little lungs out in effort to receive more food from their ever judgeful mother. A part of Godwyn longed for such a life as of the little forest critters: a simple life, without worry for anything but food and a place to hide. But alas, he was stuck in this painful, torturous existence filled with struggles and complexities for which he cared nought.

The path came to a sudden stop by a cliff reaching up toward the blue sky, which had now been partly covered in dark, unpleasant clouds, and Godwyn began his climb.