It is a new moon and the forest is quiet. Hordes of droning crickets reduced to silence, wildlife frozen, the minks and the vonkish and the tam-tams turned still as cold ash. The wind whistles through the undergrowth yet there is no sound. Inside the forest's darkness, twisted and decaying under intertwined knots of the tree canopies, life waits in taunt agitation. Slowly, hazy twilight spills into the night air and lingers amongst the stars, the first light before dawn. Under the sky, shadows only grow darker.

Five miles east lies the city of Novant, the furthest of all frontiers and a bubbling capital of failed ambitions. Seeking veins of gold and the whispers of the mystic, the mundane settlers of old created a 'city' in three days. They were the most ambitious of their fellows, greedy for the heart of magic and wealth. All of them died harrowing deaths. In time, the descendants of the founders will become one with the forest. Or so the story goes.

Brighter legends say they sacrificed themselves to quell the forest's wrath, leaving the city intact for those who remain. Others say that magic is nothing more than an old wives tale—that the forest is nothing but a forest. The tough folk of Novant have always laughed in the face of danger. Together, tonight, joined by many pints of beer, they rejoice in their ignorance.

Dawn rises and the shadows change.

In the heart of one such shadow, a spirit is born.

Leah feels herself come back in slow waves. Like a phantom itch, like marble sculpted into a statue, she is everything and then—she is Leah again. She is 'alive' again. If she can be described by mere words from the human language anymore, that is. The sudden intrusive thought brings Leah to a halt.

< Am I a monster? >

Leah heard the ancient people of the southern square talk about it before. No one ever turned into monsters, even in their stories, but... The demonic Skiva and the unfeeling Elriga'u'na were always horrific villains. The Qheenir were the origin of plague; the Abat were false apostles and heretics; the Seosmon were a bunch of filthy turncoats that revolted against the human race's sovereignty. All of them were of a different species.

And Leah wasn't human anymore, was she?

< I wanna go home... >

She didn't want to be a monster. When she was human, mama hated her strong nose, freckled cheeks, the bony parts of her wrists and the size of her ears, everything that was 'hers'. She hated everything that wasn't from papa. There was nothing left of papa now. Leah was scared. Did that mean mama wouldn't even hate her now? Would she not care? Leah found that to be the worst part of it all.

Death was fine, Leah was okay with it. At least it got rid of her hunger. She didn't expect anything more from anyone. Leah gave up on love and school and sweets, so she could give up on this too. She didn't want to hurt anyone. She didn't want mama to know.

If mama ever knew, Leah would kill her.

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Suddenly disgusted, Leah jerks her translucent and incomplete body against the shadow, yet she remains stuck inside of it. Something inside of her bursts in irritation, so she gathers and shoves all of 'Leah' against the shadow. Foreign instincts scream in alarm, but it is already too late. The shadow has cracked. Whirling tendrils of darkness rise and fall, twisting with the wind, dangling and threadbare. The sun high above reaches out and the shadow turns pale. Soon, there is no shadow left.

Leah is free for a brief, stunning moment.

And then she is not. The sun, the wind, the earth, the sky and the clouds twist and reveal themselves, pulsing as the world is stripped of false perception. Color fades, sound fades, the cradle of sanity falls into the sea of chaos—and all is lost.

Wavelengths weave through everything, collapsing into particles and eventualities, colliding and dissipating with matter and mass. Energy shifts between potential and kinetic, heat and mechanical, conserving and immortal in the cycle.

Smaller lies the micro: the positive proton, the neutral neutron, the negative electron, orbiting and comprising everything—gyrating in countless tiny worlds that never touch. Beyond, in macro, lies gravity and the electromagnetic, the strong attractive force and the weak radioactive decay. Everything is bound by what kills it.

Order is the beginning. As time follows space, as atoms spin, the closed system loses the sovereign's benediction. Disorder reigns, entropy its kingmaker. The core has always been madness. The forest eats itself and lives forever.

< The forest eats itself and... >

The nameless entity unknowingly repeats. Their perception has unraveled, leaving the world raw and untamed. Mortals can't change the world--only see it differently. Truth is forever. Gods remain. Even amidst the cosmos, such beings are difficult to ignore and harder to understand. Yet, as always, they are irresistible.

Grand Asvarki is lost to king and sovereign, distant kin to flora and fauna. Violence for violence is the rule of beasts; death for life is the law of the forest. All else is impermanence.

< ...lives forever. >

The nameless entity feels breathtaking hunger, deeper than anything she has ever known yet familiar to the taste. Like all hunger, it is all-consuming and she is starved. She knows this, knows it better than she knows herself. 'Hunger' and 'Leah' are inseparable. So Leah must exist.

Leah the girl, the spirit, the collapsing wavelength and the false conservation, are one in the same.

The hourglass flips and all aspects of Leah flood back in, coalescing into a single whole. Information is retrieved and stuffed back in a disarray of concepts, while the dissociated core regains stability. Leah's translucent and torn spirit regenerates. All the while, hunger sings in her soul and drowns out the rest of the world. It is her anchor.

Yet the situation remains dire.

If Leah waits too long, she will fall deeper into the untamed world. Hunger is powerful because it is impossible to ignore. It is a remnant of morality—of Newtonian human perception and no, stop—that shouldn't exist for current Leah. It grounds her enough to retain a semblance of self. But as long as she can see, there is no safety. The problem is that sight might as well be a euphemism for a spirit. Rather than eyes, spirits have the nigh omnipresent sensory field of the soul. There is no brain to dilute the world into something comprehensible.

It is not impossible to shut off, but Leah doesn't have the ability to.

Leah hesitates before steeling her resolve.

If she had merely been infected with the forest's way before, now she'll have it look at her.

< Grand Asvarki, hilo solva, phi'loge filansi hega c'i'ola begiel hirenga >

As brambles cut into her eyes, Leah smiles softly.