The black canopy of the Forbidden Forest did not welcome the light of the broken sky. Beneath the massive, twisting roots of the ancient alpine pines, the air was thick with the scent of frozen peat, decaying winter moss, and the heavy, metallic musk of things that had remained nameless since the first age of the world.
The white, geometric grid lines of the God-King Aurelius stretched across the open sky like a cold glass cage, but down here, in the suffocating density of the wilderness, the grid fractured, unable to pierce the ancient, chaotic mass of the timberlands.
Through the waist-deep snow drifts, a small, solitary figure pressed forward.
