Flakes of snow drifted down from laden branches, carpeting the stone-lined track ahead, like the petals of fallen blossoms. Spring, however, seemed far away. The sound of his horse’s hoofs was sharp and solid, and yet Captain Kellaras heard little echo, as the snow-shrouded forest made for a muted world. This was one of the few remaining stretches of true wilderness left in the realm, spared the axe only by an ancient royal mandate, granted to an ancestor of House Tulla.

The night before, he had heard wolves, and their voices, rising so mournfully into the night, had stirred something primal within the captain, something he had not known existed. He pondered that experience now, as he let his horse choose its own pace on the slippery cobbles, and it seemed that his thoughts well matched his surroundings. Cloaked in strange isolation, where the only sounds he heard belonged to himself, his mount, and their journey.

Wilderness offered a curious solitude. The comforts of society were gone, and in their place, indifferent nature – but that indifference set forth a challenge to the spirit. It would be easy to choose to see it as cruel, and to then fear it, flee it, or destroy it. Even easier, perhaps, to surrender to animal instincts, to live or die by its own rules.

Long before villages, or towns, or cities, the wild forests were home to modest huddles of makeshift huts, to clans of family. Each camp no doubt commanded a vast range, since such forests were miserly in what they yielded. But by the hearth-fires alone, the wild was kept at bay, and in those flames, a war had begun.

It was not difficult to see the path of devastation made by that still ongoing war, and from the perspective of where he now rode, in this silent forest, it was a challenge to find virtue in the many monuments to victory with which his kind now surrounded itself. Keeps of stone and timber laid claim to the simplest needs, of shelter and warmth and security. Villages, towns and indeed cities gave purpose and protection to the gathered denizens, and the pursuit of convenience was a powerful motivator in all things. All of these creations were fashioned from the bones of nature, the slain corpses in this eternal war. In this manner, the victors did enclose themselves in what they had killed, be it tree or wild stone.

Surrounded by death, it was little wonder that they would sense virtually nothing of what lay beyond it. And yet, from nature’s bones the artists among the people would find and make things of great beauty, things that pleased the eye, with poetry of form and the peace of those forms rearranged in seeming balance. More to the point, Kellaras realized, so much of what was deemed pleasing, or satisfying, or indeed edifying, was but a simulacrum, a reinventing of what nature already possessed, far beyond the lifeless walls and tamed fields.