Filled with such memories, Orum was forced to stop now, leaning against a tree for support. His stomach and chest ached, and a bout of weariness weakened his knees beneath him. For whenever he thought of love he was forced to cast aside the denial that was his armor against most of life’s perils.

For as much as he wanted to believe it was so, Orum Saltlog hadn’t exiled himself from his beloved Dunmire because of the progress he despised with every ember in the fires of his soul.

He’d left because of her.

He pressed his calloused fingers against the tree, feeling its firmness, its hardness, its solidity. He let some of that solidness seep into him, borrowing it to combat the liquid feeling that had entered his very bones. Bit by bit, he plucked the remnants of her memory out from within where they had burrowed, replacing them with that which he could see and feel and hear and smell and taste. The earthiness of the forest after a fresh rainfall, everything green and vibrant and so alive it made up for the parts of him that had died all those years ago. The taste of lavender and lilac on his tongue, everything growing and exuding its own smell. The towering trees that occasionally dropped the leaves they no longer needed, spinning and spiraling to the ground with an apparent randomness Orum suspected was false, each leaf and twig precisely placed where the forest desired it to be.

Here, in Lostwood, an endless forest realm feared by the vast majority of Finfalla’s population, he was the master of nothing but where his next foot fell. He relished that lack of responsibility, for it was the only thing that allowed him to exist here and now and keep existing in the future.

Of course, living in Lostwood wasn’t without its dangers. There were reasons most people feared what was hidden within the forest’s shadows. Reasons that came in the dead of night on four padded feet attached to strong limbs that moved without so much as stirring the wind. And these dangers almost always came along with claws that could tear flesh to ribbons, fangs that could tear flesh and crack bones.

Orum still remembered his first few nights under Lostwood’s canopy, shivering in the dark as a fell wind blew through the boughs. He’d covered himself in stinkmoss and thick sheets of brittle bark he’d torn from a coruscated willow tree. The reflective, flashing nature of the strange bark combined with the godsawful smell had kept the predators away that night and many more to come, though he’d seen their eyes gleaming in the dark, had heard the passing of their lithe, loping bodies as they bent stalks of plants more completely than even the most powerful gusts of wind could achieve.