Porcelain Child/ChapterOnePrologue

The Island Edge of the Wood

The traveler was alone. The forest seemed to stretch on for an eternity. This far east, a man could walk untill he no longer set his feet on mere ground, but undergrowth and foliage so thick that it would support the weight of ten men. Here, shadows warped strangely, long blacknesses fell, and the welcome sunlight could never penetrate the dense canopy. The forest was lit by nothing more than a cool green ambient light. It was a magical place. Still he walked on. He had passed places of unerring beauty, where the forest became a holy place of green filtered light and staunch pillars of wood. He had seen places of unrivalled horror, where thorns grew as impaling spikes, and the hallucinating mind sometimes saw pieces of human flesh dangling almost decoratively from the boughs. He drank only the dew on leaves, and ate only the shrunken black fruit of the forest floor. Still he walked on. There was a place here, that he had been led to. A place that would change creation. As a king, the man had seen the hollow pleasures of the rich. Their luxuries mere distractions from the agonies of life. He saw the fake smiles that even the bearers believed were genuine. He felt nothing. As a pauper, he had discovered the longing for the trappings of the rich, the distractions they hoarded to give meaning to their lives. He had seen naked suffering, stripped bare of the pleasantries and lies. He had seen it. And he reviled it. He had seen how dreams were the only places that man was truly at peace, free from the frozen, solid creation that constricted and suffocated. Within dreams everyone was equal, and everyone's shapelss, formless creation was perfection.

He had travelled to the harsh seas of the west, through pirate dens and struggling settlements. He had travelled to the frigid north, where people huddled for warmth and safety of predators both malicious and instinctive. He had travelled to the south, saw the spirits of the desert, tortured in life, tortured in death. The very fight to replenish the liquid in their veins was stripped bare for him to see. He travelled to the center of creation, the Empress' crumbling realm, the very heart of suffering, concioius and unconcious of their plight. There the people dreamed of freedom, not from tyranny, not from opression, but from creation. The traveller had stood upon the very peak of the Imperial Mountain, the anchor of creation, and he wept.

There, he too dreamed. And in these dreams was an answer. The answer was to bring the dreamer to the dream. He did not know why he knew, nor why he travelled east past the edge of the world.