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PROLOGUE<center> Once upon a long ago, Far, far, away, A tale of olde did unfold On a rainy, rainy, day.
No shinning prince, No knight who shone, No princess sealed In a cell of stone.
A motley crew Did rendezvous In the forest of Shadyhue.
This is the story that begins on a stormy day in Raindead Glen.</center>
To tell you how it goes, I must first tell you how it went. We must go back to how it was. You wondered how it went, this is how it goes.
Shadyhue Forest was justly christianed its name - for everywhere to the eye was shade and the hues of green and gray, blue and brown. And there was the mist. Always the mist hanging in the corners of the vision, looming sullenly behind the trees and over the grasses. Some wondered if the behavior of the gray plague did not verify some superstitions that it possessed an awareness of a sort. But this was never sorted fact or farce as few if any dared venture beyond the wooded boundary separating the forest from the rest of the known world. And for good reason - for many a foul hazard had been pegged on the responsibility of those woods, and those things that dwelled within its living fortress. But despite whatever reputation Shadyhue had earned to be labled "Danger" on the map, it was never the fiercer thing than the rank, rotten core of wooded throngs, Skulkmortem. For in that vile, dark place of twisted trunks, blemished bark, gangrenous grass, and rancid rivers - few had ever stepped foot. In that debased, degenerate bowel of wooded land, many a tale of nightmarish horror had birthed. On the map, the foul stretch of black sprung forth the warning "Here Be Monsters", and rightly forewarned, for many a tale of debauch creatures rumored to be spawned from the addled depths of Skulkmortem and roving in the boundaries of Shadyhue had been born over the foul wood's many long, long years. Shadyhue, the one outerrim that detained the worst of Skulmortem's nightmares from reaching the lands of Sylvan - though its people's history bore scars of the monstrous wood's few encounters into their humbled land.
The forests were the danger and the unknown. The most prominent, withstanding symbol of the wild and untammed in the land of men. All other hazards being well away, it was with the forests that man had to contend. And so he did - working an uneasy truce in leaving the woods well enough alone and to man the woods held the same unspoken oath - as well as such wild things could. Shadyhue was no different, and it acted as a gateway, keeping locked the rotten Skulkmortem Woods from the living Land of Sylvan - embedded deep within the inner ring. The truce was never broken, and both sides cut their ocassional loses. Such was the way of the time.
Dangerous as the wild and uncharted could be, it was still an honest world - unlike the lands outsided its wooded boarders. Man had his own earned reputations of treachery, debauchery, greed, and cruelty. "Drayken" behavior so it was christianed, and well enough for rumored it was that the great hoarding beasts had first brought these notions onto man and his ever so impressionable world. And over his world the Draykes took monopolistic claim - governing all for their own wealth and well-being. The charted world was a vast business to be made for those with vast power. And the need for the business often drove those seeking a way to earn livings into the borders of the wooded lands, testing the durability of oaths and tolerance. And so it began to be that man and beast began to filter through the growing cracks in the accord.
R0CK STAR GLITTER · Tue Mar 22, 2005 @ 12:15am · 0 Comments |
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