The verdant dark of Rowan’s eyes glared at the border wall of the kingdom with the same steely focus as he had the day he’d murdered his father. That day it had been a final glance back at the world he would abandon to its inevitable ruin. Now, fifteen years later, he returned.
This wall, the largest of any of the plateau’s border fortifications, curved for a few leagues in either direction, cupping the royal fortress in the easternmost point of the Kingdom. The crumbled watchtowers on its parapet menaced from a height of over a hundred feet. Rowan recalled how much the border wall’s enormity had frightened when he was a child, the first time he escaped the fortress. Almost humorous, how much things had changed. Behind him lay the Evergrowth, the forest that stretched endlessly outward from all sides of the Kingdom’s plateau. Evergrowth was only the most common of its many names. The Evergrowth, the eternal forest, the goddess lands, the primal depths, the verdant dark, all referred to the primordial forest from which all life came and to which only humanity did not still belong. No border wall, or any man made structure, could even approach the proportions of the Evergrowth. Rowan looked out across the neverending canopy and knew that some of it was composed of trees as large as the human capital city itself, and others still larger than that. On the bloody horizon of the evening sky, farther than any human had ever traveled and returned to tell of, rose mountains of green. Some of those mountains were great masses of stone, others were the continental bodies of ancient trees grown so massive they now hosted whole forests of their own on their colossal branches. The true scale of the Evergrowth was the subject of theological mystery, an incomprehensible vastness. Yet, standing on the sloping edge of the kingdom’s plateau, Rowan could only view the canopy plain where trees of all sizes ceased to grow upwards, as if bound by some prehistoric pact. Concealed by the relatively flat surface of this living sea was an erratic topology of mountain ranges, plateaus, ravines, and cliffs. Valleys extended deeper than the human eye could see and opened their chasmous jaws so wide they could have easily swallowed the entirety of human civilization and vanished it forever in their fathomless bellies. Rowan often wondered why the Goddess had not chosen such an immediate method of execution when she condemned humanity to extinction only half a century ago. That condemnation had sent the kingdom, the only tiny clearing outside the Goddess’s sovereign, into its terminal decline and thus sparked the final war of rebellion, the birth of Rowan and his brothers, and his seclusion in those teeming depths for fifteen short years. The worlds of monsters and magic that he had come to know in the verdant dark should have far overshadowed any memory the ruined kingdom could project, and yet the fears and tragedies of his youth had not come from the forest, and it was those fears and tragedies that now crept into his heart to gnaw at its flesh as he stood at the precipice of his once home.
“It’s so straight.” Esther, Rowan’s daughter, made this observation from his back, peering over his shoulder at the great wall. A child of the forest, she may have been conceived in the kingdom but she had not once set foot in it. To Rowan, who had seen the wall when it was still subject to minimal upkeep, the erosion by fifteen years of wind and vine growth and other forces of the goddess effected a reversion to nature’s messiness. But Esther had grown up amidst the wild geometry of tree roots and tangled undergrowth and so the ediface of even masonry was her first exposure to humanity’s trademark straight lines and angles.
“Wait until you see the inside, a whole city of straight cut stone.” Rowan said.
“I think I can walk from here.”
“Show me your feet.” She dropped from his back and removed the crude leather socks from her feet. They remained marked by red blisters she’d incurred from days of walking over uneven ground. Rowan silently scolded himself again, he’d pushed their journey too fast. “Let me keep carrying you, we need to move quickly. There’ll be no cover in the salt strip.”
“I can move quickly. I’m not a baby, Mom.” Esther protested. Now fifteen years old, she approached maturity with an eagerness to prove her capabilities. In his ideal world, Rowan would have babied her for at least another decade, but the circumstances that brought them back to the kingdom were far from ideal.
“Don’t argue with me. Hop on.”
“I can keep up! Aren’t you tired?”
“I can rest when we’re over the wall. Now let’s go.” He employed a tone of maternal command and Esther obeyed, though not without a little grumbling.
With her secured piggy-back, he moved swiftly through the edge of the Evergrowth to the salt strip. Capable as Esther was, they moved faster like this. Rowan swam between the trees like one of their native creatures, listening for any sign or sound of another presence while keeping his footsteps light enough to mask his own. It was easier to stealth through here, in the forest immediately surrounding the kingdom where trees grew normal sized and mostly mundane animals roamed. The real monsters lurked in the farther depths from where they had come. Still, the kingdom, even in ruin, presented its own threats. Rowan never let his guard down. The hardened wooden flesh of his feet did not blister and he had his superhuman reserves of stamina to draw from.
The trees soon thinned completely and between them and the great wall lay only the salt strip, a thin band of land around the eastern kingdom that had once been tilled with salt as a defensive measure against the encroaching wild. Even back when the kingdom sustained functional governance this measure had only half-succeeded. Tenacious plants of one kind or another constantly took root in the acrid soil, detoxifying the land as quickly as a declining kingdom could poison it. Had a field in the Kingdom’s own western farmlands been salted the same way it would have laid fallow for generations, but the wilds belonged to the Goddess and her will compelled nature's relentless encroach on human lands. Now hardy tall grasses choked the earth along the strip and stalks of pale blue flowers thrived. However, no trees had yet reclaimed the territory, meaning anyone atop the wall with a decent eye could have spotted them as they crossed the open field. There was not likely to be anyone watching, at least Rowan hoped not, but it only took one sighting for rumors of a runaway prince and a young human girl to spread through whatever population remained within the city.
“I’m going to climb up as quickly as I can, okay? Are you ready?” He asked her. She squeezed his shoulders affirmatively. “Hold on tight.”
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