Dragon Tamer - Book 1

Chapter 29

A forest is  a living thing.

Putting aside the creatures that live within it and the plants that so aptly gives them their name, there is a sense of consciousness about a forest.

Some forests more than most.

The Forgotten Forest was one that had a life unlike any other.

It was called The Forgotten simply because it appears and feels so old that it feels very much so like an old grandparent. telling stories to its grandchildren and occasionally pausing to try to recollect, without much success and much to the annoyance of its audience, some thread of a tale that has been lost to the echoes of its past and shall not be recovered. Despite many attempts.

 It was this history, and the lost of such history that led travelers and adventurers to try and explore its depths.

The only group to venture to the very heart of the  forest and survive (supposedly unearthing its secrets in the process) were led by a determined farmer, who having lost his health to a rare and incredible slow working illness, fled, along with his clan into the forest, hoping to find a legendary plant able to cure him of his plight.

The tale lacks the imagination to decide what he, his faithful and long suffering wife, his eleven children, two farm hands and a young woman rumoured to be his mistress, faced when they entered into the fireside tales of old women and children.

But whispers arose that the farmer made a deal with a demon, or dealt in witchcraft to make it safely through the dangers that had taken so many lives.

The legend of the Farmer and his followers only came about when a member of a small community in the forest traversed to the outside world for the first and last time to invite a select number of tradesmen into their village to ensure their continued survival with fresh materials and goods. If they had hoped to keep their existence secret they failed. And, aided by the traders lose tongues when it came to gossips and story telling, their legend spread until there was not a Village or Hold in the whole land that did not know of those who cheated fate to come to dwell in The Forgotten Forest. A name soon became popular, one that dramatised the community's feat of prospering in one of the most inhospitable places in all the land.

The Forgotten.

Their existence remained a mystery still. With tales telling of tall, pale haired folk with brilliant blue eyes that glowed in the dark, able to see clearly in the thick forest they called home.

But the most compelling part of the tale (at least to some people) was the part about what drove the farmer into the forest in the first place.

The mysterious plant that has haunted the minds of every dying or diseased persons mind as they lay in their sick beds, hoping and wondering for some measure of relief from Deaths cold embrace.

But it is never to be found and never to be used, for the forest have proved far to great a defence.

But still they try.

 One hunts this elusive plant through the forest at this same time. But he is different to the others for he seeks this not for his own health or for the health of a loved one but simply for the glory it would bring to his name if he was the one to discover it. However he and his companions have become lost and it is no doubt that they will perish like so many before them.

Or will they.