PROLOGUE

 

 

ONCE, A LONG time ago, this was a world. A living, breathing world.

Now it’s just a shell, a shadow of what it once was. Not that Mouse could remember the time before; he was far too young. This was the only world he’d ever known, the one he’d grown up in. Alone, more or less, since he was very little. He had vague recollections of a family, parents maybe—or at the very least people who had looked after him... to begin with. But they weren’t around for very long. He couldn’t remember exactly why: one minute they were there, the next they were gone. Anything could have happened to them really; as much as it was a dead world, it was also a dangerous one.

It hadn’t always been that way. Somehow, Mouse knew that. Perhaps the people who’d been around during the first few years of his life had told him so. There had been peace... of a kind. Some sort of order, at any rate. It was all he did know, as he hadn’t come across anyone who could tell him more. Not that he’d ask. It wasn’t wise—you only fell for that once. Trust was a hard thing to come by in this day and age, so it was best just to not get involved.

He’d been scavenging all this time, and had become incredibly good at it. Hunger was a pretty good motivator, even when you were very small—not that he was much bigger now—and fear kept you safe. Mostly. It was a combination that had worked well enough up to this point. It had also seen him travel a lot, moving on if a place had already been picked over—or he’d found all he could. Flitting from one burnt-out town to another, just as he was doing today. Sometimes you got lucky, like when he’d found that untouched basement with the tinned goods in. Tins were his best friends, they survived anything.

More often than not, there were days like this, when he found nothing. Mouse took one last look over his shoulder, at the scarred remains of the structures he’d been searching. The latest city he’d entered, which looked pretty much like all the others he’d ever come across. Except it wasn’t like all the rest, he felt. And there was a sadness he couldn’t explain as his eyes took in the rubble that filled the streets, the caved-in walls of buildings, bricks sticking out like broken teeth.

He shrugged, hitching up his backpack and leaving. It was time to head off somewhere else, somewhere that held more promise than this.

Time to hit the road again.

 

 

MOUSE HADN’T BEEN walking for very long down that road when he came across a curious sight in the distance.

He was used to seeing blackened stretches of land; there was little else sometimes, between the towns and cities. What remained of that living, breathing world he had never seen. But the landscape here was slightly different. It was uneven, rising and falling around him. As Mouse drew closer, he saw that it was littered with short, squat columns, fixed into the ground. He crouched and peered at one of them, running a finger over the surface, then wiping off the ash that covered it. Beneath were rings, lots of them: larger on the outside, then progressively smaller the closer to the centre they came.

There were lots of the strange objects here, all of differing sizes and shapes.

“It used to be how you could tell the age,” came a voice from behind him.

Mouse jumped, whipping out the piece of jagged metal he used as a weapon. How anyone had crept up on him was a mystery; Mouse was the quiet one, the sneaker—though someone was obviously much better. But the speaker wasn’t as close as he’d sounded. He sat on one of the odd columns, his cloak hanging down over the sides. He was leaning on something long and twisted, two hands clutching it for support. His white hair and beard rippled in the breeze passing through this place, and his skin was as wrinkled as old leather. Mouse had never seen anyone as old as him, in fact. The man looked older than time itself.

Mouse was simultaneously terrified and intrigued, fixed to the spot. But standing here out in the open like this, gawping, was a good way to get yourself killed. Perhaps it was a trap, and any moment now he’d be attacked from other angles, his backpack snatched from him as he was kicked and stomped into the ground.

He made a concerted effort to move forward, placing one foot in front of the other. “You... You stay where you are,” warned Mouse, looking about him all the while as he covered the distance between them, expecting at any moment to have to defend himself.

But the attack never came.

The man laughed softly. “You have nothing to fear from me, I assure you.” His voice was rough, but kindly. His breathing was laboured, though, as if it was an effort for him to speak at all. “I am quite alone.”

Still cautious, Mouse took another few steps. Out of habit, he looked the man over for anything that he might be able to steal. Wasn’t the usual way he did things, he preferred not to get his hands dirty, but when the opportunity presented itself he would grab it with both hands. The man shifted his position, took one of his owns hands off the twisted thing in front of him, and held it up.

At first Mouse thought he was commanding him to halt, then realised he was showing that he had nothing of worth about his person. Just his clothes, by the looks of things; no belts or pouches, certainly no food or drink. Mouse’s eyes flicked sideways again to the oddly-shaped thing the man was still gripping with his other hand.

“You like this?” the old fellow asked, laughing softly again. “I bet you’ve never seen anything like it before, have you?”

In spite of himself, Mouse shook his head.

“Or like this...” Now the old man tapped the thing he was sitting upon. “Most forests were completely obliterated, but, well, this one is a little bit special.” He sighed. “Only the stumps remain, however. All that’s left of the trees.”

Mouse frowned. “Trees?” He had no idea what the word meant, nor what a stump was. Or a forest, for that matter.

“Yes. There used to be trees here, so many of them. Huge, tall trees that reached into the sky.” He craned his head back and without even realising it, Mouse did the same. When he looked down again the man was patting the thing he was leaning upon. “These grew from the sides, they were called branches. It’s called a staff; it helps me to walk.”

Trees, branches, staffs... It was like gibberish to Mouse’s ears.

“So you see, I cannot give it to you—much as I’d like. And I have nothing else to offer a... collector such as yourself.” That much Mouse had figured out already. “Oh, wait. Except, perhaps...”

Mouse held his breath, waiting for the man to continue.

“...a story.”

A story? Mouse let out the breath again. He needed something to eat, or maybe even items to trade for food. What did he need with a story, with words? You couldn’t—shouldn’t—trade them. He shouldn’t even be here talking to this old fool, had lingered too long in the one spot as it was.

“A story about the old days,” the man clarified.

That made Mouse pause. The time before? Had this man lived through those times? He was old—ancient—that was for sure, but still... And how would Mouse know if he was telling the truth or not? Might be more nonsense like the thing with the trees, the branches. Yet there were the... what had he called them? Stumps? Mouse had never seen anything like those things before, with their rings for telling ages. He shook his head again.

“Are you sure? I would imagine someone like you would be very interested in those times. In what happened here in the past, back when this really was a forest.” The old man grinned, revealing a mouth almost devoid of teeth. “It’s a tale about good and evil and everything in-between. Heroes and villains, battles and wars.”

Mouse edged just that little bit closer.

“In the beginning, there was a great plague,” the storyteller told him. “It killed all but a handful of people with a certain kind of blood. And there was a man who survived, who was almost driven crazy by the death of his wife and child. He sought refuge out here in the wilderness, where he lived alone. Where he hunted with his bow and his arrows. Until he was needed, that was. Until he was called on to stand up for those who could not stand up for themselves. Who were being bullied by a lunatic who wanted to take over the world.”

Without even realising what he was doing, Mouse had sat down opposite the storyteller on a nearby stump. He listened, head cocked, transfixed by what the old man was saying.

“He had help, of course, this man. This hooded man. There was a gruff farmer... Oh, a farmer is someone who used to grow food in the ground.” He laughed at Mouse’s reaction to that one; nothing could possibly grow in the earth that surrounded them now. “There was a priest, a holy man—you probably don’t know what religion is, either, do you?” Mouse’s silence was answer enough. “Anyway, that man believed in an almighty power called God, who created us all. Who created the world and watched over us, guiding events. The priest always thought that Hood had been sent to them by God... Then there was a giant of a man, Hood’s trusted second-in-command. They were like brothers, those two. Fought side by side so many times. And there was a woman Hood met who taught him the true meaning of love.” When the storyteller noticed Mouse frowning again, he explained: “That feeling of connecting with someone. Of trusting someone. Of wanting to look after them. No?”

Mouse shook his head yet again, this time much more emphatically. Maybe those people he could hardly remember had... had loved him. They’d tried to look after him, at any rate. But—whether it was through choice or not—they’d left him alone to fend for himself. Which is what he’d done; it was what he was still doing.

The storyteller shrugged, then carried on. “Ah yes, that’s right. There was a young lad as well, about your age when he first encountered Hood.” Now he really did have Mouse’s attention. “Together they fought a number of foes, building up their own army in the process. A peace-keeping force like no other.

“Their enemies included a witch and a man who thought he was a dragon... Oh, that’s a mythical creature, one with wings who could breathe fire.” The storyteller realised he was going off subject and got on track again. “Not to mention other armies from different places, one a group who worshipped the opposite number of that priest’s God.”

Mouse pulled his legs up and folded his arms around his knees, his jagged metal weapon still in his fist, though he had loosened his grip slightly. The more the old man talked, the more Mouse wanted him to. There was something, not just about his tone of voice, but the story itself.

A story, the man continued, of what had once been this forest, of the city Mouse had just come from. Back when it had still been standing, back when it had contained something called a castle.

“So,” said the storyteller, “should I go on?”

Mouse nodded, just as emphatically as he’d shaken his head before. Real or not, he was hooked.

“All right then. Well, this particular story takes place after the others, but is no less important. Indeed, it might just be the most important of all the stories concerning the legendary Hooded Man...”