Thousands of miles east of Mirgorod, beyond the continental plain, the endless forest begins. The forest that has no centre and no farther edge. The absolutely elsewhere, under an endless sky.
There are pools in the forest: pools and lakes of still brown water; streams and slow rivers, surrounded on all sides by brown and grey columns that disappear upwards into shadow and leaf. Ivy and moss. Fern. Liverwort. Lichen. Mycelium. Thread. There are no landmarks, only the rising and falling of the ground, and trees becoming dark in the distance. Low cloud and morning mist: breaths of cool air moving, chill and earthy and damp. There is rustling and sudden small movement. There are broad hollow ways, paths and side paths, ways trodden clear. Large things walk there: boar and aurochs, wisent and wolf. Lynx and wolverine. Elk and sloth and woolly rhinoceros. War otter and cave bear. Dark leopard and fox.
Somewhere in the forest it is winter. The long night settles; predators bury carrion in the snow; bear sows sleep with their cubs and the old fighting males wander in the dark. And somewhere in the forest it is spring, with the deep roaring of rutting deer, the air filled with the musk of females in season, and trees, trembling and flaring with blossom, pouring out scent and colour, ignited with life.
The forest is larger than the world, though the world thinks the opposite. Going in is easy: it’s coming out that’s hard. Time stops in the forest. People walk into the forest and never come out. They feel lost. They drift. They walk round in circles. They stop wanting.
The forest is the first place, original, primeval, primordial, primal. It is the inexhaustible beginning, direct, instinctual, unmediated, real. The land before the people came. This land. Old and bright and dark and full of dreams and nightmares. It is not an empty place. People live here, human and not so: free giants and tunnel dwellers; windwalkers, rusalkas, vyrdalaks, shapeshifers, hamrs, fetches, man-wolves; disembodied watchful intelligences, wild and cruel, that might be called witches and trolls. Many things are lost and buried in the forest: old things, perdurable, and new things, potential, unrealised yet, and waiting. All things are possible here, and here is everything. Growth and change. Here everything freely, abundantly begins, and becomes itself: the multiplicity, variousness, potential, myriadness, wanderability, wellspring and wilderness of forest. The trees are sensitive to light and earth. They taste and listen. Their roots go deep, and touch, and interweave. They spill pheromone language on the air. The trees are watchful. The rain, the air, the earth are watchful. The forest is borderless mind. It is aware.
Across the forest Archangel grinds his way, immense and alien and poison.