Under the smoldering gaze of the brilliant 'star' in the sky, the knight moved through the fungal, slightly boggy land that had once been an infectious forest of flesh. The soil was both healing and hurting itself at the same time by letting the blood that had soaked the land since the forests' inception flow to the surface, becoming lakes of red liquid across the land. The knight wasn't sure, but he was almost certain that he could see the pools of water both shrinking and growing at the same rate. The sun–as it did with decomposing corpses–was breaking down the blood and evaporating it before it flooded the area as the land began to mend itself. This thought floated through his mind when a cloud obscured the sun as the knight was walking to the forest he had spotted before, and the nearby puddles of blood grew disproportionately large in the shade before they began shrinking much faster when the blood was exposed to the rays of light once again.
Now that he was thinking about it, the sun was a strange being, unlike any the knight had ever seen before. It disappeared from the sky randomly, and just reappeared like nothing had happened–at least that's what Soven's records suggested–It can decompose corpses in no time at all despite its heat being disproportionately colder to everything else, and it was always, weirdly right above him, like it was following the knight. Not to mention all the weird stuff the sun was doing when he was still a guard, like shifting to be blue for a day–that was the weirdest from what he could remember, though there was the time the sun decided to not go down, at all. Even when the moons came and went, the sun stood stationary at high noon, then it went down like nothing was wrong–continuing the regular day night cycle like nothing happened. Sometimes, even, the knight could swear the sun was grinning–or even had a face, maybe even a consciousness.
'What a weird fiend' The sun grew a little hotter after that thought, making the knight's back a little wet from sweat. There was not a piece of shade for miles, so maybe it wasn't a good idea to comment on the strange artifact in the sky.
The knight focused forward again, deciding to ignore the ball of light that puzzled him so, and instead looked at the remote forest he spotted before he started his walk. It had been a few hours since then, and the knight was still unsure of what he was looking at. The trees were barren, with bark the color of midnight, from fire most likely, and an almost ashen atmosphere–at least from what the knight could see from a distance. It looked to be quite the anomaly of a place, so he looked forward to it–anything was better than having to walk through mushy, bloody soil that made his feet tingle through the boots. The sloshing of blood being expunged and expelled to the surface of the terrain was also getting on his nerves, yet he knew that it would be over in time, so he powered through the new–and not very desirable–sensations, and continued forward to the slightly eerie forest.
Another couple hours passed, and the knight was slowly becoming numb. Across his journey through the now wetlands, the knight had encountered quite a few unexplainable oddities dotted across the beaten path he was still making: A hand made of marble, balled into a fist about the size of his body emerged from the reddened dirt like a sword in the stone. It wasn't quite tall enough to pierce the heavens, but it was almost as tall as the tree the knight had stayed on his first night after his God-given return. Around that hand were the remnants of the forest that once had thousands in its population–now only the greats of the forest remained. A small orchard of real trees remained–autum leaves clung to the branches despite the desolate summer that was plaguing the land–their bark a rich, earthy brown signifying their healthiness in a land of disease. These were not people transformed by their want to live–these were people in the metaphorical sense. The knight saw several names carved into the trees in a dialect that reminded him of his own–or at least what he remembered of the characters–yet there was a difference, it was elder–even more so than himself, it was a strange text that seemed to unravel, becoming more confusing than it was before the more the knight tried to figure out what the text wrote until the characters became foreign to his eyes entirely. He walked off to the forest in the distance once again, deciding to ignore the agitating place he found himself in.
Another one of the arcanian things he visited on his journey was an altar of some kind. In the center of an obsidian plate, an elevated platform stood out of a stark white marble–tears of black running down its many faces as it replayed the horrors it had witnessed in its use. The memory would never stop haunting this place. A small carved out semicircle was present in the center of the top face of the cube of marble–and in the break from the horizontally perfect a small, disgusting tree grew. Its stem was of an oozing skin color, blood dripped like sap from various bumps across its small form mixed with a spine chilling yellow liquid that the knight could only describe as smelling of a combination of melting wax and the melancholy of a thousand disturbed memories. The knight could feel his stomach drop as he felt the horrendous thing in front of him dance gracefully in the wind. The leaves of an obscenely dark red twisted in the wind in something that tried to mimic how trees swayed in the wind, but failed on its face. The knight had to take a step back from the obsidian and back onto the mushy ground–a feeling he was happy to remember as he hurriedly excused himself from the altar and trained his mind away from the place behind him–though he thought he could he the murmurs of a fickle whisper in the air, its laughter at his plight made the knights speed quicken despite the nagging, protesting groans of soreness from his legs. Now he was miles away from the creepy altar, and the likely memorial that had frustrated him. Looking only forward to the slowly approaching decrepit horizon while darkness of an equal saturatedness began to inch its way up the sky, revealing the animated bodies of light infinitely far away from the knight and the land he trudged through.
The knight continued walking, enjoying the moments of silence he had, because as the wind speaks many things, it whispers omens of fire in the land of an angel of death. As he listened to the willowing winds, the knight stared at the forest ahead with curiosity. The tree line had been revealed to the knight for a short while already, each tree was blackened with heat, and radiating that heat still, on a couple off trees not too far behind the tree line, the knight notices small wisps of pearl while flames flicker in and out of existence. A cloud of ash surrounded the land above, enshrouding and obscuring his keen eye sight, yet it only seemed to make the iridescent fire stand out more, despite its distance from the knight. It was like a beacon, and that beacon was the knight's objective. He wasn't sure what he'd find in a forest destroyed by fire, but the white fire piqued his interest, so he continued towards it. Every step in the blood soaked swamp-like land, through the plain that had once been a jungle of blood and trees made of misshapen humans, however he wanted to say it, he was moving his way out of these lands.
'Maybe I'll find regular lands past here,' the knight thought, making him smile a little behind his mask. He loved the diversity of it, but not having trees that were made out of living meat, a desert not filled with more skeletons than grains of sand, or a forest not trying to swallow him sounded very relaxing. There were many odd places in his land, but all were places, not entire regions of land of abstract rulers, forests, and chiefs, yet, somehow, his journey was still only beginning, he hadn't even encountered any of the horsemen outside of the Necromancer. If they were anything like that monarch then they were all to be vexing, nightmarish, and wells of power unlike any the land had seen before their creation. It sounded both thrilling and chilling when it was put that way.
It was in these moments of wonder and distant thought that a tide of white fire sprouted from the depths of the black forest, and consumed the whole forest for a few fleeting moments. The knight stared at the fire as it danced on the branches of the trees like leaves in the wind, while both exuding and consuming the light of itself. It was a lovely sight for the few fleeting moments the forest was on fire, it looked almost complete in those moments, but, like a dying heart beat, the flame weakened rapidly, leaving the once beautiful forest fire to nothing more and flickers of fire that were extinguished by a light breeze in the wind. The knight watched the forest for a few more moments–intriuged by the act he had seen. The forest seemed at peace in the white fire, despite fire being the natural enemy of the land. He could almost feel the forest shiver from the slightly chilly gusts. By now the knight's legs were nearly fully healthy, so, in his interested state, he decided to pick up the pace as he wanted to get to the forest by nightfall–or at least on the outskirts of the forest. He grabbed his sword at his waist by its sheath, making sure the weapon would not flounder about, and jolted forward.
Like a crack of thunder, the knight was gone leaving behind a boom, flying mud, and displaced air as he took lighting-quick step after lighting-quick step. The forest was still quite a distance away, but the knight was sure that he would get there relatively quickly. There was no rattle from his armor in protest–simply silent in acceptance. He wouldn't have noticed the clanging and clanking anyway as the knight was completely hyperfocused on keeping his current speed up the entire way. Seconds ticked by, followed by minutes as the knight's enormous frame shook the world in his immediate radius with each step. These minutes added up, until an hour had passed, and the knight was still running. If he had the capacity to think about anything else in that moment, he would've asked how his eyes improved to such a degree again that he could make out anything from the forest from the terrible distance it was away. Another hour passed, and the knight had started to slow his pace. He was beginning to approach the unknown and he wasn't sure if he wanted to continue inside the forest right before sun down. The trenches his boots created as he slowed grew in height the closer to the forest he got, before, finally, right as the first of the sun began to cut off from the horizon, the knight arrived at the tree line.
Though splinters of light could be seen through the extremely dense and tall treeline, the knight still could not see almost any sunlight through the dense wall of black, charred wood. Still in trenches of his own creation, the knight stared at the cloud of ash that seemed to bubble around the forest. Through the slightly dense wall, the knight noticed quite a few small wisps of fire covering hints of the nearby thicker than he was tall, stems that could fit dragons in them and even the grassless ground. From the boggy, sloshy terrain of the deforested he had been in prior, the hard ground was a great thing. The knight let his boots glide across the dirt as he felt the sensation of dusty dirt on his souls for the first time since he finished his training. It was–-nostalgic, if the knight had to place a word to it. The subtle flame in his chest grew warmer as he thought about those times. His brown eyes grew soft behind the helmet for a moment, but nothing more as he refocused on his surroundings.
The cloud of ash parted in front of him–looking to invite the knight into the forest, but he was not quick to accept. Instead, the knight shut down his curiosity and glanced once more at the dark sky above and sighed. He could begin his journey tomorrow, but tonight, he will rest. His legs were beginning to ache again–not as much as before, but they needed a night of rest.
Across the ground around him were various pieces of charred wood in many different sizes and in various different shapes. The knight surveyed the area critically; he noticed some pieces that were almost as big as him, but the rest were giants. Pieces of wood twice, if not thrice as big as the man himself. Some hollow, others not. Something the knight found interesting was that the bark wasn't the only part that was black, but every section of the tree was too, the rings, core, kernel, sapwood, cambium, core rays, and the rest of the intricate sections were all worn the same charred expression of black plastered across its face. The growth rings would've been hard to notice because of it, but to his eyes, they stood out like a sore thumb, and there were many. The rings weren't even centimeters apart from each other; they were obscenely close, and just as obscene in number. These trees were of the elder age, yet they were on the outskirts of the forest. The knight wasn't sure, but he had the inclination that he would be stepping on sacred ground–grounds of fire, but that was for tomorrow.
After doing a small investigation on the gradient between regions, the knight found a hollowed, fallen tree of the fiery forest, and lowered his slightly limping form into the empty circular space, before crashing his side into the nearby interior wall recklessly. Despite the dust, and small cloud of ash that released from what he believe to be a weak space, but, to his surprise, it was still strong enough to hold his weight without moving in the slightest–though that might've been because the piece of wood was already sunken into the ground a good amount–to where he could simply walk on dirt in the large, dark corridor. He slid down the side of the log, which was followed by an annoyed shrieking from his armor. Ignoring it, the knight readjusted himself and propped his body against the side of the wall, letting his legs rest for the first time since he started walking.
Sighing, the knight watched the outside world darken from his spot, revealing the brilliant spots of light masked by the sun through the day. It felt like he hadn't seen them for an eternity, yet they still radiated that same kindness, somehow. They still danced to themselves in the young night sky while the moons began to wake up. The knight turned his head away from the exit of the tunnel, closed his eyes, and fell asleep to the simple portrait of the gloam, covered in celestial lights.