Day broke. The knight was already awake. He had a dreamless slumber–thankfully. The pillars of light broke up the boisterous night, sending it back to the distant land of infinite space. Glancing around, the knight's crystal clear vision wrote down every little detail of the hollow log he rested in his mind, making his mind hurt slightly from the incessant additions to his memory. Closing his eyes slightly, he let his lashes drown out much of the world as his face scrunched up as the beams of glimmering light fell on his frame–lighting up the interior of the log like one of the flames that had once glimmered on the branches of this fallen trunk. The knight was a recluse in his life before–so sleeping in places such as these was not uncommon for him. Though it was rare, he found resting in nature to be the most peaceful act he could commit–especially considering his hands were made to raze the world he stepped on into nothing more than fire and blood. He was a warrior–a destroyer, so the simple act of being in nature–God's creation–soothed him, and now, he was going to enter a place unlike any other, nature at its most extreme and most aberrant. He was cautious first–but that didn't stop the almost crazed, rabid excitement he felt. This forest of burning trees was a place that had sectioned itself off from the rest of the world with its cloudy, ashen atmosphere, and that meant all types of interesting things could happen.
The knight was a wanderer, a masterless soldier, so the wind was his guide, and the wind whispered of this place, and now here was here, rested, and with a healthy pair of legs that were fully healed–there was only one way to go from here, and that was inside, inside the cloud of ash and enter the forest of fire–so he did.
The knight hastily got to his feet, not wanting to waste a single moment of daylight and lumbered his way out of the log, leaving large, echoing footsteps with every moment passed. When he finally exited the log, the knight looked out fully to the world while standing at the very edge of the log, ready to make the first step onto the hard ground once again. The debris near the edge of the forest was great in number, yet somehow seldom close to one another. Branches jutted from the slightly blacked grass of the woodland edge like pikes constructed as barriers on a great battle field, while trunks stood scattered about land like small bunkers for the many righteous, weak foot soldiers fighting for their home–and he would soon intrude on it. Taking the first step outward, the knight felt the morning dew on his feet from the slightly smoldering grass beneath his feet. The grass burned, but it did not burn him–the fictitious murmurs of white fire that remained did not heat the grass up–it did not spread, and it did not move–it only died, silently.
The knight took another step, and walked steadily, yet cautiously, across the grass, avoiding the fallen, titanous tree segments and soon arrived at the barrier between realms–the outside, and the inside–the cloud of ash was an odd thing the knight was half amused by, and half confused by. It was some kind of magic cast on this place–but the knight couldn't be certain about it. The cloud didn't seem to hold the same suspicions as he did, because it had parted like the Red Sea for him, inviting the knight through–something the knight was almost certain wasn't a normal occurrence.
He grabbed his weapon from his hip, and swiftly removed it from its holder, releasing it with a quiet sheen. Rising Tide in hand, with an excited dragon zooming across the blade of the silvery weapon, and took the first step past the gloom. A tremble was present in his shoulders as he took in the forest that he now found himself in. Black. That was all he could do to describe the forest. It was dark. The sun was still rising from the east, and the day was still young, so the light of the sun was not something that would have invaded the land–but even if the obstruction in the sky reached its precipice, the thicket was so dense only the tiniest of rays would make it through the enmesh–let alone reach the forest floor. Maybe the fire that seemed to mingle in the forest was the light of this place? Then why did something precious to the forest disappear? In the darkness of the endless tangle of branches twisted around one another in the vague image of traditional forest, the knight looked upward, staring at the giant trees, dressed in dying white, gloomy flames that seemed to flicker in and out of existence more often than not. Unlike true trees–these pine-like ones were mostly naked of leaves–giving off the effect that the trees were entering winter after shedding all the leaves that had once covered them, with only remnants remaining, sparsely decorating, and illuminating the aphotic zone of the forest. These were true trees–just–different fundamentally in some way.
Looking down, the knight saw the barely lit up, empty image of the forest floor–a vacant land with only small sputters of fire the same color as the magical flames dotting the everpresent ceiling of black wood. The forest was silent as he entered, but that changed abruptly was a caw of warning that rang in the knight's ears. He looked in the far, far distance, observing the darkness that was probably staring back–and not just what was making the noise–yet there was nothing. Not a clammer of a sound after the cry let alone the visage of any creature hidden in the lowest branches of the trees.
The knight took a step forward, having already took a deep breath to relax his fraying instincts and was woefully refrayed when the knight saw a pillar–no, more like a tornado of white fire erupting at an angle into the sky, passed the ashen barrier that kept the world out, and obviously not the inside inside. It grew in volume the farther out the pier stretched until it bloomed in the sky, far above the thicket of branches and tree stems that tickled the edges of the skies above. That's when he saw it: the trees were alit, and the forest came alive.
The wave of fire–which the knight was almost certain was some sort of attack–ignited the forest around it, and just as fast as the attack from the unknown creature of the forest erupted it disappeared. The torrent of slightly molded flames bursted and popped resulting in an echoed explosion in the obscured sky. A sea of white particles scattered across the great tapestry of early indigo-painted morning not covered in a fire snowstorm. The knight watches as the small orbs of fire fell lazily to the forest no so far below where the fire seemed to gravitate to the peaks of the charred wood–akin to that of a lighting rod, the mods linked together in a chain, dispersed, and entered the ecosystem–and then, the light came.
The knight saw it all in a moment, as the trees consumed the small licks of fire, they were then consumed by the small fires turned large. The little pieces of the grand pillar that had emerged consumed each tree in the area, creating a small warmth in the knight as he looked at the fires grow so bright in happiness to be attached to the land once again. The iridescent flames danced in the wind, looking more like leaves than leaves themselves, and if the knight's gut told the truth–it was–the trees seemed complete. Veins of white light burned into the wood and illuminated the already well lit canopy, understory, and forest floor, making the world seem almost radiant for a few short moments. Fire was channeled through the stems, into the roots, and dispersed into the earth, lighting up the ground around the knight's feet in small white flames–yet the knight's feet did not burn in the obvious heat of the flames as did nothing else the scorching flames touched, leaving the knight a bit puzzled as he pivoted around the same spot–trying to take in every bit of the world around him.
Through the light provided, the knight saw through the unnatural darkness of the forest, and in the few moments–the knights eyes landed on a few things of interest: an enormous, black object sat on the branch of an even larger branch of an equal shade–the knight originally thought the tree was diseased at that was a pimple at least thrice as big as he, but when he saw the thing twitch, swiveling its head towards him–he knew it wasn't.
With feathers the color of midnight–though they glistened with a grand rainbow of colors in the white light, twin beady eyes, blacker than the feathers that covered it and a pair of small, grey horns protruding out from the top of skull, getting through even the dense population of feathers that dressed the aviation-oriented creature. It was a bird of some kind–though it was many sizes too big to be considered a bird the knight knew. Its tail feathers were somehow longer than its entire body and it had a pair of legs with a set of talons the size of Rising Tide on each.
For a moment the pair stared at each other, which was then cut short from a very familiar cry erupting from the now open, black beak of the bird. His tongue had tasted a scent he hadn't heard in a long time: the taste of a predator–a true predator. One that wasn't quite like Necromancer–that one was far too powerful. Soven wasn't quite what this bird was either, as Soven was a warrior at most–this perched beast with wings was a hunter–for how long, the knight did not know, but he knew that the bird in front of him was a foe unlike any that the knight had faced previously. The way it observed the knight in the brief moments of light they had held eyes with one another–it was as though the creature could see through him–or had been staring at him for far longer than he had at it.
A terribly loud, almost chaotic caw came out of the bird mouth as its eyes stayed laser focused on the knight. The bird ruffled its feathers a bit–purring its delight at the slight adjustment as it stared at the knight recuperating from his now bleeding ears, and then spread those large, feathered wings out–its pitch-black, feathered wings. If the knight didn't know the sun wasn't high enough to even slightly perceive, then he would've questioned if this thing's wings could eclipse even the great size of the sun. Meanwhile, in that moment, all the beautiful light the knight was slowly becoming used to, as it had only been in existence a few, fleeting, moments, the inferno that had inspired out of the depths of the forest had flickered out of existence–spurring for the last time, and then, it all went black. The embers had blown out. The fire had been extinguished. It was now the knight and the bird–one in the familiar land it had grown up in, and the other having been invited into a death zone. The knight pivoted to the right, and took off right as the knight could feel a slight disturbance in the wind followed in short by a strong hurricane of wind while the sound of the bird's imbalancedly large wings beat as its great frame rocketed towards the knight.
The chase was on.