067

Soon afterwards Gregor was back on horse riding behind one of his captors. His hands were bound and it was incredibly uncomfortable to his already sore muscles. The men were more at ease during the days travel and there were no signs as they traveled deeper through he forest. Gregor was upset with himself because he now had no idea where they were. They were travelling westward with the sun implying that they were travelling still deeper into the Moss-Head forest.

The topography had changed slightly and large rocks had become visible from time to time covered with a mat of brown pine needles and moss. The trees were tall with boughs that spread across the gaps between the trunks, blotting out much of the sun. The roots for these old trees would run long through the covering of soil over the rocky shield that Gregor knew they now traveled over.

He could see the map in his head, but Moss-Head was a massive forest largely uninhabited and their direction to the North or South would matter dearly. The forest awoke memories of stories his mother had told Gregor when he was a young boy. Stories of thieves and Nymphs. Of wild creatures and wilder men, no good was said to come from Moss-Head forest, at least according to those in the walled city of Ayrillac.

As Gregor had traveled more due to his job as a Censor he learnt that the smaller villages had their own Moss-Head stories, the only points these stories seemed to agree upon was that travelling through Moss-Head was a bad idea. Gregor had always discounted the tales as nothing more then stories to get young children to behave. Or stories spread by thieves or hermits trying to keep people as far away as possible. Although, now that he thought about it how likely was it that hermits would go spreading stories. Regardless of how the stories had been spread Gregor saw no signs of human or supernatural life. There were no paths or marks upon the terrain save those made by animals or weather.