Registration #001-S-1733
The Register
Account of Bertrand, organized by The Registrar
”I was walking, my way was on to the temple to receive some bread, I have been out of my job as a scribe. I was bound there when I heard on the road – and felt it too – a rumbling like the footfalls of many men and horses. I did not want to be caught up in any mess so I made my way off the path. I had all of my minae on me so I could not afford to be robbed.
It wasn’t a rough forest or a bad time to be in a forest at all. It was quite leisurely at first, actually, being only around morning when I first entered. I decided to move deeper into the forest and delve deeper into any path that could take me across it. I reckoned it at first to be an hour's walk. The wood has its own set of sounds that seep into the silence, just as a city has its own set of sounds that become the backdrop to it and merely ambient and normal. I began to feel that nature noise pressing louder upon my hearing as I walked deeper into the increasingly thick wood.
The sound of swooshing wind was what struck me first as strange, it was not a windy day nor was there any place for the wind to breach this deeply into the wood I had walked so deep into. So deep in fact that now the sun was approaching its summit in the sky and the morning had nearly gone, noon fast approaching.
I reached soon in the wood a river, trees parting to reveal the rushing waters. It was almost deafeningly loud when I reached it, the sounds of the world hounding on my ears roughly as I came close to see if I could at all cross. This sound paralyzed me in that moment as I stared down into the waters and I felt my head splitting in pain as the noises seeped into my mind. I closed my eyes and clutched my head and soon felt heat all around my body. As my eyes opened I could see the source of the warmth, the water that was rushing had now begun to boil and scald the dirt at my feet. I wanted to back up but the waters had warped to form a ring around me, leaving me in the middle of a confined island. I opened my mouth to let out a surprised scream but the air was warm and dried out my mouth. The sun had risen to its zenith in the sky, I recall, at this moment. As my eyes were cast up towards the sun when I observed this, the wood around me was struck down and flattened in a second, leaving a barren grassland where the forest had once been. I stared across the endless plain, my eyes wide with fear and wonder. The boiling water at my feet spilled out across the expanse, when I saw a glimmer in the distance and collapsed to the ground in a fit. I heard in those fleeting moments before darkness silence fall upon the expanse.
I came to shortly after, not in a gored forest or endless expanse but not very far off the road that I had once ventured off. When I awoke the sun was again at the zenith in the sky and I quickly made my way back onto the road, not feeling any of the effects of my woodland vision.”