The Musings of an Arborean

"Patches of land. One could raise sheep unmolested for centuries in the vast, immeasurable lands, and their darting valleys hiding the land's secrets. There is no way to tame the land or conquer its heart - or even to become part of it. The soil only allows its flesh to be ridden by its spirits, and its skin to be trodden by the finite. I tended to cows for years in the canyons, among rivers and falls, and never found a single presence to disturb that clarity.

Trees are the true people of Arborea. Other creatures are merely spectators in the greater cycle of events, passengers. Still, the land may be dominated by a persuasive will, though it be frail. Cliffs the size of orbs puncture the sky above the Valley of Ten Baboons. The naked rock pulses to my touch, the color of polished gold. The rivers that cross the paths are large, capable of flooding the earth; their run ends in Ossa, I suppose. The clay told me many secrets, but it will never tell all.

The sands and snow make no effort to relate to man. The land is absorbed in dreams of what might be, and the stream is locked away in potential. Sometimes galleries are opened below pools of quicksand, so that heavier objects fall through into them. The thoughts of the land are as unfathomable as the scorpions and spiders that crowd the caverns."