The Forest of Wandering Spirits

The forest remembers everything. The question is whether what you did deserves to be remembered.

There is a kind of magic that is not learned — it is remembered. It is in the smell of the earth after rain, in the way certain trees bend their branches toward children when they are sad, in the sound the wind makes when it passes through the hollow of a rock that has been in exactly the same place for a hundred years. The Wandering Spirits Forest is a world where that magic was never entirely forgotten: the Spirits that inhabit the rivers, mountains, forests, and skies are as real as the humans who live alongside them, and the relationships between one and the other — of fear, of respect, of mutual harm and mutual healing — form the fabric from which the world is made. There is a Bathhouse somewhere in the Forest that heals things that have no name in any medical manual. There is a castle that walks on iron legs and leaves trails of smoke in the valleys. There are princesses who carry spears and forest gods who slowly die as the environment that sustains them disappears. And there are children — there are always children — who accidentally cross the threshold and discover that the world is infinitely larger and stranger than their parents had told them.