The Tree

Above the mountain stretches a thundering velvet sky like a wicked wartorn iron armour enveloping the peaks and surrounding lowlands with its unshifting stillness as if it has been here for an age of everlasting. Snow falls as if it will never stop falling and the ice glitters in contrast to the somber blackness. The forest below keeps within its shadows a darkness that no man wishes to experience, but alluring as it is for some, only they will know what lures them. A cold wind whips with no direction or purpose and dances around like a band of screaming warhorses, and carrying with them the snow that swirls and drifts and then dies like those who themselves are on that same journey.

They say the Red Door that they speak of is just a gimmick. When they reach the peak they find not a door but a tree with stunning greenery that defies the surrounding corruption and bleakness. The warrior arrives weary and battle-scarred but a golden warmth carries him back, for if the tree is green then it is not dead and only if the tree is dead and without leaf does the Door appear. But in an act of mind-numbing disapproval in that very moment the wanderer will never really know about the tree or its green life-giving brilliance because he will already be carrying with him a heavy cold dead black heart that knows nothing about anything else but the impending death or glory that will soon greet him.

And because the tree is nearly always in flower and green, the tragic play goes full circle more often than not and in a world of thieves and wolfbrothers where violence and greed and death and betrayal are the gears of lust that drive the mechanism of desire, our warrior finds himself back where he started. And back at the beginning he dreams of a mountain that he knows nothing about.


MB.