Months passed once more, spring turning into summer as flowers and plants retook the forest. Skellington, seeing flocks of birds migrate and return, decided it was time for him to move too. He packed his bag, the axe, and his various oddities before heading east. He walked for hours on end, past the beautiful lake, past countless massive trees, to the edge of Belua, what the humans called this part of Ocula. At the very edge of the forest, he saw the bridge the humans had built, a great structure of stone hundreds of feet long, at least three dozen feet thick. There were people all around, people with swords around their hips patrolling around the bridge, and many more coming and going with carts and horses. Some were loaded with straw, others with jars and boxes of who knew what. Skellington studied the movement for days, trying to learn the patterns, trying to figure out how he too might get across. He knew both people and animals were afraid of him, so walking right across was out of the question. There was a tall stone watchtower too, where a pair of guards kept a lookout day and night. He waited until the dead of night on the third day, when the traffic was lowest and the guards were just about to change shift. That’s when he made his move, slowly crouching past the bushes thirty paces behind the tower. He knew from before that he could walk across the seabed; if he could only make it under the bridge, from there he could easily traverse the distance to the other side.
“Hey, you!” a voice suddenly cut through the night. Skellington turned his head to see a man with a torch walking towards him, fully dressed in a fitted gambeson, a shield in his other hand. Skellington’s boots clattered as he began running toward the water. “Stop right there!” the man said as he started running after him. SPLASH! Skellington hit the water, sinking like a rock. As the man turned around the corner, using his torch to light the area, he could only see the bubbles hitting the surface, the ripples steadying. Skellington could see the torchlight from under the water. Trouble? he thought to himself. A minute passed, and the guard kept staring at the water, but nobody was surfacing. Skellington began walking on the bottom of the seabed, slow, steady steps forward, invisible on the surface. Not even bubbles escaped him as he walked, and the guard kept staring at the water. He rubbed his eyes, waving his torch back toward the bridge and the shoreline. Three minutes had passed, and nobody had surfaced. The guard must’ve thought he was seeing things, or perhaps it was just a deer, maybe even a fish, or perhaps he was just tired. Skellington saw the torchlight move away from the shoreline. It took a while, but he eventually made it to the other side, officially setting foot on the coast of East Ocula.
As dawn came, Skellington took shelter in the nearest forest, being careful not to go too near the adjacent village. The trees here were much smaller, the sky pillars replaced by gentle leafers only the height of a dozen men. Oak and maple trees danced in the wind, the ground much more alive with ferns, bushes, and flowers than the great forest he came from. It was much louder: birds singing in every corner, trees groaning and leaves rustling gently in the wind. Branches and rusted leaves crunched as Skellington walked across them. The canopy no longer shadowed the ground, allowing all manner of life the privilege of basking in the sun. A mouse ran across a natural path formed by deer, ants crawled in a line to the top of a tree, and insects flew all around. The sky was as blue as could be, not a single cloud drifting through. The sun illuminated the forest, and despite having no way to feel its warmth, Skellington knew, somehow, that this forest was a lot brighter, a lot happier. He pondered as he walked through the forest, about the age of the forest itself, how this one seemed much younger than the last, less choked by predation, gentler. It was odd adjusting to the size of the trees; it felt more like he was one of those giants now, able to snap a young tree with just his hand if he so wished.
He walked for hours on end, through day and night, through the gentle forests and tall hills. Past the hills was another gentle forest. He walked across its natural paths, the soft, warm ground squishing and crunching with every step.
It was then he found a clearing, far enough from the nearest village to not be discovered, yet close enough to allow study—a clearing at the heart of the forest. The clearing had a small pond nearby, formed from a natural artesian spring bubbling through a crack in the earth. The edges were covered in wildflowers and white moss. Here, Skellington decided, was home. It was not dissimilar to the places the deer had chosen as their own, but unlike them, he would come to spend his next few centuries here, in a clearing at the heart of the forest.
The World Stones 