1 Episode 1 : Forest of the Dead - Prologue

 It's--

It was an aberration.

 The word "strange" doesn't even begin to describe the strangeness of the thing itself. It's not enough to say "strange phase.

 There was no other way to describe it than to say that it was a deformity. However, the words also did not fully convey the shock and awe they evoked in those who saw them.

 It has been lying there like that for the past, say, half a day or so, and has not moved. It looks just like a stranded spring.

 But it was alive.

 As a testimony to this, the unusually developed muscles of the limbs, which are still stretched, sometimes move as if they were twitching, albeit at a considerable distance.

 But there is no other movement to testify that it is alive.

 The world was filled with a silence that was almost eternal. The sun was near the edge of the mountain, a dull, glowing ball that had turned into a bizarrely huge disk. A sane person would not, of course, be wandering at such a time, so close to night, in the vicinity of the fortress of Staphorus, which was about to cross the boundary between human territory and the dark territory of the demons. But if there had been a man of such courage, and if he had seen the man lying there with his head half propped up on the edge of the fountain, and had looked into it, the man would probably have sat down at once He might have believed that he had finally stepped over the safe and sane territory of the human world.

 The strange thing had the shape of a man, at any rate. But how many people would have recognized it as a man?

 His strong, practically trained body, with all its muscles well developed, was naked except for the crude leather cloth wrapped around his waist. Her body also shook violently and moved as if involuntarily aroused by pain and thirst. His hand went out to the fountain which, just before his fall, was gushing forth as if to quench his thirst. The big, strong hand was stained with blood and wounds as if it had fought hard.

 When his hand reached the clear water of the spring, he hollowed out his palm, scooped it up, and brought it to his mouth, trembling - perhaps it - or he He was on the verge of dying of thirst.

 But the water which he brought to his mouth he could not at last pass down his throat. Again he tried, three times. But all with the same result.

 And from his mouth came the roar of a wounded and dying beast. Frightened at the sound of his horrible anguish, a small animal - perhaps a Tauro, a flying beast, a combination of bird and beast - leapt quickly from a tree at the edge of the spring. His hand was stretched out to fetch water again.

 But thereupon his strength was exhausted. Again, his whole body convulsed, and he fell down, and did not move as he had done before.

 A breeze came up, rustling the grass and making small waves in the spring water. The red eyes of some kind of grass snake glimmered through the undergrowth, and from the treetops of the strangely colored and shaped trees came a bloodsucking crane.

 And yet, unawares, he - or it - lies defenceless in its deformed form. And here in the wood of the Rood, not far from Staphorus, he is thirsty and weak, and covered with blood and mud, and dying a slow and fearful death.