There was once a girl who lived in the Forest of Forgetfulness, deep in the heart of territory they call ‘The Liminal’. The Forest was a place with trees and vegetation, so thick that no one had ever seen the earth beneath. Since there was no earth, to get around, the girl could hardly walk so instead she navigated its shrubs and boughs, its vines and its branches, like a bird hopping from one to the next. Sometimes the girl hopped and sometimes the foliage shrugged her off like dust so that she tumbled from hedgerow to bracken and fern.
The Forest of Forgetfulness is not a place to be confused with the Forgotten Forest for that was somewhere else and not here at all. No indeed not, not here and nowhere near The Liminal. How the girl had arrived she could no longer recall for naturally, no memory existed in the forest. This had its advantages as it was as impossible to lose one’s way as it was to find it. The girl did not even recall her name nor whether she had ever had one.
On another day yet to end, the girl suddenly noticed that she was not alone. The form was faint and there was no noise to give it away, but unmistakably there was a shape and it seemed to be following her. At first, she tried to out pace it, only that didn’t work. Next she thought she would outwit it. Of course, too easy, for what did a mere shape have on her? Only that didn’t work either. Just when the girl thought that she had led it a merry dance out of sight betwixt the trunks of two ancient oaks, it was she who became dizzy, only to find the shape silently waiting in plain sight for her vision to clear.
On a day soon to begin, the girl will find that the shape speaks. At first, a whisper there and here, again so faint that perhaps it is only her imagination, calling to another voice beyond the wind in the trees. But before long and after a great age, the whispers will run to rain and the girl will become drenched in wisdoms not yet known to her. And just as the soil stirs beneath the forest floor after an almighty rainfall, deep within her, a remembering emerges.