Marc Arden and the Siphilon Academy

- Homecoming.

“What did I do to deserve this?!” Marc screamed in frustration at the canopy of trees above. A fox jumped out of a nearby bush and scampered away in terror.

Marc wasn't a person of dreams, he rarely had any in his sleep, and the days he had dreams he wouldn't remember any of it the following day, but never before did he ever experience a nightmare of great magnitude, much less one so bizarre as the previous.

He couldn't think of anything as scary as a nightmare and to wake up in the dead of twilight, half out of his wits, in a dark forest with wild creatures all around, trying to make sense of the dream. After the incident, he spent a lot of time walking- no, scouting the outskirts of the land of the elder woods known as the Palm.

He was just a typical seventeen-year-old boy having a walk in a wild old forest - and if the legends were true, he was merely miles away from the ruins of a city - but that's exactly the opposite of what his village thinks. For them, teenagers of Marc's age should be out in farms helping their aging fathers or working in the main part of the town in one way or another, not walking around a forest all day.

Little did he know the Palm was extremely dangerous. Not the ordinary wild animals and dark surroundings where you could get lost, but a mysterious force lingering around the foliage.

All he knew was that his father, Mr. Arden, is a member of a group of Elders called the Olden, and he was supposed to report activities of the the Palm to his father.

Marc had been in the thickset of nature for three days now, four days away from home if he includes the day taken to reach the the entrance to the forest, and the only difference he had found in the forest from his last scouting was that some young plants had grown a couple of inches longer. Literally no difference at all.

He loved exploring and learning about the way the world works and the secrets it holds. That's why he took up the job of exploring the Palm. He had been to the Woods far southwest of his village – or city, he wasn’t sure what it was called after recent developments were made – once before, thriving with bandits and thieves, but the location was not as interesting as the Palm. The Woods held no fascinating mysteries worth unfolding. Just trees and trees.

So Marc convinced himself to believe that the offer his father made to him to explore the Palm was an extension of an olive branch and an opportunity to prove his purpose, even though his father never really cared about him and his aspirations. He and his father weren't very close to each other. Marc ached to meet his mother.

He was sick at the fact that his father never paid her any attention. She left a year after tying the knot with his father, pregnant with Marc's sister - when Marc was just a year old - all the way to Middenheim, back to her parents, somewhere south of Lorenzia, leaving him in Acanon, the closest village to the Palm. Marc wandered around the grass path, thinking about all the troubles he had and how best to deal with them.

He decided that when he returned home, he would confront his father and demand reason as to why his father has behaved in such a secretive manner, away from his family. Then ask if he could finally see his mother.

He reached a clearing in the Palm he was familiar with, this clearing was the extent of his scouting and his father told him to never cross it. It was this clearing that he reached every time, and then made his way back home. He sighed to himself and pivoted on his heel, twisting a few blades of grass, running back in the direction of Acanon, fed up with the monotony of his job.

Just as he left the clearing, a massive hide crossed the threshold of the trees and into the clearing, covering the whole area with its long dark shadow, blocking the sunlight entirely, the clearing plunged into darkness, the creature raised its head in the air and roared. Marc flinched as a claw flew out of nowhere and ripped at his chest, He screamed half out of pain and half out of terror, his thoughts went back to the roar he had dreamt of, and the beasts he had seen. He couldn't see past the trees and took off running past the clearing.

His ignorance of what the beast actually was, was the little thing that saved him from madness. Every lunging step inflicted a wave of pain that tore at his chest, despite that, Marc ran on through the forest.