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Framarr sliced through the thick vines with his sword and passed with a beggar's stoop beneath the cold, yellow growths that fell from the overhanging branches like remnants of hair from an imperfectly scalped skull. He was following the little green man. For weeks he'd been following him, but the green man was perpetually a hundred paces ahead, within sight though never moving, waiting until Framarr got near enough to raise his sword, then disappearing, only to reappear again, another hundred paces ahead and again within sight...
They'd not exchanged a word. Framarr had tried, of course, but the green man had always refused to answer. Perhaps he didn't hear. Perhaps he heard but didn't understand.
Framarr squinted. The fog in the air was making the pursuit, if that’s what it was, more difficult than usual. The green man's body was sometimes hard to discern against the milky backdrop of the forest. Thankfully, he was wearing his purple cloak and a matching hat which came to a perfect tip and radiated like a dull beacon. That's why Framarr followed. Men are meant to be guided by beacons. Besides, all the others were dead, and the ship had long ago been lost to the sea on the treacherous coast of this new world. So what else was there to do but eat, sleep and keep pursuing?
The fog clung as drops of water to Framarr's weather beaten face, gathered in his eyebrows, soaked his ragged beard, and flowed, salty, into his eyes and between the lips of his gasping mouth. His clothes, heavy with wet, stuck to his body. He was glad to have shattered his shield in the clearing while killing the ones with long black hair. Afterwards was when the green man in the purple hat had first appeared.
Framarr came within a few paces of him and the green man vanished into the air once more.
Only to materialize farther in the forest, whose trees were thinning and whose ground was becoming mud. Framarr's boots sunk into it. His pace slowed.
If he doesn't wish for me to keep going, Framarr thought, he would hide or make his escape in the night while I'm asleep. If he wanted me dead, he would have led me into a bear's den or within stalking range of one of the wolf packs that howl in the night. Because that hasn't happened, because I am still breathing, he must have a purpose for me. He must want to bring me somewhere.
Perhaps that meant they had communicated after all. "Come," the green man had said, "to the place to which I lead you."
And Framarr willingly obeyed.
He obeyed until the day the sun came up and burned the persistent fog away, turning the trees to shrubs, and their branches to wiry twigs loaded with crimson berries and brambles that scratched his face as he pushed through them, stumbling, crawling toward the green man whom he could no longer see but who he knew was on the other side...
The shrubs ended.
Framarr stepped onto the edge of a great circular plain.
The green man materialized behind his back.
Framarr's knees buckled and he collapsed to the ground, unable to stay upright, breathe or comprehend the brilliance of what now stood so nakedly before him.
The green man placed a small, four-fingered hand on his shoulder.
Framarr's heart pounded within his chest and through tear-stained eyes he saw—