The Territory of the Wilderness

Written by Dark Matter

Some call it The Wilderness; some call it The Expanse. In reality, it has no official name because no one officially owns it...and no one wishes to. Strange myths and legends wrap themselves around the surreptitious grasslands which skirt The Wilderness. Many of the travelers who have wandered too deep into The Expanse have never returned, and those who did carried strange tales back with them. They spoke of trees as large as mountains and freakish, eerie beings that roamed them. They spoke of how everything seemed so much larger and, they, so much smaller. In fact, the anomaly that pervasively surrounds The Wilderness is this: that the further in one goes, the smaller they get. And it seems that no one can tell if the landscape is simply growing larger and more fantastic around them or if they, themselves, are slowly shrinking to a different dimension. Most of the surrounding countries attribute this to some strange form of sorcery or magic but the true cause may forever remain a mystery because The Wilderness has been avoided for many centuries.