Nzarel: The Horned Forest
an excerpt

Chapter ~ 1 !

The world can be a strange thing. Sometimes, what would seem to be the safest and most secure of places unexpectedly becomes one of the cruelest. Even stranger, the corners of the world wrought with danger can often be little less than a refuge. These little havens in life, tucked away as they are, would never occur to anyone as a place to hide until they are backed in to one, or else stumble on something in their path and accidentally fall in to it. But then, there they are, safe and sound in the strangest of places.
The Naticar Nzera was one such place. The stories were true, the kinds of beasts and ghouls that hid behind the leaves at night time as the trees hung heavy with dripping fog, and that you could lose your way forever in the labyrinth of loam and bark and branch. Many foolish travelers had never found their way home after delving too far in to the tangle. Sometimes they did, stark raving mad. Sometimes it was from lack of food or good water, but mostly it was from fear. The woods were not a friendly place to those on the outside edges, and there was a lot of them to be lost in.
It was a place of danger and seclusion, and the sane and civilized never built their hearths too far deep. But for a few, this was the very reason it became an asylum. They became as much a part of the Nzera as the wolves and bears which kept the rest of the cruel, safe, sane world away. They belonged to the forest, as the forest belonged to them, and they had no fear of becoming separated from their home, because the trees themselves were their home. So long as they were near, it was impossible to become lost. For they are, as their title implies, forest people.