The problem with saying that you've started writing again is that sooner or later people will expect you to produce some sort of documentary evidence. So here's something to distract you for a bit. It's actually intended as the prologue for a larger story, but I'm putting it here rather than in Scraps because: (a) it does tell at least a basic standalone story; (b) I've received some preliminary indications that it's not especially terrible; and © I suspect that the intended "real story" may not go over nearly as well as the prologue, so I'd better take any praise I can get while I can get it.

Here's the text for the people who can't read the PDF:

So anyway, it was well after sunset, when any reasonable person would be asleep, and I had just watered down the fireplace and started to settle in for the night, when the bear knocked at the door.

Yes, I did say bear.

Perhaps I should explain my circumstances. It probably won't make things any clearer, but at least you won't mistake this for some other story.

You see, I was born to a family of traveling musicians. Fate dealt me a cruel blow from the start; I inherited both my parents' aversion to a 'normal job', without getting so much as a drop of their musical talent. They did their best for me, I'm sure, and we got along all right, but they weren't in any position to provide me with much of an education; they could barely read and do math themselves, and we never settled down in one place long enough for a school or anything like that, so I didn't wind up knowing much more than they did. I didn't have the Gift for magic, nor the strength or the temperament for war, nor... well, the attitude for thievery. In short, about the only two things I found that I could really do were carving and talking. I could carve wood into little figurines that looked, well, passable. And I could talk just well enough to get people to buy them -- sometimes -- if the price was right. So I just sort of roamed for a few years, and between carving and talking, I scraped together just enough along the way to keep myself from starting a new career as an emaciated corpse.

Anyway, one day a few years ago, I found myself wandering around the Great Forest looking for deadwood. Ask the gods why; I certainly don't know. There're three other forests within a day's walk that are a whole lot smaller, and a whole lot harder to get lost in, and a whole lot less dark and overgrown, and just generally a whole lot more pleasant to be wandering around looking for driftwood in. I had traveled enough to not be _utterly_ ignorant in the ways of the woods, but I had about as much business being in the Great Forest as a mage has in a barbarian's bathtub. I was out of money, and I'd just been thrown out of my humble lodgings in town, so maybe I was just hoping for some kind of giant tree snake to eat me and get it over with.

Anyway, I had just picked myself up after tripping over a tree root for the fourth time, and calling myself an idiot for about the eight hundredth time, when I heard something. And I turned around to look, and what did I see in a direction I would have sworn I'd looked before, but this little clearing. Right in the middle of the Great Forest -- okay, not in the _middle_, the Great Forest is umpty-hundred miles across, so in the scheme of things it's pretty much the very very edge of the Great Forest, but it sure as hell _felt_ like the middle at the time, and anyway this clearing just had no right whatsoever to be there, okay? It was just obviously _wrong_.

So of course, being a fool with no particular reason to live, I had to go right over and have a look. Someday that's going to have to be on my tombstone if I ever have one. "Here lies Gregor. He just had to go and look at everything, didn't he? And look where that got him." That's really too long to carve on a tombstone, but that's what it _should_ say.

Anyway, I walked into this clearing, and I stood there blinded for a while waiting for my eyes to adjust to the light, and I'd pretty well concluded that the only reason I hadn't been eaten yet is that every creature in this forest must have thought I was poisonous -- after all, nothing that obviously stupid could survive for long if it were made of good meat, could it? Well, finally I could see, and right in the center of the clearing was this shack. This little, run-down, falling-apart wood shack.

So of course, still being a fool, I had to go and look.

And no, there wasn't anything exciting. The place was deserted. The door had rotted off its hinges and collapsed. The inside looked worse than the outside; there was mold all over the walls, and the dirt floor had sprouted grass, thanks to the water so thoughtfully provided by the gaps in the roof. There was some rotten wood in the middle of the room that might have once been a table and chair, and a strongbox in the corner that fell apart when I touched it. There was nothing inside but a pound or two of iron rations. They looked edible, more or less, but that proved nothing about when the place had last been used; iron rations look "edible, more or less" when they've just been scraped out of the cookpots that spawned them, and they'll probably still look "edible, more or less" when you and I have long passed on. All things considered, I'd probably be better off starving.

So, great. I had just found a place that had no right to exist, and it had nothing interesting whatsoever -- nothing but a shack that, from the looks of things, wouldn't exist for very much longer, and that, knowing my luck, was probably the lair of some unspeakably evil thing that was even now returning from its daily rounds of slaughtering heroes and devouring infants.

So of course, still being a fool, I decided to go to sleep.

I mean, what would _you_ do? I was tired. The place was a wreck, but it would still be marginally more comfortable then sleeping completely out in the open -- at least the walls should still keep a bit of the wind out. It wasn't as if I was swimming in other offers. And if the unspeakably evil thing _did_ show up, or if the roof decided to collapse, well, that would just be typical of my life, wouldn't it?

Anyway, so I spread out my sleeping roll -- my only possession, other than my carving knife, that I had managed to grab before being forced from my former abode -- and I went to sleep.

The next thing I remember hearing was "Good day.”

I managed to open my eyes, and saw a bear standing on its hind legs in the doorway. I blinked, and realized that it was actually a man dressed in bearskins. A very, very large man. From the look of things, it probably took more than one bear to do the job. And the bears might have just _given_ him the skins; it certainly didn't look like a measly grizzly or two would have had much of a chance against him in a fair fight.

My first thought was to flee in terror. In one fluid motion, I pushed myself to my feet... well, I _tried_ to push myself to my feet. However, as I was still bundled up in a sleeping roll at the time, I wound up launching myself a few inches in the air, twisting in mid-flight like some giant startled worm, and landing flat on my face.

The quiet, diplomatic side of my brain suddenly kicked into gear and seized control of my mouth.

"Oooh. Er. Is this your, um, er? Eee."

Smooth. Very smooth. I waited to die.

"I am sorry to disturb you. Are you going to town today?"

My brain was too busy melting down to completely comprehend the words, but some remaining part of my sanity seized on the fact that the huge bear-man's words had been a _question_, that the right combination of _words_ might prevent this man from killing me. My mouth opened once more.

"Oh. Yes."

Out of the corner of my eye, as I lay there very still with my nose pressed into the dirt, I thought I saw the corners of his mouth turn upward. My heart was joyous. I might yet live.

"By chance, could you trade these quail eggs for some black ink at the marketplace for me?"

It was then that I noticed for the first time that the bear-man was carrying a basket. I guess it had just seemed unimportant before then, like, say, a small tattoo on a dragon.

"Yes. Absolutely. No question. Certainly. Uh-huh." My brain had found a collection of words that would allow it to survive, and it was determined to use them.

"Thank you. I will stop by tonight for the ink." With that, the man turned and loped away on all fours. And he left the basket in the doorway.

So anyway, while I was cleaning my own pee off the sleeping roll, it gradually occurred to me that my fear of this man had been unreasonable -- that it was simply my surprise, combined with the fact that this man dressed in the skins of large predators and was big and strong enough to tear me in half, that had caused me to react that way. True, his newfound tendency to walk on all fours was also a bit disturbing, but surely I shouldn't judge a man on that. So I firmly resolved to make a better impression on him when next we met. At the very least, I would try to make a coherent sentence.

Anyway, so I went to market with the basket of eggs.

I mean, what would _you_ do? I had _promised_ the man -- true, it was a promise made while I was busy soiling myself with fear, but it's still a promise, isn't it? And besides, suppose I simply walked away, and suppose at some point in the future I actually managed to turn my life around into something wonderfully warm and meaningful. Inevitably, if I ever truly managed to enjoy my life, this man would show up at that point and disembowel me for lying to him about his quail eggs. And that would just be silly. So I went.

And the interesting thing was, I actually enjoyed the market. I had pretty much grown to detest it; no matter where I was, the market was always the same -- a place to plead to people to please buy my carvings, and to try to turn the pittance I got into just enough food to make it through another day. And yet here I was, with a basket of quail eggs that I had no rational business having, and the ultimate goal of obtaining ink that I had utterly no use for whatsoever. It was absurd in a truly wonderful way. Every conversation had this delightful touch of the ridiculous. "Where did you get those?” people would ask. "Very inattentive quails,” I would reply. And that seemed to leave most of them at a loss to haggle properly, so they paid me more than they really should have. I was able to get nearly a pint of fine ink with the proceeds, which would have to be more than the man was expecting. I was almost certain that he wouldn't kill me.

So anyway, I headed back to the forest with the basket and the ink. By all rights, I should have been worried out of my mind; it was getting dark, and here I was traipsing off to the Great Forest again, this time trying to find an impossible clearing whose location I only vaguely remembered, in the dark. In any sane world, I would surely be killed by, say, a pack of dire wolves, and they would drag my body off somewhere to consume at their leisure, leaving only the basket and the bottle of ink to thoroughly confuse whoever might happen to stumble across it. But of course, I am a fool, and I was firmly convinced by this point in the day that it wasn't a sane world, so I barely gave it a second thought.

And sure enough, I found the place with no problem at all.

So I sat out in front of the shack for two hours or so, practicing what I would say when the bear-man showed up. "Hello again, sir,” I would say cordially. "I do apologize for not introducing myself earlier; my name is Gregor, and it's a pleasure to make your acquaintance. Here is the ink you asked for; I do apologize -- this is the most I could get with my humble abilities.” I would hand him the ink, and perhaps, shake his hand in a friendly and nonthreatening manner. From there, the conversation would have to flow on its own course; but I did have a couple of topics at hand -- "I'm so terribly sorry if I've moved into your house,” and, if that proved not to be the case, "Pray tell, whatever happened to the previous occupant?” Perhaps I could bridge from there into asking where he lived, and whether there were any more bears around these parts as large as those whose skins he was wearing. By that time, the conversation would have gone on long enough that I could gently steer it towards its closing, cheerfully and sincerely wish him good evening, and escape with my life.

But he didn't show up.

So I finally decided it was no use waiting up for him; maybe he had more pressing business, such as strangling another bear with his bare hands. It was too dark to leave anyway, so I decided to spend another night in the shack. I put the bottle of ink in the basket, and left them both right in the center of the doorway. Even if he showed up after I went to sleep, he would surely be able to see it in the full moonlight; once he saw that I'd brought back what he sent me for, he would presumably have no reason to rip me limb from limb.

I think it was sometime in the wee hours of the morning when the noise woke me up, and there he was, hunched over in the doorway.

"Hello again, sir,” I said, in exactly the right tone. "I do apologize for not introooo eeeeep.”

No, on second thought, it was not a man wearing bearskins in the doorway. It was most definitely a bear.

For the second time that day, I waited quite expectantly to die.

The bear looked at me, snorted, and I could have sworn that it nodded its head once. Then it quite nimbly picked up the basket's handle in its jaws, turned, and lumbered away into the night.

So I spent five or ten minutes waiting for my heart to start beating again, and another few minutes sitting with my back against the wall holding my carving knife out in front of me like it would do a damn bit of good. And finally I started actually _thinking_ again, and sort of put one and one and one together. One very large man, plus one bear, plus one full moon, equals one werebear. I mean, I'm still a fool, but given enough time, even a fool can figure out a few things.

Anyway, I woke up the next morning, and found that the bear-man had left me breakfast. At least I assume it was him. Berries and some sort of jerky; quite good, actually. I hoped he hadn't intended me to sell them, but if he had, at least I'd die full.

And just as I'm finishing up, he shows up again, and he politely asks if there's still a blacksmith in town who can make decent axe blades.

This explanation has gotten out of hand, hasn't it? I'll speed it up, I promise.

Anyway, this time I did manage to get some actual words out without urinating on myself, and we got to talking. And of course, being a fool, it turns out I had him completely wrong. But he had me completely wrong too, so I guess we're even.

You see, he's a druid, not a werebear. There's actually quite a few of them in that neck of the woods, if you'll pardon the expression. I've gotten to meet some of the others, and they're not as big as Bjorn, but they all do look, well, unusual. They don't like venturing out of the Forest, which is probably a good thing for all concerned; if I were a guardsman and saw Bjorn coming towards the gate, I'd probably sound the alarm and man the ballista.

Bjorn's not his real name, by the way. I guess druids are a lot like mages that way; reeeeally touchy about whom they give their names to -- The Name Of The Thing Is The Power Over The Thing, and all that kind of stuff. They don't even like nicknames; they just point if they're talking about someone who's there, and otherwise they just _describe_ whoever it is they're talking about. The druids call each other 'brothers'; so when I want to talk to one of the other druids about Bjorn when he isn't there, I have to say something like "So I was talking to your brother, the very tall one, the one who introduced us, the one with...”, and at that point the other druid bobs his head a little, which means ‘Yes, I got it, you can stop now,' and then we go on from there. It makes for some long conversations, but then again, when you live in the middle of a forest, time is not usually one of the things you're short of. So I make up names for them just to keep them straight in my head, and I make sure to never, never, never use those names when I'm actually talking to them, and I would heartily suggest that you do the same.

So anyway, they keep to themselves, and they do just fine, needless to say. But I guess that even if you live like they do, a few civilized things still come in handy -- metal tools and cloth and such. And I guess there used to be a guy, this old mage, who just wanted to live by himself. So he'd come here, and he'd conjured up this little clearing and this little shack, and he'd put up some kind of enchantment on it to keep others away. Well, the druids didn't care for that _at all_. But somehow, they got to talking instead of fighting, and they found out that they could get along after all. They helped each other out. And one of the things the mage did for them -- since he didn't mind going to town every once in a while -- was to sell things for them. They'd give him things that they picked up in the Forest, and he'd go to market and get the stuff they wanted.

Well, anyway, this guy died a few years ago -- they assure me it was natural causes -- and the place had been empty ever since.

So then I showed up. And since I was there, and since I was in this clearing -- which only the mage and the druids were supposed to be able to find -- Bjorn had thought that I must be related to the mage somehow, and that I'd come to take over his home the same way he had. And when I'd been willing to go to the market for him without so much as a who-are-you, well, that pretty well clinched it. So he was pretty surprised to find out that I was actually nothing more than a fool with a sleeping roll and a carving knife.

Well, he was convinced that there was some kind of karmic reason I was there, even if I wasn't aware of it, and that maybe if I stayed for a little while, it would become clearer.

So, of course, being a fool, I stayed.

As far as I was concerned, the whole "karmic reason” thing was pure bollocks. But, well, it seemed like it _could_ be a nice place to stay, if it were fixed up, and if you didn't mind being surrounded by miles of hostile woods probably filled with savage man-eating beasts and such. And, well, I had no money, and it was free. And besides, Bjorn seemed like a nice guy. So I figured I'd stay for a few days and see how things worked out.

And I've been living there ever since.

It's really not a bad place. Bjorn did his magic thing and got rid of the mold and rot and such inside, and I summoned the meager carpentry skills needed to patch up the holes. The floor is still dirt, but it's good dry dirt.

The rest of the Great Forest isn't _quite_ as nasty a place as I thought it was, but there's plenty of ways to get killed there. I guess the old guy could use his magic to keep the beasties away when he wandered around in there; and until we talked, Bjorn just assumed that I could too. He says that I must have very good karma. Well, if bad things lead to good karma, then that explanation makes as much sense as any. But anyway, he put some sort of enchantment on me that basically tells the animals ‘don't eat this', so I don't have much to worry about. Well, except for that one time with the wolverine... but accidents can happen anywhere, and I did finally manage to drive it off with a stick, and Bjorn patched me up just fine, and a couple of scars just build character, don't you think?

Anyway, a bunch of the druids -- friends of Bjorn, I assume -- have sort of looked after me. Sometimes I get the feeling that they've taken me in as a pet. But they're all very nice about it. Somebody's always dropping by the shack, usually two or three times a day; sometimes they bring stuff they want to trade, but usually it's just to talk.

They offered to pay me for taking their things to market -- you know, let me keep a little of the take. But I turned them down; it just didn't feel right. They're my neighbors -- okay, they're eccentric and most of them sleep under trees, but they're still neighbors -- and you just don't charge to do a favor for a neighbor, you know? And they respect that. They just share their food, and sometimes they bring tree branches that they thought might be good for carving. You know, now that I've had more time to concentrate on it, I think my carving has really gotten better. And some of the wood is just _incredible_. Here, have a look at this; ever seen anything like it? Didn't think so. Black as night, no visible grain at all, but it's light as balsa, and it carves like a dream. I make little boats out of that, and the kids love ‘em. Anyway, every month or so I bring some carvings to market along with the druids' stuff. So I get some money that way, and I use that to buy a few little extra things -- some decent clothes, some better knives for carving, that kind of stuff. I even saved up and got a few books. All in all, it's not a whole lot, but then again, when the food is free and there's no rent to pay, I don't need a whole lot. It's kind of a low-budget fairy tale.

And the druids bring me things too. It's kind of an odd little ritual we have. They don't want to just _give_ me anything valuable, especially not anything magical, because then it would kind of seem like it was payment in disguise, and they wouldn't want to insult me. So one of them will just show up with something, and tell me that he found this in the Forest, and one of the other druids must have dropped it, and could I please do him a favor and hold onto it until the rightful owner comes to claim it? And I say sure, and I hold onto it, and I make sure to ask the others about it when they stop by, and they all say no, it must be somebody else's. So a couple of weeks go by, and whoever ‘found' it in the first place comes back by, and says, oh, nobody came for that? And I say no, it's very strange, nobody seems to know just who that belongs to. And he says hmm, that's a shame, and I say yeah, yeah it is. And he says, well, there's no point in letting it go to waste, and he doesn't need it, so maybe I should just go ahead and use it, you know, until the owner comes back. And I say, okay. And, of course, everybody knows exactly what's going on, and everybody _knows_ that everybody knows, but we still go through the whole ritual every time, because it just makes us all feel more relaxed about it, and it gives us all an excuse to socialize, and frankly, at this point, I think we all think it's funny.

So anyway, I've picked up some pretty useful things that way too. I've got this nice hooded robe that always seems to be pretty much warm and dry inside no matter what the weather, and these boots that stay dry too and don't make a sound, and this backpack that's a lot bigger on the inside than the outside -- that makes it a lot easier to bring the bulky stuff to market. And the interesting thing about it is, when you wear a druid's robe and a druid's boots and a druid's pack, and you're bringing druids' stuff to market, people sort of treat you like a druid, even when they know damn well that you're not. It's sort of druidism by association. So people in town just don't usually give me trouble, especially now that I've paid off the people I owed money to. And like I said, the man-eating beasties in the Forest pretty much leave me alone too. For someone who's kind of gotten used to, well, getting thrown out of places a lot, it's a pretty nice gig, actually.

So anyway, getting back to... ummmm...

Say, do you remember what I was talking about in the first place? I forgot.