“Look, you’re out of your mind,” the Forest Mystic said when I told him what I intended to do. No one had ever climbed the mountain in the dead of winter. Between the ice and the rapidly changing weather, climbing the mountain at this time of year pretty much meant committing suicide. Well, damned if he didn’t pull it off, with a blinding white blizzard none the less.

Talk ran rampant about what it was he saw on the top of the mountain in that blizzard. He never said. But people saw something different in his eyes. Some called it a thousand yard stare shone in his eyes. Like he could look right into your eyes and see into your soul. It made people say, “he’s the one foretold, he’s the Mystic of Cascadial!!!”