Once upon a time on a great far-away island there lived a boy named Adrian. It was a large island, and a very old island. It was the kind of island that people told bedtime stories about to their children and grandchildren. Those children and grandchildren would listen with wide eyes, amazed at what they heard. This is one of those stories.

Adrian was 4 years old, the youngest of three brothers. He had blondish-brown hair, blue eyes, and generally dirty fingernails. Since he was much younger than his brothers and couldn’t do the heavy chores on the farm, he often spent his days playing alone. He would  wander across the farm catching bugs or would run along the banks of the creek looking for frogs and snakes. On other days he would fritter his time away in the barn among the dusty bales of hay and secret corners of the loft, finding good places to nap or run his toy tractors along the old rafters. Sometimes, when he had quite run out of ideas, he would leap from haystack to haystack, pretending the floor was molten lava.

Now the farm was large enough that Adrian could play all day and never quite travel all of it. But there were some playtime rules. He was not allowed across the street, or across the driveway, or onto the neighbor’s farm next door. And he most certainly, most definitely, and double bubble emphatically was not permitted to cross the old wooden bridge which led to the wild grass field and the Dark Forest.

His mother had told him stories of the dangers in the wild grass field and in the Dark Forest. She told him over and over that many adventurers had traveled across the field and into the forest and were never heard from again. But what she didn’t know was that each time she told him these stories, it made him want to visit the Forest all the more. You can’t tell a playful little boy about the dangers of a place without expecting him to think about those dangers, and what it might be like to discover more about those dangers. And so it happened that one day, after playing his heart out that Adrian began to think about The Dark Forest, and he found himself walking in the direction of the Old Wooden Bridge.