Magical Forest

He is woven from the thicket itself. From the smell of moss after rain, from the warmth of a rotting stump, from that particular silence that exists only deep in the forest in the middle of the night. This Fluffy keeps old books and even older secrets. A mandrake that smells of rain and ancient earth always sits beside him. And in his paw, a caring owl holds a vial of moss potion.

Roses bloom on his antlers — the very first ones, the most tender, the ones that appear before all others when the forest hasn't yet decided whether to wake for good. Every spring he emerges from his secret place with little bottles in which something magical swirls, brewed from the first morning mist, from the smell of wet leaves under snow, from that particular silence that lives in the forest between the last frost and the first flower.

He appears where books have waited too long — in forgotten libraries, on dusty attics, in houses where no one has read aloud for a long time. The antler branches on his head grew with every page read. They say the candle on his staff was lit by the first fire by which the oldest of his books was written. And the rustle of pages in a quiet room is perhaps simply him, turning something important very close by.

He grew from an old stump at the crossroads of three paths — where the forest thinks especially long and especially quietly. His spring-thicket-coloured eyes glow from within, as if a small forest flame slumbers in each. The branches on his head remember the names of all the trees that are no longer there, and the black cat at his paws is the only creature in the forest that knows all his secrets — and conceals them so convincingly that even the mist learns the art from him.

He was born the night the last star of the old sky fell — and while everyone slept, he caught its shard and wove it into his staff, and now it glows with mysterious light in the dark. His black fur holds the scent of a storm and old ink, the branches on his head remember all the forests that ever rustled under the night sky, and the book in his paws never closes. Because the story he is reading never ends.

No one knows exactly what he brews in his small red teapot, but the scent drifts through the whole forest on the darkest evenings: mushroomy, spicy, faintly intoxicating, like a dream on the border of waking. He lives where fly agarics grow especially thick and especially beautiful. Among white spots and red caps, with curling antlers and shaggy ginger fur, together with his favourite fly agaric mushroom, he awaits the guests who have wandered a little further into the forest than they intended.