Thinking back on my years at The Administration and the events that occurred and that I witnessed in The Forest, new fragments of memories have recently come to my recollection. What exactly did I see in The Forest? I met three forest witches. But you never know who you’ll meet in The Forest. I witnessed the destruction of villages and the eradication of acres of landscape, a Forest bog that looked like a factory of living things, scientists enveloped in yellow fog... Experiments, destruction, collapse... But these are my words, my concepts... Now I know that even the destruction of the villages wasn’t destruction—it was The Surpassment. Or at least that's what the villagers called it. But I don’t know what The Surpassment is. I’m afraid of it, I’m disgusted by it, but that’s merely because it’s alien to me. I've tried many times to define it and this is all I could come up with: “a masterful, highly organized, carefully crafted offensive by the present on the past,” or maybe better even “a recently matured and invigorated present attacking an obsolete, rotting past.” Not depravity but a revolution. A law of nature. A law that I’m watching from the outside with the biased eyes of a stranger—a stranger who doesn’t understand a thing, and for that very reason imagines that he understands everything and has the right to judge.

My brain has long been overgrown with Forest and I still don't understand a thing. But what is certain to me is that I can feel The Surpassment, and I know it's still coming...

Signing off,
Candide.