I can't even tell you how many things I am touching with palms lately, knuckles all sore from carrying these fists for all this time. Maybe it was the trees, sinking their calm and their quiet through my palms all summer while I was busy looking elsewhere. Maybe we've just followed the corpse candles all the way through to the other side of the swamp, and touching with palms is the reward for making it through the adventure almost entirely alive and intact. There are more swamps, of course, all laid out in a row and full of wolves and candy and shiny diamond monsters, but the point is that this one here has been crossed. The second rule of fairytales is to pause in your clearings whenever you find them, since there's no way back but forward.
