The Wild Hunt of the Thornwood

The Doornwoud closes behind you, and the trees stand nearer than they did a moment ago. Leaves drift through slanting light, thorns snatch at your clothes as if the forest wants to hold you, and in the distance a hunting horn sounds that no one seems to blow. Every night a spectral procession hunts here, the Wilde Jacht, chasing a quarry through the undergrowth, and every morning someone is missing.

The Jacht is led by an armored rider, once a mortal huntmaster who defied the forest and its guardian spirit with such arrogance that he was cursed to hunt forever. His pack of shadow-hounds and ghost riders knows no rest; they must scent blood every night, and whoever gets lost in the forest becomes the game. Tonight the horn has already caught your scent.

This is an adventure of flight and cunning. You run through a forest that rearranges itself, seek hiding places that hold for only a moment, lay trails and traps, and discover as you go the old rules of the Jacht, because the Jacht plays by a pact, and pacts have loopholes. A battered forester who barely survived the previous night can tell you what the Jacht may and may not do.

Then it turns out De Spookruiter van de Wilde Jacht hunts not out of malice but because he is trapped in his own curse, high on a shadow-steed with the horn to his lips and a pack of translucent hounds about his legs. The curse breaks only by fulfilling one of three old rules: defeat the rider in a fair hunt, wrest his stolen horn from him, or offer him a quarry he cannot catch. To reach the morning you must stop fleeing and make De Spookruiter himself the quarry. The climax plays out in the thorny clearing where the Jacht always ends, with the pack at your heels and the dawn as the only safe harbor.