#summerlands

WE HAVE WON AND THE DECAYING LEAVES PLAY THEIR TRIUMPHANT TUNE

(his regular deer-headed depiction was a little dopey and didn't translate well to Heroforge, so I found a different one that was better. 😅)

Heath is enjoying himself on stage 😊

Sunlight filtered in through the darkness as if it were merely dense storm clouds. They were nearing the edge of the Summerlands. Ardri had at last fallen to the back of the group, no longer having the heart to keep asking the King of Summer questions when they were so obviously painful. Andy had taken the opportunity to ask questions of his own, comparing what he remembered of Faerie Folklore to what he learned from the King. At the moment they were discussing the topic of Sympathetic Magic and the King was looking far happier than he had before. Oliver on the other hand was beginning to look quite bored and had fallen back to walk with Sam and Ardri, and after listening to the scholarly conversation for a bit, Ellie had joined them with an equally bored expression. “What is the matter?” Ardri asked Oliver with a teasing smile. “Not enjoying your first visit to a Faerie country?” Oliver scowled and mumbled something about it being too dark to see anything. and what was the point anyway? Ardri laughed at him. “Come now, don’t be like that. It isn’t the best our world has to offer, but this emptiness only lies upon the Summerlands, once we are beyond the border you shall see what the Deep Woods is really like. See? Look there, I can see a bit of the sky!” They all stared at the place where a little hint of blue was just visible and Ellie offered that she though she could see what might be part of a cloud. After a moment Sam turned back to Ardri. “You said the Deep Woods like it was a name. What do you mean?” Ardri blinked at him in confusion, hadn’t he already explained this on the first day of meeting them? “Well,” he said, trying to think of the clearest way to define what the Deep Woods were. “You have a normal forest in your world. The trees are young and the forest itself is finite. It has a clear end and a beginning. You might run into wild animals or find a few strange plants, but its very rare to find something that doesn’t challenge the way most humans see the world.” “But in Faerie things are a bit different. Here the forests are all one. An endless ocean of trees that stretches past every horizon. It’s so big that it covers most of our world, adapting to different climates and geography yet still connected to the whole. The trees are old and remember much that is nearly forgotten, and things that are strange or frightening even to us lurk in the deepest glens. There are many peoples who make their homes here as well, and the Seasonal Courts hold some of the biggest lands under their rule. But unlike human forests, even where the Deep Wood ends...it doesn’t always. It’s sort of like a sea with high and low tides. Sometimes the edge extends further and reaches places you would never expect, other times it retreats and reveals things long thought lost. It even intrudes upon the human world sometimes. Connecting to ordinary forests, deep caves under the earth, dark alleys in cities, and other far stranger places you might never expect to suddenly find a forest.” They hung upon his words with fascination. Oliver opened his mouth, no doubt to ask a question about how the woods could intrude on places like cities when it wasn’t even next to a human city but in a different world, when Ellie interrupted. “Look!” she cried. They all looked in the direction she was pointing excitedly, even Andy and the King paused in their conversation to see what was happening. At the very edge of the Summerlands the void and darkness that crushed against the world was not endless, and now they were close enough to see what lay beyond. Through the gloom Sam, Andy, and Oliver caught their first glimpse at one of Faerie’s wonders. A mountain rose before them, its peaks reaching towards the endless blue of the sky, and its base greener than anything they could ever remember from home. There was a kind of path that they could see led up into the heights, and little structures, almost like shrines, were built along the road as it wound up into the clouds that drifted among the peaks and vanished from sight.

Me: WAKE SKADI!

Summerlands, Australia