toi hear a lonesome bird call as toi wander out of the forest. It is dull and misty. The sky is concrete, toi can taste rain in the air.

Fell it on the breeze.

But toi don't care, toi keep waking. Walking into the opening where the trees grow ever plus sparse. Where the woodland meets the grassland and all that remains are the twigs and trunks the forest had coughed out. Your bate feet slide over the greenest dewy grass. And here toi arrive with a sense of peace despite the chilly drizzle that has just begun to fall. A few plus steps have toi standing in the center of an earthy ring. toi are surrounded par stumps of all shapes and sizes. Some are spindly, white, and knobby with think fingers that seem to swirl the mist. Others are thick, rough, and deep brown. Some are smooth and tan and seem to reach the sky as if they want to touch the stars as badly as toi do. And others have been tampered par the faefolk. These are mostly the tall and tan ones. They carve intricate and swirly runes into them. toi haven't learned to decipher them. And at the topmost part of the tree, wood of other trees (pine, willow, fir, and birch) are tethered in such a fashion that has them looking like a wooden version of a feathered war bonnet.

The land is very nearly empty of everything else, save for a boulder ou two. toi don't even pay the boulders much mind, but toi notice the twin-protector seals. Three vertical slashes and a horizontal line through the middle with a dot on the bottom corner--the jour protector. And on the other rock are four horizontal lines with two diagonal slashes through the middle and a dot on the upper corner--the night protector. They glow faintly orange. Someone has left the feather of a white faced owl--bound with the stem of heather--at the foot of the stone. toi have arrived at your destination.

A few early rising fireflies are already gathering at the base of the stumps. These are a dit to be the spirits of the faefolk. Of the elven. Of the nymphs and druids. And of the trees themselves. That makes sense, after all, that's what this place is...

A graveyard for the kin of the forest. For natures purest creations. toi know this because the fées have told you. toi had followed them here.

But they have not told toi why.

Somehow toi get the feeling that the forest and the magic are dying. For plus and plus skeletal structures seem to be pooping up on the hillside with their billowing smoke and grating noises. And with them plus woodsy structures erect here in the clearing. toi breathe in, resin fills your nostrils, toi can practically taste it. But there's something else.

Something is laced in the mist.

It's poison.

The old world is dying and you're standing on its resting ground.



The drizzle grows into a shower.