Medellwyn
Shrouded footsteps, shrouded eyes. Under our fingers, your footsteps lie. Gushing river, flowing falls. Set free your soul, give us your all. Lilting laughs, watchful whispers. You know her face, but you've never met her. Set foot in our forest, lay hand on our trees. Be one with the garden, for you will never now leave.The forest of Medellwyn is a sweeping fey forest that looms at the border of Llithirhos in the First World. It is an area strictly forbidden to mortals without fey accompaniment, which strikes many an adventurer as odd - usually, the fey are happy to let them meander wherever they please.
SIghtful Path by Hanhula (via Midjourney)
The few fools who decide to test their delightful hosts' patience by entering Medellwyn alone soon learn the very important lesson of listening. It is a pity they learn it so late. Too late.
Medellwyn is also known as the Reaping Woods to the fey who flit around its edges, fearful to delve further within. Even to those native to the lands of the fey, it is a place of fear. No wisdom comes to those who seek answers in its twisting leaves, no strength is offered to the feyfolk who roam in its grasp.
By the words of Llithirhos's citizenry: it is a cursed forest despite its vibrancy, and the only ones to benefit from its touch are those who lose something they may never get back.
Fey lands are ever chaotic in what they hold. Those risking a venture towards even the edges of Medellwyn must remember that they cannot expect the flora, fauna, or even geography to match their expectations or beliefs. A forest can be a forest, but so too can it be wide open lakes or deep underground caverns.
Geography
A compass to guide you, magic to hide you. Our roots to touch you, smell you. Our hands to hold you, find you.It is usual for the unusual to be true in the First World. Medellwyn is an expansive forest without standard borders, for it does not understand the concept of an ending. The only reason the forest has yet to swallow Llithirhos is that Llithirhos itself refuses to be swallowed; the two realms are locked into an embrace, this way.
Travelling through Medellwyn will take any wayward wanderer past expansive lakes flowing in reverse, up hills and through valleys. It will lead them through twisting woods that end upon floating islands, where the forest spreads up into the sky as well as across the ground below.
Mazelike, its paths turn in on themselves, ever leading somewhere new and potentially untouched.
Much has been lost within Medellwyn's leafy maw. As one walks, their chance of running into ancient steles bearing warnings for travellers, lost visitors from millennia long past, or long-abandoned treasure left behind by a long-lost adventurer increases - as does their chance of being found by something else. If they are lucky, the trees will hold something peaceful.
If they are not?
Well. There's a reason the fey warn visitors about the forest.
Glittering Reaches by Hanhula (via Midjourney)
Localized Phenomena
A whisper of heart, a glimmer of hate. Lay down your burdens, embrace your sweet fate.The forests of Medellwyn are continuously cradled in the embrace of strange magics. Colourful mists, often soporific in nature, drift peacefully through the brilliant blue trees and dancing vines, bringing with them a haze of slumber. Day and night are concepts that do not exist in the First World. Above Medellwyn, though, the sky shifts into jewel-tones and fills with drifting planet-like shapes that may yet be glimpses to other worlds - or perhaps they're just illusions crafted by the forest's will. Beyond the usual strangeness, though, Medellwyn holds a multitude of secrets - some far greater in magnitude. The first of these secrets, you already know, even if you haven't quite noticed yet. Medellwyn is fully intelligent - and not in the manner of an avatar, not alone. The forest's sentience is magnificent yet cruel, powerful yet precious. It whispers to those that set foot in its borders, and teases them ever further into its embrace.
Reaper of the Woods by Hanhula (via Midjourney)
It is not exaggerating in the slightest to say that the reason Medellwyn keeps so many of its visitors is because the forest itself decides to keep them. It is a possessive beast, the forest.
Those that harm it meet with its anger made manifest as shadowed beasts, twisting roots, and cruel hosts of horrors that snap at the ankles its victims with bone-chilling hallucinations, with the cold grasp of death.
Those that embrace the forest instead find their joy matched beat-for-beat as the forest entwines itself around them, granting their every wish as it bends their wishes to be its own.
It does not kill those it claims, not usually. Like many fey beings, the forest finds little joy in murder. Those that earn its ire are typically kept on the brink until they can be twisted into something more useful. Only the most egregious of sins earns death from the forest itself, though it cares not if its broken pets are slain by new blood.
Their memories become their cradle, reflected from their minds - the forest's mind - on their surrounds as their comforts are melded to the forest they shall dwell forevermore in. The forest soothes them, settles them. Gradually, with each passing breath, nothing beyond Medellwyn matters anymore.
The form those embraced by Medellwyn take in the end varies. Some become dryads, living embodiments of their former selves now so thoroughly bound to the forest that their bodies become as trees. Some take root in their blessed cradles and grow as trees, their minds melding to the forest itself and becoming part of the greater whole.
Some are reborn entirely, sacrificing the last remnants of their former selves to allow the forest to make anew their souls - perhaps as animals or guards, as flowers or fruit, or as new fey that shall serve.
Yet Medellwyn's sentience is far from its biggest secret.
Belonging by Hanhula (via Midjourney)
The Grove at the Centre|Medellwyn
Close your eyes and still your heart, for this is where the shadows start. Know your place and hide your pain, for you too shall witness blighted shame.Mortals have developed, over the years, a fluctuating interest in forleidine, a green viscous substance originating from Medellwyn. It is produced only at the heart of the forest, where none can find without the forest guiding them to it. The forest's beloved fey-children cannot harvest it themselves - the forest cannot touch it.
Blood of the Unseen by Hanhula (via Midjourney)
For at the centre of the forest, in a grove scarred bitter-black, there stands the being-beyond-sight: Yr un Anweledig, as the fey call them. What this being is, the forest has never revealed. They exist in this grove shattered across the reflections of the plane, visible-but-not in every turn.
From that which weeps from them, an awful liquid of shimmering gold that bends reality around it into mirrors upon mirrors, forleidine can be made.
The rite of creating forleidine is too sacred, too secret for these pages. Yet the forest seems to consider it important - outsiders are ushered into its grasp to brew it, and oddly, may leave again once it is done. Whether it shares the material or not seems to be chance, but it does mark those that enter with an odd brand.
Mortals living with the brand describe odd dreams and memories not their own. They do not notice any other effects. Their dreams have always been so verdant, you see.
Medellwyn Paths by Hanhula (via Midjourney)
Etymology
We depart from the realm of fantasy for a moment, here. The forest's name is actually in Welsh, a language most often used to represent facets of Elven and Sylvan. Medel is used more often in the sense of mowing or cutting farmland than the more deadly sense the fey imply, and llwyn, is a toponymic fragment in Welsh, used in placenames like Llwyncelyn, Tŷ-llwyn, and Llwyn-yr-hwrdd. Its sister-neighbour city of Llithirhos also uses a Welsh name to connect the two together: it compounds llithio and the toponymic suffix of rhos. By contrast, the toxic material forleidine that originates in Medellwyn has roots in Old Saxon to mark a distinction from most fey material. It derives from the Old Saxon term farledian.The forest is not merciless. If you need to leave - for the sake of others, especially - it can be convinced. You just have to be aware of that. That doesn't mean it won't keep an eye on you. When you've become the forest's, it will always want you back.
Skies of Medellwyn by Hanhula (via Midjourney)
I didn't realise it was the sort of fey forest that keeps you! I wouldn't have taken that damn quest otherwise! You think it'll let me out to go turn in the quest?
Reaping Woods
Despite its title as the reaping woods, Medellwyn has no known association with the realm of death. The name itself is assumed to derive from the bloody fate its woodland guardians carve into those seeking to harm it. Many myths abound of the shadowed tree behemoths dragging scythes of lethal chill behind them, haunting the borders of Llithirhos and the nightmares of mortal children alike.
Coming Home by Hanhula (via Midjourney)
It is always the fey, always! Han the rhymes from the forest, they are eerie as *** and yet beautiful, you've done it again you eldritch creature you! I can hear it, the tempo the whispering leaves as if a voice all around, inviting yet threatening, calm yet with power beyond my comprehension. It is beyond mortal, beyond immortal, this.....intelligence seeming collective and yet....not a hive mind so much as a unified deep and ancient consciousness from time long forgotten. Perhaps even from before the concepts of time began. Its eerie and strange, foreign and twisted, and yet... Yet one cannot help but be enthralled. Be drawn in, pulled to the mystery, to the unknown and unknowable, to not just listen, but perhaps even answer, a thing most dangerous. After all, the forest, it speaks to those whom can listen......would it not be rude to ignore and not respond?? I adore this piece you keep doing this my goodness. I simply must add it to the collection! I shall simply have to build a display chamber just for the delights and joys Istralar itself has provided me, such is what we are coming too! <3 Tis an amazing piece, one of my favorites I've read thus far!