>>5895686The two attendants assume <Free Movement> forms, as do you. Theirs are much more akin to their ‘normal’ elven forms than the goddess’, you note. With the characteristic ease with which one moves in this form—even greater ease and with greater speed, here on the moon—the three of you leap and bound in great bunny hops beyond Miannie’s city. Your destination is not a ‘sister-city’, though, but the outskirts of this one: the Moonwoods. You have heard legends of them ever since you were a child: allegedly, it is from these woods which the most majestic of fairy-creatures hail, and here where superior herbs for medicine and cuisine originate and are exemplified. You have heard them described as a great garden: the Gardens of the Gods, in fact!
And damn… They live up to the legend.
The first thing that strikes you is the sheer scale of everything. Human refer to the Sylvanwoods as lush and ancient, since they are never clear-cut for materials or farmland in the way that humans and short-folk do with their own territory. Here, though, it is clear that no tree has EVER been cut down, nor fallen to storm or sickness. Each tree is a giant, with rich, lustrous black bark and silvery leaves that sit still for lack of breeze. Fairy-lights akin to your own <Faerie Fire> float between them, bobbing and dipping on their own, sometimes flitting about as if at play; every now and again, you hear what sound like the giggles of children from them, and see little flickers of what you take for soul-stuff.
And then there are the ANIMALS! The Moonwoods are home to an impossible variety of truly fantastic beats. There are rabbits twice the size of men, for one thing, who rear like bears to nibble at the low-lying branches or prune hedges into flowing, organic masterpieces of abstract topiary. Birds flutter and fly in a thousand colours—a million!—sometimes with half the shades and hues you know of on a SINGLE specimen. Many are so translucent you could take them for glass constructs of impossible complexity, save for how organic their movement is. And even THEIR song is not as beautiful as the chirping chorus which emanates from the ponds and streams, which flow glowing with light and are home to flowing-finned fish and orchestras of small, beautiful little frogs smooth and wartless and seemingly content to gather and sing to one another, while clouds of butterflies form firework-like formations above them. They are watched by an audience of tiny—impossibly thin and dainty—deer… Like miniature versions of the one which was slain to bring Miannie down to Earth, and to allow you to come here.
