The Thornwood
The Thornwood is the vast, ancient forest against Westmarch's western wall. For three hundred years the Pact has kept the city out of it and it out of the city: no logging past the old Border Stones that mark the forest's edge, no hunting in the deep woods, and a cleared strip called the Green Belt kept safe between the trees and the wall. The Rangers of the Green walk that line; the Delver's Guild works the near forest under licence.
That was the arrangement. Lately monsters cross the Green Belt where they should not, the mist comes over the wall, and the party has walked far enough into the trees to learn that the forest is a great deal older and stranger than the Pact admits. What the party now understands about why is on The Pact and the Stones.
The Singing Pools
Fey water, three days' march in, kept by Lady Oona and guarded on the approach by the redcap Riven-Vow. The party came for Source Stone, which lies at the bottom of the Pools, and paid Oona's price to get it — Kaelen took on the Sorrow of the Forest. Whoever drinks is shown things: Kaelen was shown the Duke on his knees before a great stone, afraid, speaking of the Great Vow and the lost South Stone. The Fey here believe the Greenwood Pact holds "an imbalance in the bargain," and they know more than they are permitted to say.
Harrow Keep
A ruined fortress deep in the forest — broken walls, a rusted portcullis, a dry well, and a great tree filling the courtyard. It fell during the Green War, and by the party's day it was held by the Poison Scale kobolds, who worship the dragon Verdanthis and believed she laired there. She did not. She had left the Tess-Kydra in the kobolds' charge and gone elsewhere.
The party took the keep, killed Chief Scris, and recovered the Tess-Kydra. In a locked chest they also found the thing that unmade the official history: a letter by Commander Edric Harrow, written in the year 941, admitting the keep never defeated the forest but was forced into a secret treaty to survive — and that Harrow hid the truth so the crown would believe the war was won. And they found a ranger's medallion that had belonged to Mira's lost mentor, Edran Holloway — which raised, for Kaelen, the question of how many senior rangers have walked into this forest and never come out.
The river road
Celindara lies on the Westrun — the same river that runs through Westmarch — a long way up it. The Archdruid's directions were one sentence: follow the river, and keep right at both forks. The party did, on foot, and it took nine days.
| Day | Where |
|---|---|
| 1 | The near woods, the familiar road toward the Singing Pools |
| 2 | The first fork, forty miles out. The left branch runs to the Pools. Keep right |
| 3 | The knight's ground. A knight of the fey court stepped out of the trees here and granted passage under the Pact, with a warning |
| 4 | The old ford. A paved road once crossed the river here; a troll lives in the water and takes a toll in food. The second fork is just beyond. Keep right. That night, three awakened trees attacked the camp |
| 5 | A slow side-stream with crocodiles on it, far from any water that should hold them |
| 6 | Traveler's Rest — an elven waystation in a hill (below) |
| 7 | Light woods and rolling hills. Celindara sighted across a bend in the river |
The forest past the first fork is deeper, darker and more awake than anything near the city. It has pickets: the trees that walked into the camp on the fourth night, and the larger thing whose tracks the party has been following ever since. Food runs short out here — a troll's toll, bad foraging and failed hunts have kept the party hungry — and there is nothing past the first fork that will come to anyone's rescue.
Traveler's Rest. A day short of the city, a hill by the river that is too regular to be a hill, with a stone door in its side carved with worn elven knotwork. Kaelen asked it in Elvish whether they might enter, and it opened. Inside is one room of fitted stone with a hearth that lights when asked and goes out when asked, and a calm that settles on anyone who steps through the door. Nothing came near the party all night. Quill's magic says the whole structure is warded. The party named it, and will use it again on the road home.
Celindara — the swallowed city
An elven city and a seat of great learning that the Thornwood swallowed whole during the Green War. It is where the Tess-Kydra — the vessel that mends the stones — was made. The Duke will not stake the city's survival on a single artifact, and the party's commission is to bring back either a second vessel or the method of making one.
They reached it on the evening of Budding 17th, 1247. It is the size of Westmarch.
What it looks like. A cliff of pale stone on the north bank of a great bend in the Westrun, inside the bend, rising above rolling hills and light woodland. Terraces are cut into the cliff face — doorways, windows, paths — and trees and vines grow out of all of them. A road climbs the cliff in five switchbacks from a paved ford that still has the stone posts of a ferry. On the clifftop, elven spires and buildings broken through by trees, and at the centre a ring of seven towers, most with their tops fallen in. The city once stood on both banks; the south bank is ruined walls, and it is where Kaelen built his haven.
The arch. Where the road leaves the water on the north bank it passes under a stone arch inscribed in Elvish: No false word passes this line. The party walked under it without testing it. Something on the clifftop later told them, in so many words, that stated things bind on this ground.
The terraces. The houses are cut from the cliff's own white stone, and most are homes. Every doorway has a lintel carved with two words in Vethara, the language of magic: Here, rest. Where the lintel is whole, the house is only a ruin. Where roots have broken it — about one house in six — the house is cold, and sorrowful, and the dead in it are no longer at rest: shadows come off the walls. Quill repaired one broken lintel by filling the crack with ice and cutting the words back into it, and the house went quiet for as long as the ice lasted. One such house gave up a hundred bars of gold stamped with the city's mark and a three-hundred-year-old ledger, The Measure of the Westrun. Something that slithers uses these houses; the party has seen its marks in the dust, days old, and not the thing itself.
The clifftop. A straight road of big cut stones runs a quarter of a mile from the cliff edge to an open court and the towers. The city is circular, laid out in spokes and ring roads around that court. In the dirt on the road: kobold tracks, the tracks of a cat the size of a lion, and the tracks of the big tree-thing, all within the week.
Who is there. Something flies into the towers — man-sized or bigger, seen once at half a mile. Kobolds, by their tracks. A large cat. Something that slithers. Something with heavy feet and an Elvish voice that holds the city and lets the party stay. See The People for what little the party knows of it.
The city's mark is seven towers in a ring around a square, joined by a line. Quill knows from his reading that the square is called the Answering Stone, and nothing else about it.
What else moves in the deep
The Poison Scale. Kobolds who worship Verdanthis, hunt the deep forest, and are forever at war with the gnolls — "dog men" — over its ground. Weak one at a time, dangerous in numbers, and fielding their own spellcasters and poisoners. Scattered now, since Harrow Keep.
Awakened trees. Trees that walk, with eyes that burn green. Three of them attacked the camp on the fourth night out and very nearly killed Quill; the party burned, froze, shot and mocked them to pieces, and they fell apart into sticks and logs. Larger tracks of the same kind lead up and down the switchbacks at Celindara.
The knight of the court. The deep forest is patrolled. Three days up the Westrun a knight in green-and-gold armour stopped the party, demanded its business under the Pact, and let it pass with a promise to be watching. The Pact, whatever else it is, binds the forest's side too, and somebody out there enforces it.
The mist. Not confined to the forest any more. It came over the wall into the Greenmark and woke a warded park into something that attacked a market — the same motes of light the party saw in the Warrens, drifting in and turning green things hostile. Mending the Warren Stone stopped it there. The wider problem has not gone away.