Eldamar

Eldamar is its forest. Nothing else inside it has ever been described. The trees are enormous and the vines above them weave a canopy dense enough that very little comes through it, so a good deal of the light on the forest floor is light the floor makes itself: the low plants there glow. Water comes down through the whole of it in falls. The air is heavy and does not dry, and behind everything is the noise of insects and birds, which does not stop either.

No capital has ever been named. No count of the people has been made; they are Hafuwë, fey, and others, with no number set against any of the three. The tongue is Bhaasha, with Kutā heard here and there, and Kutā belongs elsewhere to the gnolls and the Triaxians, neither of whom anything places in this forest.

The trees run out at the Saltmarch, and that is the one edge of Eldamar anybody in Idir can point to. No crown reaches the march at all.

What Comes Out of It

Eldamar exports nothing. There is no state here to trade, no port, no road built outward, and nobody in the forest selling anything to anyone. What leaves Eldamar leaves because somebody came and took it.

Plenty does leave. Darkwood grows here and nowhere else that has been named, and it moves south in shipments large enough to be bought in bulk: Phillipa takes hers at Momly, far up the caravan road in Vala, where a good share of what comes down from the forest arrives. Who fells it, and by what road it reaches the Vala, was never written down. The forest is the reason it is not: the wood is thick past ordinary reckoning and holds a little magic besides, so getting in and out of it is the whole difficulty, and the traffic that manages it is nobody’s official business.

Three other things trace back to the forest, and all three were met in Idir rather than in Eldamar. The Eldamar sequoia is a tree of centuries whose seeds will not open without fire, which is why a lone giant with no saplings under it is nothing strange; one of them stands over the Twisted Grove, and its twin grows up through the keep. The dryads are Fay of Eldamar, each bound to a particular oak that carries her markings, and while the tree lives she lives: the temple in the curse-keep beneath Haudh-Gwenn, with its oak and its light-crystal standing in for the sun, seems to have been built to hold one. And the hags of the night are Eldamar’s own tale, of fae who ate souls until they were no longer fae.

Wood, a tree, a bound spirit and a story. None of it came south with anybody who had been there.