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The Feywild

The Feywild, classified as echo of the Material Plane by the Faculty of Metaphysics, but given many other names and descriptions by countless poets, travelers, scholars, and storytellers, is a land of magic and emotion, a place of contrasts and mystery where the truth is rarely what it seems. Countless legends, songs, and whispered tales speak of fleeting, or not-so-fleeting, encounters with its strange, beautiful, and dangerous denizens, only a small handful of which are recorded here. While scholars debate the exact nature of the Feywild, its undeniable presence permeates the arts, folklore, and even the politics of Taelgar.

Beneath the Boughs, one of the many sonnets written by Thomas Hawke

Beneath the boughs where twilight shadows play,

The fey spin bright, their songs a siren’s call.
Through glens of gold and meadows wrapped in gray,
Their laughter weaves a spell to bind us all.

The shifting woods bewitch all guiding light,
As time dissolves within this haunted glade.
No dawn will break to end eternal night,
Where bargains made demand the price be paid.

Fair beauty shrouds the thorn and hides the snare,
With shimmering hues that veil a darker scheme.
Beware, O heart, for wonder masks despair,
And joy dissolves like mist within a dream.

‘Neath shadowed skies, the endless whispers weave,
The mournful songs of those who cannot leave.

Travel in the Feywild

The Feywild is a place of contradictions, where even the most basic truths seem malleable. While many accounts agree that its geography loosely mirrors the Material Plane—mountains reflecting mountains, rivers matching rivers—there are just as many tales of travelers finding verdant forests where deserts should be or endless fields of flowers in the midst of barren plains. The elven poet Elenwen wrote that “the Feywild shapes itself to memory and dream, not to logic or law,” and some travelers have speculated that geography in the Feywild may, at times, reflect what once was, or even what will be, on the Material Plane, not what is now.

Time and Space

No one who has ventured to the Feywild could fail to notice that time does not move as it does on the Material Plane. The sun does not cross the sky: instead, the time of day seems to be associated with location. Numerous Tyrwinghan poems and legends describe the perpetual twilight of the court of the Archfey Ethlenn, where the sun has forever just set. Even stranger is the physical structure of the sunset made solid, on the western edge of the Green Sea, as described by Calenya of Orenlas:

Amber strokes alight,
on sunset’s blazing crystals—
colors breathing life.
Yet hidden cracks bend time’s path,
to where all moments lose their grasp.

West of the Sunset Gate, the sky gets brighter and brighter, until as some point one must reach the light of perpetual dawn, while east of the Sunset Gate, the light dims past twilight to the darkest midnight.

Many stories tell of the disorientation that the confounding of time and space causes. Some tales speak travelers losing their sense of time altogether, with days passing in what feels like moments or weeks shrinking into hours. A typical example comes from the tragedy A Court of Whispers, which tells the tale of Avim of Cedrano, who found himself in a strange fey court, lit by the warm afternoon sun, full of games of chance and rare delicacies. Thinking to spend only a few moments sampling the pleasures, Avim leaves after an afternoon of games, only to find that ten years have passed in Cedrano. In contrast, the letters of Saria, conjurer of Cymea, speak of a year of study in the Feywild that seemed to last only an evening, for when she returned the sun had not yet risen on the night of her departure.

While endless scholarly words have been written dissecting these tales, and the strange fact that dawn in the Feywild is in the direction of sunset in the Material Plane, perhaps the best advice for travelers remains the Tyrwinghan proverb: “Where the sun stands still, the hours are fickle friends—take no second for granted, nor any year for lost.”

Portals to the Feywild

Of all the planes, it is undeniable that the Feywild is the easiest for a traveler from the Material Plane to reach. In some places, the walls between the worlds are so thin that hapless travelers may find themselves carelessly wandering into the Feywild; often such places are marked with warnings to the unwary. Elsewhere, gates between the Feywild and the Material Plane are marked by unusual geography or incongruous features, and often only open at specific times or under particular circumstances. The Golden Door, for example, is said to appear only to those who chance favors, and never quite in the same place twice: in the villages and towns along the ancient road that follows the north bank of the Yeraad, tales abound of the lucky at cards vanishing for a night, or a year, when – and if – they return claiming to have followed a golden shimmering light in the dark to a court endless games in an eternal spring afternoon.

Nonetheless, despite extensive catalogs, the rules that govern connections to the Feywild have eluded all scholarly categorization.

People of the Feywild

The denizens of the Feywild, often collectively called the fey, are as varied as the realm they inhabit, their presence inspiring awe and trepidation in equal measure. Most striking are the elegant and graceful creatures known simply as fae, often mistaken for elves or humans, but distinguished by their luminous eyes and unearthly poise. Mischievous fairies, such as pixies, sprites, and brownies, flit through stories of pranks and magical interventions, while the horned satyrs, embodying the wild vitality of their home, are renowned as the masters of revelry, mischief, and sometimes wisdom.

As diverse as the fey are the stories about them and their interactions with the natives of the Material Plane. The classic Chardonian ballad, the Curse of the Thorned Feast, often sung as a cautionary tale, speaks of the wandering warrior who dined eagerly in a dryad’s grove, failing to offer thanks or recompense, only to find himself bound to serve the forest for a hundred and one years. And a famous scene in A Fool’s Fortune depicts the tragi-comic hero, Estelis, bargaining with a pixie, who offers the seeds of vast riches for a mere trifle of gems. Of course, as the audience knows, the seeds of vast riches grow into flowers, and fey bargains, while never broken, are often not as they seem. Yet not all tales are cautionary examples: Light of the Everglade, an elven epic poem, speaks of the bard Laurlinde whose silver voice and noble demeanor won her a boon from a mysterious archfey called the Queen of Sunset.

Archfey and Fey Realms

No discussion of the Feywild would be complete without a mention of the endless tales of the masters and rulers of the Feywild, the archfey. The archfey, it is said, are as varied and diverse as the fey themselves, and carry the power to shape the realms in which they dwell in their own image. Few encounter these powerful beings, and none encounter them unchanged.