Silverleaf Forest
The Silverleaf Forest, which the elves name Nimthalas, "the silver-leaf," is an ancient elven wood on the western shore of the Galek Sea, in the heart of Gallorea. It is one of the last woods on the continent where elves still keep their homes, and one of the loveliest: a place of pale leaves and silver light, ringed on every side by the lands of men, Euboros and the Hills of Mathon to the north, Balasa to the east, and Feldosha to the southwest. Those men know it mostly from a distance, and mostly by its shining. Few have ever gone in, and fewer still have been welcomed.
Name
The forest takes its common name from its leaves, which are green above and silver beneath, so that any wind turns the whole canopy to a rippling sheet of pale light. By day it is beautiful; by night, when the moon rises over the Galek Sea and its light comes off the water into the trees, the entire wood is said to shimmer like a second sea, silver upon silver, until it is hard to say where the water ends and the forest begins.
The elves call it Nimthalas, and this too means the silver-leaf, though in their sung tongue the true name runs far longer and is never spoken to outsiders in full. What the wandering folk of the human lands know as "Nimthalas" is only the barest fragment of it, the way Elsh'Akal is only a fragment of Elven: enough for a stranger to point to the place, and nothing of what the place means to those who named it.
The Elven Remnant
The Silverleaf is not a young wood, nor a whole one. It is what remains of a far greater elven realm that once spread across the heart of Gallorea, a kingdom now so long fallen that the elves who keep the forest will not speak its name, and turn away from any who ask. What is left is a remnant and a memorial: the elves of Nimthalas tend it not as a home so much as a grave they will not leave, guarding the last green of a country the world has otherwise forgotten.
They are few, and they are withdrawn even by the measure of their kind. Most of the humans who ring the wood have never seen one, and a good many hold the elves of the Silverleaf to be a legend, a story told to explain the shining and the silence and the way travelers who enter uninvited are so seldom seen again. The elves do nothing to correct the belief. A people mistaken for a myth are left alone, and being left alone is nearly all they ask.
The Fringes
Where the Silverleaf meets the fields of men, the border blurs. In the marches between the wood and the human kingdoms there are villages of half-elves, born of the rare meetings of the two peoples, who live as the half-elven so often do: belonging fully to neither side, trusted fully by neither, and keeping to the threshold-country that is the only place that will have them. They are the forest's one open face, the go-betweens through whom what little trade or word passes between Nimthalas and the outer world must go. The full elves within tolerate them; the humans without distrust them; and they endure, as they always have.
Rumors and Legends
- That on certain nights the elves of the Silverleaf sing the Mourning-song for their lost kingdom, and that a human who hears it entire will weep without knowing why for the rest of his life, grieving a country that was never his.
- That the silver shimmer is not the leaves at all but the light of the vanished realm, still shining up out of the ground where it fell, and visible only because the wood has never let it die.
- That the elves will abandon Nimthalas only when the last of them can no longer bear to guard the grave of their kingdom, and that on the day the Silverleaf goes dark, something long kept sleeping beneath it will be free to wake.
See also:
| This page has been identified as needing a map for clarity. |
| This article is part of the Player's Guide to Gallorea | |
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Introduction · Economics and Trade · Legends and History · Religion · Regions and Realms |
