We head north out of Haven, intending on making for Elden Root and completely failing to remember to ask for directions first. I’m going to need to remember to buy another map.

As we’re traveling along the road, a wood elf man intercepts us, wanting a word with us before we enter his village.

“Village?” I ask. “Is this Elden Root?”

He chuckles. “No, I’m afraid you must have taken a wrong turn, travelers. This is the forest of Brackenleaf, one of the oldest trees of Grahtwood. I am Eringor, of Brackenleaf’s Briars.”

“Is that like a local guild or something?” I ask.

“A guild?” Eringor repeats. “I guess you could call it something like that. We are elite hunters and protectors of the forest.”

“Can I join?” I wonder.

“Why do you always have to join everything?” Merry mumbles. “You joined both the Fighters and Mages Guilds even though you can barely do magic. At least they’re likely to be less insane than the Undaunted, I suppose.”

Eringor talks about how joining is a difficult trial but I’d receive blessings of some sort while traveling in Grahtwood if I were to successfully join.

“It seems the thing to do, doesn’t it, Merry?” Eran says. “We just arrived in Valenwood and have no idea what’s going on, so naturally we’ve got to get acquainted with things, make ourselves at home, run headlong into every stupid thing we come across, right?”

“You’ve been traveling with Neri for too long,” Merry says.

Eringor dubiously directs us to speak with someone named Glaras if we’re serious, and then proceeds to not give directions to find this person, perhaps hoping we’ll just go away instead.

We head into the village, and I get my first good look at what wood elven architecture is really like. To say they live in trees is completely missing the point. There’s nothing natural about the pod-like buildings they live in aside from having been grown from plants. They remind me somewhat of the Telvanni mushroom buildings, although more along the plant side of that than fungus. There are holes in each building framed by large bones, some of them covered in leather ‘doors’, and oval amber windows dotting the sides. Although there’s some stonework on the ground, almost everything that doesn’t look like it was grown from a plant is made of bone and leather.

My companions and I split up to explore the town. I find a book laying on the ground titled Aurbic Enigma 4: The Elden Tree, and excitedly scoop it up. Somebody more interested in Aurbic enigmas than me is going to love this! Let me tell you, mythic lore makes my head spin sometimes. Skimming it does at least give me a chance to figure out how to spell the name of that stupid red diamond drop of blood of the Heart of Lorkhan thing the Ayleids had: Chim el-Adabal.

Near some sort of altar, I run across a man playing a flute, who happily gives us directions to find Glaras. If you can call “head up to the top of the tree” directions, at any rate. And I’d been so busy running around on the ground that I’d walked past a ramp leading upward five times. I come across Merry browsing a potion shop.

“Oh, there you are, Neri,” he says. “If you’re finished exploring the town, Eran and Ilara already went upstairs. Well. Upramp, I suppose. They were eager to get started, but I will not be participating in this venture.”

“Okay, great,” I say, and hand him the *Aurbic Enigma *book. “Could you read this and tell me if there’s anything important in it, then?”

Merry takes the book and raises an eyebrow. “Do you consider the nature of the cosmos to be important?”

“Maybe I should say ‘relevant’…”

He hands the book back. “You know what, joining these Briars sounds like a splendid idea after all.”

I toss the book back into my pack, and we head up the ramp. The room at the top, where Eran and Ilara are (along with a couple of wood elves), contains a number of stone altars painted with red markings resembling vines, or veins. Red markings on Bosmer architecture look considerably less threatening than Daedric ones.

“Merry, decided to come along after all?” Eran asks.

“Neri threatened to make me read a book about Tower lore if I didn’t,” Merry says.

“This promises to be much more interesting,” Eran says. “Glaras here,” he gestures to the woman, “has been telling us… well, mostly about old hunts, but now that you guys are here, maybe she’ll actually tell us what we’re supposed to be doing to join.”

“We aren’t really planning to be staying in this town for very long,” Merry says.

“That’s quite alright,” Glaras says. “You’re travelers and we’d hardly expect you to stay here all the time. You’d miss out on all the hunting out in the world, after all. It’s good to see that our taller and furrier cousins wish to honor our traditions and give respect to Brackenleaf, though.”

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

She starts telling us about some trials we will need to undergo, something about an outsider trying to steal the heart of the tree, which all sounds very symbolic but who knows. She won’t tell us any details about that yet, instead instructing us to visit some shrines and listen to some masters and heed their wisdom.

You’d think having wandered all over town, I would know where these shrines are by now. Fortunately, the village isn’t particularly large and they’re difficult to miss if you’re paying attention. I am always incredibly attentive.

The three shrines are based on various animals. The sneaky snake, the ferocious tiger, and the wolf who hunts in a pack. We’ll have to choose which totem (I guess they’re totems?) to represent, and after some consultation with one another, we decide we’ll go with the obvious one, the wolf.

And then Glaras tells us that we need to go eat a hallucinogenic frog.

“A frog?” Merry says. “Really?”

Glaras grins. “Too fancy for eating frogs, high elf?”

“No, I’ve consumed plenty of stranger alchemical reagents,” Merry says. “I mean, does it still need to be alive? And do we each need to eat an entire frog?”

Glaras laughs. “It just has to be fresh. It doesn’t need to still be wriggling. But you’re each gonna need your own frog, and you’ve got to eat the entire thing.”

We head off into a forest chock full of giant wasps, thunder bugs, and walking plant things. There’s a cave not too far from the village, full of frogs. Normal sized frogs, not giant frogs. Are there giant frogs somewhere? And for some reason, there’s another book about the Ayleids laying on the floor of the cave. Naturally, we are able to immediately capture the frogs without any great effort, and don’t wind up soaked and muddy in the aftermath.

Yeah, we totally wind up soaked and muddy. Merry’s cleaning spells are better than mine, at least.

Once we’re momentarily clean again, Merry inspects his own frog. “The things I do…”

“Are you reconsidering Aurbic Enigma yet?” I ask.

“No, not really,” Merry says. “We might as well all do this if we’re doing this, right? Are we all doing this?”

“Ilara is doing this.”

“I didn’t muck around catching frogs for nothing,” Eran says.

“Alright!” I say with a grin. “Time to get high for the second time in two days.”

We eat our frogs, and the world goes woogly. A plant woman spirit thing comes and speaks to us, telling us not to be afraid. She–I guess it’s a she? The voice sounds feminine but it’s not like those are actual breasts or anything…

“Excuse me,” I say. “Are you a she, or a he, or an it or they?”

The spriggan makes an amused noise. “You may refer to me as ‘she’. And you may refer to Brackenleaf as ‘he’. Not many think to ask. You must go and speak with him now.”

The forest outside the cave looks strange now. The sky is blurry and the creatures seem positively spectral. (They still attack us on sight, of course.) I wonder how I can tell which tree might be Brackenleaf, then realize it’s probably the big one with a face.

I come up under the huge wood nose. “Excuse me. Are you Brackenleaf?”

The slits that vaguely resemble eyes light up. Yep, this is Brackenleaf. Upon being told that we wish to join Brackenleaf’s Briars, he asks us why.

“Why not?” I say.

“It sounds like it would be quite the experience,” Eran says.

“This one wishes to test herself as a great hunter,” Ilara says.

“Because my companions decided to,” Merry adds with a broad shrug.

“Hah!” Brackenleaf replies. “You are a strange mix, but you lend one another your strengths and are stronger as a whole, yes?”

We speak of the spirit animals and the tree tells us to embody the wolf, we must go hunt a tiger. This naturally leads to quite a bit more trudging through mud. Maybe it sounds better to say we’re stalking through mud. That makes it sound more purposeful. Anyway, we eventually find and kill the spectral tiger that may or may not actually exist.

Then the spriggan lady shows up and tells us that we need to kill a snake, too. Mostly we’ve been proving adept at killing large numbers of giant wasps. So we slog through the mud some more to eventually find a wolf shrine, light it, and kill a spirit snake that shows up.

“You tired of mud yet, Merry?” Eran asks.

Merry sighs. “It’s fine. If this is what I can expect of Valenwood, I had best get used to it, as we are likely to be here for a while.”

“Probably until we solve absolutely every problem we stumble across,” Eran says.

“It is a nice place,” Ilara says. “It was a nice place when Ilara was not having visions, as well.”

We return to Brackenleaf, and there’s a wolf sitting at his roots who isn’t attacking us, just kind of chilling there. I guess this is also symbolic. He (the tree, that is, not the wolf) sends us on our last trial, which is to… defeat ourselves or something? This is getting a little unclear here. He sends us into his roots to fight the master Briars. The wolf comes along to fight with us.

I don’t want to kill them and I’m not even clear on how much of this is real and how much is just a shared hallucination. Fighting non-lethally is a lot harder than simply killing people, but we’re up for it. They’re probably going to have headaches later, if they’re even real. Dammit, Brackenleaf, if these are fake people, it would have been easier to just tell us that up front so we can go all out on them. Not that it matters too much as honestly they’re not even a match for us, so trying not to kill them is possibly the only handicap that makes it even slightly a fair fight.

Brackenleaf’s heart appears to be a fire, twirling about in shapes no normal fire would. We go up and touch it, one by one. It doesn’t burn, but instead we absorb it a bit like a Skyshard. Brackenleaf’s voice echoes through the chamber, that we now carry a piece of his heart within us, and he sends us out again.

Once outside again, the world has returned to its normal colors. Also, we’re immediately attacked by hoarvor, so thank you, Brackenleaf, for teleporting us into the middle of a bunch of hoarvor.

“That was really cool,” Ilara whispers once the bugs are dead and we’re slogging through mud to get back to the village.

We find Glaras when we’re back in town and speak with her for a bit.

“Are the masters okay?” Ilara asks.

“You didn’t actually fight the real masters,” Glaras says. “They were just illusions Brackenleaf summoned up to test you.”

I groan. “We were trying really hard not to hurt them too badly.”

Ilara grins. “It is fine. It was good practice.”

Glaras chuckles. “It speaks well of you that you would not wish to harm your allies even in a test.”

She directs us to go over and light the wolf brazier and we’ll be able to complete our initiation, so we do that. Consider ourselves fully initiated into Brackenleaf’s Briars, even if Merry still has no idea why we joined.