They alighted upon a dais of blackest alabaster, an ancient forest unravelling around them like the skirts of a giantess of eld. Vegetation thick and incestous, it grew into itself and warped without rhyme or reason into spiral-like, malformed patterns. The green canopy was a veil of tangled-together roots, blanketing the sky above. The heavens beyond the wilds were the porphyric-aquamarine of a summer sunset, only penetrating the forest in vast light shafts through great circular breaches as if the maw of some great organism.

Feyries and wisps frolicked upon the trunks and flitted between moss-carpeted branches, tinkling with the sound of windchimes. Parasitic flowers grew from the boughs every which colour, running the gamut from tones that Baethen had the names for and those he didn’t.

Instead of the tableau inspiring calm and tranquillity, the cadre tensed, knowing better than to let their guards down within the Feywilds of Phantasmagoria. Where the Gallowswoods was a domain of quiet, lonesome dread, this place was one of hypnotic beauty belying hidden death. A single wrong step and they’d die, horrifically slowly, or worse, not at all.

The cadre switched to hand-signs for to speak within the vicinity of feyries was to risk becoming a bondsman for millenia in service to fickle masters whose desires and ire were impossible to discern through mortal sense alone.

<> Haviershan signed, his gestures short, clipped behind his back so that only they’d see the movements. Though it was doubtful that feyries could understand signed communication, it was best not to tempt Fate and Her literal flesh-and-blood children. <>

Off they went, into the green jungles of Phantasmagoria.

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The Field-Sergeant tapped intermittently on Baethen’s bare shoulders, the code one that the expedition members had practiced in the round before braving the Evergaol proper. They’d settled on a mixture of pauses, taps and holds, each combination of which meant a single Woeden rune-letter. With the use of two fingers, you could sign two runes at the same time to form an abbreviated word.

Each step within Phantasmagoria was a lesson in the pitfalls of complacency and in actual pitfalls. What was seemingly just more green bark was, in sooth, a highly dense veil of butterflies masquerading as such. At the bottom of these traps were vicious thorns that could impale a man from the nave to the chops, white bones strewn between the fine-tipped pillars. The underside of these butterflies was a lurid red like that of freshly spilt-blood and royal vermillion.

Baethen had been the first to trespass one of these feyry pits, grasping onto the walls by the skin of his teeth and the blade of his gladius. Long, scoric talons held him aloft in tandem, plunging deep into the greensap flesh of the hole’s smooth and slick walls. When the pit wavered, spasming no different than a wounded beast, Baethen got his wits about him and clawed his out, breathing heavily as he vaulted the lip of the fey machination.

After they put some distance between themselves and that particular trap, the cadre stopped for a moment to catch their breaths and settle their minds. They’d so far let Narancan and Baethen dictate where they’d venture, seeing as the Field-Sergeant was a veteran woodsman and navigator while the Footman was nigh indestructible to ambushes and traps.

Baethen didn’t remember signing up with the expedition as a meat-shield but he also wouldn’t complain much given he’d survived several acts of extreme bodily harm that would have left lesser men dead and wiser men without a scratch for they’d not throw themselves into the unknown in search of bounty.

<>

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They happened upon a great many bronze-skinned fruits throughout the stunds of silent marching. Narancan, seeing as he was the fastest and an avid scout, had taken to prospecting what these fruits were.

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Seeing as this was the Feywilds, they’d happen upon quite a few natural treasures and alchemical reagents. Haviershan had already collected hundreds of flowers into tiny glass ampoules that sealed themselves shut. After the Evergaol was conquered, it could be properly surveyed and exploited as a spawning ground of arcane resources that ranged the gamut from card-making and rune-branding materials to specialised spellcraft focuses and even familiars.

There was no ground in this incarnation of the Feywilds, only gargantuan boughs and root-mats which could tenuously support one’s weight. Narancan had to climb his way up half a trunk until he reached a parasitic tree that bore the copper-bronze fruit. These fruits grew only on these specific parasitic trees with golden flowers blossoming upon their deciduous ivory. The flowers were like eyes, blinking open and close as they seemed to track the cadre’s movements.

Narancan made a hasty retreat from the tree before it could react to his theft, sliding down the gargantuan trunk by use of his [Frostbitten-Fingers-of-the-Eiruenn]. When the Field-Sergeant reached the cadre and showed them what lay within the fruit, they all-but lost their minds.

The fruit parted into even sections like a pomegranate, but rather than seeds, there were copper-tokens within. Hundreds of them. A single fruit was the size of a melon or thereabouts the size of Baethen’s head.

He did not like the comparison he himself had wrought but that was easily ignored as the enormity of what they’d stumbled upon made itself known.

Copper-tokens—obols of Zartaxia—grew within fertile soil, found wherever there lay cradles of root. Bountiful harvests of this token happened whenever farmers took to reaping the fields ‘neath the morning-star Adhafera or the Braid. There were species of divine saplings—offshoots of Yggrdrazil—that also produced this token though it could also be made by one with the appropriate minting-card. The World-Root aspect was attributed primarily to Yurnmagog though it was tended to by Fata-Morgana and Zartaxia both; Fate and the Empress, respectively.

The parasitic saplings that gestated all throughout the Feywilds were miniature Yggrdrazils. Even a single branch of that ivory wood could be worth tens of thousands of copper-tokens. Staves and sword-handles wrought of worldroot were powerful focuses for the arcana and Baethen was about to get one for himself.

<> He signed to Haviershan.

<>

Though it doused his fires something fierce, Baethen did not argue. There was a very real danger of trespassing upon some ancient archfey writ that could spell their doom.

Narancan put the fruit on the root-mat ground and the cadre left it behind as they ventured forth once more.

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Three stunds of the clock later—just two stunds before they’d make camp—and night descended. It had nothing to do with time but rather distance; the more they walked in a certain direction, the more it darkened or lightened. The Captain had been the first to notice, seeing as he held the compass-clock and other instruments of calculus in hand.

The gargantuan light shafts were places where the ground gave way to a great and bottomless pit like that of Gehenna. They’d avoided them so far, seeing as these pits were natural obstacles to them in their current elevation within Phantasmagoria. However, the paths they’d braved so far, these like the beast-shod game trails of Eot, dried up one by one.

It was a subtle thing, corralling them towards a specific root-bridge that traversed the circular gap. On the other side was an altar-of-refuge, tantalising and like bait. With their current locale, darkness had staked claim to the sky; rather than this making sight difficult, the Feywild seemed to come alive in a manner it hadn’t before.

Phosphorescent moss lit up, mushroom-lanterns blossoming into being as great streamers of feyries flew through the air like painted wind. It was a dance of spirits, a Revelry of Phantasmagoria.

Their spines stiffened as they realised the danger. Revelries-of-Phantasmagoria were just as horrid and dreadful as Gehennic-conjunctions. Devils were wont to sow death and wanted nothing more than to eat your flesh before your very eyes; feyries were wont to bind others in their service and wanted so much worse.

The Feywilds had steered them towards the bridge so that they’d accept this poison gift and be under the hospitality of the feyries around them. There was no other choice but to brave it, the whispers of the Fifteenth Hand stoking their fears from remnant embers into fires of gibbering panic.

Devils did not manifest outside of an Evergaol.

But within?

Fair game.