V. What Lives There

The Witchwoods are not empty. The Book of Unseen Currents describes them as a place where fae and spirits grieve, and this is confirmed by every account of the forest’s inhabitants. But grieving fae and spirits are not what most travelers expect to find, and the nature of their grief is not what most travelers expect grief to look like. What they grieve, most of them, is resolved belonging: they exist at the threshold-consensus’s boundary between states, and that position, while it offers a specific freedom, also forecloses the certainty of being fully in either world.

The Fey that inhabit the Witchwoods are not court Fey, not members of any Revel or Seasonal Court in any active sense, though some of them were once. They are Fey who have come to the threshold and remained, and what they share, beneath their otherwise various natures, is a relationship to the boundary itself that has become their primary orientation. Some came intentionally: seeking the specific quality of existence that only the boundary between states can provide, the freedom from commitment to either waking or dreaming that the Witchwoods offer to those who stop trying to pass through and simply inhabit instead. Some came in the way that the forest draws travelers deeper and found themselves unable or unwilling to resist the pull of a place that was, in some fundamental sense, what they had always been looking for.

The spirits are more varied: the remnants of dreamers whose connection to their dreaming selves became permanent rather than nightly, presences that formed from the accumulated weight of dreams that the boundary absorbed over its long existence, entities whose origin is genuinely uncertain even to those scholars who have spent the most time attempting to categorize them. The Witchwoods do not discriminate between these categories. It houses what comes to it.

These inhabitants are not hostile to travelers as a rule. They are occupied with whatever has occupied them since they arrived, which for many of them has been a very long time, and a passing traveler is simply an event in an existence that has had many events. Some will communicate, and these communications are often the most informative accounts of the Witchwoods that exist, because entities that have lived at the threshold for centuries understand the threshold in ways that visiting scholars do not. Some will not communicate, and their silence is neither threatening nor welcoming but simply what it is: the preference of something that stopped being interested in the concerns of passing travelers long before the traveler was born.

There are also things in the Witchwoods that are neither Fey nor spirit nor any category that maps cleanly onto existing taxonomies. The Witchwoods have been the boundary between waking and dreaming since before those categories had names, and what arises from that position across that span of time does not always conform to any framework that was developed after the fact.