The Dragonstone

CHAPTER 15

Bounded on the north by the River Rissanin, on the east by the plains of Riamon, on the south by the Glave Hills, and on the west by the broad Argon and a portion of the Great Escarpment, there lies a vast timberland stretching some seven hundred miles in length and two hundred in width. It is the Greatwood, one of the mightiest forests in all of Mithgar.

In this woodland dwells the race of men known as the Baeron. Huge they are, the males growing to six feet ten or more, the females to six feet six. And like their kindred in the Great Greenhall to the north, they revere and husband the land and all it brings.

In the Greatwood, too, it is rumored that Hidden Ones dwell, yet this forest does not have the warded air of Blackwood, Darda Erynian, the Great Greenhall. If Hidden Ones dwell within, they signal it not.

In the midst of the northern half of the Greatwood there exists an immense area where only grass grows; trees encroach not upon this mighty meadow, some eighty miles by forty. It is simply called The Clearing, and here it is that the Baeron gather the week preceding and following each Mid-Year's Day to sing of the deeds of their kindred and to seek wives or husbands. These are powerful days of kinship and courtship and celebration, there in The Clearing, and when they are over, the Baeron men and women, some newly mated, fade back into these wide woods, returning unto scattered thorps or to isolated dwellings…

… there in the vast Greatwood.