every moment marked with apparitions of your soul

You gotta love product placement. This was taken at Trap, part of the Deviant Kitties store-set, during their skin sale. (If you don't get why it's funny, click for the larger picture and look for the thing that says Bare Rose.)

Last night, Miss Subversive Vavoom invited us on a self-guided tour of the new sim for Brythony, Brythony Caer Llyr. All lands, she said, were ours to wander, but the ones to the east, as she did not know that neighbor well. And we did our best to hold to that guide, and mark no place permanently, and leave as quietly as we had come.



Brythony slept when we arrived, but such magic came through the sleeping soil as to refresh my fae self entire. Feral wild magics guide this isle, for all they've been contained and, to an extent, controlled. Thatched-roof cottages, low hedge walls, Celtic knotwork wrought in wood and green...t'is a lovely place, indeed.



Near the base of a large spreading willow, we found a grouping of singing mushrooms, their green radiance lovely to my eyes. I had not, I admit, seen such a wonder since leaving Lumindor, and the first sithen. I could not but help imagining how my Queen would fare in these lands. Such rich food after so long privation...and how would our sithen change and grow?

I pondered such things as we wandered.



For a moment, I stopped breathing, power in these stones sweeping over me in a wave. Little enough, they slept dormant as well, but it had been so long disconnected from any place of power...

Of course a storyteller lived near to this place. When he does not relate tales and legends at the Falling Anvil in New Babbage, Mr. Gilbert Sapwood recites myth and myth-made-real at these stones. We dropped coin in his cup and moved on.

We passed a low fence of stone and iron, staying well back, pausing to be amused by a squirrel eating acorns. I looked for oaks, saw none, and looked down in time to see the wee one snatch another acorn out of air. Oh, wild and feral magics indeed, wild and feral land, and such beauty in the green...Fern-bedecked and glorious. This was what my heart had been needing to heal.



We passed an odd place. It looked like the fencing for a sheep paddock, or something similar, but all it held was a hill, and mist, and fish and ducks swimming through the mist. The mist was solid enough to stand on.

We stood there, speaking quietly in the gloaming, until the Queen's Consort jumped the fence. That quick, she was back, sitting astride the fence as if naught were wrong, but she was breathing oddly. Fawkes decided to risk it out of curiosity, and jumped the fence as well. The mist held, but the koi swimming through it surged, and I watched as normal grace and skill left the hands I knew as they scrabbled to pull their owner to safety.

Miss Neome and I looked at each other.

"Vicious, man-eating koi," I said solemnly. She nodded.

"Could be worse," she replied. "Could have been vicious man-eating monks." I nodded at that.

We turned and walked away.



Our circuitous path took us across a wide and empty field that swallowed me entire for a long moment. I came up, gasping and spitting earth, to find my companions leagues away. I called out to them, and they came forward as I walked back, and together we meandered back to where the magics were somewhat more controlled. Dandelions sprang up in our wake, the seeds blowing in cascading waves through the nightspawned wind.



We spent the rest of our hours by the pond with much calmer koi, watching the dandelions spawn and puff, fade and spawn again. Fertile magics indeed.

My verdict, after our night of wandering? I think Brythony will pair wonderfully with Winterfell, and with those parts of Caledon that embrace the night as well as the day. I'm not sure all residents will find such enchanted lands to their liking. Magic and science are uneasy partners, after all.