Hey, what’s in the Pacific Ocean?
I mean that sounds funny doesn’t it? There’s nothing in the Pacific Ocean. Not really, I mean, there are places like Macronesia and Aotearea and Hawaii and Samoa and Guam and Japan but those aren’t in the Pacific Ocean, even if they’re literally surrounded by it. There’s several mountains, there’s a seam where the ground is being made brand new, the Mariana Trench, the Tonga Trench, and the Phillipine Trench, to just mention ones I’m reasonably sure still exist since I was in high school. Despite the presence of people living in the space within the boundary declared as the edges of the Pacific Ocean, the Pacific Ocean has a population of close enough to zero as to make no difference.
We think of the Ocean this way for a reason, mostly because we can’t put anything there. If someone did build a city in the ocean somehow, all Bioshock Style, it wouldn’t work as a fill bucket tool, a sort of capture the flag rules set up of filling in all the ocean as their territory – it would just be another place which, probably, had territory extending out to the edges of what they’d built a bit, like any land mass has.
This is how the people of Cobrin’Seil think of the Corrindale Forest. It is not a place, of its own, and nor should it be considered as such. The southern parts of the Corrindale forest rest at the equator and lick warm sea coastline. The people of Kyranou see the Corrindale forest at the edges of land when they go fishing. The people of Dal Raeda’s northern borders can stand on the beach and look across the bay at the southernmost parts of Corrindale Forest. Slinging to the opposite side of the continent, though, the only thing that stops the Corrindale forest going north is the inevitable boundaries of frozen ground: The forest thins out as it creeps up mountains and then tumbles down the far side of the mountain into the region that you’d call ‘arctic.’
That is to say, in comparison to Earth, the Corrindale Forest in its entirety reaches from about Mexico to Nunavut.
The character and temper of the forest changes, along this vast spread. When you stand anywhere in the forest you might imagine what you see is entirely homogenous, vast trees that create a dark and silent cloak in their midst, but travel a few kilometers north or south and you find the foliage different, the wildlife different, but once agian, homogenous. The vastness of a forest of this ilk is hard to explain. People avoid going off paths and trails in the forest because it’s so big, and so deep, that it’s entirely possible to be completely lost just by the environment itself.
There are beasts in the Corrindale forests, but the forest is, itself, the great, oppressive vastness that’s most disquieting. As one floats in the ocean and sees the emerging shape of a vast banking whale, so too one can stand in the Corrindale forest, and see stretching out all around, trees, offset to one another so that there’s no way to see anywhere that you’re not seeing a tree, no single sliver of visual space that is not occupied by trees near or far, and that when something emerges from the greyness and the fogginess created by the canopy of the Corrindale forest, that you do not know how far or close it really is…
Nor how big.
The forest was once this vast because of nature alone; leave enough trees alone for long enough, before people existed, and you’d get something of this impressive breadth. Now the Corrindale Forest is a thing maintained. People peck at its borders, logging and deforming and changing its shape a little, but that’s done as an act of daring, knowing that the forest has people who live there who will retaliate. What’s more it’s not a given? You don’t know who or where or on what time scale. What space within Corrindale exists that is definitively not Corrindale is territory that was hard fought for and in some cases resultant of an actual treaty.
Sometimes, you chop down trees to expand your farmland and a bunch of elves come out of the forest to interrupt. Sometimes, you don’t get interrupted and a gang of kobolds show up a week later to let you know you’ve given the farmland to a dragon sleeping nearby. Sometimes, nothing happens at all. Sometimes, something old stirs in the dark, and the treeline is restored and expanded.
Corrindale is a forest but it’s a forest the way the Daintree is a forest, the way that The Deep Dark is a forest, the way that the Moon is an Ocean. There is something about the Corrindale Forest that represents a vastness, a terrifying, ancient, darkness, and a reminder that it was here before every city and, if it takes measures, it will be here after they have all fallen and their parasites and hosts both have all rotted away.
There are, within Corrindale Forest, a network of Elf communities sometimes glibly known as ‘Elvish nations,’ which is a bit like calling a treehouse a fortress. There are the Portal Pathways into the Manses of the Eladrin and down into the linked world of the Drow’s Dreaming Dark. There are orcish communities and there are several druidic orders. Thing is, for each of these though, none of them are wholly contained in the forest. They all reach out and across into other spaces, none of them are entirely contained.
There are cities and there are nations inside the Corrindale Forests’s boundaries. There’s the Wu Kan’s only city, the mountain transplanted by Sunmon Tzu, where if you look behind the waterfall you find a hoard of gold overseen by a horde of monkey people. But, like islands in an ocean, they are not ‘in’ the forest. Corrindale Forest has two long strips of the King’s Highway through it, linking all the Eresh territories within Corrindale Forest. Those strips represent the single largest work project that exists within the Forest, stretched from almost the Dal Raedan borderlands up to the snowy fortress city perched above the snowline. The Ragauzan who patrol it are borderline pagans. The Church Authorities of Olifar have demanded that Raguzans who patrol there be cycled back to more central locations for fear of creating hooting cults of people who wear antlers and imagine themselves as snakes.
Corrindale is a place, but it is a place like an ocean. It is a place for places to be in.