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The dark is different now.

The darkness itself hasn't changed, but I have. Acclimated, perhaps.

When I first stepped into it, it was more than consuming. It was crushing and suffocating—and I felt its weight press down on me like a thick, woollen blanket draped over my shoulders. I felt it lick and lash at me. Nothing playful in that sensation, it was a threat.

Now, I see the haunting beauty in it.

A stroll beyond the battle blocks, down the trail that leads through the woods to the town, there's a glade I found.

But it's the tree I took a fancy to.

I visit it this Warmth.

In the Warmth, I find it's more docile than in the middle of the phase or in the dead of the Quiet.

Back home, willows are my favourites. I befriended most of them, the ones near my home at least.

I don't dare get close enough to this forest tree to even attempt to befriend it—or to figure out what sort of tree it is.

It belongs to the darkness.

Sitting on the mossy slope, I watch it. Those golden gleams that are dusted over the forest floor, fallen leaves that—though dead—illuminate the thick darkness that should be all this land is, and yet it's so much more. I watch the flickering green glow of the moss crawling and curving all over the roots of the tree that have punched their way up from the earth; the bioluminescence of the pale blue worms that slick their way up the trunk to the thick branches, thicker than a dark male's muscular body. Then I look up, all the way at the thick bush of the leaves above—

The Gilded Glade.

Named, I should think, because of the light of aureate fruits that hang too low on the branches, or maybe after the specks of gold glitter—that I think the wind must have carried in—that dusts all over the foliage.

Gilded.

And I think it's all so beautiful that it must be magickal.

The tree is not the only source of soothing light in and around the glade. It's every tree, every fallen leaf, every worm that dusts an ambient light over the forest so that I—a light halfling—could walk the woods with sight.

Before I ever came to the Midlands, I only ever imagined the darkness to be a cold and hollow thing. An air that killed all that dared live. I imagined the fruit to be, not rotten, but dead, withered, like the roses in my bedchamber at home. I thought of the grey, weathered and skeletal appearance of the kelpies I saw sketched into parchment before I ever came here, and supposed that all beasts here looked starved and sickly and grim.

But as I sit here on the moss of the hill, I realize it's not a dead world—it's just a dark one. And there is light to illuminate it.

I watch a perfectly plump and healthy rodent bounce along the forest floor. My knowledge of the darkness's creatures is limited, but I think it's a voder by the pale grey hue of its thick fur.

At the root of the tree, it crouches down and lifts its bottom into the air—then starts to burrow.

It doesn't see me… or if it does, it's like the beasts in my lands, largely unfazed by my presence, a litalf, a female, a kindness—and I am in no mood to harm it.

I let it find a new burrow, a new home, unbothered.

Then it's gone, and I'm alone again in the moody light of the forest.

The more I stay in the dark, the better I see the beauty…

Somehow, it welcomes me now.

Sometimes, I might like to stay.