Tarnethil
Tarnethil, the realm of the Court of Mist and Petrichor, is a land suspended in breathless stillness—forever caught in the hush that follows rainfall. Cloaked in a perpetual veil of silver-gray mist, the realm seems to dissolve at its edges, never fully revealing its borders. Trees rise from the fog like ancient sentinels, their bark slick with moisture and lichen, their branches hung with moss and dew-heavy leaves. Every surface glistens faintly with damp, and the scent of wet earth—rich, loamy, and oddly comforting—permeates the air. Here, the light is never direct; instead, it is diffused through layers of vapor, casting the world in a soft glow as though everything is seen through memory.
The land is a mixture of gentle wetlands, fern-choked woodlands, and sunken meadows where rain never quite finishes falling. Quiet brooks wind through beds of moss and stone, whispering soft secrets as they go, while still pools gather in natural hollows, reflecting sky and mist in equal measure. In some places, the ground is solid and springy beneath one’s feet; in others, it yields suddenly to marshes that bloom with ghostly white flowers and phosphorescent fungi. The very terrain seems to shift when unobserved—paths fade into nothing, streams change course, groves vanish into the fog. Orientation is fleeting here, and the realm favors those who drift rather than those who tread with purpose.
Above, the skies are a restless watercolor of pale blue, pearl, and lavender, constantly shifting with slow-moving clouds that seem to fall rather than float. Rain comes in many forms—sometimes in sudden, silver sheets, other times in soft drizzles that last for days. More often, it is not rain at all, but the presence of it: droplets suspended in air, never falling, simply hanging in a hush of gravity-defying reverence. The air is thick but not oppressive, and sound travels strangely—voices are dampened, while a single raindrop hitting a still pool might echo for miles.
Tarnethil is not a place of grandeur but of subtle power. Its beauty lies in what is hidden, what is waiting, what is remembered. Fey spirits drift through the fog, barely visible—tall, slow-moving silhouettes, or shapes that seem to shift when not looked at directly. Chancellor Eldrasveil and the lichen-covered Mossgrasp dwell within the Mistcourt Hollow, a translucent, cathedral-like canopy of living vines and fog-woven threads suspended between towering trees. It is said that if one waits long enough in the center of Tarnethil, the Shroud of Unnerving Mist may choose to manifest—but only as much as needed, never more.
Tarnethil is not meant to be known. It is a realm that exists between footsteps, between breaths, between thoughts—where nothing is permanent, but everything is profound. To walk through Tarnethil is to forget your own shape and name for a moment, and to hear the world exhale.
Geography
The geography of Tarnethil is subtle, fluid, and constantly shifting beneath its gauzy veil of mist. It rests in a shallow, bowl-like depression in the Feywild, ringed by low, forested ridgelines that fade into distant fogbanks. There are no mountains here, no sharp edges or sudden rises—only gentle swells of land draped in wet moss and old-growth trees with roots that drink deeply from the ever-present moisture in the soil. These trees—towering willows, silver birches, and ancient cypress—form a loose canopy above the realm, their limbs festooned with hanging mosses and glowing mushrooms that light the mists in pale blues and greens at night.
Much of the terrain is lowland marsh and rain-fed fen, broken by patches of firmer ground called hearth-isles, where the Court’s fey construct their temporary dwellings or plant enchanted groves. These isles shift subtly over time, as the ground swells and contracts with each new rainfall. Narrow, winding mistpaths—barely visible trails of firm footing—connect them across the soggy expanse, though many vanish if not walked regularly. Some areas become temporarily impassable as fog-thick bogs rise in their place, while others dry into echoing glades filled with the rustle of dew-slick leaves.
A network of stillwater pools and slow, meandering streams defines much of Tarnethil’s hydrology. These waters move so subtly that it’s often difficult to tell whether one is walking alongside a stream or simply a stretch of rain-soaked ground. The water is clear, cold, and sometimes impossibly deep in unexpected places. Rainfall is a constant presence—not always falling, but always remembered in the landscape, shaping shallow gullies, soft-edged terraces, and fern-covered embankments.
At the realm’s center lies Dwelmere Hollow, a vast basin filled with mirror-still water, surrounded by leaning trees that arch like bowed heads. It is here that the realm’s heaviest mists gather, and where the Shroud of Unnerving Mist is said to coalesce most often. Beneath the surface of Dwelmere, winding root-caverns and submerged ruins lie in silence, home to ancient secrets and slumbering things that breathe only fog.
Tarnethil’s geography is not static, but alive—dreamlike and melancholic, shaped by memory and mood. It is a land not to be charted, but felt; to map it is to misunderstand it, for Tarnethil reveals itself only to those who move slowly, listen carefully, and carry no certainty in their stride.
Climate
The climate of Tarnethil is one of perpetual dampness and gentle melancholy, as if the realm itself is caught forever in the hour after rainfall. The air hangs heavy with moisture, cool but not cold, and laden with the scent of moss, bark, and rain-slick stone. Rain falls often, though rarely in torrents—more commonly it arrives as a persistent drizzle, a drifting mist, or the soft hiss of droplets falling from leaf to leaf in an endless chain. Fog rises with each dawn and lingers long into the twilight, curling around trunks and across still waters like a living thing. Lightning and thunder are foreign here; instead, Tarnethil breathes in sighs and silence. The seasons do not shift with temperature, but with subtleties of rainfall: the golden mists of early spring, the warm rain-haze of midsummer, the cold, clinging fogs of autumn, and the thin, brittle dew of winter that coats everything in a sheen of silver sorrow.
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