The Wood · Land Two
the forest that remembers
Redwoods is the personal domain of Benjamin of the Beasts. This means the forest and the boy are the same — that when Benjamin is in balance, the forest is healthy, and when he is not, something called the Blight advances from the edges, eating at the green.
It is also a forest that has swallowed a 20th-century shopping mall whole. The mall is still there, visible in places, the bones of a different civilization subsumed into something older. Trees grow through what were once windows. The parking lot has become a clearing where strange things live.
Somewhere in the canopy, a 30-foot-tall being called the Entwife watches over what grows.
the war at the edges
Redwoods is in a constant, slow conflict between two forces: the Blight, which is mindless corruption, and the Wildwood, which is chaotic magical growth. Left to themselves, they struggle for territory across the forest’s seven key locations. The Dreamers’ choices determine which wins.
A Blight victory means the forest is lost — and so is Benjamin.
A Wildwood victory means Benjamin becomes something that is no longer quite Benjamin — the King in Green, or perhaps The World itself.
The middle path is harder to find and harder to hold. It always is.
what it feels like
Ancient and enormous. The specific silence of a forest that is aware of you. The sound of something enormous moving through trees three hundred feet away, not threatening, just present.
Benjamin hears the trees talking. The trees hear him back. This, he would tell you, is not unusual — it’s just that most people stopped listening.