Gutmansdottir, our resident expert on The Wild Wood that forms an impossibly large region of this Scottish Estate, has a new theory on what is and why it contains literally multitudes of very queer things from Herne the God of The Wood to whole communities that look a thousand years behind now. Her theory as given over a late evenings worth of summer ale is something she calls The Wood Between The Worlds.
She first noticed something wasn’t quite right late autumn afternoon, several years back when she heard a commotion headed towards her. For sometimes nothing was visible but then she saw a fox with a white blaze across her face running well ahead of a mounted hunter in leathers. What was really odd was that the box never attempted to lose the hunter but instead stopped when it looked like the hunter would lose the fox in the denser areas of the woods. She soon lose track of both of them and went back to cataloguing plants.
Winter that year fought a fascinating encounter that she and another staff member saw when they were skiing through another area of the wood after dark on a night when the Aurora Borealis was particularly bright. They had reached the top of a tall hill when they heard a fiddle playing a spritely tune that neither recognized. So they looked for the fiddler and found a being that looked almost human bout wasn’t when you saw her close him as her eyes had no irises and her ears were slightly pointed. Not like the Truebloods who live across the Border but definitely something akin to them. They listen to her for quite sometime before they continued on to home.
It took little time for her to realize that gross of all sorts were commonplace here and that none of them would harm mortals though each other was another as she had watched the two old kings fight for hours and rather brutally hacking away at each other. She noted that they were the only ghosts that was always there though not everyone could see them.
Gutmansdottir asked for another summer ale before continue on to tell the oddest tale of all. She’d been here long enough that she had an intuitive feel for the geography of the Wild Wood that allowed her to know where she was without thinking about it, so she was very surprised one evening (and yes, evenings were when things were out odd there) near summer solstice when she had no idea where she was. She looked around for something familiar but there was nothing at all.
Not even the trees were right as the season was clearly late fall and not the midsummer it was in her world. And once again, there was a female red fox with a white blazer across her face watching her as she had so many other times in her world. The fox looked at her and obviously wanted here to follow her which Gutmansdottir did which brought her back into her world.
She watched in amazement as the fox clearly turned into a red human with a silver streak through her short cut red hair. Dressed in a green skirt, she wore a circlet of silver around her head and her carriage was that of royalty, so Gutmansdottir bowed to her and our Summer Queen nodded to her in turn. Gutmansdottir left her standing there in the dying sun as she walked towards the Estate Building.
So the Wild Wood might truly be the Wood Between The Worlds.
