Lyeet Seasonal Forest

Place

Place Name:

Lyeet Seasonal Forest

Biome:

Seasonal Forest

Size:

Unknown

Continent:

Unknown

Subcontinent

Unknown

Geography

Like most other forests that kin’toni have taken over, Lyeet is filled with traps. So watch your step when entering, as well as your head, and your seat, and your armrest. Wouldn’t want to get knocked out by some kind of rope or poison trap now, would we?

Fortunately, so long as you keep an eye on the sun, it’s pretty simple to keep your sense of direction whilst traveling through Lyeet. There are fairly large gaps between the trees and the air isn’t stuffy. There are plenty of paths, though most of them either lead nowhere, or in circles. There are also plenty of streams, easily crossed and probably safe to drink from.

The most striking thing about Lyeet is its varying elevation. The hills roll up and down — though never forming inclines too steep to climb without aid — and trees cover most of them. The highest point in Lyeet, called the Spire, is the exception to both the rule of steepness and the rule of trees. It is extremely steep and has no trees. But when you climb to the top, you can see quite a far way into the neighbouring lands. The Torust kin’toni have secured some very powerful binoculars during their adventures over all Taerel, and often spy on their neighbours from up here. They’ve left a rope here, so that climbing is easier and less likely to send you falling to your death at the base of the Spire.

The lowest point in Lyeet, by contrast, is basically unremarkable. It’s just a depression in a valley, a depression full of water — well, the valley is also full of water, so perhaps it’s a little remarkable. If you want to visit the lowest point of Lyeet, bring your diving equipment, because this particular lake, the Valley Lake, is quite deep.

The Torust village is a simple place, though you’ll have a hard time finding it if you don’t know where it is. The one aspect in which the village is not simple is in its concealment. The houses are made out of trees, branches, vines, and foliage, in an effort to keep the place well hidden. They’ve succeeded; more zu’aan than one have walked straight through the village without realizing it existed.

The Caves — that’s all they’re called, just the Caves — are where the imprisoned, incapacitated, knocked out, dead, or otherwise stored zu’aan are kept. The Caves are some distance away from the Torust village. The entrance to these caves is barred, guarded, and secured with a pair of huge oaken doors. Inside and past the entrance is a simple network of caves. It’s unknown if the imprisoned zu’aan within the caves have any sort of society — whether there are those who take care of the injured, men who protect the women, men who prey on the women, men who bribe other men, men who hoard the food that the guards bring in every few days — the Torust don’t really care, so long as they don’t start killing each other off in large quantities. When they sell zu’aan to other kin’toni clans, they let the emissaries come in and have their pick. Then they leave. It’s not a particularly pleasant place, even for a kin’toni.

Plants

The high priestis a bit of a joke. Originally, the name of this tree was ‘high perist’, named after the high heights at which this particular kind of Perist tree liked to grow, but after some visitors heard and repeated the name incorrectly, the high priest stuck as the name for the tree, and you can still hear kin’toni snickering about that joke when you ask about the tree. And in accordance with the joke, the ‘low perist’ tree had to be renamed to the acolyte tree. This also brings forth some chuckles when referred to, though not as many. Now for some details about both these trees, once referred to as Perists.

Like the high priests of the nearest zu’aan villages, who tend to stand in high places and utter nonsense, pretending that they’re forming coherent words in a coherent language and pretending that they’re completely sober, high priest trees stand in high places with their branches uplifted. If the wind’s blowing, their leaves catch the wind, and make a wailing, whistling, babbling sound, not unlike the babbling of a man who’s had a good deal too much to drink within the past two hours. The reason that these trees grow in only high elevations is because they need as much sun as they can get and as windy an atmosphere as they can get.

Their trunks need a lot of energy to grow properly, as do their roots — high priestwood is valued for its sheer weight — it’s so dense that it doesn’t float. But how do the seeds of the high priest trees manage to get planted in high places? Well… mostly, they get lucky. Saplings a couple years old either die off or become somewhat similar to acolyte trees if they’re planted in the wrong spots. Those seeds planted in the right spots, however, will suddenly slow down their growth and suddenly become a lot heavier — sometimes so heavy that they cause the cliffs they grow on to collapse.

acolyte trees, once called low perists for a reason, are very similar to the high priest trees. They have the same distinctive leaves as the high priest trees, and will also wail, whistle, and babble if wind passes through them, but they won’t cry out for long, because their leaves are not quite so tightly attached to their branches. They also grow in low places, where it’s not quite so windy. There are other similarities between these two trees, such as the unusual vibrant yellow that both trees turn in the autumn, but these similarities are mostly visual.

Other similarities are scarce. The wood of acolyte trees is not nearly as heavy as the wood of high priest trees and is a more respectable and useful building material. The seeds of acolyte trees are quite happy to plant themselves in the high places, and to grow there, even if their progress is slow because their leaves keep getting blown off before their time. And they don’t coax quite the same laugh out of the Torusts.

Animals

Lyeet’s animals are typically not that swift, since speed is of somewhat limited use in its hilly terrain. Flying animals are the natural exceptions; some of Taerel’s fastest birds can be found living here. The karash is a fierce predatory bird with dull red wings and dark grey bodies, preying on the animals that just can’t climb hills fast enough no matter how fast they are. In harsher times, karashes have been known to attack even large beasts, zu’aan, and kin’toni, despite their losing odds — food won at the cost of some injuries is better than no food at all, since the latter comes at the cost of death by starvation.

A karash is a force to be reckoned with if you get attacked by one with the element of surprise on its side. They’ve got extremely sharp talons and beaks, as well as sharp feathers. The sharp feathers are the especially dangerous part since they’re the especially surprising part. The average wanderer in Lyeet isn’t going to know that you’re probably only going to get your hand chopped off by razor-sharp wings if you try to remove this bird that’s suddenly appeared on your neck and is slashing at your head, trying to crack your skull or sever your spine.

The proper way to deal with this is to bat the bird off with a weapon or a stick, before either finishing it off as it lies surprised on the ground, or finishing it off as it soars in for a direct attack. The improper way is to reach backwards with an unarmoured hand, and lose a couple of fingers before you lose your life. karash’s are perfectly harmless if you carry bags with meat in them, though. The karash will smell the meat and go after that instead of you, and you can strike them down at your leisure. karash feathers make good fletching for arrows, due to their size, weight, and stiffness.

But you just have to make sure you cut off the sharp bits before you put them on your arrows, lest you injure your fingers when trying to draw an arrow from your quiver at a critical moment in the heat of the battle. The other lightning-quick bird in Lyeet is the archerriqui. Unlike the karash, the archerriqui is a songbird that eats seeds. They’ll happily rob your garden and then sing you a song to apologie. Most people (generally not kin’toni) are fine with losing a couple of tomatoes if it means they get archerriqui songs sung in their backyard. These songs are in a class of their own when it comes to birdsong.

Archerriquis have dull brown and grey markings on their backs, but have extremely bright blue stomachs. The undersides of their wings are also the same bright blue. They are very small and very clever — they know traps when they see them and know to avoid them. If you bait your trap with the finest kind of birdseed, archerriquis will often find ways of getting around the trap, just to examine the seed. Even if you poison the seed itself, they’re too smart to be fooled by such a simple ploy as poison.

Historical Timeline of Ages

Age Name	Dates	Controller
Stone Age	Before 1E 0	Unknown
Copper Age	1E 1–1E 2200	Unknown
Bronze Age	1E 2200–1E 4400	Unknown
Iron Age	2E 0–2E 700	Unknown
Ancient Age	2E 700–2E 2200	Unknown
Middle Age	3E 0–3E 2050	Unknown
Early Modern Age	3E 2050–3E 2600	Unknown
Industrial Age	3E 2600–3E 2700	Unknown
Machine Age	3E 2700–3E 2800	Unknown
Atomic Age	3E 2800–3E 2850	Unknown
Space Age	3E 2850–3E 2875	Unknown
Information Age	3E 2875–3E 2900	Unknown
Genetic Age	3E 2950–3E 3000	Unknown
Awakening Age	3E 3000–3E 3415	Unknown
Twilight Age	4E 0–4E 500	Torust Kin'toni Clan

Place

Unknown Unknown Unknown Unknown

Lyeet Seasonal Forest

Unknown Unknown Unknown Unknown

This article is written by Xerxes Worldweaver. Copyright 2026 Xerxes Worldweaver. All rights reserved.