Oldryna Flowering Forest

Place

Place Name:

Oldryna Flowering Forest

Biome:

Flowering Forest

Size:

Unknown

Continent:

Unknown

Subcontinent

Unknown

Geography

The path to Oldryna is narrow and difficult to pass through. It runs through both a land of cliffs and a land of swamps, and is blocked in many places by enormous boulders, and in other places by large pools of murky water. These obstacles tend to discourage merely casual explorers from investigating the path to Oldryna. Seven-year-olds, however, are not merely casual explorers; a seven-year-old it was who first discovered Oldryna. Admittedly, he could sneak under and climb over some of the obstacles more difficult to pass around, where few others could.

When the princess was informed of the location of the flower forest, she had a proper path made so that she could get there more easily. This path has since deteriorated, but remnants of it still exist to guide the watchful eye towards the hidden forest. There are no other real ways into Oldryna, unless you’re a full-fledged mountain climber or a swamp diver: the forest is surrounded by cliffs and enormous rocks and mountains and filthy marshes, on all sides. The flowering forest itself has many cliffs and pools, but the cliffs are not nearly so difficult to climb as the mountains.

And the water of the pools is far cleaner than the water of the surrounding marshes. There are a lot more cliffs in the northern half of the forest than the southern half, but you can still find some in the southern half. But there’s a lot more water in the southern half, and a lot more pools and brooks and things like that. Some of the pools in Oldryna are even deep enough in certain places to take a proper swim. And some pools are heated by hot springs. Compared to the cliffs of the areas surrounding this forest, the cliffs of Oldryna are small and easy to climb.

Some of the cliffs are made out of a loose dirt held together by roots and grass — watch your step if you’re standing on the edge of one of these cliffs. Other cliffs are made out of more or less solid stone. While the stone cliffs aren’t nearly as dangerous, it’s more difficult to carve steps into them. What with all the water, cliffs, stones, and of course, the difficult entrance you have to pass through to get here to begin with, you’d expect the forest of Oldryna to be difficult to traverse once you actually got into it. As it turns out, it’s actually not too bad.

There are lots of fallen trees that haven’t rotted to nothing yet; these make outstanding natural bridges and staircases. There are lots of vines that are similar enough to ropes as well. The only difficult part about moving around in the flowering forest of Oldryna is leaving. Not only do you have the flowers just begging you to stay longer — the entrance to Oldryna is a lot more difficult to go backwards along than it is to go forwards. So be careful, or come prepared to stay a while.

Plants

There are tons of flowers in any flowering forest. Oldryna is no exception. There are flowers growing on the ground, and flowers growing on bushes, and flowers growing on trees, and flowers growing on vines, and even flowers growing on the water. The ground flowers are the most common, of course. That’s where flowers normally grow. They also grow year-round, with some sorts sprouting even in the winter. Most flowers common in other lands can also be found in Oldryna, but there are some flowers here that are only rarely found elsewhere:

In the spring, you have blue little flowers lining the bottoms of trees, called ako. They have five petals each and smell like wet sugar. In the summer there grow larger flowers known asnelra. These are massive flowers, scarlet at the base of their petals, and white everywhere else. (Kin’toni do not like eating asnelra, but can survive on them if they eat an immense amount.) In the autumn sprout the Paintgrasses, which are flowers that, while they appear to be colourful grasses, are actually long, colourful petals that grow off of a flower that grows extremely close to the ground.

In the winter, is when the dithri can be found. These peculiarly named flowers do actually look a little bit like small, brown hri when in full bloom. The flowers that grow on trees — well, first I better mention that there are a lot of cherry trees in Oldryna. That should give you some idea of the kind of colour the trees turn in the spring. Now imagine trees like cherry trees, except red and purple and yellow and blue and grey, instead of pink. With petals falling instead of leaves in the summer. The red petal trees are known as Lunams, the purple trees as ekural.

The yellow as ukeka, the blue as marra, and the grey as kerrta. The woods of all these trees have niche uses, but compared to other versatile woods, they’re just plainly and simply inferior to something like pine for almost all uses. The petal trees of the flowering forest are better left standing, since such trees generally look nicer standing on their feet than standing on their faces and trailing their colourful branches in the dirt. The vines that intertwine with the whole forest also grow flowers, and these are no less beautiful than any of the others.

There’s only one kind of vine that grows in Oldryna, and it has a tendency to strangle any other kind of vine that manages to make its way into the forest; this vine sprouts emerald flowers every winter. Pollinated flowers fall off and float away to some other place, where a new vine will hopefully start growing that spring. There are also flowers growing on the water — primarily ibi, but not exclusively ibi. There’s a kind of flower called the cachil which looks like a mushroom floating in the water, but is actually a sturdy bunch of petals, similar to a rose or a tulip.

Animals

Insects are abundant in Oldryna, trees are abundant in Oldryna, and predators are not abundant in Oldryna as they might be. So of course there’s going to be a lot of birds that make their homes here. Songbirds are especially prevalent. A forgotten legend says that if you listen to the birdsong of Oldryna at midnight, you can hear the voice of the princess singing with them. Another forgotten legend says that the birds will gather together and sing a symphony once in a blue moon. But now that the kin’tonis have arrived and taken their place in the flowering forest, the birds have begun to fall silent, and sing far less.

Occasionally, a rebel or two will whisper a melody or two, singing it back and forth if they’re sure that nobody’s listening. But even these rebels are growing rarer. It’s not likely that the birds will ever stop bringing beauty to Oldryna entirely, however, since they still build their nests out of fallen petals and faded flowers. You have a good chance of spotting one of these curious little constructions if you look up into a tree: they look like an infant got his hands on a paintbrush and three dozen different colours of paint. Truly, a riot of colour.

Birds nesting in Oldryna have one predator, and that predator is the jyricat. These little rodents are extremely skilled climbers: so skilled that they can climb just as well when they’re only using two of their clever little limbs to crawl along a branch or trunk. Their other two claws are holding a bird egg, of course. Birds do gang up on jyricats if they’re spotted, but this is seldom, because jyricats have chameleon fur, and can change their colour to match the flower petals that also make up a part of their diet. This colour change is most accurate when the jyricat has recently eaten petals of the colour it’s trying to change to.

(Not too recently, though. Between twelve and twenty-four hours seems to be the best time interval.) Jyracats dig themselves little burrows with their friends and mates, and have their offspring in these burrows. Nobody’s ever seen a baby jyracat (except perhaps the princess), but it’s conceivable that the little baby jyracats lined up in a row, huddling together, would be of different colours, like a little row of candies. Few other animals live in Oldryna, but the tidy little scavenger called the Polerum is worth some note. He digs holes and fills them back up again.

If he comes across the corpse of anything, he’ll take a nibble and bury the rest for later, or for never, if he forgets where he buried it. In either case, we can’t have great big smelly things like corpses marring the flower garden. Paylara also eat a lot of ira and as a result their white fur tends to gain a pinkish hue. paylara make good pets if you can catch one, which most people aren’t patient enough to do.

Place

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Oldryna Flowering Forest

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