The Pass

If tonight you told a visitor that not so long ago the Arma Mountains had burned, they would have laughed. 

There is only beauty here now, only wooden trellises arching over pathways, wound around with ivy. Only clearings that have been transformed to sculpture gardens, if only for a night, with marble as pale as the moon carved into strange and fanciful things. 

It is a little bit like a maze, in a way, though the paths are lit with fairy-lights that gleam at once softer and brighter than any firefly could. Tonight the forest could belong to the fae, for along with the beauty there is an air of mystery, too (though it never verges into danger). 

Where once there stood a wall there is now a living gallery: paintings on the stone, and mosaics of mica and ruby and silver, and thick ivy in weaving braids. It is all that remains of the Dragon-gate. 

There are a few secrets in these gardens (each of them somehow more than the last - more quiet, more lovely, more colorful, more strange). There are a few stories behind the sculptures, some depictions from Novian lore. Will you wander to find them? Or only to see where the twisting pathways and meandering gardens take you, below the whispering of the boughs?