She has for some reason landed in an insultingly picturesque forest clearing. Late afternoon sunlight slants through the trees, illuminating moss, leaves, scattered twigs, stunningly beautiful wildflowers, and a hoppable little stream that sparkles its way through the whole scene like a dropped ribbon snaking across the sewing table.

Annaveth honestly doesn't even know how to react to this. Is this witchcraft? Has she been drugged and kidnapped and transported to the most bizarre hideaway of all time? What kind of political motivations would lead to that? Is the Outsider screwing with her?

She stands and peers confusedly at the picturesque forest clearing. It's all real, right, she's not hallucinating?

Completely real! The flowers have appropriate flower smells; there are occasional miscellaneous forest noises from beyond the edge of the clearing. Things that she touches have substance. Things that she looks away from are still there when she looks back. Nothing looks suspiciously magical.

She considers the wisdom of being the kind of person to call out a 'Hello,' to an empty forest. Then she decides that as a princess, she should probably try to find people as quickly as possible. Her father's reign has been one of change, but he's well liked. Probably no one will want to ransom her if they just randomly trip over her in the woods. Right? ... She hopes so, anyway.

"Hello?" she calls out, to an empty forest, feeling like a very boring protagonist in a very boring story.

Nothing... nothing... a sound from over thataway that might be a human, or might be a deer...

Please don't be a bear, or a wolf, or a, a—what do forests have, anyway? She doesn't know, she is a little bit out of her comfort zone. Please don't be dangerous, anyway.

She cautiously heads towards the sound.

"Hello?" she calls again, nervously. Hoping it's not a bear.

Turns out it's a unicorn!

His fur is dark, black or nearly so; his hooves and mane and tail are all white-gold, shining brilliantly in the sunlight. He blinks at her and says something in a language she doesn't speak - but definitely in a language.

???????

"I don't. What. What?!" Is the strangely shiny horned horse talking like people??? Horses don't talk like people, horned or no! She admittedly hasn't seen all that many (or any) horses, she didn't get out much, but she's pretty sure she would know if they talked! What kind of bizarre drug trip did her hypothetical kidnappers put her on?!

The unicorn backs up slightly, startled by her emphatic confusion, and asks her something in a worried tone.

"You are a talking horned horse! I think! Actually you might resemble other animals more closely than horses, but specifics of animal species were not among the subjects I thought it important to have a dedicated tutor for! So I really don't know! Either way you are talking and animal shaped! I am alarmed, are you the Outsider, why are you shaped like this, can I go home, I would like to go home, I have a father and an empire that will probably not handle my disappearance super well!"

He shakes his head slightly, then attempts to beckon her to follow him, a gesture that is surprisingly legible coming from someone with no arms.

"Yes okay sure I can come with you and also while I'm doing that I will try not to hyperventilate about the state of my empire without me. Okay? Okay."

She follows!

Worried unicorn leads her to...

...a path between rows of evenly spaced trees, where a soft green glow envelops the ground and everything within a few inches of it. The unicorn demonstrates walking very slowly along the glowing part: he seems to sort of - slide along the glow, so that he covers more ground than his steps should strictly have accounted for.

....

So. Yeah. This is definitely either 'drug fueled fantasy' or 'Outsider nonsense.' If it's the latter she doesn't give a damn if he's all powerful or not, she is punching him in the nose.

She takes a few seconds to stare in baffled bewilderment at the green slidey glow thing, then... tries... it...?

It's pretty easy to use! You have to make sure to keep yourself aligned with the path, because you lose speed very rapidly if you start drifting toward the edge, but once you've got the hang of that it's pretty much just Walking, But Faster. The unicorn keeps an eye on her to make sure she's doing all right.

This is weird, this is so weird, she is alarmed and frightened. She's holding it together and successfully stays on the path, but. She's alarmed and frightened while doing it.

The unicorn continues to lead her down the road. A few minutes go by. He's clearly still worried about her, but apparently this is the best he can do.

And then, up ahead, a small girl with wings comes zooming around a bend.

The girl is mostly pretty ordinary - she'd look sixteen if she were more than three feet tall - but the wings are really something. Big glittering leafy butterflyish things, resplendent in sunset shades from amber through indigo. They don't look like they should be able to bear her weight. They don't look like they should be able to exist. And yet there they are.

She pulls up a little when she sees them, slowing down to avoid a collision.

The unicorn brightens right up when he sees her. He does a sort of excited little prance-hop and calls out to her in his unintelligible language.

What? What?? Wings? Why wings! Why this! Why flying! Why this! Is she on Pandyssia? There are all sorts of strange things on Pandyssia! Except, she distinctly got the impression that Pandyssia is significantly less twee.

She doesn't interrupt, she'll let the talking horned maybe-horse do its thing. It's not like she has any idea what's going on.

The winged girl nods acknowledgment to whatever the unicorn said, flutters to a stop in front of them, and pulls a small bit of glowing blue-green something-or-other out of a little pouch. It drifts and wobbles like a curl of smoke, eddying around her fingers, but somehow she's able to spin it like thread and weave it into a complicated little knot. This task accomplished, she looks up from her work and tosses the finished product at Annaveth. It floats lightly through the air toward her, trailing a long tail of soft blue mist.

She squeaks a little fearful squeak and flinches, but decides not to dodge. The talking horned maybe-horse seems concerned for her welfare, and while she isn't particularly good at reading nonhuman faces, she does... mostly... trust what's happening. This is probably helpful. Right?

"That should do it," she says as the little knot reaches Annaveth and curls up on her shoulder like a small insubstantial pet.

The unicorn turns to Annaveth, almost speaking over the fairy in his haste to ask, "Are you all right?"

—and they haven't stopped speaking their unfamiliar language, but now she understands it as clearly as though she's known it all her life.

She stares at the blue knot on her shoulder like it's a second head.

Then she looks at the talking not-horse. "... No! I'm not! What is going on? Where am I? I would very much like to be put back where I came from!"

"You're in the Forest—how did you get here? I wouldn't have thought it was possible to get in without passing the border and if you'd passed the border you'd have been given a translation spell and told where you were."

"I was—I was home and then the window disappeared and I fell through it and landed here, and none of that makes any sense and I am making a terrible first impression, I apologize for my lack of composure but this is all very confusing and alarming."

"That's confusing and alarming, all right!" he agrees. "I'm sorry, I'm really not sure what to do—I don't at all know how to put people back through windows they fell out of into the middle of the Forest—maybe someone in Manafall could help—?"

"Maybe they could," the fairy says thoughtfully. "This seems like a Manafall sort of thing."

"I don't know where that is. I—I am very far from home. We don't have any of this. Wings or little translating shoulder lights or talking horned—I don't actually know what you are, I'm sorry."

"Oh—I'm a unicorn," he says, with an anxious little toss of his head. "My name's Sunpatch." Eiefalain, in the language he's speaking.

"Lady Annaveth Kaldwin," she says, with a polite little curtsy that is entirely the product of too much practice.

The winged girl looks slightly surprised at the 'lady' part; her wings flutter, moving her hovering form an inch or so away.

"And I'm Starshine—" Karistea "—and that's a translation spell on your shoulder."

"Okay," she says, a little helplessly. "Thank you, I appreciate it, it's very helpful."

"Manafall is a country," she adds. "Here—" and she pulls out another bit of glowing mist and fiddles with it until it's a net of glowing threads outlining a rudimentary map, rippling and wavering as it floats in midair.

"We're here," she says, pointing at a place just above the middle of the not-quite-easternmost country, "in the Forest. East of us is Manafall, and north is Faessaya—don't go there, it's terrible—and just west is the Dragonlands, and southwest is the Blessed Lands, and farther west is the Pit. Don't go there either."

Annaveth blinks at the map. Well. She can certainly now assert that she's not on Pandyssia. While there are no guarantees that the coastlines in the maps she's seen are particularly accurate, they'd have to be inaccurate to sheer absurdity to be of the landmasses shown in Starshine's (Karistea's?) map.

"All right. I won't go to either of those places if I can help it. Uh, what makes them terrible?"

"The Pit has demons in it," says Sunpatch, shivering slightly. "Demons are - bad."

"And the Faessayan nobility aren't much good either."

"So if I go there I will probably never be heard from again. Got it. Yep, avoiding those."

"Good idea."

"How—" She waves at the translation spell on her shoulder, then at the road. "How do you have magic, where do you get it from? Is it just. Around?"

"That's a Manafall question if I ever heard one—they study it there," she explains. "Because there's a big fountain of mana pouring from the sky in the middle of the country. Hence the name. Everywhere else," she collects her map and unweaves its strands and tucks it away again, "people have to trade for it or grow it or dig it out of the ground, depending. I grow mine, of course, but I'm a fae—we are living spells, so of course we find them easiest to work with."

"There's one kind of magic that has to do with mana, and one that has to do with lifeforce, and one that has to do with demons and one that has to do with angels, and I have no idea what's going on with dragons but I don't think it's any of those exactly," Sunpatch adds. "Unicorns are more like the angel kind of magic than like any of the other kinds."

"So there are... kinds of magic. And none of those kinds of magic have anything to do with anyone called the Outsider?"

"Who?" says Sunpatch blankly.

"He's a, a god that only the desperate actually believe in. Allegedly he sometimes bestows dark magic on people that catch his attention. The ability to drive men mad, or possess them, or summon a swarm of rats, or the like. He's not a very nice god."

"...That sounds more demonish than anything," he says, sounding rather worried by this possibility.

"I'm not really an expert in Outsider lore, I'm mostly just parroting things I've heard from the religious group that wants people to stop worshiping the Outsider. He is however my going theory for the window incident, mostly because I don't have a better idea."

"He doesn't sound very demonish. ...but a little bit yes."

"Well, if I ever have a conversation with him I'll let him know that he needs to work on his image."

"Having conversations with demonish sorts of people is probably not a good idea."

"I wasn't planning to try to start one," she says, a little amused. "Telling someone to go have a chat with the Outsider is generally not a nice thing to say to someone, and I doubt it'd be a nice thing to do. Apparently the people that he bestows his gifts upon don't tend to have happy endings."

"Sounds demonish all right!"

She doesn't say, Granted, a lot of this might be religious revisionism by a bunch of zealots, and should be squinted at accordingly, because while she doesn't very much like the Overseers and their cult, they are actually more sane and pro-social than people that worship the Outsider. As the heir to the empire, she'd really rather not casually piss them off. On purpose, sure, but not when she doesn't mean to.

"It's possible that my information might be incomplete," she says, instead. "So I should probably go to Manafall and ask them for solutions to my inexplicable problem?"

"Yeah, I think that's your best plan from here. Somebody in the City of Light is bound to have an answer."

"I think you might need... money, and things?" says Sunpatch, dubiously. "I've never left the Forest, I'm really not sure how all that works."

"I will probably need money and things," she agrees, a little amused. "I would like to get home as soon as possible, but I would like to get home in one piece as soon as possible. So I'd prefer to take a little while to make sure I can successfully not starve in the wilderness trying to get to Manafall, if that's all right with you."

"Oh, well, of course," says Sunpatch. "I'm hardly going to leave you to wander around in the woods by yourself, that wouldn't be nice of me at all!"

This place is so very, very twee.

"Thank you kindly for that, I appreciate it very much," she says sincerely, curtsying again.

"We're a little far from the Tree—it's where most of the buildings in the Forest are, humans are usually more comfortable there—but my house is just around the corner and I've got an elf-sized guest room, you can stay with me for a few days while you get used to roads and so on," Starshine offers.

"That sounds excellent, thank you!"

"You're welcome! It's a good thing you landed in the Forest; most places aren't nearly so hospitable."

She nods. Note to self: only the Forest is twee. Probably. The twee status of other places is still to be determined.

"Well, I think you might've done all right in Manafall," says Sunpatch. "I don't really understand the Blessed Lands well enough to know how they handle unexpected visitors but it's probably not as well as us."

"Hmm... the thing about places that aren't the Forest is that they might have good ways of handling unexpected visitors, but you'll have to go farther than the first person you meet to find them," says Starshine. "In the Forest everyone expects to help each other; even if the first person you'd met had been busy or ungenerous, they'd still almost certainly have shown you to a road and pointed you at the Tree. And as long as there's nothing demonic about you—there isn't, right?—"

"Of course not, I did check," says Sunpatch.

"—oh good—then there's no reason to turn you away, since there's only one of you and it's not your fault you ended up here."

That's interesting. And makes her very curious about how this country is run and how they take care of their people so well.

"... Is the Forest the sort of place, where, if it had the resources to comfortably manage it, it'd happily accept as many people as it could take care of?"

"...well, of course it is," says Sunpatch.

"Not everywhere is like that!"

"Well, no, but this is the Forest." He swishes his tail.

"From what I've seen it's very nice so far. My home certainly isn't the sort of place where one can get help from just anyone. How do you do it?"

"Nearly all the fae and unicorns in the world live in the Forest, and the rest is mostly elves," Starshine explains. "Having this many unicorns means all the water is always safe to drink, because that's one of the easiest things to do with unicorn magic, and the second easiest thing is healing, so that's covered too. There's more than enough Sylvan fae to maintain huge living spells like the roads and borders without much trouble, so we're safe from the rest of the world and it's easy to get around; and between the fae and the unicorns, we've got the happiest, healthiest gardens and orchards in the world, so we never have to worry about food. With all that, I'd be surprised if the Forest wasn't a really nice place to live, wouldn't you?"

"I could see it going wrong somewhere despite the starting advantages," she says. "Differences in class and education splitting the populace apart, in-fighting in the government about policy and which problems are worth devoting resources towards... It'd be a pity, though."

"It's - our thing to be proud of," she says. "Manafall is proud of being the best place to learn things, and the Blessed Lands are proud of having lots of angels around, and the Forest is proud of being a really nice place to live where people help each other and things work right."

"And Faessaya and the Pit are run by terrible people and proud of being terrible, respectively?"

"Something like that."

"And I'm sure the Dragonlands have something to be proud of but I have no idea what," says Sunpatch.

She nods, thoughtfully.

"Have you done a lot of traveling?" she asks Starshine.

"Some. More than usual for a Sylvan."

Annaveth nods again. "Will the translation spell, ah. Work outside of the Forest, or with different languages?"

"Yes, but it won't last as long outside the Forest - I'd give it a year, maybe, if you left right now, and if you stayed it'd be more like two."

"That's interesting. The Forest helps maintain it, then?"

"Sort of! Living spells last longer when they're around other living spells a lot, and the Forest is full of them."

She supposes that makes sense. Probably.

"Are there things that could make living spells expire faster?"

"...well, yes... taking care of living spells is kind of a complicated subject. It'll be fine if you just ignore it. You can move it around if you need to, but you should be gentle with it. And if you leave it alone outdoors it might float off somewhere and abandon you, but if you put it in a container to make sure it doesn't do that the container should be something see-through, it'll get lonely otherwise."

How incredibly... no, don't finish that sentence, and for that matter stop circling back around to that line of thought. It's going to get her in trouble and she's going to end up eating her words.

Instead she gives the little blue knot on her shoulder a measured look, and gently pats it with her index finger. Like she's petting an extremely delicate flower, or a newborn kitten.

"All right," she says. "Thank you. Anything else I should know for my first day in another world?"

The spell makes the teeniest tiniest little humming noise imaginable and snuggles mistily against her finger.

"Aww," says Starshine. "I'm not sure! I've never advised anyone about how to handle their first day in another world before!"

"Me neither," agrees Sunpatch.

The spell is adorable and she already loves it unconditionally. It may have another gentle pat, just because it's so cute.

"Well, let's hope this trend continues. If I may, which way is it to your home?"

"This way!"

Back the way she came originally, it turns out. The road continues to be magic. Starshine seems able to zoom along it just as well as Sunpatch even though her feet have not once touched the ground this entire time.

The road is still super weird, and she is not comfortable interacting with it. She'd like to get off it as soon as possible, but it is rather convenient so she'll tolerate it for now. As a bonus, she even doesn't fall over on it. So she has that going for her.

Sunpatch and Starshine are very patient with her lack of road experience.

She's ever so grateful. And manages not to embarrass herself. Just. Augh. She does not like being on this road, it's moving her while she walks and it is incredibly unsettling. This is clearly a category reserved for boats, and only boats. As is right and proper.

Eventually, her road based purgatory must end. Right? It clearly must end at some point. They're not going in a giant loop just to make her quietly miserable?