On the night of September 24, two forest paths ran side by side through the woods in southern Iowa, each wide enough for a carriage to pass with ease. Twenty meters above them, the treetops interlaced to form a canopy that completely concealed the carriages and camp below.
On both sides of the paths, faintly glowing mushrooms marked the edges. Beyond them, one tree every thirty meters shone with light, fully illuminating the otherwise pitch-dark woods.
While Landen was still enjoying a banquet in Breyak, his ancestor, the Wood Elf Halcala, was working magic in the forest alongside more than a dozen Elf Priests.
Harkala flew into the air and took amber after amber from her Space Ring. Each piece was carved with an illumination Rune. She fitted them into the natural Magic Patterns in the trees, then guided the amber into the bark until it could glow.
On the ground, the Priests following the Wood Elf chanted songs to help the glowing mushrooms along both sides of the path grow faster. Ahead of them, the Wood School Great Fairy Mixineer made the trees draw in their branches, while the Earth Great Fairy Elsa leveled and hardened the ground beneath both paths to make it easier for carriages to pass.
Five hundred meters behind Halcala's road-building crew, on the south side of the path, stood a fully formed camp of considerable size. Around its perimeter, trees, shrubs, and vines covered a ten-meter-high earthen wall, making the camp look more like a clump of trees than a settlement.
The buildings inside the earthen wall looked like raised houses made of earth. The upper levels consisted of large wooden houses for short-term lodging, while the lower levels had only stone pillars and no walls, and were used to store goods and livestock.