Nature:
The Hedge is the borderland between the human world and Arcadia. But it’s more than just a strip of contested territory — it’s a whole world in itself, one that’s always around the edges of the mortal world. In the lonely places, where yours is the only breath stirring the air; in the uncanny places, where fear quickens your step; in the liminal places, where you hang in the balance between here and there. An abandoned office park, weedy grass breaking through broken asphalt; a graveyard, Spanish moss hanging from the low branch of a tree; a cold beach at dawn, succulents dangling over the lip of a sandy cliff.
It's the world on the other side of the mirror, the world that pretends to look like ours, that behaves while you're watching it, that's watching you when your back is turned. It is the world that exists in empty places where no one can see it. It's the universe that's up and about at 3:00 AM. It's twisted and hungry and it knows all about you. It's read your mail, your diary, and your mind. It has your single, missing socks. It's a world of story and dream and legend and magic, of beauty and terror, of butterflies that weep liquid lies with bodies made of stained glass, where a 'wellspring of courage' isn't just a figure of speech but an actual liquid that oozes from your chest to be bottled and sold, where time and distance are suggestions rather than the rule, so you can travel miles in moments if you pick the proper paths, and navigating is more through intuition and gut instinct, which paths "feel" right, than by memorizing the path because things change moment to moment. Doors lead somewhere else when you close them behind you, you might round a corner only to turn back and find a solid wall
It doesn’t always rip you away from the world, briars catching you and tugging you into some dark hollow of hobgoblins and malevolent Fae. Sometimes a fairy glen is lovely and mild, with soft places to tread, or lay down your head. Contact with the Hedge is the risk you take in your reclaimed life, and risk brings not only disaster, but reward.
When asking about the nature of the hedge, a common joke is that if you ask four fae the origins of it, you'll get five different answers. For all that's known it may have been there from the beginnings of time, maybe even longer considering how little meaning time actually holds in the deepest parts."
Traversing The Hedge:​
The Hedge shapes itself according to need, presence, and the available terrain. There are some constants. Its paths are always labyrinthine and confusing. Time passes according to different stars, and the land beneath you to according to different earths. The character of the obstructions you encounter there will vary according to what you carry with you into it. Including, and especially, what you are carrying in your heart. The thoughts, desires, or memories that shape you will skew the landscape you navigate.
Carved through the Hedge is a network of trods, the country roads that lead through the wild wood that lies between the human world and Arcadia. They range from well-traveled streets to loose suggestions of paths half buried in undergrowth. The clarity of the path is not a good predictor of its safety, however. Some overgrown hiking trails might be quiet and unnoticed, protected by their obscurity. Some wide, busy roads may be kept superficially clear by enterprising bandits. Many trods are worn into the fabric of the Hedge by years of regular use, but some are maintained. All sorts of creatures might opt to maintain a trod from hobgoblin denizens, the Courts....or the Keepers themselves.
Objects you carry into the Hedge may continue to work, but will become temperamental and whimsical. A flashlight may throw light, but as a lantern or a candle or a cold flame cradled in your palm. A phone might make contact, but to the person you last told a secret or with your voice translated into a forgotten tongue. An object may choose to obey the letter of the law rather than the spirit, or interpret your actions as metaphoric desires. A lit path may glow with a sudden beam of sunshine, or become alight with flame. A sword might become a serpent in your hand, poised to strike the warrior as well as the adversary.
Eerie paths lace around the Hedge, linking it with the minds of dreamers. These are the Dreaming Roads, and the Bastions of human dreams that line them vary in strength. Even the poorest offers a moment of rest, a shortcut, or an escape.
Somewhere else, both within and throughout the Hedge, there is a shining maze — desolate and cold, but not uninhabited. In the distance, hear the song of a Huntsman’s horn, or the murmuring of voices behind the mirrors that line the halls. In moments of anguish, doubt, or pain, when you catch your face in the mirror and recoil or look away, unable to face yourself — you create a mirror-person. And these, the Halls of Mirrors, are their home.
The Hedge, at first, tempts people with beauty and love and joy, A touch of wildness overlaid on a familiar place, a note in the distance that might have been a horn or a songbird, a tingle you felt under your skin, a sense that you had time to linger. When you crossed the threshold, things began to turn. Paths turned wilder and the noises become stranger, even what you suppose must have been the sound of your own footsteps. When you tried to turn back, you found the way unfamiliar and disorienting. Walls of thorns grew up in your footsteps. Gusts of snow erased your path even as you looked back at it. Walking forward was far easier than trying to place just where your feet had been. It didn’t resist the way it did when you tried to leave. The Hedge drew on what lay inside you, calling up your secret fears and dreams to drive you forward. It tested your strength even as it lured you in. Beguiling you with the nearness of escape while pushing you to expend your will against it.
In the Hedge, a traveler can see echoes of human world analogues. If she wanders the Hedge of Detroit, she’ll see hints of buildings, cars, and factories even as brambles cover and consume them; or perhaps the brambles are busybody salesmen and surly factory supervisors, all sporting long red noses and voices like shrill whistles. Some objects and places directly correspond to things on the other side, especially closer to the mortal world. But more often, objects in the Hedge reflect the way the traveler thinks of them when she’s feeling fanciful or frightened. If she always thought the city’s skyscrapers looked like looming guardians closing in on her, they’re exactly that here: taller and more sinister, inching closer moment by moment. If she loves riding the train and wishes trips would take longer, the tracks in the Hedge stretch out to the horizon, letting her ride as long as she likes, assuming the majority of those present hold similar feelings. Places long gone and forgotten in the mortal world may still have reflections in the Hedge, if someone who enters remembers them or has looked lovingly on their black-and-white photos in old newspapers.
Thus the Hedge shapes itself based on a few main factors:
1. What’s nearby on the other side, in the mortal world.
2. What has been in a particular place before.
3. The traveler’s own needs, fears, and feelings, and those of others around him.
4. How strong the traveler is in the Wyrd. The more fae, the more the Hedge "bends" to be advantageous, even as it struggles and warps.
Goblin Markets:​
Within the Hedge, concepts are made manifest, abstract concepts can be bought and sold on the markets. A wellspring of courage isn't just an emotion, it is literally a liquid that oozes from your chest that can be bottled and sold. You can trade memories, skills, or other things for cloaks spun from the midnight sky, for armor made from a witch's stony heart, and similar fae-enchanted things. Often such items were mundane items that became lost there, soaking up magic through time. This also is how fae get their contracts, encountering the conceptual embodiment of a concept such as Fire, Iron, or Love and entering into a deal with it.
Rules:​
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1. Pain is a necessary possibility to exist, but it need not be constant. Everything must have some kind of danger to counter-balance the beauty, some kind of benefit to balance the negatives, even if that danger is relatively minor like being enticed into a deal you didn't understand for the sake of purchasing the words that would break your lover's heart on the market.
2. It's always easy to get lost.
3. The Hedge has a 'mind of its own', a paradox of chaos yet rules, fancy yet horror, beauty yet fear. As such, it may not fully 'change its mind'. It can be altered and warped, but the nature does not fully change. Trying to turn dragons into dandelions will only cause their scales to grow a coat of fluff before they torch you. You could, however, turn one type of bird into another.
4. The Hedge loosely corresponds to a real-world analogue, meaning that if you enter a Hedge-gate at a hospital, you'll exit into a fae hospital full of creatures that still seek to treat and help, but feed on pain and wounds, literally sucking the wounds out of a person. You'll heal just fine, without scar nor weakness, but it will be quite painful as a price.
5. Technology and trappings of the world are unreliable, a phone might still make calls but to the last person you told a secret. A flashlight will still work, but as a cold flame cradled in your palm or as a lantern, or a motorcycle will still function, but will act more like a beast than a machine with a mind of its own.
6. Everything has a price, whether physically or emotionally. No exceptions.
7. The Hedge never stays the same unless reshaped masterfully. Pathways change the moment you turn your back, doors can lead elsewhere once you close them, etc. Finding one's way through the Hedge is more instinct and following one's gut intuition than actually learning paths.
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Example Locations:
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Dreaming Roads: The part of the Hedge that connects to humanity’s dreams. They branch off from hidden gates and take the traveler into the realm of dreams, where sleeping minds grasp for wonder inside fortress-like Bastions. Many a wanderer has fled a briarwolf only to find himself standing beneath black solid-ebony gates and an ever-moonlit sky Bastions are 'shells' that form around the sleeping mind within the Roads, each taking a form unique to the dreamer from a sheltered tower to their favorite car with the sleeping mortal curled up within. Each Bastion’s dream spills out into the surrounding area, so a traveler has some idea of what she’s getting into as she approaches such a stretch: a dreamer stuck in a glass coffin in the woods imposes a dark forest filled with the baleful yellow eyes of hidden predators, while a dreamer flying among skyscrapers creates a shining metropolis where the sun glints from infinitely tall steel beams.
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Gloomwood looks from outside like a small stand of foreboding trees blocking the path forward through the Hedge. Inside, it is a dreamlike forest filled with mist, with giant cobwebs strung between the boughs. This is where the Gloomwood Fair, a regular Goblin Market, takes place every solstice and equinox, and this is where the spiderthing la Duquesa de las Arañas holds her court.
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The Sleeping Badger is an inn across which wanderers in the Hedge occasionally stumble. Travelers have found it in many places, many times — some Lost speculate that the Sleeping Badger actually stalks interesting travelers across the Hedge and appears to them in their moment of need. The Fae and their servants never approach the inn and, when they’re hunting someone, it appears to their quarry. Little knowledge exists about it — it is always empty of customers, but offers deliciously prepared meals, hot baths already drawn, and inviting, ready-made beds.
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