theshadowdreams:

A thought that occurred to me, but the world outside their Clan was probably really fucking weird for Mahariel and I don’t mean in a purely cultural sense.

They lived in the Brecilian which to outsiders is your typical horror story/fairy tale dark magical haunted forest where people go in and never return (save hunters around Gwaren apparently).

The forest is one step in the Fade to the point where it might as well already be the Fade and in places the Veil is torn. There are spirits everywhere, veilfire is everywhere, the air seems to glow green, the forest is always rearranging itself, the air sometimes whispers at you… Merrill says you can’t frolic in the woods because the trees get jealous. I don’t think she’s joking.

And suddenly they’re in the outside world where a tree is just a tree and will not suddenly twist into a sylvan and try and rip your head off, fire is just a plain red and doesn’t hiss and whisper ominously on the edge of your hearing, nobody has to worry about damaging the environment and having an angry spirit destroy your home and family because you damaged their host, the weird pressure of the nearby Fade leaking through the Veil isn’t there.

There are no traps set by shades, no possessed animals who start talking to you and trying to lead you into traps, no feeling of something lurking over your shoulder, no strange whispers on the air, you’re not likely to stumble onto a strange scene and have to work out whether you’re seeing something real or an echo of the past replayed by spirits, and weirdest of all you can turn around and find out that the road you’re following hasn’t vanished into thin air. The world is completely and totally static.

I can just imagine Mahariel just routinely checking their environment, testing if it’s actually real because they’re not used to this much of the pure physical world.