The Valley of Ra'Vish

      The world of Juhn, a seemingly normal little blue, brown, and green planet floating in orbit around a normal yellow sun, save that this sun has four intersecting red rings around it, an unusual anomaly not really visible from the surface of Juhn. This little planet has mountains capped with ice, snowy valleys, forests, deserts, jungles, lakes, rivers, and great salty oceans. From high above one may only notice one oddity on the planet, the north pole, the entire arctic circle is covered in green. This entire region belongs to a massive tree that grows as tall as the troposphere and spreads out wide across the land. The great tree produces warmth and even light with in its region; however by some mystical property this warmth does not overheat it nor does it escape beyond its rim to influence the rest of the planet, thus one finds frozen lands and mountains just outside the great tree known to the locals as Yggdrasil.

   However it is not this great tree or its inhabitants the Light Elves that are the most unusual feature on this world, far to the south east in a distant sea lies a continent that should not exist. This land is a perfect circle, a ring of harsh desert surrounding an inland sea, or rather a massive circular lake as its deep blue waters are fresh and clean. In the middle of this lake poking out from the waters is a chain of mountains, grey harsh seemingly lifeless rock. This land however is filled with dragons and another race even more mysterious than Dark Elves. Amongst the crags there is a great castle and within the land are many tunnels home to a race known as the Silver Elves, being with near silver skin and hair whose color ranges from white, silver, black, red, blackish red, deep gold with black streaks, and even a few dark blue, violet, and pink hairs; their eyes too match these strange colors not seen in the similar race of the Dark Elves.

   These Silver Elves, who call themselves the Nocturne guard religiously a valley in the center of the mountains, and in fact at the very center of the continent, the valley of Ra’Vish. A valley filled with plants, ponds, and dinosaur like animals, the area is a paradise; with one slight problem. Anyone who enters the valley only has three minutes to thirty minutes for a select few until a strange fog overcomes them and they are teleported back to one of the four gate like entrances to the valley any other way would involve climbing over insanely steep sharp ledges.

     In the castle near the valley, in which one of the four entrances lies, there is a small room. This room is lit by the flickering screens of many monitors, but on them are green and blue monochrome screens upon which only text appears unless another wills an image to them. From behind one would think they see a stand of silky pink hair trailing on the floor, this hair is in fact attached to the head of a Nocturne sitting in a black leather swivel chair sitting before the monitors, but her eyes do not see them for they are covered by a black strap with a gold outlined pattern of a hawk on it in the space between her eyes.

     A strange violet colored hawk flies above the valley, its mind linked to the elven girl in the dark room. What it sees, she sees, what it hears, she hears. While no sentient being, elf, human, or otherwise, may stay in the valley; animals may come and go, even those whose minds are linked to a sentient being.

    Even at night the valley is as bright as and warm as a spring morning, even when its winter in this part of the world the valley remains warm and liken to a spring day, the violet hawk flies as it has for years. Aside from the beasts the watch over the valley is boring, although a great honor, for the psionic masters of the Silver Elves; if only for just knowing they will see things no one else will ever see.

    The pink haired elf’s long point ears, a smidgen taller than her eyebrows, twitch, as she also furrows her brow. Through the eyes of the violet hawk she sees something that shouldn’t be; upon a ledge over looking the territory of the giant long necked herbivores a woman dressed in a strange orange costume with long blond hair sits and watched the great beasts. Through the hawk she can sense that this woman is some kind of elf, at first glance with her pale skin and blond hair she would be mistaken for a Light Elf or a High Elf, but the essence is just off, some new kind of elf, or at least one never before seen on Juhn before.

    The girl in the dark room spreads out her senses through the hawk to see if anymore are near by, two more strange life signs appear not too far away at one of the crystal clear lagoons. A short pale dark haired girl with small white cat like ears on her head is bathing in the lagoon along with a small white fur covered serpentine dragon as long as her arm. Her life essence screams of High Elf despite her ears not fitting this description, but also something else, an essence appearing to make her a cross between a High Elf and the now very rare Common Elf, but something else, something alien she’s never sensed before is also in the girl; and if only to complicate matters the life essence of the dragon would imply it’s the child of the girl.

    The girl in the dark room records these events on the screens, as well as one other odd detail, the minds of these individuals, although their bodies are clearly awake, their minds are in a state of dreaming. Even as the girl summons up the machines to call her queen to the room to alert her to the impossible presence of outsiders in the valley she senses the dream state of the mind fade from them, and with that they too vanish like ghosts.

    ******

    Skin the color of living silver, ears just longer than her brow, hair the color of dried blood, eyes the color of deepest blue, lips a pale silver, her form one of grace and beauty clad in red armor and a thin cape. She is Sylvia, the queen of the Silver Elves, Queen of the Nocturne. She steps into the little dark room.

   “Mana,” she says addressing the one in the chair.

   “My majesty,” states Mana not turning away from the monitors.

   Sylvia looks at the monochrome screens as Mana points at them, the image seen by her hawk projected onto them, showing the queen the unknown beings, it should be no surprise they vanished, but the method differs greatly than the fog that would envelop others, not to mention the distance they are should be impossible to reach even if they had thirty minutes. They are in the region known as the Garden of the Goddess, a place untouched for a thousand years.

    ******

   “The valley continues to surprise us,” says Sylvia to a group of grey skinned and mostly white haired men in black armor standing before one of the great gates into the valley; while it is darkness on their side the inside is light, “for a thousand years it laid silent, then our equipment detected the long dormant machines of the forbidden store house coming to life and working on a regular basis.”


    She paces a little and smiles while examining the men, “Now our watcher has spotted two unknown individuals deep with in the valley.”

   The men are surprised but their military composure refuses to reveal this on the surface.

   “They vanished, yes, but not as they should have. They were in the Garden of the Goddess, a whole day’s walk even for us. Your duty is to journey into the garden, see what has changed, now go.”

   With a salute and a bow of the heads in unison the men turn and march through the gate into the light. They walk through the vegetation, the buzzing of insects, and the ever watchful eyes of the small feathered predatory dinosaurs of the valley. As they journey however, if it can even be called that, in a span of only three minutes a fog materializes from the air and engulfs them as a snake would swallow its prey. The men find themselves back already where they started on the grey rocky ground before their queen who only makes a *hmmm* sound before saying, “dismissed.”

    Allowing the men to return to their regular duties. Sylvia walks up to the threshold between dark and light, her hand to her chin, her eyes narrowed thinking, “What is happening here? Have you left us silent for so long only to now return and play some sort of silly game?”