"What the hell? Look at this place. Everything's frozen solid. The entire forest..."
"And not just the trees, look at this fox..."
"Yeah, i don't think we should camp here tonight"
- Two confused Rumalian explorers.
Along the southern coast of the large
Island of Haiska, in northern Arros, is located a peninsula on which a primordial forest used to trive thousands of years ago.
The Discovery
Like the rest of the island, this forest was discovered in 994 Bc, by a band of
Rumalian raiders blown off course by a storm in the Northern sea. In fact, this peninsula, covered in forest, is were they first landed. However, they didn't stay there for long and instead sailed around the coast before turning back. Eventualy, a settlement would be made further west, leaving the forest untouched to this day.
Description
Nestled in a valley running north to south along the lenght of the peninsula, this forest consists of thousands of trees, mostly spruces and pines, as well as a few artic flowers and a few wild strawberry shrubs. The twist is that all of these plants and trees are permanently frozen solid. The trunks, branches and needles of the trees, the twigs, leaves and fruits of the plants around them are all covered in a thin but solid layer of ice, as if the entire forest had been frozen in time. A few animals can also be seen, frozen aswell. Birds inside their nests, foxes in their dens and rabits in their warrens. During the night, a powerful icy wind descends the valley and freezes any humidity in the air, adding to the layer of ice covering the forest. During the day, a part of that ice evaporates away.
How did it get this way?
Many have said that the climate on the peninsula used to be much warmer, possibly as warm as the northern Accosian isles, which would allow forests like this to thrive. However, the climate in the region drasticaly changed at some point in the past and made it one of the coldest place in Arros. A rapid cooling of temperatures seems to be the leading theory among scholars to explain the state of the forest. How rapid this cooling was is subject to debate. Some say it might have taken only a single night, referencing the icy winds that descend in the valley after every nightfall, while others more conservative estimates allows for months to a year or two. Either way, it was sudden enough for buds to grow on trees and then freeze over, which also indicates that the freeze happend during spring. As to what triggered this sudden and permanant freeze, some have suggested that the effects of
The Long Winter may be to blame, but with no way to know when the freeze actualy happened, it is unprovable.
There has to be more going on than just a cold wind if the animals are frozen, too!
hmmm, maybe....