Cormanthor

The formal life of the Elven Court has given way to the hunting of the ranger and the steps of the druid. Though Cormanthor is still beautiful, and still very much a high forest worthy of bards' songs and poets' flights of fluttering adjectives, it now shudders at the felling of trees in its fringe and the sounds of stealthy battle in its heart.

War is brewing in Cormanthor as humans, elves, drow, and gnolls struggle to carve their settlements from the green fastness and establish strongholds and borders they can defend against their rivals. The old Elven Woods stretch for hundreds and hundreds of miles. They may prove expansive enough for all the competing powers and settlements. The drow, the elves, and the occasional human settlers can go days and even tendays within the forest without running into signs of each other's existence. But even Cormanthor might not be large enough for all of these races to share.

Cormanthor itself is the dominant feature of the entire region. Once the great forest extended all the way to the

Dragon Reach, covering the lands that are now Sembia and Cormyr. Even after thousands of years of human encroachment, the great woods of the Elven Court are the mightiest forestland in this part of Faerun.

The elves created most of the forest's wonders, but humans and mad deities have left permanent scars.

There was a time when deep, green forest stretched unbroken from the Sea of Fallen Stars north to the Tortured Land, west through the Thunder Peak passes, and around the Stonelands to the Storm Horns. Trees cloaked both shores of the Dragon Reach, broken only by occasional peaks, dead-fall glades where huge trees plunged to earth, and the burned scars of lightning-strike fires. Then came the elves, the first gardeners of the forest. They found haunting, sacred beauty around Lake Sember. They saw the works of their high gods farther north, near Elventree. They settled in the latter place, still known as the Elven Court today, and tended the woods as carefully as any royal gardener. The elves broke the "evershade" beneath the trees by creating magical glades. Great and terrible beasts were largely slain or driven off in eldritch hunts.

The kingdom of Cormanthyr in the great forest of Cormanthor was founded approximately four thousand years before the creation of the Dales and the start of Dalereckoning. For a time, the elves lived freely in their great forest, but the millennia of elven rule were over once humans entered Faerun. The elves watched with increasing anger as humans clawed at the borders of the once-endless wood, cutting it ever smaller, forcing roads and trails through undisturbed forest. Woodcutters, adventurers, and homesteaders who penetrated too boldly into the green vastness of the old elven forest often met their ends under elven arrows.

Yet humans came in waves, as numerous as gnats. Oak after oak fell to their axes, then the shadowtop and duskwood trees, and they brought swords and wizards of their own to contend with elven arrows, Farsighted elven leaders saw that the heart and strength of the elves would be worn away if they fought humans at every turn. Such battle would only leave them weak before orc hordes, drow forays from the Realms Below, and strokes from the divine powers, such as merciless "wolf winters" and flights of dragons.

So they welcomed humans as allies and even gave passage and settlement room to gnomes, dwarves, and halflings. These were the early years of the Dales Compact that created the Dales. The elves sought to make peace with the humans rather than fighting against them, but remained wary of their neighbors. To guard themselves and a vestige of their original realm, the elves raised great areas of magic called mythals within the borders of Cormanthor.

Each mythal was the product of an elven high magic ritual that created a magical field governing various conditions within its confines. Some mythals protected the forest by inhibiting fires and explosive magic; others increased the power of spells drawing upon the elven deities or elven scrolls while suppressing non-elven magic.

As the centuries rolled on, the elves of Cormanthor layered the forest with portals, invisible hideaways, and wards. Thus, the elves made the woods alive with magic. Unfortunately, elven high magic has a steep price. Riddled with portals, the great forest was more open to portals created by others, threatening the realm with attacks from its enemies and dooming the mythals to eventual decay. Today, the once-bright city of Myth Drannor is a fiend-roamed, haunted ruin. The rest of Cormanthor is not nearly as dangerous as Myth Drannor, but centuries of magical wards, portals and summonings have turned certain parts of the forest into areas that only the skilled, wood-wise, or magically gifted can expect to survive without harm.