The Tale of Gudrun's Door
Rome R. Oshaw, 504 CT | Reading time: 3 minutes
In the year 27 CT, a young dwarven girl named Gudrun wandered too far into the Emeraldhide forest, and disappeared.
Over the next few days, the girl's frantic mother would raise the Nine Hells themselves, or at least so her neighbors swore. Search parties and scouts scoured the safe stretches of the forest, but none found the youngling.
In the months to come, Gudrun's grief-stricken mother took to the bed, and one night, she would be freed of her suffering and her mortal shell.
The villagers buried her in her garden behind the house, which itself would be barred and abandoned for the next five years.
Siegfried was preparing to truss a buck and carry it home, when his attention would be drawn by a glimmer in his periphery. The young ranger would wave a hand and turn invisible, before quickly climbing into the lower branches of the nearby tree line.
Slowly approaching the increasing glimmer, he saw something that forced him to blink several times, sure that his eyes were playing tricks on him. He saw a rift - a tear in space that folded onto itself many times over, refracting light around its edges. To him, it looked like water draining into a basin.
Before he could think any further, the light flashed and he shielded his eyes as his vision grew hot. A few moments later, when his vision would return to him, he saw the rift was unlit again, and lying face down on the ground, was a short, stout figure.
He would approach with caution, and upon discovering that the body was a dwarven girl, he would grab his symbol of The Blossomed Lotus and pray, suffusing her with warm light. The heavy scratches on her body would disappear, and Gudrun's eyes would open.
It wasn't long after that Siegfried returned to the village with a dead buck and a living girl.
The villagers became more and more wary as Gudrun shared fantastical, perverse stories about another realm of life. She insisted that she had visited a land of "fey magic" - a "Feywild". She regaled children with tall tales of small goat men and flying elfkin the size of your palm. A terrifying shroud of ombré chaotic colour descended upon the village, and the sensible parents feared their children might spend their days dreaming instead of mining minerals. Gudrun was no longer welcome in a village that had moved on from her.
Moreover, rumours encroached among the villagers like termites. Apparently Damela had spied upon Gudrun changing her appearance with strange magicks. She swore Gudrun's body had been an alabaster white for a moment, and this creature had transformed into the lost girl.
"Perhaps it is a fiend assuming her form, a deviant trickster with her gaze upon the village, a doppelganger!"
As time went on, more and more families turned their back on Gudrun, and even the adolescent girl could sense something was wrong. Siegfried stayed true, but the village soon became austere, even hostile to her. She grew more and more isolated, and one day, she packed a single bag and went to Siegfried's house.
What transpired between them is unknown, but Siegfried would flee with Gudrun that night. It is said that they returned to the forest and went through the schism to live in the Feywild forever.
Since then, other cultures have told their own stories of this Feywild, and fey creatures, though rare, are confirmed to exist in Zemera. The village called Narndur would fall to time, and the site would become the foundation for the city of Divyista, known in modern day as The Artisan Fen.
Gudrun's door to the Feywild remains lost, somewhere in the Ashtea Peaks. Gudrun and Siegfried were never heard from again, but it is said that their children returned through the rift. They are called The Changelings - beings of alabaster white that can change their appearance at will. They are thought to live among us, though by their very nature, they are elusive.
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