A vast woodland blanketing the lowlands between the Sunset Mountains and the Vokas Enrisikna range. The forest takes its name from the millions of butterflies that swarm beneath its canopy—an impossible profusion of color drifting between the ancient trees.
The butterflies are beautiful. The forest is not safe.
The Canopy
The Butterfly Forest is old-growth broadleaf, dominated by massive pale-barked trees the orcs call veleth, "ghost wood." The veleth grow two hundred feet tall or more, their crowns interlocking to form a continuous canopy that filters the sun into a dim green twilight. Little undergrowth survives in the perpetual shade; the forest floor is open, carpeted with decades of fallen leaves.
The butterflies are everywhere. Every color, every pattern, every size from thumbnail to handspan. They gather in clouds around certain trees, drift in lazy spirals through clearings, land on anything that holds still. The orcs say each butterfly carries a single memory from someone who died in the forest. They might be speaking metaphorically. They might not.
Why No One Settles
The Jeh Bli orcs enter the forest to hunt and gather, but they don't stay overnight. When asked why, they point to the butterflies and change the subject.
The forest provides abundantly—deer, boar, edible fungi, medicinal plants, timber—but no one has ever built a permanent camp beneath the veleth. The orcs never did, nor the elves in all their centuries here, nor whoever came before them.
The reason becomes clear to anyone who spends a night under the canopy. The butterflies don't sleep. After dark, they glow—faintly, softly, each one a drifting point of pale light. And they watch. Thousands of them, gathering around sleeping figures, landing on closed eyelids, brushing against lips. Those who wake find the butterflies scattering, innocent as sunlight.
Those who don't wake are found in the morning looking peaceful, looking rested, looking like they simply forgot to breathe.
It doesn't happen every night. It doesn't happen to everyone. But it happens often enough that the orcs learned not to sleep here, and whatever the elves know about it, they haven't shared.
The Veleth Trees
The ghost-barked veleth are the heart of the ecosystem. Their leaves feed caterpillars that become butterflies. Their sap draws insects that the butterflies drink. Their roots go deep, deeper than they should given the soil, and in places the roots have surfaced, forming natural arches and chambers between the trees.
Cutting a veleth is forbidden among the Jeh Bli, though they harvest fallen timber readily enough. The taboo is practical, not religious: when a veleth is cut, the butterflies in that grove become agitated. They swarm the cutter. And then, according to the orcs, the cutter walks into the forest and doesn't walk out.
The veleth might be sapient. They might be connected to something beneath the forest. They might simply be unusual trees that happen to feed unusual butterflies. The orcs aren't curious enough to find out, and neither is anyone else who's seen what the butterflies can do.
Deeper In
Most hunting parties stay near the forest's edges, within a day's walk of open ground. Deeper in, the veleth grow larger, the canopy thicker, the light dimmer. The butterflies grow larger too—some as big as ravens, their wings patterned with shapes that almost look like faces.
At the forest's heart, according to orc hunters who've glimpsed it from distant rises, there's a clearing. The veleth circle it but don't enter. The clearing is full of butterflies—a solid mass of them, piled and drifting and layered on top of each other. What's beneath them, if anything, no one has seen.
The orcs call it Kel-Vethris: "the place where memory gathers." They don't go there. They strongly recommend no one else go there either.