Posted by Seanan McGuire

https://seananmcguire.com/blog/2025/12/08/out-of-this-wood-the-dvd-extras/

https://seananmcguire.com/blog/?p=664

Out of this wood do not desire to go:
Thou shalt remain here, whether thou wilt or no.
I am a spirit of no common rate;
The summer still doth tend upon my state…

The time is come for me to dissect Lorwyn Eclipsed for your amusement.  Because this is time-consuming, I only know people are enjoying it if they comment, and that means I really am holding future DVD extras hostage against comments. Sorry about that.

Welcome to the “DVD extras” for the first main story installment for Lorwyn Eclipsed, “Out of This Wood.”  This story is copyright Wizards of the Coast, although it was written by me, and can be found in its entirety here: https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/magic-story/lorwyn-eclipsed-episode-1-out-of-this-wood

Give them some clicks.  Convince them that you love me and I should get to keep writing things.  Seriously, though, please click the link, even if the story isn’t relevant to you.  Click-throughs are how Wizards knows that Story matters.

So what is this?  This is little excerpts of the story, with my thoughts on them, because, IDK, I thought it was funny.  I’ve also tried to include context for people new to Magic Story, to help you understand what the hell is going on.  If people continue to like it, I will probably continue.  If you don’t care about Magic Story, skip on over, although I’d still like it if you clicked.

And here we go!

As always, from this point on, plain text is bits from the story, italic text is my commentary on the same.

“All right, students, the moment you’ve been waiting for is finally at hand,” announced Dina, spreading her arms in a theatrical gesture that managed to encompass the entire glade, students, trees, and all. Letting them drop back down to her sides, she continued, “We have reached the Harrier’s Wood.”

This is a Lorwyn-Shadowmoor story, but we’re doing sort of a Narnia/fish out of water riff, and so we start on Arcavios, home plane of several members of our cast, to get an idea of where they were and what they’ve lost. I promise we won’t be here for very long.

Dina is a character from the original Strixhaven story, a Witherbloom dryad who’s in the early stages of magic grad school by this point. She’s a fan-favorite, well-beloved, and only an incidental player in this story, which is about Lorwyn, after all. Harrier’s Wood is a new location; you’re not missing anything.

“We would have reached it much faster if we’d been allowed to use the carts,” said a student, lifting one foot off the ground like it pained them to move, “or if you’d told us to wear hiking shoes.”

Kirol’s footwear is going to play a larger than anticipated part in this narration. They are a vampire native to Arcavios who really didn’t sign up for all this “hiking” bullshit.

“An excellent point, Kirol,” said Dina. “Can anyone guess why it may have been important for us to walk instead of taking a cart or skycoach from campus?”

What’s a skycoach? Well, that’s a Strixhaven thing that’s going to get explained more thoroughly in, y’know, the actual Strixhaven set. Where it belongs.

“You were trying to exhaust us so we wouldn’t wander off in the woods?” asked another student, this one a short, blue-skinned goblin whose stature was overshadowed by the size of his collection basket.

I love Sanar.

“That is not correct, Sanar, but I wish I’d thought of it,” said Dina. “This is the Harrier’s Wood, and this is only the second year that underclassmen have been allowed to come here for sample collection. Can anyone tell me why?”

Dina doesn’t sound a lot like Dina here. Why? Because this is her first time leading a group of underclassmen off campus alone, and she’s doing the new grad student thing of being as formal as she possibly can to hide her nerves. This is really Dina pretending as hard as she can to be Professor Vess, and not entirely nailing it.

A slender female student whose yellow-green skin was patterned with darker green stripes, like the scales of a snake, raised her hand and waited for Dina to nod in her direction. “Before the Oriq and their mage hunters were driven back, letting first-year mage-students go to a location that’s an hour from the main campus would have been an enormous risk. Now that the Oriq are effectively gone, we can reopen more remote locations for scholarship.”

The Oriq were the villains of the first Strixhaven set, mage-hunters who would happily wreck a young mage-scholar’s life. They’re not so much a factor anymore, but they had to be considered for the first set, and everything echoes.

Dina nodded. “Very good, Tamira. Because the Harrier’s Wood is an hour’s walk from campus, it’s far enough from the ambient magic of places like Sedgemoor or the Furygale that the flora here is considered magically neutral. We don’t bring the carts because the artifice that drives them is magically powered, and it might impact the flowers we’re here to collect.”

Magic logistics! I like it when things make internal sense, so this was a great opportunity for me to nerd, hard, at the way you’d have to handle things like magic botany and such in a high-magic environment like Strixhaven.

I’m not on a Witherbloom study track, signed a brown-feathered owlin. Her words were broadcast telepathically by her hearing aid only a beat later, echoing in the minds around her. I’m only taking Introduction to Magibotanical Environments because it’s a prerequisite for Advanced Floral Invocations. I don’t understand why I’m here.

Owlin are owl-people, native to Arcavios. Abigale was born Deaf in an owlin community, and signs as her base form of communication. But many sign languages involve facial expressions as a part of the syntax. How do you do that with someone who is, literally, an owl? Well, Abigale speaks a form of sign that uses feather motions in place of facial expressions–puffed out, slicked back, slightly raised, etc. And yes, I made a mask of construction paper feathers and modeled expressions for myself until I was confident she could make herself understood.

Dutifully, the students looked at it. There was nothing special about the trumpet-shaped white blossom. Snarlflowers were a common sight around the university, growing everywhere from the rocky walkways of the Lorehold campus to the moist dampness of Sedgemoor. They were a primary food source for the Witherbloom pests, which chewed them down to the root, keeping the fast-growing vines from doing serious damage to the masonry. And they were incredibly magically reactive, with a tendency to change color and even perfume depending on where they grew.

The snarlflowers were a beautiful side effect of me both writing the upcoming Strixhaven book (Omens of Chaos, order your copy today) and this story starting on Arcavios. I was able to incorporate them in both places, and show why they’re important to the ecology of campus in a steady, consistent way. Aw, yay!

All five colleges used them in one way or another. Prismari florists made elaborate displays of snarlflowers, exposing them to different elemental forces to change their shapes and colors, making every flower arrangement utterly unique and breathtakingly lovely. Lorehold historiobotanists planted snarlflowers near dig sites, using the color gradations of the resulting blossoms to map the flow of magic in a specific region, learning much about the spells cast there in the past. Quandrix scholars studied the growth of snarlflower vines to learn how ambient magic affected mathematical probabilities, and Silverquill poets whispered to the seeds until their flowers grew as living poems, perfect and unique.

We only have like three pages on Arcavios, but the students are sticking with us for the long haul, which meant that it was important to ground the philosophies of the colleges. This was a quick and easy way to show how students from different colleges might approach the same item.

Dina grinned, trying to look encouraging. This was her second year as a TA for this class, and she was going to ask Professor Vess to assign her to something less general next year before she was tempted to drown an undeclared first-year in Sedgemoor. Their dislike of getting their hands dirty was getting on her nerves.

Second year TA, first year leading the field trip by herself.

Dina leaned back against the tree behind her. “Instructions over,” she said. “Get to work.”

Dina, internally: “I sounded just like Professor Vess just there. I am nailing this TA situation. Go team Dina.”

Really, this year’s crop was doing quite well, especially compared to last year’s, when she’d needed to conjure a massive vine and pull three Quandrix hopefuls out of a mud puddle that they had somehow caused to swell exponentially until it threatened to swallow them all whole.

Quandrix is the college of mathematical bullshit. You may remember Zimone from Duskmourn? Well, she’s Quandrix. For them, a man-eating mud puddle is just another Tuesday.

Still, after the last few years, there was something to be said for babysitting duty, which might be boring but didn’t end with anybody dying or transforming into a horrific amalgamation of flesh and steel that would haunt her dreams for the rest of her life. Dina closed her eyes and breathed in the scent of the forest, listening to the students going about their work. This was a lovely way to spend an afternoon, boring or not.

Someday everything I write will cease to be haunted by the specter of the Phyrexian Invasion. Someday.

Abigale was among the first to move out of sight of Dina, following a narrow, desired path deep into the trees. As always, the reserved owlin moved with care, her taloned feet crunching in the leaves that covered the ground. Her hearing aid was of Silverquill design and didn’t pick up ambient noise, only intentional speech. She walked carefully, because she wouldn’t know if she made the kind of racket that could get her into trouble.

It was important that Abigale’s hearing aid not become a “magical cure” or something that turned her Deafness into a cosmetic affectation. And it being of Silverquill design, it only picking up on intent made a lot of sense. I love her so much.

Almost directly overhead, Kirol moved through the branches, shifting their grip carefully from bough to bough as they followed her into the wood. Like Abigale, they had a specimen basket hanging from one arm. Unlike Abigale, they had tucked their shears into the waistband of their trousers, where they would probably impale themself if they fell. As Abigale stopped to look more closely at a patch of flowers, they swung gracefully into a dismount, landing directly behind her.

Kirol isn’t trying to be an asshole. They’re a naturally stealthy person, and startle their hearing classmates often enough that it’s never really occurred to them that this might bother Abigale more than it does anyone else. In their vague defense, Abigale hasn’t told them explicitly. As a counter to that defense, they’d notice if they paid attention.

Abigale dropped her shears into her basket beside the flowers and began moving her hands in sharp, declarative gestures, followed a beat later by the telepathic echo. Kirol, we’ve talked about this! You can’t sneak up on me!

From Kirol’s POV, they obviously can. She hasn’t said “you shouldn’t,” and so they keep ignoring her complaints. Real younger sibling behavior, buddy. Maybe chill.

Kirol huffed theatrically. They made a gesture with one hand.

The feathered crests at the side of Abigale’s head that some people erroneously called “ears” lifted in an amused arc as she signed back. Close. That was almost the sign for “whatever.”

“What did I actually say?”

Kirol may be kind of a jerk about sneaking up on Abigale, but they’re also the only one of her classmates who’s actually been making an effort to learn sign. Of such little quirks are friendships made.

Just don’t repeat it where Professor Vess can see you, or you’re likely to get a lecture about watching your language.

Kirol sputtered. “She’d never care about swearing!”

She’d care that you didn’t know what you were saying. I bet she’d call you sloppy again.

Kirol is prone to acting without thinking about it, but they mean well.

“Almost caught an LBB!” said Sanar cheerfully. “It was pecking at the snarlflowers. I think they may be the explanation for how the seeds wind up everywhere.”

Sanar is having six conversations in tandem at any given time, and he’d like you to stop getting confused. Come on, all the threads were there!

“LBB?”

“He means ‘little brown bird,'” said a new voice, calm, female, and precise in the way that signaled “academic” to anyone who’d spent much time in the halls of Strixhaven. The green-striped gorgon student from before stepped out of the bushes, following Sanar’s arc. Unlike him, she was perfectly tidy and composed, with no offending vegetation caught in the serpentine tendrils of her hair. Her basket of perfect snarlflowers was very nearly full.

The term “LBB” is not my invention: it’s common in birdwatching circles, and in ornithology, where it’s used to describe exactly what it sounds like. And with our gorgon girl’s arrival, we have the full compliment of Arcavios students who will be accompanying us for this story.

Kirol tapped Abigale on the shoulder, gesturing to the newcomer. “Hey, Tamira,” they said. “Come to hang out with the class clowns?”

All four of these students are bound for different colleges, and are only together because this is a first year intro class, before colleges are declared.

“Tam is fine. And Abigale is a perfectly good student when she focuses on the classwork, rather than her latest ode to the color of the sky above the Prismari campus at night,” said Tam mildly. “I should have known you’d all wind up in the same place.”

The Prismari are the red/blue masters of expression, and the sky above their campus is probably gorgeous at night. I would write poems about it too.

Tam turned back to Kirol. “Have you been trying to sneak up on Abigale again?”

“No,” they said. “I’ve been succeeding.”

Tam is aware that Kirol is being rude, even if they refuse to admit it.

“It’s not polite to sneak up on someone who can’t hear you coming.” Tam’s hair writhed. “Keep this up and I’ll have to see how much sneaking you do when you’re made of stone.”

“You wouldn’t. You can’t. Can you?”

“Want to find out?”

Tam doesn’t want to be team mom. She just seems to have fallen into that role. As to whether she can turn them to stone, that remains unclear. Gorgons have different abilities depending on where they come from, and they’re not normally found on Arcavios. So who knows?

“Does anyone else see that?” he asked.

Sanar will now cause some problems.

Kirol moved to look where the goblin was pointing and stopped, blinking at the small creature in the trees above them. It looked like a humanoid insect, almost—bipedal, with long, spindly limbs covered in shining blue chitin. Its wings were broad and shimmering, like sheets of mica flaked off some larger piece of stone. It turned its unnervingly human face toward them and laughed before taking off into the air.

Did we forget this was a Lorwyn story?

He leapt to his feet and ran after the fleeing creature—taking Tam’s sample basket with him. Too late, Kirol tried to grab the back of his shirt and almost fell forward as their hand closed on empty air.

“My flowers!” yelped Tam. “My grade!”

And in this little piece of action, we have learned most of what we need to know about both of them.

The four students ran pell-mell into the woods, each focused on their individual goals: Sanar was pursuing the strange creature; Abigale and Kirol were chasing Sanar; and Tam was chasing her sample basket, swearing under her breath every time she saw a flower get bounced loose and fall to the ground. The impact would bruise the petals, leaving them useless for grading purposes.

None of them were looking down.

I just love the classic physical comedy of this sequence. It’s silly, but it fulfills the soul.

The tree root seemed to unwind from the underbrush, extending until it ran all the way across the path, unevenly humped and mounded like a sea serpent breaking the surface of the water. Sanar hit it first, his foot hooking over a loop in the root and sending him sprawling. Abigale, who was more graceful in the air than she was on the ground, followed. Kirol tried to stop before they could trip like the others, only for Tam to run straight into them from behind, pushing them over and falling atop them.

Try picturing this as an animated movie. For the highest comedy, picture it while mentally playing “Cotton-Eyed Joe.” Oh, the laughter. Oh, the tragedy. Oh, dear.

To add insult to injury, a circle of perfect snarlflowers surrounded the edges of the hole, like the promise of a passing grade.

And then they fell into cascading, prismatic light, and classwork didn’t seem to matter much anymore. In an instant, they were gone.

Omenpaths can open anywhere, at any time, and while we’ve mostly dealt with semi-stable omenpaths in the story up until this point, they aren’t all like that. They can literally happen in the middle of a well-traveled corridor, swallow you, and then be gone. Very inconvenient.

The strange little creature that had originally caught Sanar’s attention flitted over to hover above the hole, giggling wildly, then dove after the students, disappearing into whatever waited on the other side.

Lorwyn faeries are kinda jerks sometimes.

The four students tumbled through a tunnel of gleaming prismatic light that formed and reformed into impossible geometric shapes, fractals and spirals bleeding off into infinity.

Describing the inside of an omenpath is sort of like describing the Blind Eternities: it’s really hard and really weird and sort of like trying to transcribe a kaleidoscope.

The fall took a matter of seconds. They barely had time to catch their breath before tumbling out of the hole and into the middle of an unfamiliar meadow, the grass growing lush and green, patterned with strange patches of wildflowers that looked almost dull in comparison to the colors of their fall. The flowers grew in spirals that appeared natural, despite their precision, and large, smooth stones patterned with similar spirals dotted the landscape around them. Some of the stones floated a few feet above the ground, seeming to hum with the magic that kept them aloft.

The spirals are endemic to Lorwyn-Shadowmoor, appearing in all sorts of natural environments. It’s a really neat bit of visual worldbuilding that makes things way more interesting to look at. So here’s a fun fact: I went to university for a degree in folklore and mythology, with a focus on the British isles. Bringing me in for the Celtic mythology-inspired plane seemed like the easiest thing in the world. And then I proceeded to drive everyone up a tree with my endless questions about basically everything. Fun!

Abigale made a hard slash through the air with one hand, shaking her head at the same time. Stop! she commanded telepathically. She continued, hands moving rapidly: We don’t know where we are. We don’t know how we got here. We shouldn’t be touching things we don’t understand.

We didn’t want to describe too many signs, because that would naturally prejudice us toward one real-world sign language or another, but sometimes it was important to show what Abigale’s signing looked like to the people around her.

There, about fifteen feet above them, was a triangular gap cut out of the air, seemingly made of the same flimsy substance as a soap bubble, dancing with the rainbows they’d all seen during their fall. A single sun shone high above that, with the washed-out shape of the moon in the distance near the horizon.

“One of the suns is missing,” said Sanar. “Suns don’t normally go missing.”

Arcavios has two suns. Lorwyn-Shadowmoor has one sun. Sanar hasn’t quite realized that they’re on a different plane now.

“The sun’s not missing,” said Tam. “It’s back on Arcavios where it belongs.”

There was a moment of silence as the others considered this statement. Finally, Abigale signed, If the sun is on Arcavios, we’re …

“Not on Arcavios,” said Tam.

Tam is quick to make this jump.

The group turned. There, behind where they had landed, was a massive gateway, formed of two tall stones with a third laid across them. All three were patterned in spirals and covered in faintly glowing purple moss. Most unnervingly of all, however, the gateway was free-standing, not attached to any wall or mountain, and yet it seemed to mark a barrier between the bright, beautiful day around them and the very dead of night. Darkness stood on the other side of the gate, broken by patches of glowing fungus and swarms of glittering fireflies, but otherwise infinitely deep.

What the hell is that?

“It’s a dolmen gate,” said Tam wonderingly. “They’re usually the entrance to a gravesite or someone’s home.”

Thanks, Tam.

“Sure, go through the creepy gate into the impossible darkness; that’s going to help,” said Kirol. “Why not?”

Kirol did not sign up for this shit. They just wanted to pick flowers and keep their GPA high enough to let them keep playing Mage Tower, not get stranded on a strange plane in the wrong shoes.

“Look at these,” said Kirol, focusing on the wall. With Sanar’s light illuminating the corridor, they could see the paintings on the stone, blotched with lichen but still perfectly visible. The paintings, stylized and full of spirals, showed two great beasts, each with a long neck, six arms, and vast wings, circling one another. One had a sun for a head; the other, a moon. As the students continued walking, the paintings of the beasts evolved, showing them moving under skies that matched the emblems. The sun-headed creature walked in day, the moon-headed creature walked in night. Finally, they came together, the day creature laying down to sleep and the night creature standing watch. Then they traded places.

This is a very old place. And here we see some of why Kirol is in Lorehold, the college of historians and archeology.

“Incarnations of the sun and moon, trading places,” said Kirol. “It’s like they were trying to find a way to paint the distinction between night and day. It’s a fascinatingly abstract way to represent it, though—anthropomorphizing the two states as living entities …”

The distinction between night and day has never mattered as much as it does right now, Kirol, buddy…

And there, at the center of the circle, was the moon-headed creature from the cave paintings. Its hide was a deep midnight blue, fading toward full-moon silver-gold as it neared the head. Its neck was almost impossibly long, and its wings were fused behind its back, creating the impression of a vast, dragging tail. Aside from the wings, it had six ambulatory limbs, which appeared divided into four legs and two arms. As for the creature’s head, it was impossible to see its shape clearly, shrouded as it was in trailing mist that should have read as fog but was somehow clearly a shifting cluster of clouds that surrounded the softly glowing moon.

I am sure that a bunch of people from off-plane finding the sleeping spirit of Shadowmoor can’t have any consequences whatsoever.

Sanar nodded, and Tam took her hand away. As soon as he was released, the goblin started forward again, this time crossing the boundary into the circle before anyone could grab him. He approached the creature with slow reverence, unable to resist the call of long autumn nights bathed in moonlight, silence waiting to be broken by stories around a bonfire, sweet cider on the tongue and all the good gifts of the harvest season welcoming him home …

Impulse control? Never heard of her.

He didn’t entirely realize he was going to reach out until it was already done. He pressed his palm against the cool, smooth neck of the creature, feeling soft fur like moss tickling his skin. For a moment, he was suffused with the greatest peace he had ever known.

Sometimes characters acting stupid to progress the plot is lazy. Other times, it’s the only thing those specific characters could possibly have done. Sanar is smart. He’s just also impulsive as all hell, and used to being in an environment where protective measures have been taken to try and keep the students from getting atomized.

As the darkness flowed across the meadow, it swallowed the sunlight and created brief auroras of color to fade and die in the dark. Those auroras left transformations in their wake. The pooling dark thinned, shifting into more ordinary night, and the sky overhead erupted in stars, the sun becoming a thin eclipse ring of fire in the distance while the moon sprang to sudden, total fullness. The grasses withered and died, the flowers largely following, even as some sprang to greater, glowing life. The spirals remained, some reversing direction, others becoming jagged and broken.

The transition between Lorwyn and Shadowmoor as distinct states of being is natural to this plane, inescapable, but jarring all the same, especially when it happens this abruptly.

Most striking of all, the blue bled out of its carapace, replaced by gleaming, gold-flecked green. The faerie looked down at itself and giggled, apparently pleased with what it saw. It flapped its newly tattered wings and launched itself into the air, following the path of darkness. In a matter of seconds, it was gone.

This Lorwyn fairy–or more properly, faerie–is acting real weird. Shadowmoor faerie now, I suppose. And I guess we’ll see what it’s up to in the next episode.

All that remained was the dark flowing out of the dolmen gate, and the distant sound of screams.

Our students are not having a great time. But at this point, probably neither is Dina.

And that’s episode one of Lorwyn: Eclipsed! Now for a fun fact: the first draft of this story was written entirely in iambic pentameter. Then, during revisions, a few character names were changed in ways that didn’t fit the meter, and everything fell apart. It’s probably better this way, but oh, I have regrets.

See you tomorrow!

https://seananmcguire.com/blog/2025/12/08/out-of-this-wood-the-dvd-extras/

https://seananmcguire.com/blog/?p=664