The woods started to change before I was born. When the elders told about a forest floor dancing with the emerald light of sunlit leaves, I saw a gloomy shadowland. When the elders reminisced the chirping of joyful wood-spirits and enchanting songbirds, I heard creaking and growling and slithering. The elder sung their songs of old, but no new music would come from the woods of my youth.

~o~

Almrond was born in the Woodland Realm in the years after the great shadow had fallen over Greenwood. 

As he grew up, he would listen to the elders talk about times past - a time when the forest had been benevolent, bathing in the rays of the sun shining through the leaves. But when he ventured in to his forest, the sun would be absent. The trees, grey and dry, would cast ominous shadows hiding nameless creatures. He could not stay there.

As Almrond arrived to this conclusion, he set out to explore the world until this darkness, this evil, would be gone. His greatest dream is to one day return to Mirkwood, and that it would once again be green and lush as it was in the stories of his youth. That it once more would be Greenwood the Great. 

Read the ongoing chronicle of Almronds long journey back to Mirkwood.