More than two thousand years before Cat’s tribe happened upon the forest they now call home, a sky-stone tore into the planet of two moons. The remnants of the stone came to rest in the far southern end of its path of destruction. Everything in the vicinity was obliterated, scorched and seared to the bare earth, and the face of the land was changed forever.

Over time trees reclaimed the damaged land, taller and hardier species of trees now free of the choking smaller growth of the primordial forest. These were generated by dormant seeds waiting in the earth for intense heat to open them, break them free to grow, as forest fires have always done.

But in the crater, nothing could generate except what was blown onto that scorched, ready ground. Grasses and hardy plants of the nearby plains and grasslands began to take root there, spreading over the damage in a dense mat of life-sustaining growth. Residue of the sky-stone, burned off and broken down into the soil, had permeated the entire area, and the alien compound changed the normally yellow-green grasses to frost touched silver.

Over time the local rodent and bird populations of the plains made forays into the woods and soon adapted, as did the large plains grazers, creating subspecies better equipped to life in and among the trees. At some point before Cat’s tribe arrived, other elves found and lived in the lush haven, but there remains little to no evidence of their tribe, and no way to know who they were or what happened to them.