Worlds of Laika Wallace: an introduction to Silent Woods
Silent Woods is one of many names given to a secret, magical realm that exists alongside every planet and moon. Its main purpose is to act as a time capsule for lost life, providing a snapshot of extinct life and ancient landscapes that you can fully immerse yourself in with varying degrees of risk.
The Woods are endlessly massive, spanning every moment of history and crisscrossing over itself and the “real” or Outside world in a confusing web that can get newcomers and natives alike lost. It can house mountain ranges as high as the sky, sunken ship graveyards far below the ocean, cities lost to time, rolling plains and dense forests.
The Woods are not easy to find, and once you’ve found them, they can be difficult to leave as well. Since they function as a sanctuary for the planet’s life, they do a very good job of protecting it, and can make themselves impossible to reach for those who have bad intentions, even if one were to follow every instruction left by someone who successfully entered. Entrances and exits can change and move seemingly randomly, spitting people out sometimes thousands of miles away from what would have been a journey of a single step.
The Woods on Earth take on a special quality, too, that makes encounters like that more frequent and more dangerous: it is not only the extinct species and old landscapes that are present there. Stories of all kinds influence what happens in the woods, from folklore to fiction to a child’s belief in magic. Fantastic creatures like dragons and unicorns roam the Woods, and whether that means they were once like any other animal on Earth or if they were purely generated by the power of the Woods is up to debate.
There are places in the Woods where elves and orcs trade in the lush blue meadows around snow capped mountains teeming with snow vultures and dire wolves, where cities of polish marble and gleaming petrified wood surround a sprawling underwater cemetery, and where an arc of stones so large they’ve grown their own ecosystems hang like a solar system over a valley of giants.
But these places are hidden deep, deep within the Woods, under the utmost protection. The average person from the Outside will find bits and pieces of the Woods’ influence in their life, when missing objects turn up unexpectedly, a familiar walk brings you to a whole new place that you struggle to find again, or when you see a cat that isn’t quite a cat escaping into the sewers of your suburb before you can pull out your camera.
The source of this special quality is not unique to Earth, but brings a lot of attention from otherworldly sources...
Silent Woods is the main setting in my stories. Town Ghosts, an upcoming novella which will be available on my website shortly, takes place on the edge of the Woods, as well as my previously published short story Awful Moon, which is available in the Fear & Trembling zine and the X/Y: A Junk Drawer of Trans Voices zine, and Grandma’s Stories, which is also available in X/Y: A Junk Drawer of Trans Voices.