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The material plane had always confounded Hazel, in a way the Feywild never did. Things made sense there--in the Wilds, that is. People couldn't always lie. Rules were always followed. Even chaos had its ebs and flows that, with enough practice and a keen enough eye, one could learn.
But in the material realm? People lied more often than they breathed. Rules were made to be broken. And chaos, well. Too many people used chaos to their advantage, at least for Hazel's liking.
She'd never thought that she'd be grateful for being whisked away to another world, ripped from any chance to know her birth family, plopped in the middle of a Fae court. She never thought she'd miss the cobweb-adorned nobles or the sickly sweet aroma of enchanted wine or the crackling embers of the gloaming forge deep within the elfmound mountains. But upon her unceremonious dump on the other side of the crackling green portal, she felt the sudden disconnect from magic-clotted air like a fish does the sudden absence of water at the hands of a fisherman.
It had taken her a long while to learn the ways of humanoids on the material plane, and longer still for her to learn her landscape. Baldur's Gate, the beating heart of the Sword Coast by the standards of some. She never stopped missing the Faewild, though.
She often thought of the forge, the place she'd found a home within the court, far away from the glittering masses and their heightened politics. She'd forged her first blade there, earned her place in the guilds through blood and sweat and grit, and she had even for a while believed that everyone around her thought she belonged there.
But she'd been wrong.
Baldurs Gate offered no shortage of income for her skillset, though she did find difficulty interacting with patrons. She had to keep reminding herself that people only paid with gold here-- no favors, no soul-bonds, and no honorific trinkets. She'd nearly been swindled a few times by a crafty patron or two who caught on that she had know idea what she was doing.
For a while, she thought that she would never again feel the magic of the Wilds-- never breathe the scent of a thousand flowers all at once in a combination that was practically music. But one evening, in the mere moments between dusk and nightfall, she was visited. Not by a person, but by a presence.
She couldn't describe the presence further than a distinctly green sense that had nothing to do with sight. It was all she could smell, taste, and feel. Green, green, green...
And then, with a start, she realized something was twining itself around her wrists, curling up over her palms, tickling her fingers.
Thorns.