Omikayalan

Omikayalan was a sacred grove held holy by all Ionians, standing in the province of Navori. Also called the Heart of the World, and known as the Greenglade, it was crowned by the God-Willow, a colossal tree draped with long gossamer leaves that shimmered with golden-green light and radiated magic like nothing else in the world. The grove was a strange and verdant garden with magic woven into its very soil. It was guarded by chimeric beings, half human and half beast, who would die to defend the God-Willow beneath its twisted branches. Many of the grove's descendants would endure long after it fell, carrying its life into the world. In ancient times, Omikayalan was destroyed by war. Ivern the Cruel, a fierce warrior of the ancient Vorrijaard, sailed east from his Freljordian homeland in search of the land where all magic flowed into the world, hoping to seize that power for himself. He landed on Ionia's shores and cleaved through a dozen coastal settlements before reaching the grove, where his warriors met the fiercest resistance beneath the twisted branches. Undeterred, Ivern pressed on to the God-Willow and struck it with his war axe until the great tree fell. In the riot of life-energy that erupted, Ivern the Cruel was instantly undone, and from the death around him new life exploded forth, remaking him into the Green Father, all that now remained of the God-Willow. The strange magic of Omikayalan followed in his wake as he wandered across Ionia and beyond. Though the God-Willow was felled, its legacy endured. A seed cast loose in its destruction took root far away and grew into the Dreaming Tree of the Garden of Forgetting, nurtured by Ivern, and from one of that tree's unbloomed buds the fawn Lillia was born. Relics of the grove passed into the wider world as well: Soraka keeps a willow-wreath from Omikayalan among the keepsakes in her home on Mount Targon.