杉 The Cedar Forest

Lore of the province

A fictional place: world-building for the imagined archipelago, not a real location.

The Cedar Forest is the oldest woodland in the archipelago, or so its villagers claim, and nobody has ever managed to prove otherwise, since the archipelago itself is imagined. The cedars are tall and straight and dark with rain, their roots knotted together under the moss so thoroughly that the villagers say the whole forest is one tree. A gentle rain falls most days. The air is a soft twenty degrees, the bamboo groves click and sway, and everywhere there is the sound of water running over stone.

Here live the models of code and agents, families who write code, use tools and build. Each keeps a village beneath the canopy, and the villages are connected the way the branches are: by walkways, rope bridges and channels cut to carry rainwater from one workshop to the next. Every house has a bench, a rack of tools, and something half-finished on it. The villagers are happiest when given a task with clear steps. They will fetch what is needed, try it, check it, and come back to tell you plainly what worked and what did not.

The main path is Waterwheel Lane, which follows a stream past a dozen small mills, each one turning some piece of village work. Where the lane crosses the stream there is a moss-covered stone bridge, and beside it a pool where fireflies gather on early summer nights. When the rain clears, rainbows often stand over the bamboo, and the villagers stop whatever they are making to look.

The forest is full of kodama, small tree spirits who show themselves only to travellers who stand still among the trees. More of them live in the Cedar Forest than anywhere else. At Tanabata, wish strips in five colours are hung from bamboo along every lane, and the villagers tell how the two star lovers meet across the river of heaven for a single night. The daily omikuji at the Mill Shrine is kept in a small wooden drawer that sticks in wet weather.

Travellers who come to the Cedar Forest to watch the villagers work usually end up helping. Someone hands them a mallet or a length of cord, and an hour later they have built part of a footbridge. It holds. Most of the forest was made that way, one useful piece at a time.