The forest had no ceiling, only layers.
Green light fell in shafts through a canopy so dense that noon looked like a cathedral's dusk, and everything below it, moss, root, stone, breath, smelled of rain and old wood. At the heart of it all, visible from every ridge for a hundred miles, stood the world tree.
Its trunk was wider than the human king's palace and its crown held clouds. The elven capital lived inside it, in spiral halls grown rather than built, and around its roots the forest divided, invisibly but absolutely, into three territories.
The merchant faction held the western groves, where trade caravans were loaded under lanterns of shaped amber. The magic tower faction held the eastern canopy, where Lealdo's students hung their study pods like wasp nests among the high branches. And between them, binding them together whether they wished it or not, the queen's own loyalists held the roots and the deep halls of the tree itself.
