The Garden

On the eastern edge of the city, nestling inside the monolithic walls of Port Blackheart, lies the Garden. The original purpose of this district is lost in the mists of time though it was certainly not always as it appears now. Underneath the canopy of trees and vegetation lie the mostly abandoned ruins of stone buildings and cobbled streets. The area is now the domain of forest-dwelling folk and the fey though and it has been for longer even than the oldest vampires in the city can remember. The Garden can be seen from quite some distance away across the city as it's towering trees are taller than most of the buildings around it. The trees and plants of the district are magically grown as can clearly be seen in the divide between the Garden and the surrounding districts. There is an invisible line here that the plantlife doesn't cross and those entering the region step from the streets of the city to the mossy floor of the forest in one step.

Within the Garden the environment is varied. THere are areas of thick leaved trees and dense brush where light rarely penetrates and ancient, unfathomable forest creatures dwell. There are small communities of folk living in houses built up the branchless boles of enormous trees. There are centaurs and satyrs playing in leafy, dappled groves of light brush and strange, magical arboreal life. The Garden is a magical, fantastical place and yet those who enter its bounds are few. The residents of the Garden are generally not well-disposed to outsiders, preferring to keep themselves to themselves and they deal harshly and swiftly with trouble in their domain. Those who enter it's wooded bounds would do well to remember that they are always under surveillance.

The highest authority in the Garden is Mirabella, a dryad of tremendous power, able to bend nature to her will. How long she has dwelt here is uncertain and she seems unintereted in power, except in the sense of having enough to control her domain. Still, she, like Lady Eviscera in the Dark and Magrus the Grey in the Wyrd, makes many of the Bloody Duke's lieutenants nervous as she obviously has the power to challenge and replace any of them, even possibly take down the Duke himself, and yet she chooses not to, for reasons unknown.