Meredith engages a simple formulaic koan she learned when first gaining magic proficiency, a tool to connect to the Weave, but which also opens the senses of the more practiced arcanists to the Weave’s delicate striations, and… everything is exactly as it should be. She has read that on other planes, the Weave may invert or possess a slight fragrance or timbre different from that on the material plane. No. This is definitely the same. For a certainty, Meredith knows she is on the material plane. Erudisia feels the same thing but with less certainty and perhaps looks to Meredith for confirmation. Yet Meredith founders when she tries to recognize their location.

Scanning the stars through the thick-boughed but not dense woodland canopy, Erudisia recognizes, rising in the northeast, the constellation humans call Centaur, while the elves of Moonshae call it Eadro Anoriel, father of Merfolk. Wracking her memory, she recalls it is visible over the Sword Coast North and points inland during the summer months.

“We are perhaps not so far as I feared, if the constellations are those I know. That is something.”

She takes Meredith’s arm, and, with a quick look back to the others, begins to walk through the woods in the direction the Portal deposited them facing. 

After ten minutes of easy walking along the well-tended path, you pass by a picturesque lily pond, dragonflies darting close over the water’s surface. Moths, too, flutter lightly in the warm, humid air made amber by the candlelight of an open gazebo that marks the pond’s far edge.

When you reach the gazebo a minute or two later, the path continues, now lined with paper lanterns guiding you toward a low, wide building. Wind chimes lightly sound from where they hang by the front door.

Another path curves away from the entrance around a small stable toward a wider road, hard to make out in the dusky half-light.  

The main building’s walls are richly stained maple slats graced and adorned by subtly curved arcs, and glass windows — some stained in earthy greens and ambers — through which candlelight flickers from within.

The entry itself is slightly ajar, a wide wooden double door with inset glass panels and delicate bronze fixtures.