Daverwood music - Underground: Hans Christian / Phantoms, Sanctum: Garden of Orient, Approach: Tahgira Ice Fields, Roads Shadowed by Green Leaves

Eyesaac should start drawing images of mushrooms.

The road from Penna Plain to the Daverwood appears to have once been a good road, but it has now be neglected. Judging from the tracks, there have only been a few wagons passing this way since the last dust storm.

Encounter with bandits? No, not enough merchants to make it worth their while. No random monster to be anything other than just a waste of time...

A quite anomalous pine forest sticks out of some of the most rugged terrain you've seen. It looks very lush, more verdant even than those on the well-watered shores of the Lake of New Equestria. Yet it begins much more abruptly than those forests - the terrain goes from desert to forest in half a meter. Drifts of sand pile up at the windward edges of the forest, repelled by some subtle, primeval sort of magic that was old when ponies were nothing more than a highly-social species of sight-based pack hunters stalking great motile vegetable creatures through the dark Everwood forests.

There is a path through the forest here. The surface of the road is made of pine needles, all aligned end to end as if magnetized. Your steps displace them, but no sooner is a hoof lifted than the needles realign themselves. To the sides of the path pinecones and other debris accumulate, perhaps pushed out of the path by the same mysterious forces.