Our project is inspired by Martha Wells’ Books of the Raksura-Series, which was nominated for a Best Series Hugo in 2018. I’m pretty sure I was among the people who nominated the series. I highly recommend starting with the first volume in the series, The Cloud Roads, although the descriptions that sparked the idea for this project come from the second volume, The Serpent Sea.

The forest of mountain-trees where the Raksura colonies make their homes makes its first appearance in the first chapter of The Serpent Sea. Travelling in a flying ship, the Valendera, the exiled members of the Indigo Cloud Court approach their ancient homeland:

Not far below the ship he could see platforms covered with greenery standing out from the trees and completely encircling the trunks, connecting the trees to each other in a web, many more than large enough for the Valendera to set down on. They looked like tethered chunks of sky-island, covered with grass and flowers, dripping with vines, most supporting glades of smaller trees. But as the ship drifted closer to one, he saw the platforms were thick branches that had grown together and intertwined in broad swathes, catching windblown dirt and seeds until they built up into solid ground.

…

The platforms of the suspended forest grew wider and more extensive. Many of them overlapped, or were connected by broad branches, with ponds or streams. Waterfalls fell from holes in some of the mountain-sized trees. … It was like a whole multi-layered second forest hanging between the tree canopy and the ground, somwhere far below.

…

From the lower part of the trunk, greenery platforms extended out, multiple levels of them, some more than five hundred paces across. A waterfall fell out of a knothole nearly big enough to sail the Valendera through, plunged down to collect in a pool on one of the platforms, then fell to the next, and the next, until it disappeared into the shadows below.

Martha Wells, The Serpent Sea, Chapter One