Southward, the forest rested on a mountain range with a symbolic name of the Desert Shepherd, where the Dvorf kingdom of Teriamar once stood, now captured by orcs. This fact the robber knew exactly, as his gang sometimes sold the prey to the tribes living there. East of the Shepherd was the land of the Valley, a huge region consisting of several dozen of the same Valleys, each of which was an independent state, but all of which were subordinate to a certain Council, to which each Valley sends a representative. It turns out to be a feudal republic or confederation. In addition, there is a giant forest called Kormanthor, at least four times larger than Storozhevoy. Once it was inhabited by elves, but most of them have long gone somewhere in the West. Hello to Grandpa Tolkien. Alof, of course, did not know the reasons and circumstances, but since he himself was born in those places, fairy tales, and legends from childhood, he listened to them in his own right.
At the moment, the great empire of light elves and the citadel of ancient magic, at least, as it was described by local folklore, ceased to exist. Now you can only find there, except that gangs of orcs and goblins, who somehow even ruined the village next to my prisoner's homeland, and from the elves themselves, according to legends, and hunting bikes, remained only the ruins of the elven capital.
The closest to me was the Dagger Valley, where there was a trade route through the forest, and the Shadow Valley, located to the south-east and bordering the Cormantor Forest. The latter, in addition to being the birthplace of one unlucky bandit, was remarkable for the fact that Elminster, the greatest, strongest and most famous magician of Toril, a living legend, the chosen goddess of magic, just a respectable old man of a thousand and more years of age, and so on and so forth, had lived there for a long time. And it was not a rumor, but the most that there is no reinforced concrete fact, as the old man did not hide from anyone, nowhere to hide, and actively participated in the life of his country, living openly in the tower built almost on the main street of the capital. It is not difficult to guess that when I found out about it, I got sick at once; I was, of course, more than a hundred kilometers from the border of the Shadow Valley, but still, such a neighborhood was, to put it mildly, tense. And there was no doubt that my comrade's coolness wasn't exaggerated, I had no doubt that I had read books about him myself in my past life.
To the east of the Watchtower Forest, about two hundred kilometers away, was the Moon Sea, a huge freshwater lake. What was going on there - Alof did not know, he could only retell the stories he had heard from others about the terrible order of the cities standing there, the flourishing slave trade, corruption, and terrible cults. But how much truth was there, and how much fiction was there, it was impossible to understand.
The situation was, frankly speaking, unhappy. The West and South were closed to me and could only be seen as perverted ways of committing suicide, and something suggested to me that dying in the desert would be less painful than meeting with, say, the Great Darkness, Elminster.
It's all paranoia, of course, but anyway, I'll have to go around the places where such figures live until a certain point in time - so to speak, to avoid it. Somehow I don't want to go back to a dead state, though there are pluses in it too.
There was no point in going north either: first, hundreds of kilometers of Watchtower forest, and then either mountains or desert and most importantly - no human settlements, at least my interlocutor has not heard of anything like that.
It was possible to move to the east and get to the coastal cities, theoretically, there was a probability to settle down, not being afraid to come across any paladins or other fighters against evil. But the long way along the plain, and even though the lands of two states (two whole valleys), albeit dwarfs, caused fears.
There were two more options - to go to Teriamar or Kormanthor and try to settle down among the orcs. But the second one I didn't like was the one that assumes the continuation of life in the forest, and I was pretty tired of it. The chance that I would find mystical ruins, dig up the library of the ancient magician and "abra-cadabra" would become a cool magician, not just aspired to zero, they were frankly funny.
Banal because I can't read anything, no matter how hard I get...