Flutter and I went back to Natthimmel… and found it entirely different! Like, totally different from our last few visits. From the landing point, you have to wade through a shallow sea to get to distant, forbidding-looking peaks rising out of the equally forbidding-looking ocean. Psychologically, we found the whole experience (getting to the islands) quite uncomfortable… you are wading through what looks like deep, dark ocean, feeling like, at any moment, you will fall into the depths; the colours are dark and cold, the island ahead looks quite grim…

… when you get to the island, the grimness continues… this looks like the last place any shipwrecked survivor would want to wash up…

… you climb up and up on very steep steps. Everything is dark and claustrophobic, most of the time you are pushing through tangles of roots. Every now and then the gloom is punctured by flickering stone lanterns…

… and you sometimes get a glimpse out over the ocean. The steps will eventually lead you to a pretty little room with a central statue of cuddling otters, all very vague and esoteric…

… we spent several hours, over two days, here. We discovered there is a lot more than the creepy stairway to the otter shrine. There are actually open spaces…

… above us, here, is a swing bridge between the two main islands, itself one of the most unsettling bridges I’ve ever experienced in SL… but it was from that bridge that we noticed how much open land was between the islands…

… when you regularly visit as many different builds as we do, you start to see familiar components in their construction… we have never seen these crystal trees, before! They are gorgeous…

… even the pretty, open spaces are filled with mist, and dark…

… but dark in a beautiful, pre-Raphaelite, Ophelia kind of way, not an ‘Island of Doctor Moreau’ kind of way…

… we even found what passes, here, for a vast, open space. We had to literally walk around the islands, in that scary sea, waves washing over us, to find it, though…

… there were several deer, just chilling in the foggy grass.