It's a fantasy role-playing game.

DM: You are Keyleth, a half-elf druid . You are the member of the famous group of adventurers. Previously, In the orchards outside the Fortress of the Sun, Vox Machina plan their next steps. They decide to make Terrah their next stop, for its proximity to the Pools of Wittebak, where Pelor said they could find the key to Ioun's whereabouts.
DM: All right, so as you complete your spell, Keyleth, you step through the base of the nearest tree, possibly the same one you spoke with earlier if you want to be a dick about it.
Player: Oh yeah! Let's walk through that asshole. That sounds worse for us. But fuck it.
DM: All right, you aggressively stampede through the center of this one tree and emerge on the other side from one of the surrounding trees on the Terrah village. There are a number of these pseudo-petrified or dried-out large-trunk trees that seem to have slowly died off from the heavy tectonic shifts and small quakes that happen in this area, that have made a lot of the land unable to support large forms of plant life, or at least the trees that used to exist here. So you step out and emerge from the exterior of the village as it domes down into this small crater that you recall seeing before, where most of the village inhabits the central portion, and the village is there before you.
Player: What were the shard things called again?
DM: The shard things?
Player: The things we need to collect?
DM: There wasn't really a name for them more than they're small pieces of essence of the deity.
