The Devouring Forest Hub

The Ancient Tale

There are some stories so old as to be almost entirely forgotten. They are just whispers of whispers, so ancient as to have the stories themselves almost rotted away. Here is what remains of one:

Once upon a time, the fair folk of the forest obeyed a powerful entity. They were its servants, and it used them. It caused them to war against other fair folk - fair folk of fields, of desert, of stone and earth and mountain - and attempted to conquer everything it came across.

The fair folk did not want to fight. They did not want to fight each other, and they did not want the forest to eat away at everything else. Nothing could survive, with the entity so aggressive, that was not strong. The fair folk are not kind or benevelont, but neither are they uniformly cruel, and they certainly do not enjoy things being out of balance.

The entity was determined to wash the land in its forest, however, and strangled life out of everything else. It forced the fair folk to obey it, for it was so powerful that they could not overcome it with brute force alone.

But anyone who has ever dealt with the good neighbors know that they are at their best when they are clever. And so the folk closest to the entity came up with a plan.

The entity, as powerful as it was, had one weakness: stone. Roots could not penetrate hard rock without the aid of water, and something about stone from deep in the earth seemed to give the entity pause.

So the entity's scouts claimed that there was a growing rebellion in the mountains - an empty part of the mountains. The entity raged, and up sheer rock it fought and tried to climb.

This exhausted it, and it fell asleep. Once it was asleep, many fair folk gathered and cast a spell so that it may sleep forever.

This was not enough. They formed chains of bronze and bound its limbs together, then bound it to stones.

This was not enough. They carved powerful sigils on stones, and buried it beneath dirt and rock and even the forest itself, creating layers and layers of walls.

This was finally enough. Satisfied that the entity would be locked away forever, the good neighbors returned to their world, freed of the entity's conquering ways.

The land found balance. Biomes of desert and ice, biomes of rock and stone, lands of a thousand different types were able to thrive. And in these many different biomes, many different creatures were able to live and play and die. No longer strangled by roots that craved to own and possess, life flourished.

For many millenia, this was the end of the story.