Digryph

THE DIGRYPH The northern forest. A thousand years dead and still standing.

Type: Forest Location: Northern Kraeta, between the kingdom proper and the Elephtheria region Known for: White trunks, brown thicket, and what people insist still lives there

The Digryph is the great forest of the north, and the wall between the kingdom proper and Elephtheria beyond it. Travelers who have crossed it describe the same thing for days on end: pale trunks standing in rows like bleached bone, and between them a brown tangle of thicket that catches at clothing and gives nothing back. Miles and miles of it. Very little moves there, and nothing grows that anyone would want.

It was not always so. A thousand years ago the Digryph was home to great beasts, and the old accounts speak of it as a place men entered in numbers or not at all. The beasts are gone now. The forest that held them has simply never fallen down.

The belief has outlasted the beasts. Ask in any tavern in Blackswain and someone will tell you there are still dragons in the Digryph, deep in, where no one goes. No one can say they have seen one. No one is willing to say they are certain there are none. In a kingdom with little left to fear but hunger, the Digryph remains the one place people are afraid of for older reasons.

At the forest’s southern edge, in an open field, a gray boulder the size of a house sits over the mouth of an unmapped cave.