Nightwood

"So we gonna be clearing them Nightwoods?"
"Nah, you go near them too close to dark and you're gonna find yourself stuck in one."

— Unknown speakers

A darkened wood

Throughout the years of the Eight Lands, dark trees known as nightwood have popped up within groves of normally plain trees. Nightwoods don't keep to a singular species of tree, they hold the appearance of the trees that are around them, just as dark as the night sky.
Some say that the nightwood are taking the earth meant for the rest of the trees for themselves, bringing corrupt roots into place. While there's no known reason to why or when a nightwood may appear, not long after they do those who seek to do harm disappear, either for hours or days at a time. When they do return, they come back not as themselves but as mere shadows, sometimes taking on entirely new personalities or even reverting to a childlike demeanor of dependence on familial relations.

A lightened earth

Though people claim the nightwoods are corrupt or evil, they are instead removing the evil from the places around them and are holding that evil inside them, causing them to lash out at people who may try and destroy them or remove them from their grove. Nightwoods do not spread, they merely appear, so any grove where a few do take hold is safe from more appearing. As little as one may appear or as many as fifteen have been seen in a grove, though it isn't proportional to the amount of evil or corruption in an area.
The few nightwoods that have been taken down are revered by a great few, the logs held in vaults or in chains due to claims that they may escape and settle down once more in a new location. The people who do revere them do not necessarily believe the trees are evil, but many are of the persuasion that while there is an evil in the world, the trees are simply a receptacle for it, an outlet for it to escape into the air instead of into the life of the Eight Lands.

Type

Wood