Forêt Delégion
We sought the fabled Legion of the Wild - me and Arry were there because we were being paid, and I have no idea what our patron was there for. He never said, and we never asked.
We had come from the south, having stopped to watch a Slam Balll match in Krugerburg before continuing on. Hermallin, the patron for the expedition, had somehow come up with a rough map as to where to find the "Bastion Grove" as he called it. Said that's where we needed to get him to to earn our pay. I kept my thoughts to myself on it, because all the map really looked like to me was someone drawing in a dot in the center of a very rough map of the area. Even if it was more than that, the dot itself covered what must have been a hundred square miles, add in the possibility of being even a bit off and that becomes an untenable search area. But we got paid by the day, plus expenses, so we'd do the search.
Based on the map, the dot, and how long before we'd left Krugerburg, we must have been anywhere from five to 500 miles away from the Grove when we first saw the signs. The first sign was the savaged corpse of a good-sized moose. We didn't think much off it at the time, another dead animal, although Arry thought the wounds were unusual and questioned why so much meat was left. He was on his guard, then, which I should have been. I doubt it would have changed things, but I still feel a touch derelict. Not too much, because Nerlon wasn't worth much, but a touch.
The next sign was, of course, Nerlon. We had made camp near a stream, and he went looking for a good place to set up the Commode where we'd have a touch of privacy. Still wasn't back an hour later, which was a long time even for him. Arry was nervous and asked me to go look with him. Arry being nervous makes me a bit so myself, and I armored up and grabbed my hammer and off we went. Didn't take long before we found the first bit of him, although we couldn't know for sure it was him - intestines look about the same on anyone. Arry was sure when we found the leg, but it was the head that really did it. The head had been gnawed on by something big enough to treat it like a dog's chew toy, and it was barely recognizable as a human's. It was that stupid feather earring that clinched it being Nerlon.
I told Arry to start tracking, and we'd find out what did this. He didn't move for a good ten seconds, until I gave him a nudge. When I did, he said, "Think it through, Chak. He got about 100 yards from the camp before we found the first sign, right?" I nodded, and he went on. "So he was gone from the camp for less than a minute before he died, badly, without making enough noise that we could hear it. No need to track it down - it's hunting us."
I realized pretty quickly that he must be right. And I also realized that we had left our patron alone back at the camp, without even our limited protection. So I thought it through, just as Arry told me. And I came up with the same answer he did - take what we have on us, and whatever is on the body of Nerlon, and head back south. And we did. We made it back here in time for the game, and it was a great decision. Nerlon may have been mostly worthless, but he served us well in the end by dying in such a way that we never looked back.
No idea what happened to Hermallin.
Geography
The Forêt is a massive forested region, stretching over a thousand miles east to west and half that again north to south. The land is rolling hills, sloping towards the oceans in both the north and south from a high point near the Cliffs of Despair. The forest is thickest near the center, thinning out the closer one gets to any edge. In areas near the center, the canopy is thick enough that it never gets brighter than twilight, while around the edges trees can be spaced dozens of yards apart and shrubs and grasses have mostly taken over.
Streams, rivers, and lakes are common throughout the Forêt. It is rare to find a place where an animal cannot smell water somewhere close, whether it be flowing or still. The water is either run off from melting snow or glaciers, or it has surfaced in springs through the limestone. The water is very clean, even at a good distance from the source.Localized Phenomena
The Forêt is the rumored home of both the Legion of the Wild and the Beast. The existence of neither of those has been confirmed, although there is much more evidence of the Legion than the Beast.
The Legion, according to tales, is a group of animals blessed by Estaes to defend the forest. It is said that those who protect the forest are protected by the Legion in turn, while those who seek to damage it will be destroyed by them. Despite some eye witness accounts, the general opinion in Sulae is that they are a fairy tale told by the people in the villages to scare their children. Most sightings have been of a raven that converses with the witness - these have been brushed off by scholars stating that it is likely a trained bird that escaped, not a divine defender of the forest.
The Beast has no known witnesses to its existence, but that does not stop the rumors about it from permeating Sulae, especially New Sulae. No one has even established a clear idea of what type of beast the Beast is. But when someone goes into the Forêt and doesn't come out, it is usually attributed to the Beast. Scholars again dismiss the tales, and say that people are conflating a lot of different stories of wolf packs, bears, and other predators of the forest into one dangerous "Beast".
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