The Shademurk

Once the Feywild was covered exclusively with verdant forest and open grasslands, teeming with strange life and fey creatures. Caught in an eternal twilight, the forest was alive with large and peculiar buzzing insects, brightly-coloured birds, and huge, vivid flowers bearing succulent, dream-inducing fruits.
Much of the Feywild is still like this, but its heart has turned rotten. At its centre there used to be the Brambletree, an immense oak watched over by a powerful arch-fey dryad called Prithvi, inside which it is rumoured the Elves hid a magical sword known as The Brambleblade, that was used to help drive dragons out of the Elven forests of Yore, many elf-generations ago.
But now the Brambletree has lost its foliage, its bark is peeling, and from beneath its roots oozes a black tar that is slowly spreading outward and relentlessly infecting the forest for miles around. Nowadays it is known as the Ichor Tree, and few things live in the dark swamp it has created.
The only sounds are the chirping of crickets and the flutter of large, misshapen moths. Many of its fey inhabitants have been twisted into unrecognisable forms, their bodies corrupted and their minds crazed. Prithvi herself has not been seen nor heard for inestimable years, although time has always been warped and illogical in this dimension.
The perpetually setting sun is obscured in this shady bog, its amber glow replaced by a dull grey mist that casts everything in shades of grey. The vegetation is gnarled, limp and sorrowful, and the thick black mud fills the air with an acrid stench of rot. Everything it touches is befouled and withered.
Worse still than the poisoning of the forest, something has brought Death to the Feywild. Where once its inhabitants frolicked without a care, blessed with eternal life, they find now that they age and die like the mortals of the Material Plane.
No one can tell what is the dark origin of the Shademurk - could it have something to do with the madness of the Old Margreve and the mutants emerging from the Festering Marshes? What will happen if the ichor spreads across the whole of the Feywild? And what has become of Prithvi, the Keeper of the Bramble?

Type

Wetland / Swamp