"Shades!" cried Palindor. "What was that?"

They gasped as the ground was riven by another concussion, and the air grew very still.

"The forest!" Grol shouted, pointing. "Look!"

Even before their eyes, the great trees of the Black Wood seemed to loom enormous, terrifying and Gothic in their sheer immensity, as though the Wood were become and endless series of pointed arches, forming an endless, vaulted canopy; an ancient place of worship whose strange, grotesque sylvan gods were as dead and forgotten as the purpose for which it had been built.

Despite their great antiquity, the trees nevertheless remained hale and possessed of a life-force as elemental and puissant as the tides of sea and time. And yet, something else lived within the Black Wood, something possessed of a strange, arcane power so very ancient that its life-force seemed more an eldritch dream than that of a living, magical thing.

It was this Power that directed the intent of the Black Wood- if a force of Nature could be said to have intent- that roused the Wood like a Giant that had slumbered for millennia, only to discover that both he and his bed had become part of the age-old hills, and the land itself. In the same instant, the air became permeated with the pungent, sharp aroma of wood-pitch, sap, and pungent evergreen needles; from the Wood there echoed the sharp reports of growing wood, and roots cracking the bones of the earth.




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