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The Hungry Wood
Hunters in the deep forests tell of a haunting song that sometimes drifts through their camps on moonless nights: a wordless, eerie melody that compels them to rise and wander toward the source, helpless as sleepwalkers. Those who tell this tale are the ones who managed to refuse the siren call, or who heard it from such a distance that they did not reach the source before dawn. The ones who walk into the song's embrace during the night have nothing to say ever again, unless it be to a necromancer.
Those who have answered the song's call and survived to tell the tale describe glimpses of a scene out of nightmare. They say the song comes from a circle of twisted trees with globes of gold and silver light clinging to their rippled bark. Some claim that the globes watch them, like eyes, while others say that the lit orbs drift up and down the trees' trunks; both might be true. The music, they say, comes from the edges of the trees' fluted, purplish-blue leaves cutting through the night air -- or perhaps resonates from deep within their trunks, or both. All agree that the trees' limbs are veined with pulsing red-violet lines, grotesquely recalling blood vessels, and that the trees can lash these out like needle-tipped whips, anchoring them in the unresisting bodies of their victims and draining them dry.
The trees' malign magic does not end with their victims' deaths. Those drained by the piercing bloodwhips rise as undead the following night, wandering and slaying aimlessly until finally brought down. Undead created in this manner seem to have no connection to, or shared purpose with, the alien trees that brought them into being; most scholars believe it is an accidental side-effect of the magics involved, not a deliberate act, though that is small consolation to the victims involved.
The Hungry Wood, as folklore has named these tree-rings, does not appear to be anchored in any specific place. It seems to drift through the deeper reaches of Delverness, but reliable reports place encounters with the Hungry Wood at the forest's edges and even in lightly wooded areas of Calantyr, including the Westwood and the remnants of the elven forest near Coeur d'Ennui.
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