Fleshless Forest

• Twisted trees stand tall and gnarled, their bark turned to stone, branches outstretched as if warding off some unseen terror.
• Animals, birds, and even insects—entire ecosystems—have been preserved in sculpted motion: a deer mid-leap, a panther frozen in pounce, a flock of stone sparrows frozen in silent descent.
• The air is still and cold, with no wind save for what travelers bring with them. Even sound seems dulled, as if the petrification extends to vibration itself.

Some trees weep a chalky, blood-colored dust. Touching it risks numbing the nerves, a precursor to the same fate.

The Fleshless Forest is not dead. Something watches.

• Statues shift when unobserved. A fox facing east now faces west. The posture of a vine has changed. A petrified wizard’s expression softens into sorrow when your back is turned.
• Those who spend too long in the forest report the feeling of stone in their bones, aching, spreading.
• Whispers follow intruders, promising mercy, freedom, or power—often in voices the listeners recognize as their own.
• Some petrified creatures are not quite still. Under the right circumstances—moonlight, spellcraft, or desperate bargains—they may stir, half-awake and utterly deranged.

There are tales of travelers leaving with stone limbs, their skin and organs perfectly functional beneath an immobile shell. Others vanish, only to appear weeks later in the forest, part of the scenery.

Magic within the forest is unpredictable. Spells may:

• Fail completely or function with twisted intent.
• Temporarily animate the stone, revealing the trapped souls of petrified beings.
• Attract the attention of whatever presence lingers behind the forest’s silence.

Artifacts or scrolls from Hazlan’s forgotten age lie within, buried in the stone soil or clutched by fossilized scholars—but retrieving them means braving cursed ground that tries to remember you into stillness.

Though most life is calcified, the Fleshless Forest is not empty:

• The Stillborn Choir: A group of sentient, mobile statues—once bards, spellcasters, and seers—who wander the forest and sing wordless, harmonic dirges. Their music halts the hearts of the living, not out of malice, but despair.
• Stone dryads: Still bonded to their now-petrified trees, they drift between animation and paralysis, begging for death or pleading to be remembered.
• The Curator: A being robed in slate-gray, said to be the only creature who walks freely in the Fleshless Forest. It collects “expressions of beauty”—memories, dreams, or actual faces—to preserve forever in the stone tableau.
• Wyrmbark, a half-petrified treant, cracked open and full of glowing runes, still speaks in riddles. Some say he knows the true name of the spell that caused the forest’s doom.

Scholars speculate that the Fleshless Forest was the result of a failed ritual, a forbidden spell, or even a battle between rival Hazlani wizards who unleashed a magical plague of calcification. Whatever the truth, all records of its creation have been erased, lost, or deliberately suppressed. No one takes credit. No one dares.

A few claim the spellwork was intended to preserve knowledge, to freeze time in a controlled space. If so, it succeeded too well—or horrifically failed.