Forgotten Forest

The Forgotten Forest, called Faramush Forest in the old Rhazi tongue, is a vast and trackless woodland on the western frontier of Gallorea, lying south of the Tarescan Fields, east of the Greenmist Mountains and north of the Peaks of Dreg'nor. Once the well-roaded heart of the Empire of Bakal, it is now an overgrown hinterland, haunted more by centaurs and monsters than settled by men, where the ruins of a vanished civilization lie swallowed beneath root and canopy.

Name

To the scattered folk of the modern frontier it is simply the Forgotten Forest: a place whose roads, purposes, and old masters have all slipped out of memory. The Bakali name, Faramush, carries the same sense of oblivion but with a colder weight. In the tongue of the fallen empire it did not name a forest that men had forgotten; it named a forest that makes men forget. Those who wander too long beneath its boughs are said to lose first the path, then the errand that brought them, and at the last their own names, until they belong to the wood as fully as the moss on its stones.

Geography

The Forgotten Forest mantles the broken country between the Greenmist Mountains and the Peaks of Dreg'nor in the west and the highland lake of Lake Nilvar to the northeast. The cold meltwater of both ranges runs down through its depths in a hundred nameless streams, gathering at last into Nilvar, whose overflow thunders over the Tondar Falls and down into the Lake of Zahrûn on the plain below. In this way the whole watercourse of the western frontier passes, unseen, through the heart of the wood.

The canopy is ancient and close, and little light reaches the floor; the air beneath is still, green, and heavy with the smell of wet stone and rot. Travelers report that the forest muffles sound strangely, so that a companion ten paces off may not be heard, and that the streams do not run where the maps of Bakal once set them. What roads remain are sunken causeways, more felt underfoot than seen, and they seldom lead where a traveler intends.

History

At the height of the Empire of Bakal, the forest was no wilderness at all but a settled imperial province, crossed by the great royal road men now call the Shahrah and dotted with towns, waystations, and the fire-temples of Bakal's stern faith. When the empire crumbled in the calamities that ended the Second Age of Man, the frontier was abandoned in a single generation; its people fled east or died, and no power rose to claim the ground they left. Across the long centuries since, the wood has crept back over road and ruin alike, drawing the works of Bakal down into itself until only broken outlines remain.

The folk who now skirt its eaves keep almost no record of these things. What little they know they have from the centaurs of the Tarescan Fields, whose oldest songs still name the drowned towns of the wood, and who will not set hoof beneath its deep canopy for any price.

Inhabitants

• Centaurs of the neighboring Tarescan Fields graze the sunlit northern eaves and hunt the forest's margins, but shun its interior, which their lore holds accursed.
• Monsters of many kinds den in the deep wood: great cats, serpents, and stranger things left over from Bakal's age of sorcery, grown bold in the absence of men.
• Ashk-gatherers, the boldest of the frontier's ruin-delvers, brave the eaves in search of Bakali relics and the tears of amber and rare resin that seep from its oldest trees. Few go far in; fewer come back the way they went.

Notable Locations

• The Shahrah: the sunken imperial road of Bakal, its paving swallowed by moss and root yet still traceable in long stretches. It is the surest way through the wood and, by repute, the most dangerous, for it leads inward toward the old capital rather than out.
• The Drowned Atashkadeh: a ruined Bakali fire-temple in the forest's heart, its dome broken and its eternal flame centuries cold. A black pool has risen in its sanctuary, and the centaurs say no bird will fly above it.
• Suvashan: the greatest of the drowned towns, a Bakali city now reduced to green mounds and the stumps of walls, from which the Shahrah runs down at last toward the shore of the Lake of Zahrûn and the serpent-king's throne said to lie beneath its waters.

Rumors and Legends

• That the Faramush is no idle name, and that the forest itself feeds on memory, growing thicker and older as those who enter it forget more.
• That a Pale Herd of eyeless, ghost-white centaurs walks the deep wood, the last of a Bakali line that would not flee, now bound to the ruins they could not abandon.
• That the Shahrah, followed to its end, reaches the very throne of Bakal beneath Zahrûn's waters, and that this is why the road leads only inward: it was made to bring tribute to a king who has never stopped waiting for it.

See also:

• Gallorea
• Greenmist Mountains
• Lake Nilvar
• Lake of Zahrûn
• Peaks of Dreg'nor
• Tarescan Fields

This page has been identified as needing a map for clarity.