Darklight Swamp
Darklight Swamp festers like a necrotic wound on the southern edge of Balgrendia, a sprawling mire of slow-choked creeks, peat-thick bogs, and stagnant pools slick with decay. Here, the sun rarely breaks the mist, and the reek of rot clings to the air like a second skin. Peat moss carpets the ground, swallowing footsteps in silence, and the cries of unseen creatures echo through the reeds—shrill, wet sounds that never seem to come from the same direction twice.
Darklight is no dead swamp—it is alive in all the wrong ways. The mire is infested with wicked fae and worse: shrieking boggles, lurking forest crones, and pale-eyed dark elves who slip through the mist like wraiths. All of them twisted remnants of ancient allegiances, driven mad or cruel by the land’s long curse. In some pockets, the swamp seems to hum—low, thrumming vibrations beneath the muck, as though something deep below still breathes.
The Borderguard patrol its borders reluctantly, cutting back overgrown paths and watching the mist for signs of movement. They know better than most what calls this place home. Entire patrols have been swallowed without sound, their remains turning up weeks later in pieces, scattered through the bogs. Others are never found at all.
At its northern edge, the swamp begins to rise and thin—the brackish waters giving way to cracked earth and sodden rootbeds. Here, the wetlands begin to die in a different way, slowly hardening into a stretch of ash-gray trees and blue-glowing fungi. This is where Darklight Swamp yields to the Wrathwood—a place not less dangerous, but differently so. The muck turns to silence, the decay to dread. The transition is gradual, but unmistakable: the air grows still, the rot takes on a bitter edge, and the trees lean not with the wind, but away from something unseen.
Few willingly pass from swamp to wood. Fewer still return. For if Darklight is rot and poison, the Wrathwood is pain—and the forest never forgets those who trespass.
