The Tree of Miur Lanath
We came across it after a few days trek into the misty moors of Con Danath on our way to the Hermetic Bay. Leading up to it we crossed the sprawling bogs, where sparse pools of hot tar bubbled and steamed in cold air, interspersed with ponds of corpse-water. It all but crept up on us, manifesting suddenly out of the mists, this effigy of dread. Fresh carnal offerings hung upon it like bloated fruit, swaying slowly on ghostly wind. Eleven we counted: men and women, young and old. The tribes who call these lands their home refer to it as the Tree of the Dead, or the Tree of Miur Lanath. The miasma of death pervades the air around it and I dread to spare more time near it than I have to, lest my body becomes the next offering. I pray to Tutelis to shield my passage and allow me to get by this monstrosity unscathed. Yet the dusk is near upon us...
The Tree of Miur Lanath is a notable landmark in the frontier lands of Cor Danath. It's a leafless northern black sycamore of prodigious size and girth, twisted and malformed in shape, that has transcended the material world aeons ago due to its use as a Dule tree. Since then, several anomalies and metaphysical mutations have further twisted and mutated the tree into something far more sinister.
Something that is immediately obvious is that the tree always has fresh bodies hanging in various positions from its thick branches. They always seem to be ripe in a grotesque mockery of fruit on a normal tree. They come in all manner of states - from elongated hanged-by-the-neck, to flayed, spreadeagled, by-the-ribs, and inverted. It's not guaranteed that the same corpses (or the number of them) would be found the following day. More notably - new corpses appear even if none of the clans or tribes offers tributes of their own. They refer to that as "reaping", when people would disappear in the night, only to appear dead on the tree in the morning.
The tree is on a barren field of shallow bogs and is always surrounded by a general air of despair, dread and hopelessness. The stench of death overpowers even the sulfurous smells coming from nearby corpse-water ponds. Some passengers swore that the corpses whisper or that their dead eye sockets follow them as they pass it by. There has been no record of anyone spending the night in view of the tree and living to speak of what transpires there.
At some point in its history, the tree was home to the hag Cai'Lleach. She built a lair in its base and ruled the region through fear and witchcraft, before mysteriously disappearing a couple of hundred years later. Evidence of her lair still exists in the form of an impenetrable doorway that sometimes emits a ghostly glow. None were able to enter, and it is said that those who even attempt are cursed to die and join the hanged corpses in exactly five days and nights.
Finally, the most peculiar phenomenon exhibits itself on the nights when Orelon is full. On those nights, the tree begins to burn with ghostly flames, and the fiery glow can be seen as a beacon through the mists. The tree itself and the corpses on it suffer no damage or charring from ethereal flames. The wind picks up and carries low keening moans that drone for miles around. It is said that on those nights the spirits of those claimed by the tree gather around it to pay tribute, and the surrounding tribes hold firm in their belief that one day the numbers of the those dead will swell until they wash over the moors and highlands to claim all life for their master. The bonfire persists for two straight days and nights, after which it simply and suddenly stops as if nothing had happened.
by Dan Attwell
Purpose / Function
It is not known when exactly this tree became a dule tree, or how much death and suffering it had to witness before the transformation began. What is known is that throughout its long history the Tree of Miur Lanath had been a gallows-tree for as long as the record of it exists. After it had changed its hunger for death and misery only grew until it became what it is today.
In its own way, it became a demigod entity to the tribes and clans of Cor Danath, a single unifying monolith to otherwise lawless and disparate communities. What gives it further legitimacy is the fact that it has existed beyond dozens of Cataclysm Cycles and still stands after so many cycles of destruction.
by Dan Attwell
While many scholars believe the Tree to have transcended its nature to become a creature or a spiritual entity, I posit a different theorem. What if the Tree has become a portal to the Realm of the Dead, further strengthened by that hag's time there? What if... what if Miur Lanath survived the Cataclysms because it doesn't exist on our plane any more, but instead resonates in another?
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