The Dark Forest

While generally thought to be a dark and dangerous place, the little villages of humans who live here know that the poorly named "Dark Forest" is actually one of the most fertile and beautiful areas in Ezoeran. This temperate rainforest is considered a sort of no man's land, as the closest kingdoms don't dare claim the wild untamed territories so close to the Dragons' Mountains.

Geography

The Dark Forest begins to extend somewhat up the Keisrin Mountains, but is otherwise located largely at the foot of the mountains, stretching across a fair distance. Several freshwater rivers flow from the mountains and rush through the thick of the forest, a few of which gather at a series of lakes. The trees grow tall, thick, and close together through most of the forest, making it difficult to navigate, and covering the sky in most places (hence the name the Dark Forest). The area receives quite a lot of heavy rainfall, and is often humid, but is rarely unduly hot outside of the summer months.

Fauna & Flora

It would be impossible to characterize all of the various animals and plants that live in the Dark Forest, as the greatest variety of creatures live in this forest, but it can be said of almost all life there that they are vicious and competitive, but thrive when they make it. This applies for the plants as well as the animals. The dominant plant life form in the forest is, no surprise, the trees. These trees are of a very limited number of species, all of which have springy trunks. The main type of tree found there are extremely tall and make it difficult for most conventional types of plants to survive, as they essentially block the sunlight for the majority of the forest, but the lower variety of plants are either mobile enough to crawl to the nearest patch of sunlight, or make do quite nicely by instead choking the life out of other plants, feeding off of the trees, or being carnivorous.
Insects are numerous in the Dark Forest, and are probably about as peaceful as the inhabitants of the forest get. Many insects have symbiotic relationships with other insects, or feed on plants, while most animals, with the exceptions of the birds, feed on other animals or the insects. The Dark Forest insects are not unusually large, but many grow into large colonies, and have some sort of camouflage. The animals, for their part, often have interesting patterns or green, brown, or mottled green-brown fur or skin. A number of them are amphibious, but fewer than one would expect, because the creatures of the lakes and rivers are some of the most dangerous in the entire forest. A wide variety of birds are quite colorful, and furred creatures are of almost every variety, from tree-crawling bird eaters, to adept fishers with ferocious jaws. The forest is also home to some of the widest variety of wyverns, which are typically the top predators in the ecosystem, though rocky areas are also home to many types of wyverns.

Natural Resources

The wood from the Dark Forest is, simply speaking, utterly useless for most purposes. It is difficult to chop down, can't be burnt by anything short of dragon fire, and isn't sturdy enough for carts or buildings. When chopped down, the interior of the wood also begins changing color, from white, to a moldy yellow, to an even sicklier green, finally settling on a sludgy dark brown color. The beasts, in the meantime, are considered to outsiders to be nigh-on impossible to tame, difficult to hunt, and not tasty or juicy enough to be worth the risk. No, the true commodity of the forest is its fruits.
The trees, bushes, and more carnivorous plants almost all do produce fruits, and while some fruits are simply nutritious and delicious, many of them do also have unique properties, from potent poisons and hallucinogens, to fruits whose juice can energize and improve the healing ability of people who consume them.

Alternative Name(s)

The Dead Valley, The Foothill of Beasts.

Type

Jungle

Included Locations

• Effyurrel