Ossireth
Ossireth, the realm of the Court of Carrion and Decomposition, is a land of endings—but also of purpose. It is not a place of chaos or horror, but of sacred unraveling, where the final stages of life are honored with reverence and precision. The entire realm is bound together by a vast, sentient mycelial network known as the Undergloom, a subterranean web of pale, glowing fungus that pulses faintly with shared memory and hungers with patient intent. Every spore, every bloom, every rotting leaf and fallen beast is cradled by the Undergloom and drawn back into the cycle of becoming. To step into Ossireth is to walk atop a living mind that remembers every death it has ever consumed. It is from this network of mycelium that Psilofyr grows, connected to all within the realm.
The landscape above is blanketed in fungi of every size and form—towering shelf mushrooms that stretch out from petrified trunks like canopies, slime-mold veils that drift over decaying underbrush, and sporeblossoms that release bursts of fine, glowing dust when disturbed. Mushrooms rise like trees in some places, their caps wide enough to shelter beneath, their stems knotted with root-like cords that pulse faintly with bioluminescence. The trees that do exist are long dead, hollowed out and colonized by saprophytic colonies—fungi that sing softly in the presence of flesh, drawing carrion beasts and decomposition-fey to their shadowed groves.
In the lowlands, Mirepools bubble and churn with decomposing vegetation, bones, and the bodies of fey creatures returned willingly to the land. These shallow, viscous swamps are warm and strangely serene, their surfaces often hidden beneath floating mats of fungal bloom and hyacinth-like lichen. Bubbles rise and pop with the scent of old blood and fertile soil. The Mirepools are sacred sites, where bodies are laid out to dissolve in full view of the court—not as funerals, but as offerings, a return to the living web below. The Undergloom drinks deep here, and the mushrooms bloom brightest in their wake.
The court itself gathers in the Sporehalls, vast caverns carved out not by tools, but by the growth and shifting of the fungal network. These halls are lit by the gentle glow of cap-lights and ringed with towering fruiting bodies that release spores like incense. Floors are soft, springy with fungus, and the very air is thick with spores and memory. Speech is often unnecessary—members of the Court commune through the mycelial web, sending thoughts and impressions through touch, breath, or ingestion of shared spores. Here, the monarchs and mycoseers of the court tend to the records of the dead, engraved not in books, but in fungal growth patterns—living archives that remember in root and bloom.
Elsewhere, the Fleshfall Groves mark the regions where carrion rains from above—delivered by sky scavengers. The soil here is thick and rich, every inch of it alive with worms, grubs, and feasting colonies. Fey creatures shaped like vultures, beetles, and leeches scuttle and flutter among the remains, not in savagery, but in ceremony. Nothing is wasted. Bones are gathered and stacked into ossuary altars, shells ground into dust for fungal feed, and memories preserved within the sporestreams of the Undergloom itself.
Ossireth is not a land of rot for its own sake—it is a realm of completion, return, and remembrance, where the great silence of death is not feared, but welcomed as the final offering to the world that bore us. It is quiet here, but never still. Every death feeds life. Every bloom tells a story. And the Undergloom listens to it all.
Geography
The geography of Ossireth is soft, sunken, and strangely serene—a landscape hollowed by time and fed by death, where every contour has been shaped by the slow, sacred act of decomposition. Much of the terrain is made up of low-lying basins, boggy hollows, and spongy forest floors, all of it blanketed in a vast network of interconnected fungi. The land rarely rises in steep elevation, favoring gentle slopes and shallow valleys where rot can pool and take root. True mountains do not exist here—only moldering hills where the soil is thick with centuries of layered decay, and every step releases the scent of old life returning to the earth.
Forests in Ossireth are not dominated by trees in the traditional sense. Instead, towering mushroom canopies stretch overhead, their broad caps blotting out the wan light that filters through the mist. These fungal forests create vast, cathedral-like chambers of vertical growth, where luminous stalks, dripping shelf fungi, and spore chimneys rise from the mulch. What trees remain are long-dead or petrified—hosted and reshaped by the relentless embrace of the Undergloom, the sentient mycelial web that underlies all of Ossireth. Their roots have become conduits of memory and decay, spreading into every hill and hollow like veins through a body.
Wetlands and mirefields dominate the deeper parts of the realm, fed by underground runoff and the seepage of decaying matter. These regions are dotted with spore-laced pools, their surfaces often choked with floating fungal mats, bioluminescent lichen, and strange, translucent growths that twitch at the edge of vision. Trails through these areas are uncertain and often shifting, formed not by worn footpaths but by the slow contraction and expansion of the terrain beneath. Sinkholes are common and often filled with fungal bloom, digesting whatever falls within.
Underground, Ossireth expands into vast networks of decay caverns, naturally formed by the spread of the Undergloom. These tunnels twist and spiral for miles, their walls coated in spore-foam, mossy fungus, and rootbound growths that breathe faintly with bioluminescence. Some of these caves are used as ossuaries, where bones are carefully arranged into patterns that the Undergloom absorbs and preserves as part of its memory. Others serve as sanctuaries, incubation chambers, or sacred places of quiet dissolution.
Even the air is part of Ossireth’s geography. Mists hang perpetually low, clinging to ridges and pooling in every depression, thick with moisture and drifting spores. Sunlight is weak and rare, often filtered through haze or the vast mushroom canopy. The wind is slow and damp, barely a whisper, and every breath tastes faintly of soil and fermentation.
Ossireth is a realm in constant, gentle motion—not of tectonic upheaval, but of gradual softening, of bones yielding to soil, of bark giving way to bloom. Its landscape is not meant for conquest or cultivation. It is meant to receive, to absorb, to remember—and in doing so, to transform death into the quiet pulse of something deeply alive beneath the surface.
Climate
The climate of Ossireth is warm, wet, and unshakably still—a realm of eternal damp, where decay thrives and life softens into surrender. The air hangs heavy with humidity and the earthy scent of rot, clinging to skin like a second layer. Rain falls often, but not in torrents—rather, in slow, persistent drizzles or dense, drifting mists that seep into everything. Sunlight is rare and filtered, when it appears at all, casting a wan, fungal glow through the haze. The ground never dries, and neither does the air; even the breeze, when it comes, feels reluctant—thick with spores and carrying the faint, sweet reek of fermentation. This is not a place of seasonal change, but of perpetual dissolution—a climate designed to soften, break down, and feed the waiting soil beneath.
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