The Gnarlwood Arbors

A corkscrew swath of old-growth greenery spirals down a loamy rondure of crevasse, throughout which ancient tree trunks have twisted and gnarled in an indecisive battle for the sunlight above and its magically reflected noon-star below. Surface travelers might think The Gnarlwood Arbors a small patch of oakish and elm-like hardwoods, some distance toward a sideways horizon, seen with great effort from the nearest trade-routes through lesser-touched fens and spinneys. Yet its girth is some half-mile across and the depth of the realm traverses even the many layers of Underdark as a thick, brightly lit core, ever unbreached by the none-wiser denizens surrounding it.   Among the forest gnomes who dwell herein, legend holds that the gaping crevasse is none other than the forcefully removed throat of an ancient god who'd been cursed with an insatiable hunger, one who came to odds with the full pantheon of deities after stripping their endless, ethereal gardens of all manner of beast, mana, and fruit. The mammoth organ was interred in secret, unblessed, in a bombastic ritual that would erase its whereabouts from the memories of all gods; forcing Harreth the Voiceless to forever hunger and hunt his way through the multiverse in search of becoming whole again.   Present day, the hollows of the realm are festooned with epochs of soil, stone, dry-rot, mirth, and an explosion of woodland life as the many facets of the soft, natural world and all that which is fleetingly fey came to rest here. Broken continents of rich arboreal thicket and wildwood stand affixed in complex patches along Harreth's gullet, woven into the illusory creases of time while the disembodied chute ever-so-slowly swallows and swallows and swallows.   "Should today's tremors," they say among the gnomefolk, "jostle you off to noon-star below, fear not, for you fall to the light heart of Harreth that beat in him before the curse stole him away. And should today's wind carry with it a loud moan of despair over your house and home, bid that call good tidings as even without voice, Harreth tries to wish you well."