WitchPyre Mound

The Witchpyre Mound was once a site of judgement and punishment. Tribes across the grasslands in the northern island of Aqshy may have had different beliefs and traditions, but they all shared the same sanction for the greatest of villains and traitors. On the southern shore, atop a cliffside near the water, stood a massive tree that was ever-burning. This tree stood in contrast to everything else in the region, a large grassland dotted with green trees otherwise. While the fire never seemed to spread from the tree to the plants around it, the fire had no such mercy for the living flesh of animals.

This made it a prime spot for executions, where the tribes would feed their damned to the fires of the tree. Generations of kinslayers, heretics, and daemon-worshippers were tossed to the tree. All this changed though when one particular heretic was slated to be consumed in the tree’s fires. She had dabbled into necromancy, twisted death back to life and tried to overthrow her tribal elders. The village had rallied and slain her shambling warriors, but at great cost. Incensed at both her heresy against the perceived natural cycle and their losses at stopping her, the village levied the punishment of the Witchpyre Mound against her.

What seemed to have been a standard punishment for such a grave crime quickly changed at the height of the execution. Instead of being helplessly tossed into the flames, the Necromancer reached out to the damned souls around her. Feeding them her life force, they awoke from their torment and burst forth from the tree and the land around it. Fiery spirits, screaming in torment from the constant burning but seeking to share that torment, slaughtered the wardens that escorted the necromancer and burned the land around it to a cinder. The necromancer rose again as a spirit and rules her host from the Witchpyre Mound to this day, a burnt out and cursed land that all the other tribes give a wide berth to and travelers are sometimes found at the edges of, corpses burnt to char and their souls another member of the host which lights up the night sky above the Mound.