The Mumbling Forest dominates the southwestern coast of Tythikerys, a dense woodland that stretches from Bluesong Bay to the southern reaches of the region. It is named for the constant low sound that pervades it, something between voices and wind that never stops.
Geography
The forest covers approximately 60 miles of coastline and extends 20-30 miles inland. The trees are ancient, tall, and densely packed, their canopy blocking most sunlight from the forest floor. The terrain is uneven, with ravines, hidden streams, and sudden clearings that appear without pattern.
The coast where the forest meets Bluesong Bay is rocky and difficult to navigate, with few natural landing spots for ships.
The Sound
The "mumbling" that gives the forest its name is audible from the forest's edge and grows louder within. It sounds like distant conversation, multiple voices speaking simultaneously in no language anyone has identified. The sound comes from no particular direction; it simply exists throughout the forest, part of the ambient environment.
Some who have spent time in the forest report that the mumbling occasionally seems to form words: phrases in their native tongue, names, warnings. Whether this is a property of the sound or a product of minds trying to find meaning in noise is unknown.
The sound does not cease at night. Some say it grows louder.
Inhabitants
Whatever lives in the Mumbling Forest has never been clearly documented by anyone who came back able to document it.
What is known:
- The Tytheri avoid the forest despite its proximity to their territory
- Animals from the surrounding area do not enter
- Travelers who venture in often become lost despite simple routes
- Some travelers who enter do not return; others emerge with no memory of what they saw
The Mumbling Forest is one of the old reservoirs—a stand never cut, where Faesong, the emotion-and-harmony current that runs under the whole world, has pooled deep enough across uncounted years to gather itself into beings. A fae court condensed here, of this ground and its song, the way fae always condense where the current runs thickest. There is no other realm behind the trees and no door to one; the forest is the song made flesh, here, in place. That much is plain to anyone who can hear the song at all.
What is wrong with it is harder to say, and outsiders who cannot hear only guess—ghosts of some old tragedy, a plant-mind grown vast and patient, a hole worn through to some other place. None of that is what is happening. The pool here has soured. A grove that is merely cut goes silent; a grove whose song has curdled does something worse—it lies. The mumbling is that soured song, and the words it shapes in a listener's own tongue, the names, the warnings, are the lie it tells to draw the listener deeper. A fae court is meant to tend its current and turn lethal on anything that would foul it; this one curdled along with the pool it was made from, and tends nothing now. The voices sound hungry, and the forest keeps what it takes.
Relationship with the Tytheri
The Tytheri blood orcs and the Mumbling Forest have an unspoken arrangement: the orcs do not enter, and whatever lives within does not emerge.
This arrangement has held for as long as anyone remembers. Orc camps stay well clear of the forest's edge. Hunting parties that pursue prey into the trees turn back. Even Ichor-maddened raiders, desperate for violence, find reasons to seek it elsewhere.
The forest's presence may be why the Tytheri never developed maritime ambitions; the coast is blocked by something they instinctively avoid.
Approach
Those who wish to enter the Mumbling Forest should understand that:
- The sound will become omnipresent and impossible to ignore
- Navigation will become unreliable—compasses work, but sense of direction does not
- Time may not pass at the expected rate
- Something is watching
- The forest may or may not choose to let you leave
The wisest approach is not to enter at all.