A primordial forest in southern Phirexes that predates the fogs by millennia. The trees here are ancient beyond reckoning, their trunks wider than houses, their canopy so thick that perpetual twilight reigns below. The Dengar called it Old One's Wood long before Phendexelas arrived, named for the spirits and creatures that dwelt here, beings the halflings negotiated with carefully, offering respect in exchange for safe passage.
When the fogs came, Old One's Wood changed differently than the rest of Phirexes. It did not go mad like Cragwood. It became calculating. Trees that move when you're not looking, repositioning themselves to close off paths or open new ones. Roots that trip those the forest dislikes and steady those it favors. Something in the heart of the wood, no one knows what, has made a decision about the queen, and that decision was hatred.
Phendexelas has never been able to subjugate Old One's Wood. Her fogs penetrate it but do not control it; her creatures enter but do not return. This is where the Dengar refugees hide, the few hundred who escaped Maurevelious and refused to go back. The forest tolerates them because they share a common enemy.
The refugees live in scattered camps, moving often, sustained by the Sweet Water River that runs along the wood's edge. All of them are sick; the fog-binding withdrawal never fully lets go. What medicine the camps have comes from beyond the wood: a fog-bound forager out of Duskwood named Mospen brings in the silver-veined duskheart bloom, and the sick take it gratefully and do not ask how a lone woman walks the deep hollows no warden will enter. They survive because the wood permits it, and they have learned not to mistake that for friendship. It shelters them the way it shelters any enemy of the queen, and it keeps its own count. Those who wander too far in, chasing game or a lost child or a quiet place to die, do not come back, the same as the queen's creatures do not come back. A woman named Brennwen holds the camps to the shallow edges of the wood and rations how deep anyone may go. The forest has never told her where its patience ends. She suspects it is nearer than the others believe.