A dense forest in southwestern Phirexes, named for the permanent twilight beneath its canopy. This is no trick of the fog. The trees grow so close, their leaves so broad and overlapping, that direct sunlight never reaches the ground. The forest floor lives in a cool, dim hush where it is always the hour after sunset.
That darkness feeds things that grow nowhere else in the swamp. Fungi that glow in colors the Dengar have words for and other tongues do not. Mosses that render down into medicines no outside healer can match. Flowers that open only in full dark, their petals worth their weight in gold to any alchemist who knows the cuts and steepings they take.
Before Phendexelas, Duskwood was where the Dengar's best alchemists gathered their rarest stock. Now entry takes royal permission, and the queen controls the swamp's medicine by controlling who walks under these trees. Petitions to harvest are granted rarely, and never for free; the usual price is a few quiet words about what one's neighbors have been saying.
But the wardens log only the groves they dare enter. The most prized bloom, the silver-veined one the Dengar call duskheart, grows deepest, in hollows where something large shifts through the leaf litter and no warden will follow. The petals reach the outside markets regardless. An old fog-bound forager called Mospen works those hollows alone and sells what she gathers to the refugee camps in Old One's Wood, who need the medicine and ask no questions. Phendexelas knows duskheart is leaving her swamp. She has not yet decided whether the bloom is worth the wardens she would spend to stop it.