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Not all forest deities were neutral. Some were actively hostile to human life. The forest contained predators—both animal and spiritual. There were beings that hunted humans as humans hunted deer, powers that fed on fear or blood, entities whose nature was destruction and whose presence marked places where humans should not go.
These dark spirits dwelt in the deepest forest, in places where sunlight never penetrated, where the ground stayed wet and cold even in summer, where bones accumulated without explanation. They did not negotiate, did not respond to offerings, did not care about human attempts at appeasement. They were older than the gods, remnants of chaos that predated order, forces that merely existed rather than serving any comprehensible purpose.
Wise travelers avoided such places. The warnings were clear—an absence of birdsong, trees growing in unnatural formations, an oppressive sense that observation was occurring from multiple directions simultaneously. Those who ignored warnings and entered anyway sometimes returned changed, struck silent or mad, bearing marks that would not heal. Often they did not return at all.
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