The Forest Shrine of Corvicel

The forest grows older with every step: the trees thicker, the silence deeper, the light greener. Leaves swirl without any wind and sometimes hang a moment in the air before they fall. In a clearing stands the moss-covered Forest Altar of Corvicel, threaded with runes that glow softly wherever your shadow falls across them. An old druid sits before it, eyes closed. "The wood has called you," he says without turning. "Something here has been disturbed."

The altar slept for millennia, until someone recently woke it. Ever since, the forest is restless: animals flee in herds, springs turn sour, and by night the trees themselves move. The druid suspects an intruder who means to siphon the altar's ancient power for himself—and the wood thrashes wildly as it suffers.

You follow the trail of desecration deeper into the wood: you soothe a wounded treewarden, decipher the runes that held the altar in balance, and solve the trials the forest sets before its visitors—courtesy toward the fey who dwell here is rewarded, arrogance punished. Every trail points to an abandoned circle of felled trees, where the evil is feeding.

The twist: the intruder is Corvicel, the Fallen Druid, who abuses the altar to forge the wood into a weapon—vines crawl like veins across his skin as he forces the forest itself to obey, with roots and thorns as his army. In the climax at the pulsing altar you must defeat him or break his ritual before the ancient tree-spirit slumbering within the forest fully wakes—for a wakened, furious forest-spirit no longer tells friend from foe.