Inspiring Illustrations - The Great Spirit of the Woods

28). The Great Spirit of the Wood

NOTE: These are adventure seeds and setting work for my own Hyperborea campaign inspired by the Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerors of Hyperborea Gazetteer

Amid the dark recesses of Hyperborean forests rests the God-King of ancient days. So old that he is nameless or if named it is forgotten before Atlantis drowned or the passage to Old Earth was lost in the mists which surround Hyperborea. He is known as the Great Spirit of the Wood to his followers and the woodland beasts and sentient monsters that dwell within his green boundaries.

He rarely shows his face beyond the heart of the woodlands, but a few incautious travelers have seen it, dark and brooding, his hair a dirty white entwined with leaves and branches but worn as a living crown. The Great Spirit does not take desecrators of his sacred groves or deep heartland lightly and the doom that may fall upon such are torments that can last an age, bound within the flesh of a great tree, living as the tree lives, but exposed to the pain of all that comes to the woods; the bite of axe, the touch of fire, the rot of age and devouring teeth of insects.

The Great Spirit calls to not only the trees and plants of the woodland, but to all those creatures, including man, who live within. He is no peaceful ruler and roots fight for nourishment from the soil and sunlight from the sky, beasts stalk the weak, the weak burrow and gnaw at the roots of tree and plant, the dead nourish the living, and so it goes on and on, the turning wheel of time, life and death, overseen by the Great Spirit, lord of all that transpires.