The Forest That Is a Mountain

There is a special hell for forgotten children. This is its canonhub. Content Advisory The Forest That Is a Mountain is a setting with dark themes, and this blog does not tag for minimally-graphic descriptions of death, abuse, and violence, including towards children. This blog is guaranteed to NOT contain rape, sexual abuse, or any sexual content whatsoever. Individual posts may be tagged with more specific content warnings. Reader discretion is advised.

[maureen2musings]

…

one_becky_blue

[cripplepunk-sylveon]

@pigcatapult FTIAM vibes

[forestthatisamountain]

Little’s gained by those afraid of dirt between their toes

And mind the cost of time you’ve lost by weeping of your woes.

Hope and pray your toil away’s not how the story goes

So do your chores and keep your scores because the Forest knows.

[forestthatisamountain]

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This is one of the many mentions of the Forest That Is a Mountain in in-multiverse documents. The excerpt itself can be read by clicking “Read the Document” above the sidebar, but I shall also reproduce the text here:

Chapter 8, page 285.

Description of fig. 4:

A she-wolf lying on her side between the roots of a large tree. Four details visually distinguish her from a normal wolf. First, she has six legs ending in distinct hands, albeit beastly ones, with opposable thumbs and prominent claws. Second, her body is proportionately half again longer, which makes room for, third, ten rows of one hundred swollen teats running down the length of her torso. Fourth, compared to the tree, she seems to be normal-sized, but compared to the silhouette of a six-foot-tall human male provided for scale, she is, even lying down, over ten times his height. End description.

Text:

...of all such [unreasonable] demons I've spoken to, the one demanding the most outrageous price could only be the Wolf Matron. Like most demons from the Forest That Is a Mountain, she can only be deliberately contacted through summoning the White King Over Red Woods (also known, variously, as the Gleaming Prince, Wearer of Mothers' Faces, and the Hand-Take-Not) and paying him for the service of speaking to her. He charges a premium on top of his usual rates of souls, suffering, and/or slaves to speak to her, and I cannot think of a circumstance where what the Wolf Matron has to offer is worth even that.

The Wolf Matron cares about exactly one thing: Collecting one thousand exceptional children to perform a ritual that will complete her life cycle, and transform the children into demons enslaved to the White King Over Red Woods and a new Wolf Matron. In all of my attempts up to the time of this writing, she has only expressed wanting children to be sent to her, often in large numbers. When I showed interest in1 the possibility of purchasing one of her demon slaves, at first her stated price seemed surprisingly low: to "add two children to [her] Thousand Pilfered Young," as she called them, "To fill the gap, one, and to make up for lost progress, the other." But, upon my probing further, she disclosed that sending her two children would only have a one in a million chance of satisfying her. She told me I should expect to send "about two thousand" (emphasis decidedly mine) before a mere two would survive whatever ritual she used to bind the children to her. This was the most ridiculous price any demon has ever offered me, and I do not intend to contact her again.

1 NEVER ask questions when dealing with demons from the Forest That Is a Mountain, unless they have asked you a question first and you have given an adequate answer.

[forestthatisamountain]

Hiding Your Children

For those who aren’t capable of the neurological feats taken for granted by the Forest’s inhabitants, and can’t hold someone in their working memory at all times, there is another way:

Make something, anything, out of the plants native to your world, and have your child wear it on their head. It will hide them from the Fathers’ sight. In contrast, wearing the plants of the Forest on one’s head is like having a beacon that can lead the Wolf Matron’s (but not the Thousand Names’s) servants to your exact location.

[forestthatisamountain]

A Forest That Is a Mountain ambience mix

In most worlds, you can run out of up, down, north, and south if you go far enough, but east and west loop together and you end up back where you started. In the Forest That Is a Mountain, north, south, east, and west are limited--and perfectly arbitrary--given that space stops just past the treeline. Up and down loop together, so the top of the tall, tall sky meets the bottom of the deep, deep ground. The Trees' roots only penetrate a comparatively shallow layer of the soil, but the Laments' hollow glass roots reach all the way down into the sky. Most clouds are sucked up by these and pumped back up to the springs at ground level, but some sparse, muddy rain still falls on the canopy. Glass Spiders dutifully and obsessively clean every speck of dirt from the Leaves, but not all of it reaches the ground again. Plants can grow on this accumulated soil layer that the Roots are too jealous to permit to grow at the Forest floor, including some normal-sized, lower-case-"t" trees. They just need available water, and are last in line to receive any. On rare occasion, a Lament root may break off under its own weight and fall into the canopy. Glass Spiders normally eat shards of glass and morsels of silica to replenish their bodies, but ones that consume Lament glass don't stop until they run out. They turn all of it into body mass, and grow in size accordingly. All creatures that incorporate Lament glass into their bodies become infected by their sorrow, and Glass Spiders express this distress in a few ways: First, they sob constantly, leading to the nickname the Wolf Matron's Thousand Pilfered Young have given them: Criders. Second, they start building hollow glass webs extending upward, back towards the clouds. Because Criders usually live under damaged sections of the Lament root layer, the air is more humid, and like Lament roots in reverse, the webs funnel water down to the aloft ground, leading to flourishing plant life, and sometimes even ponds or lakes. Third, they become highly aggressive when disturbed by other creatures. A Crider's oasis is one of the few places to find something to drink so far above the Forest floor, but one does so at great, great risk.

[forestthatisamountain]

“Eighth!

“The Glass Spi-der cleans leaves in Trees

“Be-cause they’re clear they’re hard to see

“A few grow large but most stay wee

“Al-ways stay cau-tious—leave them be!”

[sweetd3lights]

[forestthatisamountain]

source: https://www.instagram.com/p/B0prQYGIlcj/

[forestthatisamountain]

Virtues and Vices

Forest virtues: Diligence, vigilance, obedience, decisiveness, callousness. Forest vices: Negligence, carelessness, defiance, indecision, compassion.

[forestthatisamountain]

World Anvil is a worldbuilding tools platform and community for writers, RPG storytellers and worldbuilding lovers

Bone Weaver’s page is finally up!

[forestthatisamountain]

Bad Words and Forbidden Topics

A key part of suppressing rebellion is keeping those who don’t know of anywhere better from finding out, and keeping those who do know from sharing. To this end, the Forest That Is a Mountain makes use of magically-enforced censorship imposed on all who have been there. When someone tries to say something forbidden, their mouth freezes up before they can start to form the “bad word”. The most prominent aspect of this is the inability to speak of the world they knew before arriving for the first time, but there is much more:

Reading and writing: Neither of these topics can be discussed, and almost all writing is prevented in the same way speaking of forbidden things is. Drawing is highly restricted to literal representations of things that might be found in the Forest, and the only wholly abstract representations permitted are a crude base-10 number system for the numbers 1 to 1000, and only for approved purposes like counting or labeling. (The number of circles drawn represents the ones place, triangles the tens, squares the hundreds, and a five-pointed star for one thousand. They can be arranged in any way as long as they’re together in an image.) “Pen” and “book” are both bad words.

Justice, ethics, and morality: Many words related to these concepts are banned for being antithetical to the Forest’s autocratic paradigm. “Deserve”, “fair”, and “sin” are all bad words for presenting an alternative basis of judging behavior than doing as the Forest demands for continued permission to live.

Rights, liberty, and freedom: I should hope this one is self-explanatory. “Free” is also banned in the usage that means “for no cost”.

Sex talk: The Forest That Is a Mountain doesn’t allow discussion of non-transmogrification-based reproduction. If they don’t know what they’re missing they won’t resent the parasitic castration bit. This incidentally limits the ways they can cuss at each other. #LetThePilferedYoungSayFuck

[radioreign]

piffyocs‌:

Hellebore felt bewildered by the question, but she turned to him with a carefully indifferent expression, the ragged finery of her skirts gently swishing with the movement. She used her peripheral vision to finish placing a purple crocus flower in its vase alternating with yellow ones around a stalk of blue hyacinths. Success and cheer in taking in what’s good, and peace and openness in moving forward from the past. “I haven’t known flowers to speak.”

She wasn’t being coy; Charlie had picked out those flowers for Hellebore to arrange while she learned the ropes of this color theory thing. Putting pleasing shapes of flowers together came easily to her, but the practice of making colors ‘go together’ held little importance back home, where the primary light source was a single highly-saturated hue.

Even so, she made her best guess as to what the Radio Demon might be talking about. “I can feel the lingering wills of bones before they’re turned into flowers, if that’s what you mean. Snake bones usually want to be made into creeping vines, for example.”

His eyebrows shot up at the response, his smile curling even wider at the hilarity of it.  A tad bit too literal, are we?  Now this would be an idiosyncrasy to exploit whenever his restless spells hit him.

The crimson clad demon allowed her to finish, but whatever derision he had held for her answer slowly dissipated into genuine interest, although not completely gone.  Whether they were the words of someone going a bit mad or - a superstitious lady, they were still curious nonetheless.

Taking a step forward, he increased their proximity while still remaining at a socially respectable distance, vision remaining on the assortments of flowers and their relatively mismatched colors.

“Do they?  What do humans strive to be then?”

[piffyocs]

The barest hint of a smile came to the corners of Hellebore’s mouth. She did like it when others took interest in her work, and it was a funny question, so she allowed a bit of the mirth she felt to seep into her voice: “Many think themselves of worth to become mighty trees, or that they should not be changed whatsoever. Some of the most delightful poisons flow from their resentment of being changed into more lowly forms than what they wished.”

In her opinion, nothing quite beat the bitter juice of human toothberries, and the caustic venom of handbramble thorns made them great for dissolving away food that stuck between her own teeth.

“But should you wish for more answers to flow from me, you’ll have to start paying for them in more than the fun of speaking about my work. You do, I hope, know the ways of bargain.”

[forestthatisamountain]

On Scaredy Cats and Sludge Pots

A regular sight around the Forest That Is a Mountain are cat sculptures. They come in a wide variety of materials, sizes, designs, and levels of detail. Most of the time, they’re perfectly still, at least as long as they’re being watched. But sometimes—only sometimes—these ubiquitous, innocuous demons spring to life when they’re presented with an opportunity to startle a member of the Pilfered Young. They have a simple goal: To scare the child enough that they forget they own something important to them, then quickly Pilfer and run off with it. They hide their ill-gotten gains in another kind of demon, the Sludge Pot, living ceramic ink pots that slowly turn anything placed inside one into thick black ink. Objects can be retrieved if they’re found in time (and Sludge Pots are easy to track down by their constant gurgling eructations) but it’s quite impossible to retrieve anything from them without staining one’s hands or other grasping appendage with the shiny black ink. This ink can’t be effectively hidden or washed off, and lingers on the skin as long as permanent marker. Every member of the Pilfered Young is encouraged by the Wolf Matron and the Fathers to shame and ridicule any of their peers they see stained with such ink. Upturning a Sludge Pot on a disliked sibling is thus a highly efficient way of bullying, and never punished except in the form of the victim getting revenge.

In this intentionally cruel way, the Pilfered Young are taught to remain vigilant and trust little, and told to be grateful that the punishment for their complacency wasn’t more injurious.

[forestthatisamountain]

OOC:

Hey, please don’t reblog my lore posts to your aesthetic blogs. My “Forest Proverbs” posts are not quirky travel aesthetic. They’re fleshing out a horror setting.

[tigerbloods]

[piffyocs]

“We each have our own Numbered Fate

“And some are small and some are great

“And so to keep all thousand straight

“A skipping song some did create!

“First!

“Always beware the Thousand Names

“Lest you be caught up in his games!

“Take not his hand of great infame

“Or else your sorrow he shall claim!

“Se-cond!

“You need not use Dark Implement

“For that to other worlds they’re sent

“To harvest souls and reap torment

“Then return with their storage spent!”

“Thir—oof!”

Hellebore was usually better at skipping rope than this.

[forestthatisamountain]

Bone Weavers are adult skeletons of their original species, except with sharklike teeth and ivory claws. In their newly-transmogrified state, their bones are stretched and warped to form a vertical spiral disc around the skull. This causes them great pain, and while a skillful application of common healing magics could, in sessions, return them to their natural shape, that would relieve their suffering, and is thus forbidden.

Bone Weavers don't have to eat much, but when they do it needs to be the flesh of the dying*. Everything else just falls through their mandible. Passing objects and materials through their mandible can still be useful, as it gives them an instant understanding of the material, its properties, and if and how that can be applied to future creations.

*Terms and conditions apply:

A) Bone Weavers cannot eat something that wasn’t dying until the Bone Weaver attacked or deliberately poisoned it. B) Bone Weavers can eat something that’s dead if it wasn’t dead yet when they started eating it, and in fact their bite packs a magical venom that quickly drains the strength of valid prey (and ONLY valid prey) to prevent escape. C) Certain sustained states of reduced vitality (e.g. undeath, severe chronic malnutrition) can qualify as chronically “dying”.

[forestthatisamountain]

How much is that demon in the window?

It’s perfectly possible to purchase a demon from the Forest That Is a Mountain, for the right price.

If that demon serves the Wolf Matron, the price is predictable, but steep: To send her enough children to get two new members of her Pilfered Young. One to make up for losing the demon she has, and one to make up for the other no longer counting towards the Forest’s growth. A clever and resourceful bargainer might be able to negotiate an alternative offer, if they can persuade her it’s of equal utility. The Forest’s growth is all she cares about in the end. (Her Thousand Pilfered Young are not for sale. She needs those.)

The Thousand Names, by contrast, has deeper schemes to serve, but since he has no interest in the Forest’s growth, it takes less to make him feel that he’s broken even. He might ask for servant of equivalent utility, or a thousand pained souls, or some task that advances his agendas. His ultimate driving factor is maintaining the Forest That Is a Mountain’s homeostasis by getting it souls and suffering and servants and raw materials.