The Beast Fears Fire - Senlin Teigou

The Teigou has never been fully mapped. It is the largest forest on the continent, possibly in the world, and it's southwestern corner dominates the northeastern region of Crickton. The rest of the forest technically resides in Murren, though the more isolated Sōng settlements may still hold that they are part of the Pine Province (or Kingdom, depending where they fell on that ancient political divide). The forest extends east to the coast and north into the Murrenic Taiga.

The Teigou is a temperate rainforest with a dense canopy of pine (similar in appearance to P. thunbergii), maple (A. stirges, Narrow-Leafed Black Maple or Teigou Maple), a local species of cork oak (Q. suber teigoum) and ghostwood persimmon (D. manes). It's well known for the dark coloration of its flora and almost universal melanosis among its native fauna. It is the continent's primary supply of ghostwood and cork. There are several large rivers that flow through the forest as well, and the waterways are said to be excellent fishing.

All that is nice enough, but doesn't really explain the bad reputation the Teigou possesses and absolutely deserves. Part of the trepidation that the forest elicits is simply its darkness. The canopy of the Teigou is almost unreasonably dark, and, according to lore, gets even darker as you continue toward the center of the forest until you reach a region that is only known in a pre Sōng tongue as Dim Stroen, in which travelers have been known to experience total sensory deprivation (those successfully fished out of the heart of the forest). The Teigou is also home to a number of local gods that have gone feral, warping this and local otherworlds with their power and madness.

The Sōng tell the story that when they were hounded toward the east, driven by the old empire in the early days of the Provincial system, they crossed the entire continent from their original home in the far northwest. The empire had their sights set on exterminating the Sōng, and only left off their pursuit when the forest rebuffed them. Inside the forest, the Sōng encountered another civilization native to the place, which their history calls Tiě shān. The Tiě shān were apparently very close to the local deities, and employed them to try and repel the Sōng, and they almost succeeded, but the Sōng turned the tide by employing an imperial tactic for dealing with enemy gods. They fed them blood. Lots of blood, and let them get drunk, then sent them back to their own people where they demanded ever more and more sacrifice, refusing to lift a finger without liters of blood in compensation. With their gods gone from a strength to a liability, the Sōng eventually destroyed the Tiě shān culture, though there are stories of communities deep in the forest.

The Sōng eventually bound the blood-drunk gods into remote shrines with staff and priests enough to keep them propitiated and enjoyed a time as one of the strongest and most cohesive Provinces of the Provincial system (though they were saddled with the name of Pine Province - Sōng, meaning pine, has a lot of connotations of weakness and fragility, and when the empire enacted their rituals to wipe the real name of the Sōng people out of all record and memory, they chose that tree, that name, and those connotations to replace it with, out of spite). Pine Province had its own hereditary monarchy, and the empire didn't really have anything it could do about it. That old national capital is lost somewhere in the forest, according to legend, still ruled by the Lich that was the last King of Pine.

Pine province was one of the principal belligerents in the Autumn War, the event that brought forth the Queen of the Ugly Birds, and between that and the death of its ruler (who had been, in life, a Highly Effective Tyrant) leading to a struggle for the throne between his three children (Stupid, Brutal and Insane; each one chose a different combination of two) and then their father's subsequent return from the grave as a lich, Pine Province collapsed.

Since then, the Sōng have lost track of a lot of those shrines that once imprisoned the feral gods they once turned on the Tiě shān. Perhaps there are still families watching over those prisoners, sacrificing to keep them quiescent. Perhaps some shrines still hold, derelict and their prisoners are too weak or lost in themselves to break free.

One can hope.