Gorthul Thicketsunder

Folk of the rimward hamlets whisper that Gorthul was once a starving hill-giant who stumbled into the bole of the tenebrous oak called the Heart of Kess. Villagers who tried to fell that oak found the axeheads dulled and their hands blistered by resin; nights after, something enormous stalked the tree, growing more bark than flesh. Over decades the giant's rage fused with the tree's slow will until what remained could be called neither wholly plant nor wholly giant. Hunters report that Gorthul seldom wanders far from its grove, preferring to lair in root-choked hollows at the base of its tree. It feeds on carrion and stray beasts, but if hunters threaten the oak it becomes relentless: it knows how to call roots to bind intruders and how to smear sap across armor and weapons. Scholars such as the reclusive druid Hennor of Cliffmire and the antiquarian Matra Voss of Durek's Library have chronicled Gorthul in their notes; Matra insists there is an old bargain written in bark-ink that ties the giant's life to the tree. The cult of the Moss-Threshold, a small sect that reveres living wood, considers Gorthul a terrible avatar and will sometimes attempt to feed offerings to the tree to placate the guardian.

Gorthul stands nearly as tall as a ruined doorway, hulking and asymmetric: one shoulder is a knobby mass of bark and lichen, the other a swollen, sinewy arm. Its skin is the color and texture of damp cedar — deeply grooved, flaking in places into curling moss. Where flesh shows, muscle is scarred and threaded with pale root-like veins that pulse with sap. Its head is broad, jaw overshot, with yellowed, sap-stiffened hair braided with twigs and fungus; one ear is a notch of gnawed bark. Long, cracked nails are blackened and tipped with resin. Vines coil about its waist like a crude belt, and portions of its torso are grafted with plates of bark and knotted wood as if the tree itself lent armor. Scattered thorny barbs and a smear of old, dried sap stain its hands and forearms. For scale: Gorthul reaches chest height to a human standing on a small crate and can fill the width of a standard cottage doorway with its shoulders.