The Black Hills

The Merican Wastes do not want for foreboding forests, but the Black Hills of the Bailey are their own sort of beast entirely. A surprisingly thin stretch of woodland abutting the inner wall of the Bailey, those who venture inward frequently report becoming lost. Disorientation is common and navigational instruments inexplicably fail. When the wall itself was being built workers clear cut the Hills in their entirety, but legend says the woods regrew in a single night thicker and darker than before. The stretch of wall that crosses it is an unpopular assignment in the Drafted Service, with many reporting nightmares and sleep paralysis during their deployment there. Patrols there have learned not to follow screams emanating from the forest.   Not many call the Black Hills home, but old houses are not unusual in its thickets, eaves sagging beneath the weight of dread history. A complex of maniacal henges, ruins of a pre-fall place that even the oldcestors wished to forget, is rumored to be the site of dark rites conducted by adherents of horrid eldritch faiths. In spite, or perhaps because, of this ill-omened reputation it has become a tradition for young Telling Visionaries of the Bailey to venture into the Black Hills and investigate its many ghost stories. Some return disappointed and disillusioned, others return with ghost stories of their own. The rest don’t return at all.