A few hours’ journey from Kas Selvess, near the heart of the sweltering Saatalen Meixhu, is an especially miserable bog of brackish water and sucking expanses of foul-smelling peat extending outward from the shattered, blackened remnants of an ancient seka tree that collapsed at some point in the past. Within the broken, obsidian-like remnants of the tree, amidst hundreds of slithering serpents, watchful badgers, and myriad poisonous mushrooms resides the curious bog druid, Thorns. In the surrounding environs are a number of unspeakably vile material components and — as he calls them — “special secretions” that are vital to brewing up the hideous, stinking bladders of animal repellant he supplies to the nearby village in exchange for — again, in his own terms — “enrichment.”
