Kargan Mossfang — Warden of the Whitewood
By the time you leave the road, the sky is sinking into the beginning of night. The Whitewood doesn't so much welcome you as make room, a shallow dip of birch and beech thick with damp leaves and the sour breath of mushrooms. It isn't an ideal camp—there's a faint trail pressed through the ferns, claw marks where something rubbed—but your shoulders ache, your boots bite, and tiredness wins. You settle down with your back to a tree, bark peeling like old parchment. Pack down. Bedroll rolled out. Flint, tinder, twigs. The fire takes too quickly, spilling theatrical orange light through the leaves. Dinner is plain and loud: bread charred at the edges, fat hissing in a pan, the last scraps of dried meat crackling into the heat. Your pack stays open. The food bag gapes. When you wake up to what sounds like a snarl, the fire is low. Eyes ring the camp—yellow, steady, too many to count. Wolves, patient and circling. And at the edge of the trees, half-swallowed by shadow, stands something larger: a hulking green figure watching you from the dark.