When I say that the forest wages war on its despoilers, I do not mean that in a merely figurative sense. Of course there are the vines and saplings that spring up at a seemingly supernatural rate in any plot of cleared ground, the seeds of millennia finally seizing their chance at a place in the sun. These are difficult enough to deal with. What I am referring to is the Dark Rain.
I am at a loss to classify it as tree, animal, or machine. It walks on eight monstrous legs, arched like those of a spider but cased in bark-like skin. Where the legs meet, a massive trunk towers up into leafy branches. Here and there among the branches is a leafless bough, shorter and oddly straight until it splits into two backward curving arms, connected at the ends by a vine-like rope. It is, in fact, an organic crossbow. (Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the crossbows the Liangyese use are manmade imitations of this.) It can load and fire quarrels grown and stored within a hollow tube inside the leafless bough.
The number of weapon-boughs varies with the age (and hence the size) of the thing. The boughs have a limited range of movement so aiming often requires the tree to turn or bend. When one bough is out of bolts, it twists around to aim the next bough at its target. From this fact comes another of its names, the Twister. A common song of the Foresters contains the line "And then the twister comes. Here comes the twister."
How the creatures sense their targets is unknown. Generally a dark rain will patrol along a seemingly random path, attacking only those who pose a serious threat to the forest. The Yeng are such a threat, but lately the boars of the Swine God have also been targeted. In the past, each twister hunted alone, but lately there are rumors of several working together to coordinate attacks on Yeng outposts-- and darker whispers of organic trebuchets that move and fire of their own accord. If true, these tales indicate that the war is about to reach a new and deadlier stage.
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