Within the Underground Forest World Log no.1
The Underground Forest is blight and bounty, causing the world above to bleed as it bears out riches and terrors of flora and fauna.
The wild bleeds, thick sticky it runs down roots and into streams and pools. The wild bleeds and people sicken, eating at its heart and tasting iron and rot on their gums and tongues. The wild bleeds and birds sing harsh through sallow days. The wild bleeds and something stirs underneath: The Underground Forest. An ever twisting tunnel under everything, straightening and contracting like worm-skin beneath the feet of the world, petrified; stinking; muted; bloody; dry. Dead — Alive.
Within the Underground Forest is a world that I started to explore in the spring of 2025, my last semester of a four year stint at junior college, and one of the most exhausting periods of my life so far. The Underground Forest is a story about control and influence; the anxiety and stress I was feeling permeates through the early iterations of the project, developed for an art show I curated through my college titled "NO ONE TOLD US WHAT TO DO". More on that another time.
The project has taken on a life of its own beyond that one exhibition. here are some of the writings, sketches, illustrations, and assorted flotsam that comprises this expanding network of tunnels and cave systems and denizens Within the Underground Forest.
Delvers enter the Underground Forest with shackles on their wrists to remind them of their duty. They specialize and group, mapping the un-mappable and cutting paths into stone and biology alike. Weighed down by rucksacks and lanterns, carabiners, ropes, bottles books and cloaks, they push into the dark, a curved blade nestled close to each of their hearts to be used only on themselves.
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Shifting, walking, spitting. On bugback and hut-fiends the city of Tumbledown topples over itself into the dark till it finds better water and leaves it's buried dead behind. [[The Delvers]], once explorers and scientists, now act as guides and protection, replacing vials and microscopes with guns and knives. They still study their books, now to find cracks in chiton and routes that do not kill.
The city runs on burning sphagnum moss, tanneries, trade, bartering, crude coins, secrets, violence, greed, desperation, kinship and community, loss beyond thought, wonder beyond imagination.
The Grin-too-Sweet
The Grin-too-Sweet lives in suffocating rot and death, covered over with sickly sweet secretions. Find it, and it will tease towards you through that rot, its masked face shivering with joy. When you offer up your gold, its mask peels away in two, leaving a gaping wet raw tunnel behind.
The Grin-too-Sweet eats gold and spits out blood and stories. The Grin-too-Sweet has no tongue, so it speaks with yours. It talks with a rasping cough, and laughs with a clatter of teeth and soft wet choking. It asks you questions from your own mouth, and searches your throat and lungs for the answer.
When it is finished asking its questions, the mask folds back in and grins at you as you ask your own. The more questions you ask, the more of your blood it spits out with the tales it answers with. The stories the Grin-too-Sweet tells with your tongue are intoxicating to hear in your ears and feel in your bones, and many do not leave until they run out of blood and gold to share. They are desperate, those who go to find the Grin-too-Sweet.
RootFiends
Wrapped in saliva-bound root armor and moaning in the dark above, you see their long slender legs first, then their needle-like teeth. They stand in groups, and their grey legs blend into the narrow stalks and petrified trunks of trees around them. I tracked a Tumblescum deserter that walked into a grove of the RootFiends, and there was only blood and bone left when I reached them. RootFiends are cowards, they're unlikely to attack any group larger than five, but keep your wits about you if you find yourself unlucky enough to be traveling alone in the Underground Forest.
HutFiends
At some point, the traders and craftspeople of Tumbledown started to domesticate RootFiends, finding that they could carry a solid dwelling on their backs, and are docile enough to muzzle and whip into shape. Over time, they've been bred to be stronger and gentler than their feral counterparts, and are a common staple of Tumbledown.
Tumblescum
Of those who wander out from [[The City of Tumbledown]], either from confusion, malice or bravery, some live long enough to build small settlements, living off of soil and bone and scraping by with coin when they can send a few souls back to Tumbledown to trade roots and pelts for richer food and comforts. Others wander until lost, encased in the never-ending pitch dark of the Underground Forest until they are caught unawares by Tunnel Demons, or something worse. Some however, survive alone or in small packs, growing ruthless and cruel in their need for survival. Many lose their sight entirely, relying on other senses to keep going, thieving and scrabbling for food and alcohol. They steal knives and guns and build walled fortresses out of mud bricks and planks to keep the forest out.
Screaming Fools
The slap of wet feet is what you hear, and a wretched howling choking wail as the Screaming Fools scamper past.
Weak, with translucent skin stretched tight over engorged lungs and seeping guts, they scream and whimper, and lure hungry prey into patches of LoamFlesh, where they carefully feed off of anything that isn't immediately dissolved. It's a horrible sound to hear out of the dark, but over time you get used to it.
Tunnel Demons
Lithe and covered in dozens of gasping, gnawing orifices, Tunnel Demons slither, lope, and snake through The Underground Forest, dripping phlegm from mouths and searching the dark for prey, with massive bulging yellow eyes. It's better to stand your ground and get one good shot in than it is to run. There's nothing faster in the forest than a hungry Tunnel Demon.
LoamFlesh
Acidic Loam, non-sentient but plenty dangerous. Looks like dead sphagnum moss, starts to dissolve your boots first, then your feet if you're not quick. It's deep too and easy to sink in. It feeds indiscriminately off of the corpses of any creature that strays into it. It's a real equalizer; I've seen a number of Tunnel Demons brought down by the LoamFlesh in the middle of a hunt, lured into it by a pack of Screaming Fools.
The Red Sick Pulsing Wet
The Red Sick Pulsing Wet is an expansive network of fungal growth with slimy wet fruiting bodies and pulsing olfactory organs scattered across the open areas of the Underground Forest. While not directly aggressive, the longer one is in it's presence, the harder it is to refrain from tasting it's flesh and losing oneself in nothingness.
broken husks of both man and creature wander these fields, dripping Red Sick from mouths, eyes, and ears. They feed slowly from that Red Sick Wet, making no noise and breathing little, and as they wander while defecating, dissolving, withering, the Red Sick Pulsing Wet teases at the ground underneath their feet, drinking from their nothing. Eventually, these creatures break and collapse, finally subsumed by the soil and the Red Sick Pulsing Wet.
There are those who believe that even in death, the soul is trapped within the saturated soil, and the Red Sick Pulsing Wet continues to feed greedily. This is a place of death.
Corpse Spiders
A bit of a misnomer, really. Corpse Spiders are actually a fungus; Attracted by heat, their spores take hold in fresh corpses. The long, spindly appendages that grow from stomachs and eyes and limbs are actually calcium growths, fused to bone and infused with chemicals that soften them into workable legs. Fruiting bodies with long, feathery feelers catch the slight breezes that flow through the forest, propelling these 'spiders' across the forest floor, often collecting and tangling together in sights of tragedy. If you hear the click and clatter of Corpse Hordes, don a respirator; the spore is indiscriminate, and if you're not a corpse already it'll be sure to turn you into one.
Mire Creeps
No one understands why Mire Creeps spread spores. In the ferment clubs and peat burns of Tumbledown, the word circulates that their minds have been rooted and decayed by the spore, bending their actions to the will of the fungal network, just another reason to stay safe and warm in HutFiends and mogspires within the shifting city. Traveling away from the smoke and noise of the city, tunnel dwellers believe that the spore spewers are a part of some larger belief and cosmology of a secret cult, enthralled by the divine shift and swirl of drifting spora.
It's unclear whether the spore itself has any effect on those who breathe it in. Nonetheless, I'd advise to stay away from any Mire Creeps without either a respirator, or stillness and peace in your soul.
The Great Grub Procession
Once every 12 years, fat and waxy grubs emerge from the mud and algae of blood-soaked slaughterfields and old skirmish sites. They shift along in the yellow thousands, latching onto corpses and bones, filling the dead with divine visions of maddening lights and searching eyes. The dead gather, breathe, lift rusted spears, flags, horns and drums, and walk. Great lines gather, falling into step, all slowly moving in the same direction ever downwards. It proceeds like this for countless days, their sorrowful music creaking and soaring through the still air. The living join this parade, too. Some to observe, cry, find lost loves and kin and walk with them one last time. Others join for good, taken in by the crowd of the gone to become gone themselves.
The grubs never harm the living, and the living never harm the grubs. Paced by the quiet scrape and clatter of bones and kit, the procession walks into the ink black, and like that it is over. Silence returns to the forest.
If anyone has followed to the end, where grubs molt and corpses rest once more, they have never come back.
Many souls in the Underground Forest place the prepared bodies of passed loved ones in the paths of these grubs, knowing that by the end of the month, their roofs and doorsteps will be alight with glossy black beetles, and perhaps, one of them will linger a little longer than the rest.
Grafted Wizards
Underneath each Grafted Wizard’s secret rib sit five hearts, one for each of the principals. The hearts beat out of time, rasping against the open air that whistles through their exposed chest cavities and aching in the cold. Walking in groups, Wizards sift through markets and backstreets, leaving trails of sticky webs and viscera in their wake. If you place offerings of gold and promises of sacrifice in their path, there is a chance that the Wizards will abide for a time to your deepest will, though folx seldom understand really what that is until it’s too late.
There are a finite number of these Wizards, created at once and never again. Final remnants of a time long past, they are the walking history of a world that no longer exists.
more to come.
Tools and Resources Used: Crocotile, Aseprite, Affinity Designer 2, Wargames Atlantic Miniatures, Perry Miniatures, Citadel Paints, True Grit Texture Supplies.
monochrome.