Green Hell is the name that stuck, and the name that’s earned – a stretch of dense, oxygen-thick jungle south of the Empire proper, humid enough that the air itself feels like a third combatant before anything with teeth ever shows up. Howler monkeys shriek somewhere close by at all hours, rain rarely stops for long, and the local wisdom – from the handful of people fool enough to settle at its edges – is not to be caught outdoors after dark.
The frontier town of Last Hope marks the practical edge of civilisation heading south, run by Sheriff Kincaid, a transplanted Agent out of Talismonde. South of it, the jungle is home to the native Ndege people and the Fekratt tribe, who keep an uneasy, almost ritualised truce with the logging camps working the tree line – a balance of retribution rather than open war, and not one outsiders are advised to test.
FILE NOTES
Deeper in, the jungle gives way to older ruins entirely – the ravaged druidic observatory at Borthanza, and beneath it, something considerably stranger than a ruined temple has any business concealing. Grimlocks, guardian constructs, and worse have all been encountered in the tunnels below it. An elvish tribe holds the plateau above, and grants passage on their own terms and no one else’s.
The wildlife alone is reason enough to keep to the trail – crocodiles in the waterways, stirge swarms, jaguars that don’t announce themselves before they attack, and at least one confirmed hag working the deep jungle, encountered and put down by the Agents along with a sorcerer running an art studio that was considerably more sinister than it looked from outside.
Not every warning out here comes from a survivor. A prior expedition’s camp turned up wrecked near the ziggurat – torn tents, burst food packs, a severed arm gnawed down to the bone – and a set of shigga-wire recordings still tangled in among the wreckage. Played back at the Section House, the wire captured the whole thing happening in real time: routine notes on a dig, growing unease about something watching the camp, one archaeologist named Jaren vanishing outright, another named Ichra falling too ill to move, and a third, Saul, found cutting his own arm before running off into the jungle raving. The last clear sounds on the recording are rock scraping against rock, a rhythmic click-click-click closing in from every direction, and screaming that ends before the tape does. Whoever left that camp never made it out, and whatever came for them didn’t stop to check whether the recorder was still running.
STATUS: Largely unmapped south of Last Hope. Filed as extremely dangerous, extremely wet, and considerably more inhabited – by things worth cataloguing – than its name would suggest.