The Creeping Wild is a vast and seemingly sentient jungle that has consumed much of the Casshern Peninsula, swallowing the Ruins of Casshern beneath an ever-growing mass of vegetation. In a world starved of water and struggling to sustain life, the Wild is an unsettling exception: a place where life grows with impossible abundance and appears determined to spread.
The Living Jungle
The Creeping Wild is no ordinary jungle. Trees and dense vegetation can reclaim cleared ground with astonishing speed, paths disappear beneath new growth, and enormous vines twist through the canopy and ruins like the limbs of some buried creature. Travelers tell of these vines lashing out without warning, seizing people and animals, crushing them, or dragging them screaming into the undergrowth.
Nor does the Wild always behave blindly. Predators have been seen driving prey toward waiting vegetation. Vines move to obstruct paths and surround intruders. Expeditions returning along familiar routes sometimes find the jungle changed against them. Those who survive long enough within the Wild frequently come away convinced of one thing: it knows they are there.
The creatures inhabiting the Wild are as abundant and dangerous as its vegetation. Some are found nowhere else in Tarisia, while others resemble familiar creatures changed by generations beneath its canopy. Whether these animals are servants of the Wild, participants in it, or merely predators taking advantage of an extraordinarily rich ecosystem is considerably harder to determine.
The Green Tide
The Wild continues to spread beyond the ruins it has already consumed. Its advance has brought it to the southern shores of the Defiled Lakes, placing the city of Ak-ta across the dark water from an immense wall of green.
Attempts to halt that advance have met with varying degrees of failure. Vegetation burned or hacked away eventually returns. Expeditions sent deep into Casshern to destroy particularly aggressive growths, recover ancient knowledge, or discover the source of the Wild frequently disappear altogether.
Yet the Wild does not advance everywhere at the same pace. In some places it can remain nearly unchanged for years, while elsewhere vines and vegetation overwhelm open ground with frightening speed. Why it expands where it does is unknown.
What Lies Beneath
Casshern was once a fertile land of jungles, caverns, springs, and abundant water. Even now, stories persist of underground rivers, flooded caverns, and ancient waterways hidden beneath the peninsula. Some believe these forgotten waters explain how the Wild sustains such impossible abundance while the rest of Tarisia withers.
Others find that explanation insufficient.
Priests claim the Wild is the wrath of Taris made manifest, or evidence that the imprisoned Mother Goddess still lives beneath Casshern. Sorcerers have blamed some forgotten consequence of the Betrayal. Those familiar with Miraj sometimes whisper that the countless living things of the Wild may share more than simple instinct.
There are stranger stories still. That the Wild remembers those who escape it. That it sometimes allows travelers to leave. That voices heard among the trees belong to people swallowed centuries ago. That everything growing beneath the canopy is merely part of something much larger.
Whatever the truth, the Creeping Wild is alive. And it is growing.