Menaces of Otherlore: The Hanging Tree

“You made an example. It came to show gratitude.”

People take for granted the blurred line between life and death in the Known World. Most folk, being decent, have proper words to say, rites to perform and methods of disposal that sends all parts of the dead on to their Next Life. Most folk, being decent, could find a body frozen by the roadside, have their heart sink and their mind say ‘poor devil,’ leading them to perform that final kindness for a perfect stranger at double time, just so as not to leave them there. Mortality as it is known is a shared condition, and in most circumstances, we prefer to do unto others as we’d like to have done unto us.

But then there’s the matter of passion, of anger, of hatred, of fear of the unknown. These are things that can drive us away from this basic decency. These are the things that led us to invent the drawing and quartering, the blood eagle, the brazen bull, the choke pear. These are the things that lead us to hang the boughs of great and broad trees with the full number of our enemies or our reviled at the end of a noose, left to swing and rot and serve as warning to others. Don’t do what they did; don’t cross who they crossed; don’t be who they were.

And as they rot, swing, bloat, and collect filth, their weight draws those broad boughs down, bending trunks and straining roots. In time, these trees crack under the mass of the dead with them, bleeding out their own essence from each break in a slow and torturous end to what was once a symbol of vitality. The tree becomes one with the dead, similarly left to rot in inhumane disgrace and postmortem humiliation. As one, this new entity rises from the sheer anguish of being left to such a fate, moving with root legs, bough arms and any help its many bodies can provide. Slow but determined, the legion seeks its makers. Day or night, through storms or fog, it will seek out its wrongdoers, those that condemned it in collective. With crushing mass, bark skin and all kicking legs, strangling arms and gnashing teeth of its many hanged appendages from their Wyrd-preserved nooses, its goal is to add those that made it to its commune. Capable of growing branch creepers made of both plant and flesh, it joins the shattered and blood dripping bodies of those that witnessed its siring with its mass, another hanged body to droop the boughs and build its antivital strength.

A Hanging Tree is a creature of vengeance, an undead collective that moves as a singular entity, but can only be truly destroyed in individual part. Because it is a creature of vengeance, it has no quarrel with the living as do other, less focused undead have, though it will retaliate against anything that attempts to stop it in its miserable quest. They are massively powerful, capable of smashing away the upper level of a moderately sized wooden house with a single swing of its hangmen-turned-gory flails. As they shamble, they leave trails of a wet, part-moss, part-flesh blight, which if left to grow and spread, will render soil unfit for either crops or safe burial for many summers. Burning Hanging Trees is effective, but also dangerous, as they can easily spread fire. Killing the tree itself will simply cause it to drop its hangmen, who will in turn rise and attack like a malignant orchard crop.