Travel through the Wilderways Forest which stretched from the icy north to halfway through the eleven kingdoms was always fraught with danger. Since the old Watch-Legions had been disbanded after a series of trade wars however, the Wilderways grew ever more perilous, until one summer all travel between east and west was choked off completely, unless it was in heavy convoys that were almost the size of small towns themselves.

But no report of where the missing merchants or travellers had vanished to emerged - no smouldering wreckage, no bodies, no tracks that even the best hunters could find. It was as though the forest had swallowed them whole.

This, as it turned out, wasn't all that far from the truth, as a grieving marcher lord discovered after his family went missing and he engaged the services of a powerful wizard to find them. A band of warlock-brigands had discovered an ancient enchantment left behind by the creatures who used to live in the forest, and had employed it for their own dark ends.

The spell, called The Opening and Closing of Ways, caused specially prepared trees near roads to grow in and over the road, looking for all the world like natural growth and foliage of many years. Simultaneously, a road appearing exactly like the one just hidden opened up along a trail of enspelled trees, so creating a diversion.

When the spell wore off or was dispelled, the trees resumed their normal places and hapless travellers were trapped in clearings deep in the forest with no possible means of escape, except on foot. Hacking a path through the dense forest to the road - if they could even find it again - would take weeks.

Of course, the warlock-brigands were waiting with a well prepared ambush surrounding the clearing, and they mercilessly took whatever they wanted, slaying any witnesses to joyous howls and the gnashing of sharpened teeth, helped by wild forest wolves they had half trained to hunt anyone who escaped and fled into the woods.

When the truth emerged, the surrounding kingdoms laid their own trap, and burned the encampment of the warlock-brigands to ashes, dark idols and all. Yet the spell itself was not destroyed and is rumoured to be held in the libraries of more lawless magicians to this day.