Not much is known about the final resting place of Kelandir. Legends say she was burned on a pyre, deep in the forest, near the mythical central root. Pilgrims still start on the journey, despite none of them having returned, ever. They all are in search of the stone monument, the rumoured rock formation, which was the pyre’s foundation. The vanishing of the pilgrims and the presence of a constant lurking danger have given the unknowns around the central root the veneer of a haunted forest. The best known of the legends is the one about the Emerald Huntress, the guardian of Kelandir’s Rest. She appears across cultures in similar stories and is also known as The Emerald Fate or Riftclaw. They say it is the human foulness which gets one marked by her. This spectral entity supposedly haunts the glades around the monument and if she catches you, so the legend, she will turn you into a tree, condemned to guard Kelandir’s Rest for eternity.
Is this just a myth, to protect people from trekking further than they can handle, to stop them for their own safety? “Old stories to spook children,” say some. They think it exists to protect something more important, something more valuable: the root-infused relics.