Arboris
Floor 8
Inside the trunk of the Tree, where the sap stood still and grew into crystal
There is no sky in Hollowheart: this is the inside of the trunk, a cavern of living wood with glowing veins of sap running up into the dark. Deepvault is cut into terraces round the Heartpillar, a column of heartwood where the sap still rises, slow as a sleeper's breath.
Everywhere else the sap stopped when the Heart fell silent, and still sap does not rot here. It sets into crystal, and the crystal grows; the townsfolk call it the Stilling. Root bridges cross the chasms to the Crystal Gardens, the Sapvein Gorge and the Shard Fields, and at the far end of the hollow sits the Hollow King.
Inside the trunk of the Tree, in the hollow at its heart. Our world was a world of halls under stone. When it ended, the Tree took the halls in with us, and we woke inside the wood. This is Deepvault. We cut it into terraces round the Heartpillar, as our forebears cut their halls into the rock.
DeepvaultThe Root BridgesThe Crystal GardensThe Sapvein GorgeThe Glowmoss DeepsThe Shard FieldsThe HeartwardThe Hollow ThroneThe wilds grow stronger the further you go from the Hearth.
The Heartworm
The Sapvein Gorge, Level 31
A worm as long as the Sapvein Gorge is wide, living in its river and eating the sap: waxy and pale, gold where the sap runs under its skin. When it rises the whole river boils; it lashes the banks, bursts burning sap up beneath you, and dives to come up under its prey.
It wakes on its own about every half hour, and the whole floor hears it: The sap of the gorge boils from bank to bank: the Heartworm has risen out of the Sapvein!
For a party of up to six, from level 31. Every party walks its own copy.
Beneath the Heartward, through the door on its west side, once its shardstalkers are cleared. Here every sap channel of the lower trunk meets before the sap climbs on; it stood still here first, and here the Stilling has its root. The Geodeback lies in the Hollow halfway down, and the Shardmother has spun the Confluence shut with crystal thread.
The Hollow King
Level 34
Hollowheart's guardian: the last king of the deep folk, who asked the Tree to take his people in and was made the warden of its sap, which ran through him for a thousand years. When it stopped, it set in him; now he is smoky crystal round the place his heart was, and his crystal spears keep growing in you.
Waits in the Hollow Throne. Everyone who climbs fights it together, and it grows with them. The first time it falls, Frostcrown opens for everyone; then it returns, to be fought again for what it leaves.
Deepvault
