The Abyssal Woods is the Realm of Shadow's quietest, most pitiless region, a forest in permanent twilight at the western edge of Scadu Altus, accessible only by descending past the Recluses' River. Almost nothing here is canon-named in item descriptions. What the canon does establish is what lives there : the Madding Hand heretics, the aged-one cult that worships the Three Fingers in distant counterpoint to the same cult sealed beneath Leyndell, and the great Madding Hand-shapes that crawl through the underbrush.

The forest's silence is its theology. The Aged One's Exultation talisman preserves the cult's whispered litany, 'Gift your madness to our Lord. Bless our brethren with grapes. Take care that they fully ripen.' The grapes are eyeballs ; the Lord is the Three Fingers ; the brethren are the heretics the rest of the Hornsent rejected. Where the Subterranean Shunning-Grounds beneath Leyndell are the Erdtree's sewer-prison for the Three Fingers, the Abyssal Woods are the Realm of Shadow's open-air chapel for the same outer-god. Two cults of the Frenzied Flame, two locations on opposite sides of the Sea of Fog, the same yellow flame. The Tarnished walks past the chapel without speaking ; the Abyssal Woods does not encourage speech.

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WeaponMadding Hand

A glove stitched together from the flayed skin of the victims of a butcherous bloodbath. Forged of an unyielding, black impulse toward revenge fostered in those who were hunted down as heretics by their own brethren.

TalismanAged One's Exultation

'Gift your madness to our Lord. Bless our brethren with grapes. Take care that they fully ripen.'

Item / MiscNote: The Lord of Frenzied Flame

Note written by a nomadic merchant succinctly detailing knowledge acquired. 'Beneath Leyndell, at the very bottom lies our lord, lord of the frenzied. The Three Fingers who holds us in thrall.'