Thorn Golem

<i>‘The trees – the roots – the forest, alive – I tell you! I saw men torn to shreds by plants that walk like men, vines like iron whips, fingers of blades. I saw its face! The face… the twisting, burning face… the face of death!’</i> - <i>Grustov, former explorer, inmate of Vohell Asylum</i> Thorn Golems arose on <color=#774418>Caoilte the Asharrow’s</color> Corrupted isle, which has festered for centuries in isolation. Being so far from the epicenter of the Corruption meant it escaped the purges of the victorious Sylvan. Sheltered from their wrath, the island brims with malignant forms of twisted life, from which the wider world is safe only due to the same isolation that allowed them to flourish. The island in certain ways resembles one giant organism, and the Thorn Golems are akin to an immune system. When the first explorers landed there, they met with many gruesome fates. Some were torn apart by roots and vines that moved like the tentacles of an enormous octopus, gripping with bone-cracking force and raking flesh with razor-sharp thorns. The fallen’s flesh fertilized these twisted plants, and their swords were engulfed in tendrils. Over time, this repeated, until numerous fallen weapons littered the island and the autonomous vine-entities began to individuate. When these wood-spirits tore themselves up out of the ground and down from the branches, consolidating their knotty wooden sinews into humanoid form, they became the first Thorn Golems. Ever since, new curious visitors to Caoilte’s nameless island have been greeted with the rusty swords of those who had come before, wrapped in rock-hard vines to form lumpen, sharp-pointed fists. Caoilte’s Corruption manifested partially as a smoldering, dark fire, dwelling within him like a tree struck by lightning that burned within itself for days. These slow-burning embers infuse the Thorn Golems as well. The heat moves about their bodies, concentrating in its sword-filled appendages when battle begins. The blades within a Thorn Golem’s fists glow red-hot, ensuring that those it strikes are not only stabbed but seared and Corrupted as well. Once touched by this evil, attackers soon wither and die. Their ebbing lifeforce bleeds into the landscape and rejuvenates the Golem, fueling the manifestation of more. The ‘face’ of a Thorn Golem is a macabre tableau of the glowing embers that infuse both them and Caoilte amid twisting roots. Those who gaze upon it see the writhing Corruption within manifest itself, twisting and shaping the Golem’s visage into patterns and forms whose angles and curvatures invoke primal, unreasoning terror. Boring into the mind with inescapable ease, each terror-image conjured by the face of a Thorn Golem is unique to the individual and will haunt them for the rest of their lives – likely to be brief, crippled as they are by eldritch fear amid an island of death. Although the Golems are individual entities, they nonetheless function together in perfect, self-supporting harmony. They swarm to the site of any landings upon the island, moving together with undulant, uncanny syncopation. When intruders fight back with fire, blade, and ax, the Thorn Golems protect one another by extruding vines to block blows directed at damaged Golems in danger of being totally broken apart. Though they are separate in body, fighting them feels as though the forest itself is rising up in assault: many parts forming a unified whole, indivisible and overwhelming.