The sleeping entity beneath Haudh-Gwenn

No name for it was ever written down. What is known is that the Mól shut it under the ruins at Haudh-Gwenn long ago, in the years when Vëné and Nancáro were still working to bring the Empire down, and that it has been there ever since.

It lives between this world and the world of the sleeping mind, and is in both at once. What it eats is dreams and feelings. It reads a person’s deepest sorrow and deepest want, and then gives them the means to live that dream out, not as a bargain offered and accepted but without their consent at all, putting a measure of its own will into them as it goes. What comes out the other side is a seed. The person grows more of the thing it feeds on, and it feeds again.

It is eternal, but not immortal. That distinction is Nancáro’s, and it means the thing can be killed: not by mortals of the sort who have looked at it so far, but killed, once an adequate means exists. Until then it can only be held down.

What Held It Down

The city above it was never the attraction. Denser and more tormented places than Haudh-Gwenn stand elsewhere in the world, and what drew it to that particular ground was the ooze stored beneath it, hundreds of years of souls kept in one place. Two things kept it dormant while it lay there. One was the Slumbering Queen, whose dream-catcher work ran on that same ooze. The other was a second presence the Elder could never fully perceive, and it is gone now.

With the Queen departed and the second check gone, the thing is starving and no longer meaningfully imprisoned. The nightmares that began working through Haudh-Gwenn after the Queen left are its work.

It has been fought before, after a fashion. A call once went out for help containing it, and a member of some arcane order answered, a gnome, who came and went away seeded: strange afterward, eccentric, altered in ways he did not choose. He is no longer around.

The way in is the place Nancáro named where the wound is inside the land.