Gloo

During a huge war waged in the Barren Lands, the Moniyan Empire's Second Regiment was almost entirely annihilated. Among the sea of corpses strewn all around, a Moniyan soldier had managed to survive; yet lost every one of his comrades, and was left to walk back to his homeland alone. Dark clouds shroud the Barren Lands year in, year out. Without the sun, moon and stars to guide his path, this solitary survivor lost his way and strayed into the Shadow Swamp. Both the earth and water found within the forests of the Shadow Swamp are corrupted by the Abyss, leaving the place moist and putrid. The man's extreme hunger and fatigue, together with the endless forest that surrounded him, plunged him into darkness and despair. Just as he was about to pass out, a most peculiar feeling wrenched him back to consciousness: a sticky sensation spread upon his back, and then he lost all control of his limbs which ran wildly of their own accord. He would describe this moment in his memoirs as feeling like he was but a wooden puppet, like those played by the Moniyan children. He was manipulated by some invisible force, nimbly darting through the forest at an unbelievable speed. The man was about to lose consciousness when the body he no longer controlled came to a halt. Coming to himself, he watched with wide eyes at what laid before him... There he saw the ruins of a great vine-entangled temple, weathered by the wind and frost yet still grand and imposing. These ancient temple ruins stuck out like a sore thumb within their Shadow Swamp surroundings. The strange sensation that ran down his back faded away as he stopped, yet it was just then that he caught sight of something small that hopped into the nearby bushes, seemingly in hiding. Could that thing be behind all of this? The soldier was determined to get to the bottom of it all, and ploughed ahead in the direction the figure had taken. From the vegetation there emanated a loud rustling, and it seemed some kind of violent struggle was taking place within. And so as the soldier crept over stealthily, reaching out to push aside a branch, there appeared before him a little critter about the size of a coal briquette; he prepared to catch it and study it more closely, yet before he could make a move, countless others had emerged from all around. They stacked together in an orderly fashion, and in a little over ten seconds the creature no bigger than a lump of coal had transformed into a mighty beast. This struck terror into the heart of the poor Moniyan soldier who fainted on the spot. But when he awakened once more[,] he found himself no longer within the swamp, instead upon the border of the Barren Lands and the Empire. Upon returning to the empire[,] he regaled those all around with this tale. The Moniyan citizens held much respect for this veteran, yet dismissed his story as merely the hallucinations of a man racked by fatigue while having narrowly escaped death. After all, even the most learned scholars in Moni