While the forest was dying, a stranger approached its most ancient spirits with a deal. In exchange for half of the grove's soul-seeds, they would teach them a ritual that would preserve the wood's essence through the aeons of death to come, so that it might grow again in another age.

At first, the ancestors refused, sensing the taint of death magic around the stranger, and assured that their own powers would allow them to weather the onslaught of death. 

Months passed. The season of Death pressed on, and the spirit's powers started to wither. Little by little, the meadows where stripped of life, leaving only blasted lands behind. When the greatest of them, a wizened birch that planted some of the first trees , rotted from the inside out overnight, the forest was on the brink of extinction.

In a last, desperate act, the remaining lord of the woods agreed to the stranger's deal. Half of the spirits willingly gave their soul to the sorcerer, who used this power to save the forest... in a way.

The grove would endure, but it would never be the same. All at once, they ley lines of the forest opened, their energies mingling with the omnipresent death magic. The spirits where pulled into the lines, their essence forever tainted by an energy anathema to their existence. Seeing the consequence of their actions, the lords of the woods broke. Their rage, anguish and sadness suffused their essence while it was torn from them into the earth, and those emotions were the last they felt for an epoch.

       Now, as the ancient forest grows anew, its ancient masters are coming back, as twisted as the woods. Those Corpseroot Primordials rise from the loam, bringing to them the lesser spirits, infusing them with their dying emotions, an changing the groves around them to reflect their broken spirits. They bring a life of sorts to the land, but now, where life grows strong, death needs to be plentiful.

As for the stranger ? Some say they died, some say they still live, keeping with them the souls of the last untainted spirits of the dead forest...