Destroyed Mine Site

Picture a rough clearing forced into the forest rather than found — Farrowood's canopy doesn't thin out naturally here, it's been knocked back, snapped trunks and scorched leaf litter marking the edge where the treeline used to be before whatever happened, happened. At the centre of the clearing sits the crater — not deep, but wide, a shallow bowl gouged into the earth with the packed, glassy look of ground that took real force rather than just erosion. Loose scorched dirt rings its edge, and a faint, unnatural orange-tinted dust clings to everything nearby — the surface residue of the ore that was being pulled out of the ground here, though nothing about it reads as obviously mineral to anyone examining it without already knowing what to look for. To one side of the crater, the mining hut — or what's left of it. It was a simple, functional structure, timber-framed with a corrugated roof, and now it's mostly a collapsed shape: one wall still standing at an angle, roof sheeting bent and half-buried, the doorway visible but leading nowhere useful anymore. Papers, tools, and personal effects are scattered where the collapse threw them, some singed, none of it salvageable-looking at a glance. Scattered around the crater's far side, the actual mining equipment: a drill rig or winch mechanism, toppled and split open, gears and housing sheared apart rather than just fallen over. A couple of overturned supply carts. Everything metal is scored with deep claw-and-impact gouges, consistently oriented like something big fought here rather than an accident occurring — this is the physical tell that a PC investigating should be able to read as 'a battle happened,' not 'machinery malfunctioned.' In the top right of the clearing — away from the worst of the wreckage, close to where the trees start again — stands a large, old berry tree. It's the one thing in the clearing that predates all of this, tall and clearly established, and notably it's completely bare: no fruit on the branches or the ground beneath it, stripped clean. That absence is worth making visually obvious rather than subtle — an otherwise healthy, mature tree with nothing on it says something happened here recently, even before anyone puts together what. There should be a clear defensible spot beneath the berry tree, as whatever caused the chaos tried to preserve the tree. A somewhat worn trail leaves the map in the bottom left corner.