- Messages
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- Character Biography
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I: Cedar and Yew
Which is the deadliest form of a broken heart? That which comes after months or years of suffering, or that which strikes as unexpectedly as lightning from a blue sky?
The elf pondered this in the back of her mind as she cradled the golden-furred fox. Burning tears dripped down her cheeks and onto the cold body slowly going stiff in her shaking arms. Death was a necessary part of the natural order – Elinyra understood this – but not this way. Not by her own hand.
Penelope had been the fox’s name. She had been Elinyra’s closest companion since she’d found the old fox trapped and hungry in the Vale. Long and lonely had been the winter the exiled druid spent in the Astenvale monastery; a self-imposed sentence made bearable by a friend with an endlessly free spirit and unconditional affection. They’d only had a few short months together, but in that time they’d rarely been apart.
“I’m so sorry…” Elinyra whispered and buried her face in the soft fur in despair. How many nights she spent by one of the monastery’s fireplaces stroking that same fur while Penelope relaxed in her lap and warmed her aching old joints; how many laughs she’s been given by her friend’s curious antics… all of them, gone. She’d been the great fool who thought she could use her healing magic to cure a simple illness. How could she have not foreseen that her curse, which had perverted her other druidic powers, would also twist that which once gave life to take it away?
A snow-laden branch shifted, dusting the kneeling elf and her perished companion in a coating of white. Elinyra had brought Penelope into this peaceful, winter-blanketed forest clearing to give her a proper funeral, but all she could bring herself to do for a long time was scream her agony into the godless void.
Once she had worn her voice to a hoarse whisper, she finished what she had come to do. She bid farewell to yet another friend.
In a rage, she all but ripped off her walking cape, leaving her blighted skin exposed to the biting cold breeze. The hardened, black barkskin had taken its time climbing up her right arm. Her failed attempt to heal her friend had cost her part of her shoulder and upper back. It was growing more rapidly, she noted bitterly. Soon it would consume part of her neck, maybe even her face.
She held her right hand in front of her, which these days looked more like she’d imagine claws on a treant.
“So I have finally become one of the monsters,” she rasped through aching vocal chords. Well, at least one knight had been correct that it had only been a matter of time: which meant that there was only one thing left to do. She had thought that the Eldyr tree had been calling to her, the blight itself singing her fate. If she was no longer a druid, hardly even an elf, what was she still holding onto?
Elinyra donned her cape again and headed back to the monastery. It was opportunely quiet within; the knights seemed to be out on a mission or entertaining their own means, and the squires were too busy with chores and practice to do more than give her a casual greeting as she passed by. Burying herself deep within the cowl of the cape, Elinyra gave no replies. No farewells. She only packed up her things in silence.
The areas of the Vale nearest to the Eldyr Tree were hazardous territory to travel alone, not least of all in the winter. Elinyra herself had been attacked even farther out from the edge of the blight’s main influence last fall, but that did not stop her now. Perhaps in some twisted way, she even welcomed it.
She’d travelled for days along muddy main thoroughfares cleared of snow by the hard work of beasts of burden pulling plows, as well as down a few side roads turned into no more than long clearings by piling drifts. She was still elf enough to tread lightly on the deep snow without the aid of snowshoes, but not enough to convince herself of the folly of this endeavor. She feared that the seed of quiet madness that had taken root in her was now ready to sprout.
There had been plenty of time to reconsider. Plenty of time to mourn and let go... but she didn’t. Short though the winter days were, they dragged on as she walked herself into exhaustion chasing after the great corrupted tree. She hardly allowed herself time to rest, even as frostbite and pain crept into the parts of her limbs that were still hers: the frigid air of nightfall had no quarrel with her blight-consumed flesh.
That disturbed her less than the intimate sense that she was stealing the life energy of everything around her as she passed by – hibernating trees, animals and even the patient seeds beneath the soil. She’d started it when she’d tried to heal Penelope, and now she couldn’t stop it. She was familiar with the distinct feeling of life energy flowing from her when she’d used healing magic before: a soft void in her spirit – like the instant water is scooped up from a pool, and filled in again almost before it could be missed. Acting in reverse, she felt as if the pool would overflow its banks and drown the whole world.
At last, camped by a fire she’d been forced to light to stave off a deathly chill, Elinyra found she could go no farther. The wood she’d managed to find was wet and burned fretfully, but it was enough to keep her toes from freezing off.
“It will be spring soon,” she said to no one in particular as she stared, her bleary eyes unfocused, through the hissing flames. It was a statement often made by the old who knew their own winter road was waiting; some semblance of comfort in the fact that although individuals came and went, the pattern always remained. No matter how harsh the winter was, spring’s renewal would follow.
She’d start again tomorrow, when she could force her legs to work again. She shuddered to think of what might happen to her surroundings if she stayed for too long. She’d tried to pick a site with more rocks than life, but she knew that not far away, some precocious winter lilies had withered away in their prime of life.
Bundled in thick furs inside her hide tent, she fell into the tattered corners of her subconscious mind.
The nightmare returned. It had visited Elinyra for so many nights at this point that she’d lost count. The memory of an attack almost eleven years ago now. A figure shrouded in a shadow so dark that even the full moon’s light could not reveal its true nature; a strange dagger that would stab into her right hand. The birth of her curse.
But a few things had changed in this rendition: Elinyra had grown weary, and didn’t bat an eye as her bow again rotted away in her grasp. If the nightmare thought her unarmed, it was sorely mistaken.
Already blighted, her hand produced its thorny vine-whip before her attacker could act. The shrouded figure rolled sideways as she lashed out vertically at it, momentarily pausing its assault.
Elinyra was more lucid in this dream than she’d ever been – to the extent that even the background noise she’d only ever been able to make out as whispers became discernible voices. They were repeating the same words over and over: Submit.
Caught in the endless cycle of this nocturnal vision, the figure attacked. Once again, a wave of dense blackness washed over them both, obscuring their forested surroundings. Elinyra didn’t bring her hand up to defend herself this time. She brought her hand back instead, pulling the whip until it wrapped around something solid.
The polished wooden dagger slashed harmlessly towards the ground as she yanked her opponent past her. Even in the stark blackness, she could clearly see the whip wrapped around her attacker’s wrist. Though the details of her attacker’s face remained obfuscated either by darkness or the illusory nature of dreaming, she could tell he was an elf looking up at her from the ground in surprise.
His look of surprise quickly turned to a pleased smirk. Though he never opened his mouth to speak, she heard his voice echo through the channels of her mind -
“At Last.” The voice was as familiar to her as someone she’d spoken with every day – or heard from every night. The very same as the one who had spoken through a malevolent specter during a fateful ceremony she’d taken part in just before the eve of Samhuinn.
Tonight would be the night Elinyra got her answers. She tugged on the whip. It went limp in her hands as the elf vanished. Like fog, the shroud dissipated into the surrounding mirage of a forest under a night sky.
“Who are you?!” she called out into the quiet woods, willing the nightmare to show itself.
“You know just who I am, Elinyra,” the strange elf’s voice replied from the very air. “Don’t be so distant.”
Consciousness struck her like a slap in the face. She opened her eyes to see a mountain-sized expanse of tree trunk rising in great twisting branches towards an evening sky. Before the tree, the shadow of a man waited.
They were standing in a large, strange glade bordered on three sides by fortress-sized buttresses that supported the girth of the arboreal giant above. Rather than being round like most roots, these were tall and flat like fins rippling out from the main trunk; a trunk that itself formed enormous undulations near the root crown. Covered with the hundred-years growth of lichens, moss, fungi and strange plants that Elinyra couldn’t begin to identify, the buttresses gave every bit the illusion of verdant cliffs. The ground itself was barren of all but a few mushrooms and surface roots. And it was tropically humid; protected from the wind and weather, thin clouds of mist formed and dissipated constantly. Though open to the sky, winter seemed not to touch this sacred place. Thankfully, it seemed that neither did Elinyra’s curse.
She turned her gaze upwards breathlessly, into the expanse of the great Eldyr tree. It was more like a wooden bridge wandering in lazy ascent, rising vertically here and running horizontally there, all the way up to touch the welkin beyond the clouds above. Here and there it formed vast leafing branches, which themselves were at least as large as the oldest trees of the Valewood. Yet unlike the surrounding forest, it was not barren even in the depths of winter’s hold. There were at least enough leaves to count every soul in the world and every star in the sky, and that was only what was visible before the tree vanished into the clouds. If ever there were gods, Elinyra was sure she was standing before one - the Lord of the Forest.
Yet she had no recollection of how or when she’d arrived here.
Then there was the elven man standing before her. The stalker of her nightmare made manifest.
Though he had the somewhat sharp, youthful features of her kin, his face was also unusually wizened - as if he was aging like a human. Chestnut-colored hair interlaced with white fell down his shoulders. He might have been handsome despite all this if not for the stony expression etched onto his face and the absolute piercing coldness in his eyes. He wore no winter coat, had no apparent protection from the cold but for a green tattered cloak adorned with a small deer skull. Tattered was an apt description for the man in general.
“You have made it to the place you have blamed for your woes. Yet your woes have not diminished,” he said. There was an undeniable charismatic quality to the man’s voice, something that pulled at the edges of her mind and demanded her attention.
“It seems that the source of my woes stands before me – and for what?” she retorted angrily. “A grudge? Because the attack on my circle was thwarted all those years ago? I was hardly the only one who fought back that night.”
The night that the Falwood betrayed Elinyra and her circle. Maddened animals and sylvan creatures went on a rampage, first attacking a caravan of pioneers, then turning on the druids when they tried to protect them. She'd never understood the reason, nor how the forest simply went back to normal the following day - as if no one remembered who or what had attacked them. Elinyra's recurring nightmare never allowed her to forget.
“Nothing so simple as a grudge. A gift,” he said matter-of-factly.
She couldn't help but remember the blighted man who'd hunted her in the forest, his mind far gone to a condition similar to hers. He'd referred to his own nightmarish transformation as a 'gift'. She also vividly recalled the times that blighted whip of thorns had erupted from her hand. While it had potentially saved her in the moment, it had taken its price by corrupting her body bit by bit. Turning her into some sort of abomination.
“It is not a gift if it demands something in return. It is not a gift if it destroys those who receive it.”
“All things demand something in return: be it affection, respect, time or energy. Such is the Cycle, druidess,” he replied with the subtle hint of mockery. "That you have failed to fully accept the seed's presence - this is your own doing.” He gestured at her blighted arm. “It has always come to your aid when you needed it. It has a purpose, even if you try to resist it. The more you resist it, the more of you it will take."
Elinyra had sensed that there was something in her hand back when her wound had first re-opened. She'd even imagined, as her condition progressed, that she could feel it spreading through her like roots; but to compare her blight to a progenitor of life was nothing less than profane.
“A purpose... tell me, then, what is it you demand of me and why,” she continued after a pause, her voice quavering with barely-contained outrage, despair, and a deep weariness.
"I demand no more of you than what you should expect from yourself. You are a protector of the wilds, and you shall fulfill that oath one way or another. You stood in the way of what had to be done once. Consider this a second chance."
"So you’re the one behind the attack on those settlers? Why?"
For a moment, his stoic expression turned into an angry sneer. "Your kin had already judged them guilty, and yet turned against the lands they'd vowed to protect! Those settlers were poachers and defilers - nothing more than parasites - and yet you chose to protect them when I gave the forest the means take their number in turn. The druids have forgotten their place. Who it was that first taught them."
No matter the order, no matter the race, druids almost universally revered the power of story. Thus, dating back into antiquity even by the long-lived elves, there were as many stories about the origins of druidry as there were druids. Elinyra thought about the single element that tied them all together and posited:
"You're a fae?"
He didn't answer, and his expression didn't betray any hint to it. It paradoxically both made sense to her, considering what she now recognized as his doing, and it didn't. It wasn't just that he looked aged, but something about his power seemed distinctly opposite to that of the fae.
"That cannot be!" she protested. "The stories say the fae elders taught us about balance and living in harmony with the natural world. Capricious though they may be, they would not create something so devastating to nature as the blight. It would be contrary to their own existence."
He was silent for awhile, his gaze looking through her into the blighted woods beyond where sickly, black-bark trees jabbed naked twisting branches towards a darkening sky. After a few minutes, the last of the sun's rays relented to the moonless darkness of early nightfall. It would have been pitch black if not for the soft green glow of bioluminescent fungi and other things that were starting to move around on the organic walls. In the silence, Elinyra thought she could sometimes hear the burbling of water as it moved up through the tree's gargantuan trunk.
At length the man finally replied,
"This forest has changed - made itself hostile to the mortals who once waged war against it. But it persists. Blight is the iron, and I am the blacksmith. I had no hand in creating the iron, but I have shaped it to my will."
"You're weaponizing blight?"
"You act surprised, though you have made a weapon out of a length of tree branch. A tool that is useless in some hands but deadly in yours."
"The difference is that I do not kill innocents with mine."
"It matters not who you deem guilty or innocent. Have you not already killed a creature dearer to your heart than your own kin? Rather, finished what time and tide had already begun?"
Elinyra's heart sank into the abyss when she thought of Penelope again. It wasn't just the death of her vulpine friend that had worn her down to nothing; it was this entire ordeal. It was leaving behind everyone and everything that she'd ever loved.
And the man who had brought her here had the audacity to mock her for it.
"Enough lies! I will not kill for you!" she growled and turned her back on him, trying to hold onto the illusion that she wasn't afraid of him when, in fact, she was terrified.
"I do not lie. You are merely unwilling to accept the truth. You delude yourself in the belief that you can hold the blight off forever, if only you can find the right healer. The right scholar. Like all mortals, you somehow think you can cheat death.
"You can't escape death, Elinyra. It is your fate. It was from the day you were born. As it was with your companion - but you couldn't accept that either."
"Arreth!" Enough! she cried, though she would not turn back around. There was some power there, some compulsion that felt stronger when she could see him. He must have been fae, but of a kind she'd never heard of. "I did not come all this way to escape death. I came to understand this thing you've afflicted me with." A strange grin crossed her face, and she forced herself to turn and stare him in his supernaturally azure eyes.
"I've come all this way to stop you."
He returned her glare with a confident smirk. "You can no more stop me than you could a hurricane. A force of nature does not bow before a defiant leaf in the wind. I will restore this forest - all of the forests, in time, and they will no longer tolerate the depredations of mortals."
Elinyra huffed in disbelief. "Pride comes before a fall. And you will fall; if not to the protectors of this forest you seek to corrupt, then others."
Strangely, his grin only spread further. "You believe you still have allies in those you left behind? Look at the path you have carved to get here. Death and decay follow in your wake. You said it yourself - you have become the monster." His eyes looked up past her, to the dark horizon. Elinyra didn't have to look to know exactly the trail of destruction she'd wrought.
"It is your doing. All of this is!" She shook her head defiantly. "No. I am an ovate. I am a healer."
"You are a reaper," the fae said coldly. "And the decay around you will get worse the longer you fight against the power growing within."
Elinyra thought she might just strike at him then and there, but she had the distinct feeling that it would do no good.
"How am I supposed to be protecting the forest if I'm killing everything around me?!" she shouted, shaking so hard she felt the whole of the earth might be trembling with her.
"Spring follows the winter. Death feeds new life. Think on that, and you will have your answer. Farewell, Elinyra. We will meet again soon," he said and turned away towards the tree. Without thinking, Elinyra lunged towards him, but he seemed to meld right into it.
Her bark-covered hand made a hollow sound as she beat her fist against the trunk.
"Vyr!!" She growled, then grew quiet as a realization struck her. He hadn't told her his name. How did she know it?
She spent the night in that sheltered place beneath the Elydr tree. It was quiet aside from the mutterings of small animals, the rustling of their movements beneath dried leaves that had fallen from the branches high above. After days of exposure to winter's bitter cold, the druid felt herself soothed by the warmth and life around her.
As morning dawned bright, Elinyra found her pack and gear nearby. Whether she had somehow had the forethought to bring them during that expanse of time she couldn't remember - or if that madman had deigned to let her have them, she couldn't guess. She was relieved all the same: she would need that gear for her return to Astenvale.
She had to warn the Knights of Anathaeum about Vyr's plans. Finally, she'd found the reason behind her condition, and the recent emergence of the blight-spawned monsters in the Valen Wilds. Regardless of the personal cost, she had to get that information into the right hands. Even if Vyr's argument that they would see her as enemy instead of ally was a strangely persuasive one; enough that she found herself eyeing the line of trees with reluctance.
Steeling herself against the intuition that begged her to stay, Elinyra hoisted her pack, ate some of her rations, and started back up the path of decayed foliage she'd created.
Which is the deadliest form of a broken heart? That which comes after months or years of suffering, or that which strikes as unexpectedly as lightning from a blue sky?
The elf pondered this in the back of her mind as she cradled the golden-furred fox. Burning tears dripped down her cheeks and onto the cold body slowly going stiff in her shaking arms. Death was a necessary part of the natural order – Elinyra understood this – but not this way. Not by her own hand.
Penelope had been the fox’s name. She had been Elinyra’s closest companion since she’d found the old fox trapped and hungry in the Vale. Long and lonely had been the winter the exiled druid spent in the Astenvale monastery; a self-imposed sentence made bearable by a friend with an endlessly free spirit and unconditional affection. They’d only had a few short months together, but in that time they’d rarely been apart.
“I’m so sorry…” Elinyra whispered and buried her face in the soft fur in despair. How many nights she spent by one of the monastery’s fireplaces stroking that same fur while Penelope relaxed in her lap and warmed her aching old joints; how many laughs she’s been given by her friend’s curious antics… all of them, gone. She’d been the great fool who thought she could use her healing magic to cure a simple illness. How could she have not foreseen that her curse, which had perverted her other druidic powers, would also twist that which once gave life to take it away?
A snow-laden branch shifted, dusting the kneeling elf and her perished companion in a coating of white. Elinyra had brought Penelope into this peaceful, winter-blanketed forest clearing to give her a proper funeral, but all she could bring herself to do for a long time was scream her agony into the godless void.
Once she had worn her voice to a hoarse whisper, she finished what she had come to do. She bid farewell to yet another friend.
In a rage, she all but ripped off her walking cape, leaving her blighted skin exposed to the biting cold breeze. The hardened, black barkskin had taken its time climbing up her right arm. Her failed attempt to heal her friend had cost her part of her shoulder and upper back. It was growing more rapidly, she noted bitterly. Soon it would consume part of her neck, maybe even her face.
She held her right hand in front of her, which these days looked more like she’d imagine claws on a treant.
“So I have finally become one of the monsters,” she rasped through aching vocal chords. Well, at least one knight had been correct that it had only been a matter of time: which meant that there was only one thing left to do. She had thought that the Eldyr tree had been calling to her, the blight itself singing her fate. If she was no longer a druid, hardly even an elf, what was she still holding onto?
Elinyra donned her cape again and headed back to the monastery. It was opportunely quiet within; the knights seemed to be out on a mission or entertaining their own means, and the squires were too busy with chores and practice to do more than give her a casual greeting as she passed by. Burying herself deep within the cowl of the cape, Elinyra gave no replies. No farewells. She only packed up her things in silence.
The areas of the Vale nearest to the Eldyr Tree were hazardous territory to travel alone, not least of all in the winter. Elinyra herself had been attacked even farther out from the edge of the blight’s main influence last fall, but that did not stop her now. Perhaps in some twisted way, she even welcomed it.
She’d travelled for days along muddy main thoroughfares cleared of snow by the hard work of beasts of burden pulling plows, as well as down a few side roads turned into no more than long clearings by piling drifts. She was still elf enough to tread lightly on the deep snow without the aid of snowshoes, but not enough to convince herself of the folly of this endeavor. She feared that the seed of quiet madness that had taken root in her was now ready to sprout.
There had been plenty of time to reconsider. Plenty of time to mourn and let go... but she didn’t. Short though the winter days were, they dragged on as she walked herself into exhaustion chasing after the great corrupted tree. She hardly allowed herself time to rest, even as frostbite and pain crept into the parts of her limbs that were still hers: the frigid air of nightfall had no quarrel with her blight-consumed flesh.
That disturbed her less than the intimate sense that she was stealing the life energy of everything around her as she passed by – hibernating trees, animals and even the patient seeds beneath the soil. She’d started it when she’d tried to heal Penelope, and now she couldn’t stop it. She was familiar with the distinct feeling of life energy flowing from her when she’d used healing magic before: a soft void in her spirit – like the instant water is scooped up from a pool, and filled in again almost before it could be missed. Acting in reverse, she felt as if the pool would overflow its banks and drown the whole world.
At last, camped by a fire she’d been forced to light to stave off a deathly chill, Elinyra found she could go no farther. The wood she’d managed to find was wet and burned fretfully, but it was enough to keep her toes from freezing off.
“It will be spring soon,” she said to no one in particular as she stared, her bleary eyes unfocused, through the hissing flames. It was a statement often made by the old who knew their own winter road was waiting; some semblance of comfort in the fact that although individuals came and went, the pattern always remained. No matter how harsh the winter was, spring’s renewal would follow.
She’d start again tomorrow, when she could force her legs to work again. She shuddered to think of what might happen to her surroundings if she stayed for too long. She’d tried to pick a site with more rocks than life, but she knew that not far away, some precocious winter lilies had withered away in their prime of life.
Bundled in thick furs inside her hide tent, she fell into the tattered corners of her subconscious mind.
The nightmare returned. It had visited Elinyra for so many nights at this point that she’d lost count. The memory of an attack almost eleven years ago now. A figure shrouded in a shadow so dark that even the full moon’s light could not reveal its true nature; a strange dagger that would stab into her right hand. The birth of her curse.
But a few things had changed in this rendition: Elinyra had grown weary, and didn’t bat an eye as her bow again rotted away in her grasp. If the nightmare thought her unarmed, it was sorely mistaken.
Already blighted, her hand produced its thorny vine-whip before her attacker could act. The shrouded figure rolled sideways as she lashed out vertically at it, momentarily pausing its assault.
Elinyra was more lucid in this dream than she’d ever been – to the extent that even the background noise she’d only ever been able to make out as whispers became discernible voices. They were repeating the same words over and over: Submit.
Caught in the endless cycle of this nocturnal vision, the figure attacked. Once again, a wave of dense blackness washed over them both, obscuring their forested surroundings. Elinyra didn’t bring her hand up to defend herself this time. She brought her hand back instead, pulling the whip until it wrapped around something solid.
The polished wooden dagger slashed harmlessly towards the ground as she yanked her opponent past her. Even in the stark blackness, she could clearly see the whip wrapped around her attacker’s wrist. Though the details of her attacker’s face remained obfuscated either by darkness or the illusory nature of dreaming, she could tell he was an elf looking up at her from the ground in surprise.
His look of surprise quickly turned to a pleased smirk. Though he never opened his mouth to speak, she heard his voice echo through the channels of her mind -
“At Last.” The voice was as familiar to her as someone she’d spoken with every day – or heard from every night. The very same as the one who had spoken through a malevolent specter during a fateful ceremony she’d taken part in just before the eve of Samhuinn.
Tonight would be the night Elinyra got her answers. She tugged on the whip. It went limp in her hands as the elf vanished. Like fog, the shroud dissipated into the surrounding mirage of a forest under a night sky.
“Who are you?!” she called out into the quiet woods, willing the nightmare to show itself.
“You know just who I am, Elinyra,” the strange elf’s voice replied from the very air. “Don’t be so distant.”
Consciousness struck her like a slap in the face. She opened her eyes to see a mountain-sized expanse of tree trunk rising in great twisting branches towards an evening sky. Before the tree, the shadow of a man waited.
They were standing in a large, strange glade bordered on three sides by fortress-sized buttresses that supported the girth of the arboreal giant above. Rather than being round like most roots, these were tall and flat like fins rippling out from the main trunk; a trunk that itself formed enormous undulations near the root crown. Covered with the hundred-years growth of lichens, moss, fungi and strange plants that Elinyra couldn’t begin to identify, the buttresses gave every bit the illusion of verdant cliffs. The ground itself was barren of all but a few mushrooms and surface roots. And it was tropically humid; protected from the wind and weather, thin clouds of mist formed and dissipated constantly. Though open to the sky, winter seemed not to touch this sacred place. Thankfully, it seemed that neither did Elinyra’s curse.
She turned her gaze upwards breathlessly, into the expanse of the great Eldyr tree. It was more like a wooden bridge wandering in lazy ascent, rising vertically here and running horizontally there, all the way up to touch the welkin beyond the clouds above. Here and there it formed vast leafing branches, which themselves were at least as large as the oldest trees of the Valewood. Yet unlike the surrounding forest, it was not barren even in the depths of winter’s hold. There were at least enough leaves to count every soul in the world and every star in the sky, and that was only what was visible before the tree vanished into the clouds. If ever there were gods, Elinyra was sure she was standing before one - the Lord of the Forest.
Yet she had no recollection of how or when she’d arrived here.
Then there was the elven man standing before her. The stalker of her nightmare made manifest.
Though he had the somewhat sharp, youthful features of her kin, his face was also unusually wizened - as if he was aging like a human. Chestnut-colored hair interlaced with white fell down his shoulders. He might have been handsome despite all this if not for the stony expression etched onto his face and the absolute piercing coldness in his eyes. He wore no winter coat, had no apparent protection from the cold but for a green tattered cloak adorned with a small deer skull. Tattered was an apt description for the man in general.
“You have made it to the place you have blamed for your woes. Yet your woes have not diminished,” he said. There was an undeniable charismatic quality to the man’s voice, something that pulled at the edges of her mind and demanded her attention.
“It seems that the source of my woes stands before me – and for what?” she retorted angrily. “A grudge? Because the attack on my circle was thwarted all those years ago? I was hardly the only one who fought back that night.”
The night that the Falwood betrayed Elinyra and her circle. Maddened animals and sylvan creatures went on a rampage, first attacking a caravan of pioneers, then turning on the druids when they tried to protect them. She'd never understood the reason, nor how the forest simply went back to normal the following day - as if no one remembered who or what had attacked them. Elinyra's recurring nightmare never allowed her to forget.
“Nothing so simple as a grudge. A gift,” he said matter-of-factly.
She couldn't help but remember the blighted man who'd hunted her in the forest, his mind far gone to a condition similar to hers. He'd referred to his own nightmarish transformation as a 'gift'. She also vividly recalled the times that blighted whip of thorns had erupted from her hand. While it had potentially saved her in the moment, it had taken its price by corrupting her body bit by bit. Turning her into some sort of abomination.
“It is not a gift if it demands something in return. It is not a gift if it destroys those who receive it.”
“All things demand something in return: be it affection, respect, time or energy. Such is the Cycle, druidess,” he replied with the subtle hint of mockery. "That you have failed to fully accept the seed's presence - this is your own doing.” He gestured at her blighted arm. “It has always come to your aid when you needed it. It has a purpose, even if you try to resist it. The more you resist it, the more of you it will take."
Elinyra had sensed that there was something in her hand back when her wound had first re-opened. She'd even imagined, as her condition progressed, that she could feel it spreading through her like roots; but to compare her blight to a progenitor of life was nothing less than profane.
“A purpose... tell me, then, what is it you demand of me and why,” she continued after a pause, her voice quavering with barely-contained outrage, despair, and a deep weariness.
"I demand no more of you than what you should expect from yourself. You are a protector of the wilds, and you shall fulfill that oath one way or another. You stood in the way of what had to be done once. Consider this a second chance."
"So you’re the one behind the attack on those settlers? Why?"
For a moment, his stoic expression turned into an angry sneer. "Your kin had already judged them guilty, and yet turned against the lands they'd vowed to protect! Those settlers were poachers and defilers - nothing more than parasites - and yet you chose to protect them when I gave the forest the means take their number in turn. The druids have forgotten their place. Who it was that first taught them."
No matter the order, no matter the race, druids almost universally revered the power of story. Thus, dating back into antiquity even by the long-lived elves, there were as many stories about the origins of druidry as there were druids. Elinyra thought about the single element that tied them all together and posited:
"You're a fae?"
He didn't answer, and his expression didn't betray any hint to it. It paradoxically both made sense to her, considering what she now recognized as his doing, and it didn't. It wasn't just that he looked aged, but something about his power seemed distinctly opposite to that of the fae.
"That cannot be!" she protested. "The stories say the fae elders taught us about balance and living in harmony with the natural world. Capricious though they may be, they would not create something so devastating to nature as the blight. It would be contrary to their own existence."
He was silent for awhile, his gaze looking through her into the blighted woods beyond where sickly, black-bark trees jabbed naked twisting branches towards a darkening sky. After a few minutes, the last of the sun's rays relented to the moonless darkness of early nightfall. It would have been pitch black if not for the soft green glow of bioluminescent fungi and other things that were starting to move around on the organic walls. In the silence, Elinyra thought she could sometimes hear the burbling of water as it moved up through the tree's gargantuan trunk.
At length the man finally replied,
"This forest has changed - made itself hostile to the mortals who once waged war against it. But it persists. Blight is the iron, and I am the blacksmith. I had no hand in creating the iron, but I have shaped it to my will."
"You're weaponizing blight?"
"You act surprised, though you have made a weapon out of a length of tree branch. A tool that is useless in some hands but deadly in yours."
"The difference is that I do not kill innocents with mine."
"It matters not who you deem guilty or innocent. Have you not already killed a creature dearer to your heart than your own kin? Rather, finished what time and tide had already begun?"
Elinyra's heart sank into the abyss when she thought of Penelope again. It wasn't just the death of her vulpine friend that had worn her down to nothing; it was this entire ordeal. It was leaving behind everyone and everything that she'd ever loved.
And the man who had brought her here had the audacity to mock her for it.
"Enough lies! I will not kill for you!" she growled and turned her back on him, trying to hold onto the illusion that she wasn't afraid of him when, in fact, she was terrified.
"I do not lie. You are merely unwilling to accept the truth. You delude yourself in the belief that you can hold the blight off forever, if only you can find the right healer. The right scholar. Like all mortals, you somehow think you can cheat death.
"You can't escape death, Elinyra. It is your fate. It was from the day you were born. As it was with your companion - but you couldn't accept that either."
"Arreth!" Enough! she cried, though she would not turn back around. There was some power there, some compulsion that felt stronger when she could see him. He must have been fae, but of a kind she'd never heard of. "I did not come all this way to escape death. I came to understand this thing you've afflicted me with." A strange grin crossed her face, and she forced herself to turn and stare him in his supernaturally azure eyes.
"I've come all this way to stop you."
He returned her glare with a confident smirk. "You can no more stop me than you could a hurricane. A force of nature does not bow before a defiant leaf in the wind. I will restore this forest - all of the forests, in time, and they will no longer tolerate the depredations of mortals."
Elinyra huffed in disbelief. "Pride comes before a fall. And you will fall; if not to the protectors of this forest you seek to corrupt, then others."
Strangely, his grin only spread further. "You believe you still have allies in those you left behind? Look at the path you have carved to get here. Death and decay follow in your wake. You said it yourself - you have become the monster." His eyes looked up past her, to the dark horizon. Elinyra didn't have to look to know exactly the trail of destruction she'd wrought.
"It is your doing. All of this is!" She shook her head defiantly. "No. I am an ovate. I am a healer."
"You are a reaper," the fae said coldly. "And the decay around you will get worse the longer you fight against the power growing within."
Elinyra thought she might just strike at him then and there, but she had the distinct feeling that it would do no good.
"How am I supposed to be protecting the forest if I'm killing everything around me?!" she shouted, shaking so hard she felt the whole of the earth might be trembling with her.
"Spring follows the winter. Death feeds new life. Think on that, and you will have your answer. Farewell, Elinyra. We will meet again soon," he said and turned away towards the tree. Without thinking, Elinyra lunged towards him, but he seemed to meld right into it.
Her bark-covered hand made a hollow sound as she beat her fist against the trunk.
"Vyr!!" She growled, then grew quiet as a realization struck her. He hadn't told her his name. How did she know it?
She spent the night in that sheltered place beneath the Elydr tree. It was quiet aside from the mutterings of small animals, the rustling of their movements beneath dried leaves that had fallen from the branches high above. After days of exposure to winter's bitter cold, the druid felt herself soothed by the warmth and life around her.
As morning dawned bright, Elinyra found her pack and gear nearby. Whether she had somehow had the forethought to bring them during that expanse of time she couldn't remember - or if that madman had deigned to let her have them, she couldn't guess. She was relieved all the same: she would need that gear for her return to Astenvale.
She had to warn the Knights of Anathaeum about Vyr's plans. Finally, she'd found the reason behind her condition, and the recent emergence of the blight-spawned monsters in the Valen Wilds. Regardless of the personal cost, she had to get that information into the right hands. Even if Vyr's argument that they would see her as enemy instead of ally was a strangely persuasive one; enough that she found herself eyeing the line of trees with reluctance.
Steeling herself against the intuition that begged her to stay, Elinyra hoisted her pack, ate some of her rations, and started back up the path of decayed foliage she'd created.
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