The Revenge of Rondhol
Into the Dell
Briars Sally Forth
The seraphon have attacked Ghur itself, and everything has changed. This was not merely the usual deforestation and land clearing of order, nor the senseless burning and razing of chaos. This was something far more dramatic, an attack launched with the intent of collapsing a realmgate. An unforgivable offence against the very realm around them, a crime of such magnitude that all other concerns immediately became inconsequential by comparison.
Yet it was only because of that dire sin that she had been able to witness the awe-inspiring spectacle of Rondhol rising to the occasion, to smite the audacious reptiles. Not only that, but she and her fellow forest folk had even been swept up and empowered by their homeland’s wrath.
When those great stampedes had so recently overrun their forces on the Att, slaying her predecessor amongst many others, she had thought of that as a spectacle she would never forget, yet it paled into insignificance next to this most recent experience. She had felt the strength of a continent flowing up her roots, into her trunk, down her branches, to the tip of every twig and leaf. She had willfully surrendered to it, reveling in the sensation of becoming a living extension of Rondhol’s will, even as its raw fury scarred her mind and soul.
She had reached out, her sisters had reached out, and the normally sedentary, non-sylvaneth trees and plants had reached out with them, and as one, they had torn into the creatures of flesh around them. The Waaagh!-song had become a distant, ephemeral thing, its insistence that she focus her wrath upon the orruks’ foes seeming an inconsequential plea, rather than its usual strident demand.
Greenskins, humans, and woodland beasts alike were trussed up or torn limb from limb, and hauled back to the Gaping Portal, their flesh and bones used to form a crude sort of scaffolding, bracing the titanic structure in an effort to keep it from sinking into the earth. That was not to say that the battle took no toll on the Brood, though. Just as many of them perished, if not more. The difference was that the dryads gave their lives willingly, without hesitation. Infused with Rondhol’s will as they were, dozens of them converged upon the realmgate, each sister adding her brittle body to the grisly tableau without a thought for her own wellbeing. Even when the land beneath their roots began to seep a thick, amber sap, which quickly set, becoming hard as stone, not one of the sylvaneth attempted to flee from her entombment.
Their sacrifice was a thing of beauty, she thinks. However, in the aftermath of that magnificent spectacle, her new role as branchwych and matriarch — and the heightened mental capacity that came along with it — forced her to reflect upon some rather uncomfortable truths. Between first the stampedes, and now this mass martyrdom, she cannot deny that the once-numerous Brashbriar Brood has been well and truly crushed. With but a smattering of surviving sisters now, their only means of surviving would be to retreat from this conflict. Yet after witnessing such a miracle, she does not even consider such a cowardly act.
Instead, she gathers together those that remain into a single, small warband.
Before departing on their final journey, they plant all the soulpods they can around the realmgate. In time, these will become new dryads, but they will not be dryads of the Brood. In all their years separated from the spirit-song and under the influence of Ghur, the minds of the common sisters have become little more complex than those of wild beasts. It is only the Brood’s single greenwood scythe that unifies it, and from where she is going now, she will not likely return. She will very probably be the last Briarbrood Branchwych.
When the next generation of dryads are born — assuming their soul pods remain undisturbed long enough for the seeds to sprout — they will be naught but mindless, savage predators. Oddly, rather than disturbing her, this notion elicits in her heartwood a strange sense of satisfaction. She decides that perhaps that is how things should be, in Ghur.
Maybe she or some previous branchwych should already have disposed of the scythe, that relic of a bygone age, which held them back from achieving true unity with the bestial realm they freely gave themselves to. Yet as her predecessors had surely all felt before her, she found that she was unwilling to part with it. It may be that only through a war as extreme as this one could her kin ever have found an opportunity to truly liberate themselves from the blessing and the curse of sapience.
They head now into the depths of the Furyoth Dell, in search of the seraphon’s fallen temple-ship. In seeking to destroy a realmgate, the starborne have earned themselves the enmity of Rondhol, turning the very land upon which they tread into their enemy. But that is not enough for the branchwych. She is determined to make living weapons of herself and her remaining sisters, to enact the feral justice of the continent they call home.
Regardless of the consequences to her Brood, even should every last one of them be slain, she is determined to teach these lizards what it means to face the Wrathful Land.
