The Revenge of Rondhol
The Shattered Temple
Briars under Stormy Skies
She and her sisters weave through the undergrowth, like the stealthiest of pack hunters, the entire warband disturbing not a leaf nor twig in their passing. Yet even the keenest-eyed amongst them have failed to spot anything remotely portal-like, right up until the moment that the branchwych feels a sudden pulse of life magic emanate from her scythe, and in the next instant, two towering trees bend towards one another and weave themselves together, their leaves and branches intertwining to form a living wreathe around a circular opening, which rapidly fills with swirling mists.
Where seconds before there was mere forest, now stands one of the majestic Queen’s Gates. In her hands, the greenwood scythe continues to thrum with power. She cannot fathom a guess as to how or why, but it seems that her weapon has some inherent connection to these ancient passages.
Putting aside for now the concerning issue of just how many secrets the relic is keeping from her — as she always finds some excuse to — the branchwych slinks closer to the portal. A mere foot from entering its fog-shrouded depths, she pauses, attempting to peer through to the other side, but when she can garner no hint of understanding of what might await her beyond those opaque mists, she gathers her courage and strides through, almost expecting to find herself thrust into the midst of a furious battle.
Instead, she steps out onto a wide, open, grassy plain. Overhead, the weather is overcast, and occasional rumbles of thunder are accompanied by flickers of blue lightning. Grey clouds are not alone in dominating the skies, though. She stares in wonderment up at hovering metaliths adorned with the broken ruins of once-majestic structures.
As her sisters spill out of the gateway behind her, they too pause to take in the spectacle of Order laid to ruin. After a suitably long pause to admire the Destruction, she gestures wordlessly for the forest folk to split up and spread out, to search this area for dangers, as well as potential boons. Those Queen’s Gates were a genuinely advantageous discovery, and it would be remiss of her not to be on the lookout for other such benefits as they progress further into the Dell.
With their quickest runners scampering on ahead, she and the bulk of her sisters advance at a more cautious pace, their paths diverging, yet almost all of them remaining within earshot of at least one other dryad. Shadows dominate beneath the looming sky-islands, making those spots ideal for lying in wait of prey. All of them keep their eyes peeled for signs of a potential ambush.
The first scouts to report back point her towards tracks and other signs which indicate that at least one warband has passed through these parts recently, and initially she thinks to follow those, to trail her foes, but alas, Rondhol sees fit to stymie her intentions once again, as it opens its skies to unleash a great deluge. In mere minutes, the ground is muddied, obliterating all but the most blatant signs of the other party’s presence.
What clues remain suggest the forces of Chaos visited here not long ago but in the downpour, visibility is greatly reduced, and their tracks — along with any lingering scents — are washed away, dashing any hopes of pursuit.
Not all is lost, though, for other scouting sisters return. Without the ability to speak, it is hard for them to provide detailed reports, but they manage to indicate that there is something that they wish for her to see. So the Brood slog over sodden fields, now moving with little of their customary, predatory grace. That is hardly cause for concern, though; in this weather, a gargant stomp could cross the plains without attracting attention. The torrential rains make stealthy movements unnecessary.
When at last she sees what her intrepid sisters have found, she gives a harsh laugh, which is swallowed up by the storm. Whilst she perceives the corrupting blight of the Ruinous Powers as being almost as bad as the scourge called civilisation, in this instance, she cannot help but admire the handiwork of the Dark Gods’ servants.
She cannot fathom how they achieved it, but somehow, the other warband have managed to trap a fragment of the fallen seraphon vessel in what must be a mid-air realmgate. Whatever the nature of the strange portal, it has somehow torn the ship to pieces, leaving nothing more than inert detritus hovering in the sky. The sight of such a marvel of engineering torn apart and preserved in that state — like a great monument to Destruction — is breathtaking to behold, even more so than the many metaliths and the ruins that litter them.
How she would love to see every free city on the continent meet a similar fate.
With a mental effort, she draws her gaze from the spectacle. There are more important things to be done than daydreaming about future conquests. With some gestures and barked commands that are more snarl than word, she instructs her sisters to comb through the grass beneath the airborne scrapyard. Just because everything up there looks broken, doesn’t mean that nothing functional survived.
If anything valuable fell down here, it is imperative that it be destroyed before the accursed seraphon can get their claws on it. Ideally, she would have liked to scour the ruins above as well — despite the dangers of approaching an unstable realmgate — but with no means of flying up, there is nothing she can do about that.
Already widely dispersed, as her command is passed from sister to sister, the forest folk begin making their way across the open field, individually, in pairs, or small groups. The rains show no signs of letting up, so she can’t see most of them at all, and most of those she can make out appear as hardly more than vague outlines. Those dryads scrabble around in the mud, their wracking talons raking through long grasses in search of any fallen scraps of detritus.
For her part, the branchwych remains upright rather than crawling on all fours, making wide, sweeping motions with her scythe to shear through any blades of grass in her path, as she strides purposefully forwards.
They keep at this for a short while, but when no fallen fragments of wreckage immediately make themselves known, her patience starts to wear thin, and she is considering calling off the fruitless endeavour when she spots something up ahead which stands out. At first, it is just a silhouette, barely visible at all in the downpour, yet as she advances as quickly as she is able across the now-marshy ground — all thoughts of grass-cutting cast aside — she gets a clearer view of it, and realises what she is looking at.
She calls out to her sisters immediately, not with the words that the scythe has taught her, but in a much more primitive manner, with the bestial howl of a pack animal. Almost immediately, her howl is picked up by others in the distance — what scarce few branch nymphs the Brashbriar Brood have left — and she knows that in moments, her sisters will converge upon her location. She gives them little more thought, though, her attention captured by what is now just a few metres before her.
A boulder-sized chunk of sandstone masonry lies in the field, covered with hieroglyphs which are unmistakably seraphon in origin. Not even her scythe’s enigmatic magics are sufficient to decipher their meanings, but all the carvings of dinosaurs are a dead giveaway. Clearly, this must be some part of the Xarlanth, broken off and cast aside when the portal did whatever it did to the rest of the large section which had once rested here.
It is not the rock that has her rapt, though, but rather, the figure upon it. Sitting in a lotus pose, eyes closed, is a dryad with a very familiar face. The branchwych comes to a halt, unsure what to do or say. Something shifts in the branches that sprout from the sitting sylvaneth’s back, and from over her right shoulder rises the head of a myriapod-like spite. The bittergrub snaps its vertical mandibles together, and the dryad opens her eyes, a serene smile softening her sharp, wooden countenance, as she looks down upon the Brood’s current matriarch.
The branchwych simply stares, lost for words at the sight of a sister she believed dead and gone. Her predecessor, the prior wielder of her greenwood scythe. The older sylvaneth unfolds her limbs and slips gracefully down from her perch, then saunters up to the new branchwych, until she so close that the two are almost touching.
Despite not holding the scythe any longer, her predecessor seems to have no difficulty recalling language, and speaks smoothly, her voice almost melodious, “I am so proud of you, little sister.”
She isn’t sure what she expected from her senior, but it wasn’t this. Flabbergasted, the branchwych can only blink mutely at the other dryad. She is not alone in her muteness, either. The other forest folk are gathering around them by this point, yet none of them seem to have any idea what to do, merely looking dumbly back and forth between their current and former branchwyches.
“I have put you through so much, by disappearing as I did,” her predecessor’s smile falters slightly as she continues to speak, her expression taking on a hint of sorrow, “by failing to hold onto the scythe, by allowing it to be retrieved, for another to inherit the blessing and curse that it bestows. For that, I can only offer my sincerest apologies.”
She knows that it must only be her imagination, but the sound of rainfall seems to fade into the background as her predecessor speaks, and as she meets her gaze, for the tiniest fraction of an instant, the older dryad’s eyes appear black and sparkling, like a starry, night sky. But no, it is just a trick of the light. Her sister’s eyes are a bright, verdant green.
“I recall what it was like to take up the scythe for the first time. I know how painful it is, how confusing, to bear the burden of knowledge, to fret over what you are becoming, what it is doing to you. You have suffered, little sister, yet you have not faltered. Even when Rondhol claimed the lives of so many of our kin, you pressed on with the hunt, even knowing that it would likely be the end of the Brood, you kept true to our way of life. You have done so well, better than I ever could have hoped for.”
Even with the scythe’s well of information to draw upon, it still takes her time to dredge up the meaning of each word that the former matriarch uses, and as her predecessor speaks much more rapidly than the treelord ancient that she most recently conversed with, the new branchwych has a tough time keeping up with the conversation. She is still piecing together the content of those last couple sentences when the other dryad finishes speaking. As a result, she is taken entirely by surprise by what happens next.
Her predecessor reaches out and embraces her. She freezes. Still clutching the greenwood scythe in both hands, she doesn’t return the hug, but merely stands there stiffly, feeling incredibly awkward and slightly panicked. She has never been in a situation like this before, and hasn’t the faintest notion of how she ought to react. In that moment, it’s as if she’s no longer a mighty leader of her people, but a mere sapling, still new to the world, lost and confused.
Yet despite the cold and the raindrops that pelt against her bark, she feels oddly warm inside. The scythe tries to give her the words to describe what she is feeling, but she ignores it. Her big sister is clearly a lot more eloquent than she let on during her own tenure as branchwych, but the current matriarch has not yet been so altered by the weapon she wields. She still does not like words. In her mind, those flat, bland definitions cheapen whatever they depict, so she doesn’t want to know.
The older dryad begins stroking the leaves and branches that grow from her head — the sylvaneth equivalent of hair — and she relaxes a little. She still can’t bring herself to drop the weapon and return the embrace, but she’s no longer standing so rigidly at least, and although she’s sure that she must look a complete fool to the other forest folk around them, she can’t really recall why that should matter to her.
“Tell me, dear sister, if you could, would you like to return to the way things were? To return to a time before you gained the power of knowledge, to return to the bliss of ignorance?” the once-branchwych enquires in a whisper, directly into her ear. Even without the noise of the storm, none of the other dryads likely would have picked up on those softly spoken words.
“Yes.” she replies simply, and is somewhat taken aback by the depth of longing that she hears in her own voice.
“Very well. You have already had to endure more than your fair share of hardships. No one can fault you for feeling that way, least of all me. Let me help you, dear sister, let me take up your burden, and free you from its demands.”
With those words, her big sister drops her hand from the branchwych’s head. Her fingertips brush the shaft of the scythe, and-
Thief! Brigand! Bandit! Monster! Evil! Hunt! Hurt! Harm! Hate! Fury! Wrath! Slay! Murder! Kill! These harsh words and many, many more all bombard the branchwych’s brain in a single instant, overriding all other thoughts and turning the pleasant warmth in her chest into an all-consuming conflagration. These are not the dull and insipid definitions she has grown accustomed to from her weapon, but rather seem infused with such rage that her thin frame cannot possibly contain it.
Letting loose a maddened roar, she slams one shoulder into the torso of the wooden figure before her, knocking it back a step, causing the would-be thief to lose its grip on her weapon. With some space opened up between them, she swings, and the crescent blade slams into the foe’s side with a thunk like a woodsman’s axe hitting home. She wrenches her weapon free to strike again, the movement accompanied by a spray of black ichor.
Black?
She blinks. Golden sap drips from the blade of her greenwood scythe. Her predecessor is staggering backwards, eyes wide with shock and fear, one hand going to the wound at her waist, more golden sap trickling between her talons. The rest of her sisters scurry off as well, giving shrill cries of confusion and alarm. Unsure if one of them will be the next to be struck down.
With a sense of dawning horror, she realises what she has just done. More than anything, she wants to cast aside the scythe. In that moment, she feels a greater revulsion for it than she has ever felt for the corruptions of chaos, or any structure of civilisation. Yet her own body will not obey her. When she tries to drop the evil thing, her talons only curl tighter around it.
She falls to her knees and lets out a wail of dismay. Her revulsion does not end with the ancient weapon. She despises herself just as much for her inability to resist its dire influence. She knew it was warping her mind, changing who she was, but never in her worst fears had she thought it would make a kinslayer of her.
She stares after her predecessor, who continues to back away. She longs to reach out towards her sister, yet her hands are affixed to her weapon, which seems now to weigh as much as a mature oak, anchoring her in place. She longs to explain herself and beg forgiveness, yet the scythe has gone silent, refusing to give her the words she demands of it. All she can do is shake her head in denial of this awful reality, and mumble over and over one of the few terms which she can recall without magical aid, “No, no, no, no, no, no…”
Tears of sap blur her vision, and soon even the faintest hint of her big sister’s silhouette is swallowed up by the downpour. She continues staring off in that direction long after her predecessor’s departure, wishing to see her return, hale and whole, as if that moment of berserk madness had been just a cruel nightmare.
Eventually, her bout of self-loathing is interrupted when some of the long grass by her side shifts, and something nuzzles against her leg. Slowly, she turns her gaze upon it, hardly caring that it may be some predator seeking to devour her.
In an instant, her eyes widen, as she finds herself looking at the bittergrub that had so recently perched upon her predecessor’s back. Despite having fled from her, in fear for her life, even now her predecessor continues to show her more affection than she could possibly deserve. She has left her faithful companion behind, knowing that with her gone, the spite would seek out the only other branchwych in the vicinity.
She finally manages to pry one hand away from the haft of her weapon, and uses the now-freed arm to sweep the bittergrub up to her chest, embracing it as she wishes she’d been able to embrace her big sister. She buries her face in its carapace and starts to sob.
Around her, she is dimly aware of the other dryads milling about aimlessly, having no direction with their brachwych reduced to such a state. She ignores them, though, her mind fixated on the one sister she has driven away, rather than all those that still remain to her.
Somewhere nearby, minutes earlier…
A dryad hobbles along, one hand pressed hard against the gaping wound in her side, from which golden sap trickles sluggishly. She stumbles, about to fall, then-
Two pairs of insectoid wings beat the air in such a frenzy that they create a low, buzzing tone. Bark and branches evaporate like smoke, as the illusion falls away. Despite the wet weather hampering its ability to fly, the lift generated by those wings is sufficient to keep the figure upright long enough for it to regain its footing. What stands in that muddy field of grass is still distinctly feminine, yet now clearly no dryad.
Were there any present to bear witness to this spectacle, an onlooker watching from afar may be forgiven for thinking the figure to be one of Malerion’s aelves, from its slender build and pointed ears, as well as the way the shadows curl and swirl about it, almost entirely obscuring its lower body. Get close enough for a clear look at the figure’s face, though, and that assumption would be revealed to be as much a falsehood as the sylvaneth guise which has just been discarded.
A trio of midnight-black eyes glare out at the world around it, as its expression twists into a pained grimace. Reaching over its shoulder, with one clawed, shadow-shrouded hand, it grasps the arthropodal being that clings to its back with a plethora of tiny limbs, and yanks the creature loose, tossing it aside with a grunt of effort. The bittergrub lands unmoving in the sodden grass, its eyes staring sightlessly ahead. Then the figure turns away and lurches off again.
Almost immediately afterwards, as if freed from an enchantment, the spite rights itself and skitters away through the grasses, giving a shrill cry of alarm as it departs. The figure does not so much as glance back, seeming to have lost all interest in its former passenger.
With such an injury as has been dealt to it, perhaps it has greater concerns. Certainly, so grievous a wound would be fatal to any ordinary mortal. Whatever magical properties the figure’s arcane disguise held, it seems they were of little use against the weapon which was turned upon it, leaving bare skin and flesh to take the full brunt of the strike.
Teeth gritted, it continues on its way, heading unerringly for a darker smudge on the horizon — barely visible through the lashing rain — which may be a forest’s edge. Perhaps the shady figure expects to find some sort of sanctuary there, a place to rest and recuperate, whilst it plots its next scheme.
