by David C. Daoust
The Wildtree was at the very center of the wood elves lands. It was actually a grouping of trees slowly woven, over centuries, to form a spectacular platform of braided wood. This was a central fixture in all the wood elves lives. This is where the Elders held council. This is where the elves came to marry, to be born. This is where they said goodbye to those they lost.
For Leonora Skywhisper it was also the last place she had seen her two brothers fly off in the borrowed forms of silvery white owls.
It was not one of her favorite days.
Had it not been for the small gnome’s insistence, that it was all for the best… well, to say the very least, she would still be arguing with the Elders. She argued, still, in her own mind, against their decision, against Alarad as well, despite his reassurances that it was his destined path. Leonora was proud that Malvor had stepped forward to assist their small adopted brother. She would have gone as well, if not for her duties to the wood.
Leonora was the Lore-maiden of the Wood elves. She was a history keeper, speaker, and an Ambassador of sorts. Leonora was one of few people to ever see within the great walls of the High Elves, to train with their sword masters, the only wood elf to ever don their armor. She was also one of the few that ever descended deep enough within the Sealed Temple to ever meet with those mountain dwarves that still held to the old treaties, one of few willing to speak to such creatures. Ultimately, she was a priestess to her people.
Leonora never doubted that she would see her brothers again someday, though as the years passed, her confidence began to waver. Like a chipping corruption to her good will, a corruption that slowly started to be mirrored to the homeland of her people. No one knew at first what it was. The darkness began to swell throughout. The foliage began to brown, patches of decay formed in the glades, and the animals became sick.
It was for Leonora to find the cause, the darkness was a mystery.
The monsters erupted from the rotted woods; the animals became ravenous creatures, twisted with hate, and a hunger that could not be sated. The wild elves’ lives changed, their wood became a battlefield, in a war against an evil no one could put a name to. It was these facts that freed her from her own worries of her brothers, to become all consumed with her peoples well being.
Leonora traveled from one end of the woods to the other in search of the cause. She visited with the High Elves, studied in their libraries; she learned much. She’d learned ancient prayers, thought long lost. Yet still nothing soothed the corruption from their wood. She even descended deep into the mountains to visit with the wizened old dwarves, whose sages were well known to her; still to no avail.
At last, she had no choice; she summoned forth the Druids to find a cure. Druids were ancient powerful beings that had fused with nature. They tended the entire natural world, custodians that used their intelligence to make the world flourish. Their hatred for those that did not worship the strict rules of nature was renowned.
Often, they were cruel and cold blooded. They considered those ‘intelligent’ beings that destroyed nature, better off rotting in the ground, to help the forest replenish itself, than allowing them to continue their destructive lives… and they were powerful enough to make it happen.
Leonora risked much, even as a wood elf, whose ways were much more in line with nature than the rest, the Druid’s tolerance for ‘intelligence’ was short. The Druids though, usually feral in thought and action, were pleased with her warning. It did not take them long to diagnose the problem.
The corruption had spread from the Wildtree, from the dust of the demon that had been destroyed there. The winds had blown the demon dust throughout the wood. The demonic energies seeping into the soil, into the water, into the food supply, thus driving the animals mad. Even the wood elves were at risk of suffering from this madness.
Demons were wild spirits that abandoned the natural world. They no longer held any place in nature, thus the druids wished to see this vile remnant expelled from the wood.
The Druids granted Leonora the ability to collect the dark energies, to fuse them into a small amethyst she wore around her neck. They granted her the ability to speak with the nymphs, to help the investigation, to seek out all the deepest corners of the vile corruption. Her quest to cleanse the wood had begun. It was a task that lasted far longer than one may imagine. Battle after battle, the corrupted and maddened were purified, though as the evil became more concentrated, as the demon was ‘reconstructed’ within the amethyst, its darkness began to plague even the mind of the now, High Priestess of the Wood Elves, Lady Leonora Skywhisper.
At long last she held the corruption completely within her power. The amethyst had turned black as night, and often its demonic voice would haunt her dreams. The madness threatened to take her, to use her to spread its evil back through the wood.
Leonora once again summoned the Druids.
The Druids were not pleased to hear from her. They had gone as far as they were willing; they helped purge the demonic corruption from nature. They were not there to free good from evil, nor evil from good. To the druids all things had a place, a time; autumn came to feed the spring, Death fed the living, the living death. Druids worshiped the living, and their death, as a great cycle to feed new birth.
Skywhisper’s request to destroy this evil, an evil that preyed only upon the intelligent, was not something they had a care to take a part in.
The Lady Skywhisper’s power had grown though. She did not allow them to simply cast her aside, to dismiss her as a lower being, better used as fertilizer. She challenged them; their feral tooth and claw, versus her fine High Elven blade. She fought them, a battle that lasted days, and in the end she defeated them. With this victory they would respect her wishes, this one time.
The Druids need for balance bound them though. They could not allow this darkness to be removed from the world without an equal force of light. Leonora’s power had grown to such heights, in her battles against the corruption, that she was the only power equal to its darkness; a dark power that far superseded the demon that it originated from. In truth, the druids saw Leonora’s power as a corruption all its own, a power that never would have come to being, without the darkness it countered. To suddenly revoke one half from the world… would leave a terrible imbalance.
And so it was Leonora sacrificed her own soul to free the world from the corruption; a corruption that threatened to drive all her people mad, to destroy her home, and leave the lands barren in its wake.
This final spell, granted by the druids, was irksome and full of loopholes, it would destroy neither light-soul nor dark-spirit, only bind them outside of the mortal planes. To free one is to free both.
A nymph by the name of Elyiah, who loved the high priestess dearly, promised to care for the vacant body of the wood elf, and keep the vacant Amythest safe from harm, thereby protecting the fragile spell. A spell no Druid, ever had a care to see last…
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