The Wildlands was an enormous dimension, filled with a startling diversity of life and civilizations. The land controlled by the mysterious King of Spring and Summer was only one monarch in a land with many such figures. None of them had the power he had, but as far as their collective influence amongst their own people they all far surpassed him. That said, his plethora of powers empowered his servants in truly terrifying ways.
The skilled and undying general Aringoth, the supreme military commander of the forces of Althos, was at work conquering more and more of the Wildlands in the name of his deific master. In the minutes after the events deep beneath the arboreal domain of the King of Spring and Summer, the resurrected elf was gripping a spear and pointing it at one of his enemies, in the depths of an ancient jungle far from the court of the King of Spring and Summer.
Aringoth was dressed in light green elven armor that prevented him from being left momentarily hobbled by enemy attacks. The spear he held was one of his new master's creations, a spear made of arcanum, one of the many magical metals that Althos, a god of blacksmithing could create with but a thought.
Aringoth's feet, clad in the elven armor he had once used as an ancient warrior, were on the thick, wooden chest of a wounded trent. The creature gasped in pain, green blood oozing out of its gaping mouth. Aringoth gazed at the thing, his cold eyes devoid of mercy. His lips were twisted upwards in a cruel sneer.
"Surrender, Alcanos. Your surrender will break the morale of your troops. If you surrender I'll be able to take command with minimal casualties. Fewer deaths on your hands." Aringoth uttered, haughtily. He was a vision of elven beauty and grace, an unstoppable manifestation of war and death.
The enemy that Aringoth stood on top of was a mighty trent, an ancient and powerful being made of wood. The creature had been humbled by the primeval elf, and stared at him with an unquenchable fury in its ancient eyes.
Aringoth waited a moment, hoping that the trent would listen to him and make his life easier. When the trent made no move to surrender, Aringoth's eyes hardened. However the instant before the elf could push his spear into his enemy, one of the trent's remaining soldiers, a young elf archer in the distance leveled her bow at the commander of the forces who had invaded her home.
"Go back... Where you came from!" The archer roared, even as she let go of the arrow she had been holding onto and aiming. Aringoth was less than a second away from impaling Alcanos with his spear when he heard the elf. He was a cruel general, his innate arrogance having been exacerbated by the innate darkness of the god he served, so he turned to goad the elf just in time to see the distant archer's arrow begin to streak through the air towards him.
The archer and Aringoth made eye contact as the general reacted to the arrow with a menacing grin. The arrow sailed through the air and it almost whistled as it flew towards the general. The arrow was a simple thing, made of the wood of the trees native to the jungle and a sharpened stone from a nearby canyon, but the archer who had fired it was a level 15 ranger.
She was an impressive member of her species and her class. The arrow was sailing true, and under other circumstances, it might well have pierced the trachea of the haughty elf it was fired at. Unfortunately Aringoth was simply more skilled than the archer.
Aringoth was many things. He was cruel, he was fast, he was cold. He was also skilled. When the archer's attack was within range of the spear the general wielded, the general casually swung his spear and dispatched the arrow, cutting it half even as it whizzed through the air. The two halves of the projectile fell harmlessly to the floor mere centimeters after where he cut the original item in twain. However, the assassination attempt wasn't just an assassination attempt.
While Aringoth sneered at the elven heroine who had tried to stop him, the trent he was on top of quietly uttered a single arcane word. The instant that the word left the mystical being's cold lips, Aringoth felt the thing his foot was top on vanish, and almost fell. The trent disappeared from underneath the elf and was magically whisked away to the stronghold of a distant ally.
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Aringoth quickly regained his composure even as his foot sailed towards the ground. The elf was a graceful, impossibly skilled fighter, and so even as his quarry escaped he was able to recover. As he regained his balance in mid-air he glared at the empty space where his foe had been mere moments ago.
"That damn trent..." He uttered, as he lifted his gaze from that spot to where the elven ranger was still glaring at him. The two of them locked eyes, and he rose his spear to point it at his new enemy.
"You're next." He uttered, now beginning to feel the white-hot fury he felt whenever he was kept from achieving his goals.
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I was alerted to the oddities of Aringoth's latest attempted conquest by a series of domain-sense notifications. Reading through them made me chuckle, since among them I was also alerted to the sense of fury that Aringoth felt towards the young elven ranger who stopped him from killing Alcanos.
At the moment I was just outside of my domain in the Wildlands. I found myself alone, and on my way to one of the conquered "kingdoms" that Aringoth had taken over. I had been quietly reading through the plethora of notifications that Aringoth was responsible for as I traveled to my next destination.
"I need to become an unseelie archfey before I go to the Heart of Darkness." I reminded myself as I wandered alone on a vast plain. The area just beyond the forest which would eventually lead to other portions of the Wildlands was a plain grassland that was larger than some entire worlds in the mortal realm.
I was walking, mostly so that I could formulate a plan, and mentally prepare for what was to come. I was quite possibly hours from heading to the Heart of Darkness and from there preparing to head to another universe. I needed to as fully diversify my powers before then so that when I was gone I'd be able to do as many things as I possibly could in case whatever condition I needed to fulfill to return here was something I wasn't used to doing.
As I made my way across the vast plain that separated me from the dark fey I intended to become the recognized monarch of, my mind ran ahead of my body and began to remotely view the strange creatures I was going to lord over.
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Fey were divided into a number of categories, but the biggest two were the seelie and unseelie fey. Those two types of fey creatures were differentiated by how they treated each other and other creatures.
The seelie fey were known for being whimsical and mischievous but ultimately benign to other lifeforms. They were fully capable of pulling significant but ultimately kind-hearted pranks. They lorded over spring and summer, and concepts like days.
On the other hand the unseelie fey were known for being malicious at worst and apathetic at best to other lifeforms. They were cold creatures who lorded over the seasons of fall and winter, as well as processes like rot and concepts like darkness.
Both camps of fey were necessary and they were surprisingly neutral towards each other. They were often more neutral towards each other than they were towards themselves, in part because of the distances between the ruins of primeval fey courts. Without archfey leading them, they'd long ago learned to adapt to new and strange social circumstances.
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My mind zipped thousands of kilometers away from my physical form. As it zipped across the vast expanse that separated my court from the closest conquered group of unseelie fey. It only took my mind, capable of moving vast distances from myself, only a few minutes to find an appropriate group of fey for me to being to observe.
The group of fey that I found and began to observe were a strange group of little terrors. The creatures were dozens of tiny, almost goblin-like beasts who wielded a number of bladed instruments. They were as tall as the goblins that I had befriended in Puerto Rico, and wore ancient-looking rags that were a variety of colors and styles. The main unifying feature that marked them all as members of the same species at a glance were the strange hats they wore.
Each of the hats was thick enough to cover their whole faces and covered in sticky, scarlet gore. As I began to watch them a number of them took their caps off and revealed eerie scarlet eyes. Almost dried blood began to slowly seep from their hats, and the disgusting creatures lifted the hats to their mouths.
Some of the creatures opened their gnarly mouths and long, nasty tongues began to stretch towards and then into the hats. Others put their whole faces in their hats and began to greedily drink the viscera within their hats. The creatures were the brutal warriors known as "Redcaps", savage warriors who delighted in pain and misery. And they were among the easiest of the unseelie to cow and command.