The enemy reached us shortly after the sun rose, Par’s reinforcements reached us when the sun was at its peak.

Using my puppets I focused my efforts on keeping the better fighters alive. I ended up adding some Whitefoot to the puppets so that I could heal. I didn’t get enough time to perfect it, so the puppets overall were a bit worse, but it allowed me to keep people alive better than I could have if I just had them block blows.

The downside to this was that it cost a ton of mana to facilitate this level of healing. I’ve certainly healed worse injuries, but never have I tried to heal on such a wide scale, and certainly not through an inefficient method like the puppets. I had to draw on my grove more than I ever had before, and as such my trees need to recover. My mana production will be crippled for the next two days at best, and there is nothing I can do to speed it up. At best I will be receiving enough mana to maintain myself from my grove, I would probably start to starve if it wasn’t for my dungeon core. But that small sacrifice was necessary, it kept people alive that ended up being crucial to the fight.

When the reinforcements from Pearlhold came the fighting just got even more fierce and desperate, on both sides. Everyone was backed into a corner, and for the vast majority of creatures the first instinct when backed into a corner is to fight your way out of it, worry about injuries later. And so the fighting just got more and more bloody as time went on.

In the end, we won, barely. It was a pyrrhic victory. We lost almost all of our soldiers, and they were completely annihilated. The survivors were rounded up and executed, no one gave the order, but no one tried to stop them.

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When the list of casualties came back a number of important people had died. Bug was an early casualty, he died saving a friend. Whisperer took a poisoned bolt for me, I simply didn’t have enough mana to heal him. I regret everything bad I ever thought about him. Par’s second in command is missing, no body, alive or dead, has been found. Several of my children were chopped to pieces, beyond their ability to recover from, including a couple of the best healers among them. Willow took a couple hits, but she will recover in a couple days with adequate healing, as did Mest. Thes was heavily injured in the fighting, but he’ll live, even without healing he’ll live.

And worst of all, a fourth of my grove was destroyed. If it wasn’t for the fire resistance I gained from that ancient dragon Thes brought back when he evolved all of it would have been gone. Now, this war is personal.

No one expected that they would completely ignore Pearlhold to send their entire army here. We thought they wanted the valuable prize of Pearlhold, not some small village that would cost them more lives to claim than they could possibly recover with a success. And yet they seemed to care more about putting us down than profiting.

Looking around at the survivors I have never seen people look so defeated, and I have never before seen people so filled with spite. Every single one of them has seen a comrade die.

I understand a bit of how Thes feels all the time. They came into our home and slaughtered our friends and our families, burned our homes to the ground, and destroyed our crops. The lack of food won’t be an issue simply because of how many of our people died, you don’t have to feed a corpse.

So naturally I’m angry, but I don’t have a way to act on my anger. So I need to clear my head. To that end I’m going to help the trees recover, I might not have mana production right now but I do have a stockpile of mana berries. The two-day prediction was assuming active support, so it will be about that long before they’re fully recovered.

Anyway, Good Night Diary.