Goblin Haze, Druid Rage
Chapter 5: Requiem
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Emrys hissed, the grip of rage seizing his heart pricking him like needles. Purity mist combated the purplish-red haze leaking out of his head, keeping him afloat as he kept cleansing himself.
Thank goodness he still could call upon the Dryad’s mind-cleansing abilities, and that it worked despite the rage being inherently part of the magic he gained from her. His gaze swept through the underground garden the Dryad dwelled within, torn up by twisted purplish-red roots Aodh had conjured to stave them off. Gran, dear Gran, had nearly lost herself again, Emrys’s heart twisting as she shook the haze spilling out of her head. Not fully consumed, but struggling against the anger pulsating from the Dryad into their tribe. Into her especially, the Communer of the Dryad.
He caught wind of the chipmunk and badger faunimal, trying to hold their thrashing, haze-addled rabbit friend in place. Seekit had her ears folded, eyes glaring at everything — she wasn’t bound to the Dryad herself, but her bond with Gran clearly messed with her. Golmac stared on as if he’d seen something precious wither before him. Which he technically had.
For at one side of the garden, the Dryad stood, a snarling mess of heads with haze billowing out of each. Purplish-red vines hung from her adorned dress like thin, viperlike tentacles, with similarly colored veins popping from her forehead and running all over her vinelike arms. Her maneater tunneler that Aodh had trapped, already crazed from his touch, seemed to have grown even more crazed. Its head kept snapping at empty air, somehow ignorant of its bindings.
And Aodh. He was dead.
The warrior’s lifeless gaze had been one of horror, with tinges of regret. His chest bled out, his heart surely torn by the roots that had grown out of the Dryad’s arm. Said roots had retracted, the Dryad suddenly snapping her heads upward.
Determined scowls plastered themselves onto her faces. The other Tanglesooth druids, Emrys remembered with a start.
Aodh’s crime was done. And now a worse one would surely occur above, with the other druids hampered by the sudden influx of rage flowing through their connection with the Dryad to them.
“Emrys.” Golmac clasped his shoulder, eyes alight with urgency. “Please tell me you can—”
A rumble. Emrys leaned onto his staff, he and Golmac gawking as giant purplish-red roots exploded out of the ceiling, literally breaking through the trunk. She broke through her tree? She can do that? thought Emrys, before noticing the ooze burning through it. Ah, of course.
The Dryad, damaging her own tree. It was unthinkable — but anger clearly messed with her mind. But more than that—
The root began to retract, the Dryad letting out a cackle, and Emrys panicked. She’s escaping the tree!
No time. He ran, a teeny part of agitation lodged into his mind giving him an ironic boost of speed. His purity cloud split from him, Emrys struggling to maintain a second one and send it to the Dryad.
It almost worked. But it didn’t. The moment it came into contact with the Dryad, she struck back, Emrys wheezing as the chest strike threw him off. His mist dispersed, and in came the poison, streams of rotten thoughts and agitated garbage swamping his head. Emrys inwardly gagged at it all.
“Oh, I’ll have none of that, child.” The Dryad’s cold voice put chills down Emrys’s spine, her expression indifferent toward him — if not just a little peeved. “The warrior so badly wanted me to become the monster he sought, did he not? Let it be so then. I’ll water these fields in human blood, just as he wanted.”
“Darned Dryad!” The hiss in Emrys’s tone startled himself, the goblin forcing himself to conjure another purity cloud and cleanse his head. “Wait, please! You—”
The hole through the tree trunk was fully opened. Teeth bared with furious glee, the Dryad shot her vine-tentacles upward, each extending by an impossible amount until they latched onto a foothold within the almost vertical tunnel. She pulled her up, shooting off.
Emrys watched. And gasped with horror.
She’ll get herself killed. Or worse, she’ll get us all killed.
Worrywort thoughts. But in the fact of a Fluxus blinded with rage, all plausible ones too. “We need to hurry out!” he shouted to the others.
Grandma Birog let an eye wander toward him, full of distaste. “And what, fight the Dryad herself, idiot boy?” she spat. “Balderdash! She’ll—”
Emrys split his purity cloud, Gran gagging as he washed out her head as much as possible. Her eyes refocused, Gran clutching her staff like it was a lifeline.
“No, you’re right, boy. We need her in control of the plagued poison Aodh infected her with,” she said. “Golmac, Seekit, quickly now.”
What, the crazy druids are leaving us?
Help the touched rabbit, nitwits!
The chipmunk and badger’s irksome cries almost made Emrys want to give himself in to the anger spiking within him. Doubly so when the two faunimals flew right into his face, crazed rabbit spirit in tow. He huffed.
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Sadhbh the Dryad had never known strength felt like this. It was simply intoxicating.
Her roots smashed through her Blessed Tree, Sadhbh feeding herself off her hatred of having to do such a despicable thing. Not that she could bring herself to care much about damaging her tree anyway — eyeless as her avatar was, she saw better than any two-eyed creature did. Her body, her vines, they felt the earth and trees. They felt all that happened in it, upon it, and beyond it.
She knew, all too vividly, of the unbridled chaos unfolding outside. The fires. The deaths. The ants that were humans, encroaching on her home like the pests they were, having just taken over the second boulder ring. The infernos they hurled, and the burning boulders they launched via catapults to devastate buildings, structures, and people alike.
Her Blessed Tree had caught fire. It would resist the flames, but aflame it was, and it would surely spread in due time. With the flesh-bags that were humans already destroying everything sacred to her, did it matter if she did a little property damage of her own?
And there were her people too, the Tanglesooth, who had just fallen back to the third and final boulder ring surrounding her tree — and had gone into disarray. She felt them clutching their heads, snarling wordlessly, acting with agitation at trolls showing concern and worry toward their messed up states. Some had turned violent and disorderly, though for now their rage remained focused on the main threat of the pyromancers, their forces startled as they cast thick, gruesome roots of a discolored purplish-red hue that ripped through their ranks. Roots that proved relatively difficult to burn away.
Kindlefury’s attacks did have a touch of fire-based elemental magic to them, after all. Funny it was still there. With the poison.
The blighted poison. She felt it — the Berserker’s essence wriggling within her. The warrior goblin known as Aodh had been so, so stupid, taking such a notable piece of a Fluxus with him! A piece full of lingering will, warping his magic and purpose!
It was the Berserker’s final act against her. His greatest ploy! The moment Aodh had touched her, the taint had pulled itself free, magically latching onto her own soul and grafting itself to her. Oh, sure, it would be fine if there had been time to filter it out, to take full control over the essence, but no! The maddened fool had been too blind to listen.
And you had to kill him? a small part of her thought. An all-too-kindly voice. When you could’ve kept him for—
Nope. Too late. The traitor got what he deserved! He infected her. Her! He turned her into a monster.
And she would revel in it. Power! Rage! All hers! Had this been how the Berserker felt all the time? Curse the warrior goblin Aodh, bless the warrior goblin Aodh! He had turned her itty bitty tricks and traps into a far more lethal force. And the goblin Emrys, that little snake who happened to be her Communer’s grandson, he had the gall to limit her!
She even could’ve sworn she heard the Communer herself, demanding her to control her rage, to confine her abilities. But no, she wouldn’t do such a thing. Why should she?
She was rage incarnate now. And she was miffed. Furious. Boiling with insatiable animosity! And she loved it. All that hate for humans, for those slighting her and her kingdom — it made her all the stronger! She wanted her hate to be such that it could be engraved in the tiniest of letters ad infinitum throughout each root, branch, and leaf of her Blessed Tree, and yet it would only equal a millionth of her true hate at just a given millisecond. Hate!
She would annihilate the humans with that hate. Utterly and thoroughly.
Manic grins sprouted on each of Sadhbh’s heads as she sped through her makeshift tunnels, the rage-enhanced strength of her vines throwing her forward with great agility. Wood transitioned abruptly to dirt and stone, the Dryad vividly feeling all that existed above her heads. There were her troops — the Tanglesooth druids, who were bickering and snapping at one another, too engrossed in their rage to maintain their unity. Trolls too got snatched up in the friction between allies. Her few surviving maneater tunnelers were a mess of their own, already having started biting each other while tearing apart humans limb from limb.
The faunimals, pesky, unreliable creatures that they were, had dared to pause their attrition in favor of gawking at the chaos. Her alliance, crumpling because they couldn’t keep themselves together in front of the obvious enemy about to wipe them out! Infuriating.
If you soothed yourself, the Tanglesooth could regroup under your command, the too-kind voice whispered.
But that meant losing her own strength. And Aodh was right about one thing: she hated being useless. Aodh had made a fool of her, up until he’d thrown away the Berserker’s essence.
No, her druids weren’t needed. She needed no one! Feeling out the humans, Sadhbh’s grins stretched wide upon finding a large clumping of them in a particular area, between the fallen second ring of boulders and the third. Many fire-flinging catapults with them too.
The perfect place to introduce them to their final welcome party. Sadhbh channeled her hate, and turned it into venomic will.
Her roots exploded outward like a freak natural disaster, ripping through their entire squadron. Sadhbh swore she could hear with her many eardrums their screaming. The loveliest noise in a battlefield.
If the humans weren’t surprised enough by the sudden rage-filled root magic her disorderly druids had cast, this definitely had astounded them. She felt every last entity out there, human and non-human, swivel their heads toward the majestic death-spike of roots that had torn up the area. She knew their silence, the awe, their fear. She feasted on it.
It was only the beginning. Hardly had the humans processed the new threat when she began the real onslaught, roots spiking out throughout the entire field. Humans fell and shrieked and died, and Sadhbh grew giddy at the blood spilled. Yes, yes!
The pyromancers were like panicked sheep. But it still wasn’t enough. She didn’t want to merely kill with her hate — she needed them to see it in her face.
So Sadhbh did that. Roots broke out overhead, ripping a hole into the night sky, and Sadhbh flung herself out. Purplish-red tendrils sprouted from all over her body like a sickly pulsating mass, and Sadhdh screeched, announcing her presence.
She felt everything even more vividly now. Humans pointing at her, a few freaking out at her terrible appearance. Several casting fires her way. Sadhbh casually blocked them with roots, before retaliating, said roots stretching out until their thorns had impaled the pyromancers’ throats.
Their blood soaked the scorched ground, and the Dryad mindlessly laughed, amidst a battlefield of rage roots, flying boulders, fae lights, and fire. All eyes were on her, from bewildered trolls to wary faunimals, and even her enraged subjects amongst the Tanglesooth and the man-eater tunnelers paid her attention. The humans most certainly did, a small wave of them having recognized her overwhelming threat and rushing to neutralize her.
Sadhbh gladly let them come, finding every excuse to feel disgust toward the insects who thought to challenge her. A little voice begged her to reel herself in, but she discarded the thought at once, too busy basking in the destruction she knew she was capable of. In the endless contempt she felt toward everything that dared to slight her.
The humans came upon her, and she killed. Fire branded her, and she let the insult to injury empower her, striking back with greater fury. And when the humans had been all slain, she rushed toward the next batch she could reach. And she killed, again and again and again.
And again.
Goodness, hate was such a wonderful thing.
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Hate was such a horrible thing.
Emrys had fought the feeling the whole way with his purity magic, escorting a haggard Gran out of the Blessed Tree maze. Golmac and Seekit followed, while the other faunimals zipped past them all, in a jubilant mood.
Freedom!
No more maze to get in our way!
Well, the chipmunk and badger were. The rabbit was a lot more solemn, scanning the corridors within the tree for any passerby. She’d been that way ever since she’d been freed from her rage curse.
Not that it mattered much to Emrys. He kept up the brisk pace he had set, moving through the hallways to escape the tree, and Gran managed to follow. All the while, thoughts of resignation swirled within Emrys’s head.
Purifying a wrathful Dryad? It’d have been easier to deal with Aodh.
“She won’t hear me.” Gran’s palms looked like they were drenched in sweat. “The Dryad. She seems entirely deaf and oblivious to anything I say, and trying to reach her—”
“I can tell.” Emrys wiped his forehead, clearing out the poisonous malice in his head with a little extra force. The Dryad’s rage had grown more and more palpable — according to Gran, Aodh’s poison had intensified her disgust toward the human pyromancers, and she’d been working herself into a fever pitch in her zeal to empower herself with as much rage as she could muster. Which worsened the negative impacts her magical rage had on the Tanglesooth.
As if knowing his concerns, Gran firmly shook her head. “Worry not about the shelters for now,” she insisted. “Each one had druids equipped with purity magic — if they were smart, they’d have bathed their entire area with their cleansing clouds, to stave off the rage. We have our own fight to deal with.”
Yes, they did. The people in the shelters were generally non-casters — they wouldn’t be as affected by the rage since they weren’t channeling magic, and would pose less of a threat to each other anyway. The people outside though?
Emrys felt his heart seize as he and the others emerged from the Blessed Forest, the guards on standby mindlessly pummeling each other with their fists — somehow both had dropped their staffs elsewhere. He tilted his head upward, and there he found a few flames, spreading across the trunk and branches of the tree.
The pyromancers had woefully managed to push the Tanglesooth to their last boulder ring, apparently at around the time Aodh had corrupted the Dryad. Emrys could see the mess already, trolls retreating back toward the Blessed Tree itself as some of his fellow goblins lashed out with purplish-red vines and roots. “The goblins have gone mad!” a troll in dark brown robes yelled, beelining toward them. “Are you fine, Fluxus Communer? You too, healing goblin? I don’t know what’s happening—”
“The Tanglesooth Fluxus was tampered with, brother,” Golmac answered for Gran and Emrys. “She’s out there fighting the humans.”
“The three-headed cackling plant witch?” The troll paled. “Oh, she’s the worst of them horrors. Thank goodness she spent so little time at our side of the barricade! Kills humans mostly, but you’d think she wanted all our heads too.”
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Emrys bit down a curse. Aodh had wanted his home saved by any means necessary — and now those means just might topple it instead. And he had to soothe the Dryad? By himself?
Wait. No. No, of course not.
“The other mind soothers,” Emrys said to Seekit. “Can you get me to them?”
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Sabhdh couldn’t feel the burns scarring her, nor remember the bodies she shredded. All she knew was that she was killing. She ripped and tore, and it would never be done.
The third boulder ring was a sizzling mess, figuratively and literally. Her useless goblins had started attacking the trolls instead of the humans, and a few trolls had stupidly fought back. Even one or two faunimals had let themselves get mixed into the fray. The perfect occasion for ridiculously bold human pyromancers to storm the defenses.
She leapt at them, smashing many heads together with her tendrils and tossing others skyward with huge roots that burst out of the earth, scattering tons of dirt in their wake. One or two of her roots struck the boulders too, and the people upon it.
They flew too. It happened sometimes.
More humans. Two had climbed up the boulder, readying fireballs at the goblins there. Roots extended out of her tendril to slice them. She nicked the goblins too.
The ungrateful fools had the audacity to swarm her with roots. She ripped them apart and struck down the goblins for their insubordination. One bumped his head and fell unconscious.
Another had his arm and chest profusely bleeding out. The Dryad ignored him and chased after her real prey, killing more and more humans.
The pain of a broken connection, a lost follower, was but a tickle. Accidents.
You killed your own! The too-kindly part of Sadhbh cried out, clearly stricken. You left him to die!
And? The goblin one been a fool. He had dared harm her clear savior.
He was one of yours!
Another drop, then, to the hatred she felt for the humans that were to blame for everything. They’d pay dearly for every life she had to waste because of them.
Rage was power, and power was everything. The more Sadhbh fought, the less she cared. The more she craved. The more she raged on, and rinse and repeat.
She killed humans. She killed a few irksome goblins getting in her way too.
Loathing overcame her as other goblins took notice, the idiots ganging her in their madness with piles and piles of roots, grouping her with the extremely obvious evil that the humans were. Why was she defending these people anyway? These were supposed to be her druids? A bunch of upstarts with the nerve to repay her like this?
She would remind them of their place. They’d learn not to invoke her anger! She’d been too soft with these worms—
No! Not them! her too-kindly voice called out. You can’t!
The Dryad’s tendrils lashed out everywhere as she squelched the insufferable voice.
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Emrys split off a purity cloud toward the addled goblin Seekit had found rummaging through the leftover goods of a wooden stall a distance behind the third boulder ring, an older fellow in a yellowish cloak whom Gran had already tied up in roots. He gagged, haze spilling out of his mouth, and hissed at Golmac, who currently held his staff. “Miserable wretches!” he spat. “When I get my staff back—”
Gran gagged his mouth. Seldom had Emrys been forced to purify three different people at once — himself, Gran, and the goblin in front of him — but he pushed on, struggling with filtering out the poison in the goblin’s head, until clarity eventually sparked in his eyes. He gave a start at Gran, as if just processing her presence.
“The Dryad’s gone mad and tainted us with her rage,” Emrys swiftly told him, as Gran set him free and Golmac returned his staff. “If we don’t cleanse her mind, the humans will be the last of our worries.”
“You heard my grandson, Finan. Go!” snapped Gran. “Get to filtering out the gunk in the other healers’ heads!”
The goblin hastily nodded, conjuring his own purity cloud over his head. “O-of course, communer. I-I apologize if—”
“I said go! And do not get into any conflict with the rest of our crazed order!”
Finan scrambled off, nearly tripping over his robes. Gran clutched her head the moment he was out of sight, hissing to herself. “She’s turning against our own,” she said. “Accursed Dryad — oh, the plague be upon this rage spell! — I don’t think she even realizes, but she’s projecting her bloodlust. She sees us as getting in our way.”
The connection between Gran and the Dryad was proving to be a rather problematic affair — a double-edged sword with the blade mostly resting against Gran’s neck. Yet one more reason to hurry this up.
Any longer, after all, and the Dryad might start treating us as her true enemy.
The brown-cloaked troll that had run into them had for some reason stuck with their group, as had the faunimals that assisted them. “Find us the next of our purifier druids,” Emrys told Seekit, before rounding upon them as the fox spirit darted off in a quick search. “Don’t any of you have somewhere else to be, or are you just here for company?”
The chipmunk and badger gave him leering expressions, daring him to wave them off. As if this whole affair was but an amusement to them. The rabbit, however, put on a resolute look.
Give me something to do.
Emrys, Golmac, and Gran raised brows at her oddly formal tone, and the stranger request she made. Her friends reacted similarly, the chipmunk making a face at her. You’re asking smelly goblins for orders? she questioned. What, did the dumb servant girl rub off on you?
Who said I’m playing servant like the silly bond spirit? I attacked you under a rage hex! The rabbit scowled with her lack of a mouth, muzzle contorting. The druid Fluxus spirit is under the stupid hex too! She attacks everything! I want it to stop before she attacks us and our forests. Or do you not want that?
The chipmunk spirit backed up with a grimace, while the badger chewed upon their friend’s words. “What the fae spirit said,” the brown-cloaked troll said. “N-not that I want to be out there with everything so stir-crazy, if you’ll excuse me, but there must be something we can do to stop this madness.”
Stop the Dryad and stop the human threat, both at once. Tall order. But maybe Aodh’s gambit, for all the destruction it was causing, could be salvaged.
Golmac spoke the words Emrys himself meant to say. “Containing a Fluxus is no small matter, brother,” he said. “We will surely need every hand we have against her.”
Gran nodded, rubbing her ailing head. “Your friends,” she told the troll and the faunimals, the rabbit in particular. “Go and gather as many of them as you can.”
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When it had happened, Sadhbh didn’t know, but the world had become her enemy.
She was running out of humans. She never thought it possible, but they were dying out, with many of the pyromancers beginning to reverse course and flee the battlefield. The enraged goblins struck down the stragglers with roots — and her too. A few trolls lobbed stones too, and faunimals hurled light orbs to burn her. A series of rips marked her shriveled dress, scars covering the entirety of her heads, and all it did was make her all the more furious.
They were focusing on her, like she was some vile monster. And the trolls and faunimals weren’t even crazy like her in the head! Oh, she knew very well the goblins yearned for her death — the rage simply brought their truest, rawest, darkest thoughts out, after all — but clearly the other two parties’ lust for bloodshed had no need for magic to bring out their evil intentions. They were much like the warrior goblin Aodh, seeking to steal from her core for themselves! They’d never been allies in the first place.
Opportunists. She would destroy them for their treason. And then the Fluxi they served, who had surely conspired against her. But no, shouldn’t she chase the humans first? Kill each and every last one of their soldiers? Or better yet, follow them to their human settlement, so she could repay the favor in full? Show them what it was like to be on the receiving end of extermination?
A large swath of roots jutted out of the earth like murderous spikes, the Dryad’s reflexes letting her leap away just in time to avoid the clumsy attack, and at last she decided she was through with this charade. Did it even mean anything that she fought off the humans, when her so-called people were so unappreciative? She should’ve let them burn! She should’ve abandoned them! No more Tanglesooth to waste her time with.
That was when she decided: she hated everything. Everything hated her, after all! They hated her virtues, they hated her power! Everything hated each other too — hate was everything.
Fine by her. She loved, loved, loved hate. Hate made her everything! It made her a being worthy of being respected and feared, a being of great power. And nobody would take that away from her! She’d be that way until the end of time, if she had to! All in her way would yield or perish!
The teeny-tiny voice of her old, too-kind self whimpered, crying that it was but the Berserker’s essence messing her completely, taking her down a path of destruction that would leave her alone for eternity — or prematurely dead. The rest of her shamelessly corrupted self just cackled, eyeing the goblins, trolls, and faunimals she no longer needed, and saw them as the ants they really were. First them, then the pesky humans. She’d—
A storm of rocks and roots engulfed Sadhbh from all sides, crushing her tight. She rasped, tendrils slashing about in a crazed frenzy, the Dryad doing everything to free herself. Yet more stones came to replace the ones destroyed, and more roots too. What? Who? Who dared?
She gazed with her inner sense, and snarled upon the threat she found. A gathering of goblin druids, green purity clouds misting their faces, alongside a party of trolls. Even a few faunimals overhead too, all working together.
It baffled her. They were coordinated against her! Her! Where was their hate that made them fight one another? How dare—
And then purity mist coalesced around her. Sabhdh wordlessly yelled out as if pricked by dagger-like thorns, her hazy rage losing its edge as it clashed with the purity. They were sapping her strength! They were taking away her wrath! The fiends!
Friends.
The echo of her too-kindly voice made the Dryad recoil. She screamed, tendrils thrashing like mad.
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Emrys wasn’t even sure how the druids mobilized so quickly without his or Gran’s input, but he saw in the distance. Casters, goblin and troll alike, had grouped up upon a crooked section of the third boulder ring that’d been somewhat displaced by the chaos of the humans and the Dryad. Many of the goblins were casting purity clouds over one another, but some, he noticed, had their staffs glowing with the darker green hues that came with root magic. The trolls too had their staffs burning bright with gray colors, a beacon of scattered lights in a charred midnight. Faunimals floated overhead too.
They were fighting the Dryad already. A little too early, he feared, for they surely needed more people. More goblins soothed to help, and more trolls. And yet, was it better to delay and let the Dryad rampage a second longer?
Golmac and another goblin with purifier magic they managed to find were moving ahead of him, Emrys sticking close to Gran. Her haggardness had briefly lifted, a spark of life returning to her face. “The gunk in my head’s clearing a little,” she said. “You feel it, boy?”
Emrys did. It was faint, but he noticed how it was a tiny bit easier to clear out the poisonous anger trying to overwhelm their minds. The druids had somehow managed to capture and purify Sadhbh already? It was a miracle.
The humans are scattering.
Emrys jerked his head upward with a little too much force, Seekit descending upon them. The battlefield is left with only broken remnants of their forces, she declared. Many fight still, but they’ve lost control.
Another miracle, just as badly needed. “The Dryad made it too difficult for them to take advantage of our disunity,” Gran said with a wretchedly bitter smirk. “Maybe, just maybe—”
She staggered, falling back into Emrys’s arms. “Gran!” he yelled.
Are you fine, Lady Birog? asked Seekit, before her ears jolted straight up. Back!
Golmac and the goblin halted at once. “Mistress spirit?” asked the former. “What—”
Large purplish-red roots exploded from beneath the feet of the goblin and troll coalition, their forces scattering everywhere. Boulders uprooted themselves, and Emrys felt his heart skip a beat as the Dryad leapt into view, shrieking like a feral beast freed from its cage.
She was even more far gone than Emrys had expected. Beyond the disgusting mass of bloodied tendrils wriggling out of her, she was buried in scars and injuries that would’ve been debilitating for any normal person, yet acted like none of them mattered. Whatever little sense of reasoning she had, it was overridden by primal, murderous rage, the kind that wasn’t even sure why it raged except for the sake of it. And she looked incredibly ticked off that the druids had tried to soothe the rage out of her.
He feared the thing she had become, far more than he feared Aodh. And yet, as the warped Dryad threw herself upon the druids, he found himself the most determined he’d been in this entire ordeal.
Keeping his purity cloud up, Emrys gritted his teeth as he pushed himself, summoning roots to ensnare the Dryad. Which failed, unsurprisingly — the Dryad hissed out and cut the obstacles down — but bought time for her targets to recuperate. Goblins cast their own roots, and trolls levitated the boulders the Dryad had tossed about and destroyed, crushing the Dryad in between again. Her garbled cries made the very earth tremble.
Her tendrils ripped through, only for the Dryad to cover herself as faunimals assaulted her, lights burning her faces. Emrys sent a pinch of purity mist upon her, as did other goblins, and somehow it brought a pain to her truer than any physical force. He sidestepped as her roots arbitrarily grew out of the ground, flailing about with no real target.
The Dryad raged, screamed, made noises Emrys never had heard before. In the corner of his eye, Gran had pulled herself up, staring down the Fluxus she was linked to.
“Sadhbh,” she whispered, and the Dryad froze up.
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Sadhbh.
The call of her name stirred something deep within the Dryad. Something tender. She hated it.
Or rather, she wished she could hate it. And she hated that she couldn’t bring herself to.
One single word from her Communer, rippling throughout her mind, and suddenly she felt truly vulnerable. And yet loved. It paralyzed her, the Dryad forgetting for a moment that she was being crushed by roots and vines. That she was being smothered by vile mist that sapped away her hate.
Love. The opposite of hate. Serenity, the opposite of rage.
Her purplish-red tendrils grew desaturated, her haze reeling back from the cleansing mist eating away at her. “No!” she hissed, ripping herself out of her prison with what strength she still retained. Her heads contorted in the direction of where Birog was, the accursed old goblin she’d been chained to.
Her Communer returned her threefold death glares with a sullen, nostalgic one. She spoke aloud, but the Dryad heard them much louder, much clearer, within her own head.
Come back to your senses, dear. You’re hurting your loved ones.
The words were no mist, forcibly dampening her rage, but the soothing tones it came with worked just as effectively, stirring awake the too-kind part of herself Sadhbh had worked so hard to silence. She hated that. She had to hate! The Berserker’s essence within her fed on hate, gave her power through hate—
But I don’t want to hate.
Her too-kind self’s words threw the Dryad into a final frenzy. She hacked and slashed her way out of her prison, lunging at the vile creature she had once called her Communer—
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Golmac blocked the Dryad with a shower of rocks, Emrys heaving as the impact knocked her off-course. She tumbled and pulled herself up, skittering about with her vines and tendrils, before yet another set of roots entangled her. “You! YOU!” she mindlessly spat at a grim-faced Gran.
Emrys pulled her away just as purplish-red roots ruptured out of the earth — hesitantly so, he noticed — in an attempt to entangle her legs. “Aodh gave her a piece of the Berserker?” she said, and Emrys thought he’d hallucinated for a moment.
He what?
A bothered tsk came from Grandma Birog. “Explains a lot of things,” she muttered, before she continued her appeal to the Dryad. “Would you really hurt me, my little Sadhbh?”
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Would you hurt the one person closest to you?
The Dryad drew sharp breaths. The tone of her Communer was like that she’d often use when she’d been but a newly-formed Fluxus, sweet and motherly. It hurt.
It hurt so much.
“GET OUT!” The bindings hadn’t fully entangled her this time, the Dryad ripping free almost immediately — only for yet more roots to catch her, and for boulders to crash into her path. The fiend! Trying to tear her apart with sticks and stones, and destroy her with words!
Faunimal light spheres struck her. The purity mist kept eating at her strength. She felt sluggish, tired. She felt like weeping.
She felt weak. She never wanted to be weak again. Her Communer was making her weak! Too tight was their bond, a series of magical knots that required extensive work to unravel — or death, and Birog had to die. She had to—
Why her? cried the too-kindly voice. Why Grandmother Birog?
The affection flayed her. It flayed the churning essence of the Berserker within her, tendrils moving as one to make the suffering stop. They weaved around vines, roots, and stones, the Dryad raging one more time for her right to hate as she reached for the Communer—
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Blue beams. Seekit had planted herself upon Gran right in the nick of time, Emrys covering his ears as the Dryad cried out in pure agony, her tendrils dissolving from the vine-like beams burning through them. Even now, he found himself in awe at the beauty, the power, behind the light attacks. Other goblins and trolls were surely mesmerized at the flashy magic before them that they had never seen before, for a few had paused their spells for just a brief moment.
The beams made the Dryad crumple, her wounds catching up. The endless swaths of poisonous rage clogging up her mind began to finally run out, Emrys feeling the taint losing its ever-present hold upon him as he and his fellow healers pushed all the way through. “Stop it!” she said, the guttural edge in her voice dulled. “I-it hurts!”
Gran had nearly fallen herself, exhaustion from the spell she casted forcing her to rest on her staff. “I’m sorry I had to hurt you, dear.”
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I didn’t want my death to hurt you more.
Sadhbh The Dryad choked. She hated — she wished she could hate! — how sincere the words felt.
Roots continued to hold her tightly, the Dryad weakly striking at them with what few tendrils she had left. No, no, this was all a trick! They were going to kill her and do terrible things with her leftover essence! They were no better than the humans! They were her enemies—
They’re my allies.
The rage, the hate, it began to flag. “Stop making me weak,” she whimpered.
Gran shook her head. You’re never weak when you’re with your people.
Her people.
She had attacked her people. She had tried wiping out those fighting for her. She had killed.
It was like storm clouds had cleared up in Sadhbh’s head. The poison within her protested — that sliver of the Berserker that had wormed its way from the warrior goblin Aodh into her, preying on her darkest, deepest fears — but the too-kind part of herself couldn’t stand the poison anymore. She tapped into her magic, her pure magic, and pressed it against the essence deep within her.
It squealed, and the Dryad collapsed, her anger locked away. She mourned.
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The Dryad’s whimpers, a far cry from the dignified persona one would associate with a being like her, were what told everyone the fight was over. Roots burrowed away and purifying mists abated, Emrys panting as if he had run a marathon. The toxic rage within him was but a seed, contained away by a calming force that clearly had to be the Dryad’s own magic at work.
The smell of smoke and fire wafted in the air. Village structures lay either broken or burnt to a crisp. A mess of cracked stones, splintered roots, and piles of tossed-up dirt littered the battleground, and Emrys couldn’t help but notice the flames still blazing all over the Blessed Tree. Far in the distance, yells and small bursts of flames spoke of the skirmishes still happening between their regrouping forces and what remained of the humans. Not a purely pyrrhic victory, but far from celebratory either.
Through the overhanging leaves of the great Blessed Tree, the moon shone upon their muted gathering, acknowledging them. Goblins and trolls took solace in each other, hushed apologies and regretful, mournful murmurs passing between the Tanglesooth and those they had harmed out of blind rage. Even the faunimals held their silence, Emrys managing to spot the threesome that had joined them deep in the Blessed Tree. The rabbit alone made eye contact with him, her gaze vacant.
Golmac came beside him, wordless. Gran knelt beside the Dryad, a hand resting upon her middle head, and the heartbroken Fluxus teared up as she embraced the touch.