Despite the bravado with which Dahlia had answered Ruth, a real problem lay before her. The souls of hundreds, maybe thousands, of mortals had been sucked into the Bleeding Grove over the years, while the number of Fey essences that rooted the Grove, such as Lord Thornheart, were fewer in number. Already, the suffering and pain of the mortal souls had corrupted the Grove into its present form, and if she removed the Fey essences that empowered the trees and bound the mortal souls, she wasn’t sure what the consequences would be.
Simply breaking the curse and freeing only the Fey might lead to a catastrophe.
You have received a Quest offer from Anubis, God of the Dead.
Quest: Send the Mortal Souls to the Afterlife.
Reward offered: Volume of Ruling Presence, ???
You have received a Quest offer from Set, God of War.
Quest: Gift the Mortal Souls to Set so that he might use them.
Reward offered: Staff of the Arcane, ???
“Ugh,” Dahlia grumbled under her breath. The sudden interruption of Nantes' annoying voice was a welcome distraction from making a choice, even if she pretended it annoyed her. The first thing she did was compare rewards. On the surface level, it didn’t seem like much of a choice. Set offered a staff with multiple spells able to be fired off on a daily basis, while Anubis offered her a book. But when she wondered what the actual details of those were, the Voice of Nantes spoke again.
Volume of Ruling Presence: This book contains instructions to manipulate and influence others. Each word is charged with potent magic. If you spend at least 48 hours out of the next 7 days studying the book, you may increase your Charisma by 2. This book allows you to raise your Charisma above 20. The book becomes magically dormant for 100 years after being used.
Staff of the Arcane: This elegant staff, crafted out of polished ebony inlaid with silver runes, hums with arcane power. Those who wield it sense an increased resonance with the flow of magic, as if guided by long-forgotten sages of the arcane arts. The Staff of the Arcane has 10 charges. The staff regains 5-10 charges daily. Charges may be spent to cast Eldritch Quills (1 charge), Sunder the Aether (3 charges), or Stasis Cocoon (4 charges).
Eldritch Quills (1st level Evocation spell): With a subtle gesture and a muttered word in a tongue older than the stars, you conjure forth quills of crackling, shimmering ink drawn from possibly imaginary dimensions. These quills shriek through the air and fly unerringly to your target. Each quill leaves a faint afterimage of sigils that never existed and injects otherworldly ichor into the target’s veins.
Sunder the Aether (3rd level Abjuration spell): You trace geometric patterns with your fingerprints, pulling at the invisible threads that bind magical forces together. The air hums with low, dissonant whispers as you focus your will, causing the fragile tapestry of magic before you to unravel. A subtle shockwave of negation ripples outward, tearing at spellwork and supernatural bindings.
Cocoon of Stasis (4th level Evocation spell): Calling upon the lost name of a watcher at the edge of eternity, you cause a shimmering, opalescent globe of crackling void-stuff to form around a target. Within, the air grows eerily quiet and stale, while faint patterns of shifting runes slither across the inside of the barrier. Nothing, not even sound, penetrates this barrier; it is an alien refuge and a prison at once, born of ancient pacts with far-distant entities.
Dahlia had to admit that the staff was tempting, but it was almost certainly cursed or fouled by the influence of the creatures from beyond this dimension. Anubis, on the other hand, offered her something she hadn’t found a way to do yet. All her power flowed from her Charisma attribute, and increasing it would make her more powerful in practically every way. While Dahlia wished for darker, edgier manifestations of her magic, squiggly tentacles from the beyond weren’t quite what she had in mind.
With a decision made, Dahlia declined the quest from Set and accepted the one from Anubis. The hard part remained. How, then, was she to free the Fey and Mortal souls without creating a ruinous outcome?
“Xeras, would you engrave a ritual circle around the whole of the grove for me?” Dahlia asked her knight.
With a nod as his answer, Xeras retraced his steps to the grove's edge to carve a circle with Gloombough.
Dahlia plucked multiple sticks of incense and sage from her Feywoven Satchel. They hadn’t been in there moments ago, but for 3 Glimmer points, she materialized a sizable mound of the materials.
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“Lorien, help Ruth make four fires at each of the cardinal directions, inside Xeras’s circle. Don’t light them yet. Drynthor, set up a pyre right there.” Dahlia pointed to a space before the Bleeding Tree that housed Lord Thornheart’s essence.
There, the fairy pulled out her lute and tuned the instrument. Once tuned, she hummed a few bars to warm her voice up. Moments later her minions returned to report their jobs complete.
“Light the fires, Ruth. This one last.” Dahlia instructed, then waited for the mage to return.
“I will break the curse; what will come of the twisted magic release, I know not. Be prepared to defend me, a manifestation of magic is likely,” Dahlia instructed. The Ebon Chorus all nodded their understanding and took up positions around the fairy.
♪ “By silent roots and crimson leaves,
In hushed twilight, I call you near,
Old bonds that coil and never ease,
Release your hold, dispel all fear.
Spirits bound in ancient strife,
Hear my voice and rise once more,
Find your wings beyond this life,
Cross the threshold, leave this war.
Fey of gleaming glades untold,
Your laughter dimmed beneath this plight,
Take my hand through forests old,
Return to fields of gentle light.
Spirits bound in ancient strife,
Hear my voice and rise once more,
Find your wings beyond this life,
Cross the threshold, leave this war.
To the Soulweald’s silver boughs,
Fey shall dance in dream’s embrace,
Where memory no longer plows
The soil of pain, but flowering grace.
Mortals caught in sorrow’s chain,
No longer linger in crimson stain,
Anubis guides you from your pain,
Into his halls, find peace again.
Spirits bound in ancient strife,
Hear my voice and rise once more,
Find your wings beyond this life,
Cross the threshold, leave this war.
In gentle hush, the grove stands still,
As whispers fade beneath the sky,
Your paths now clear by ancient will,
Be free, be whole, and never cry.” ♪
As Dahlia’s voice rose in steady, crystal-like notes, the air within the Bleeding Grove stilled as if the grove held its breath. The long, thorned branches, twisted and dripping dark crimson sap, trembled in response to the fairy’s voice. A tremor with subtle ripples passed through the gnarled wood and crimson leaves. With each phrase of Dahlia’s song, the hush deepened—no wind, no rustle, only her mesmerizing voice could be heard as she wove ancient magic through the silent gloom.
A shift—the sap no longer seeped in thick, clotted drops but instead fades to become translucent before the sap completely ceases weeping from the wounds in the bark. Twisted, towering trunks straighten by degrees. Where barbs once jutted from the bark blossoms of pale green timidly unfurled. Petals shook off old blood as if woken from some long nightmare. All around Dahlia, the shapes of Fey—delicate winged forms like her own, tall elves, horny satyrs, dryads, and even redcaps—formed out of shimmering, ethereal light. Trapped beneath the trees and other foliage, each Fey only found freedom when Dahlia’s song sunk into their very being and whispered the way to the Soulweald to them. One by one, they rose upwards, until their motes of light formed a bright doorway and faded.
Human spirits emerged next. Their apparitions bore tired, worn looks, and their eyes were hollowed out by years of long torment. Dahlia changed her tone—to an undertone of solemn grace—more appropriate to lull the tormented souls to step forward into the great unknown. She had less care for the final fate of these mortals—they needed only to reach Anubis for the terms of the quest to be fulfilled. The state of those souls did not matter, and many were butchers of Fey. Dahlia had little to no interest in lightening the burden of their suffering, for they seemed to deserve it.
Still, although no figure of Anubis is visible, a solemn weight descended upon the grove. An unseen gate seemed to manifest with the appearance of Anubis’s power. The mortal souls seemed to recognize and accept the invitations one by one; they moved to the invisible gate and slipped away on currents of stardust, their very being carried off to whatever distant dimension the dark halls of Anubis rested in. No longer bound to earthly suffering the tide of mortal souls diminished rapidly.
The bitterness, the poison that soaked into the roots of the Bleeding Grove, could not simply vanish into thin air. Neither Anubis nor the Soulweald were interested in the biting emotional residue of the forbidden rite. It gathered thickest where the fey and mortals once suffered, where it then pooled into a writhing mass of shadow and sinew. Dahlia’s voice faltered slightly when the powerful emotions coalesced into something dreadful and starving. Vines curled inwards to cover ribs formed of twisted bark. Old, spilled sap flowed from the soil upward, turning into hateful, black-blooded eyes. A jagged maw split the face of a newly born horror, a face that conveyed only hunger and disgust for the world of Nantes.
The demonic abomination rose taller than the large tree that had once housed the essence of Lord Thornheart, which made sense since most of its form had been torn from it. Its limbs were half-formed nightmares—elongated claws that dripped with ghostly residues of the bloody sap. The torso resembled a mixture of knotted wood and sharp spines, while twisted wooden antlers crowned its head. The antlers dripped bloody liquid, concentrated suffering that destroyed even the earth with corrosive emotion.
The monster raised its head and shrieked at the sky. The ground rumbled, and the scream echoed off the steep hills surrounding the hollow. In response to the cry, small cracks in the earth formed, from which roots rose like snakes.
From Grove to Monster, the now empty husks of all the Bleeding Grove deflated, drained of all mortal and fey essences. The shrieking creature remained the only testament to the existence of the Bleeding Grove at all; the green growth that had started in response to Dahlia’s magic was drained of life, magic, and existence by the monster. A monster that snarled at her before it unleashed a torrid stream of red vapors from its cruel maw.