Eofe marched into the plains until her home became just a stretch of green peeking over the hills at her back. She knew very little about the lands outside the Green, but she had carefully studied maps of the island of Ilthera that the Elves called home, so she knew she merely had to travel west until she reached a river. From there, she would follow its winding path to the southwest until the river poured into the sea. At that inlet lay an Aedwyn coastal city. Once she reached the city, it should be a simple matter to charter a ship to cross the Opal Sea to the nation of Orith.
It was long past dawn, the sun was halfway from its apex to the horizon, when Eofe crested a hill and came upon a sudden splotch of color marring the yellow fields in the distance. There she was faced with one of her greatest fears.
Strangers.
Even worse, Aedwyn strangers.
Eofe crouched in the grass and spied on what appeared to be a small camp of travelers. They had erected five bright tents in a circle near a pasture where a handful of tame beasts grazed on the golden grass. They gathered in a clearing between these tents, six brightly clothed and merry folk talking and laughing in a circle. Among them, a fiddler played a lively tune which Eofe had never heard in Fal Tiren, while a grey-haired matron stirred a large pot to the side.
Oh, they were certainly Elves. But these were no Surag. They were the Aedwyn. And Eofe had no idea what they were doing within half a day’s walk of the Green.
The camp was set up near the bank of the river Eofe needed to follow, surrounded by a flat plain on all sides. Unless she wanted to backtrack and add several more hours to her journey, or wait until night, she would end up traveling well within their line of sight.
Impatience and a dash of curiosity settled the matter for her. Eofe put up her hood and steadied herself. With her eyes on the ground and the camp in the corner of her vision, she stepped down the hill and set on a path far from the travelers. She hoped they either wouldn’t notice or wouldn’t care about her presence.
“Oi there!” a voice cried out and dashed Eofe’s hopes against a rock.
Eofe ignored the voice and continued walking, warily eying the camp in her peripheral where a brightly dressed man stepped away from the tents. Eofe made the mistake of looking directly his way and made eye contact with the beaming Aedwyn waving his arms in the air.
Was it too late to pretend she hadn’t noticed him? Would they think she was suspicious if she just walked away? Eofe was suddenly reminded of Aunt Maeve’s warning of the oncoming Bloom and the wariness of outsiders as it approached. Would they chase her down if she fled, thinking she was a spy?
The man ignored Eofe’s internal turmoil and continued beckoning. Her desire to avoid an awkward encounter warred with fear for what would happen if she ignored them. In the end, the fear of danger won over the fear of socialization. Eofe put down her head and sulked over to the man like a guilty child. His smile grew wider as she approached. She saw that he was a full head taller than her (most people were) and wore a bright tunic of vibrant green and a jaunty cap in some foreign style on his head.
She disliked him immediately.
“A real Surag in our midst! And a child at that!” he said, waving at her as if she were some rare specimen.
“I’m not a child.”
“What was that? Anyway, come have dinner with us! It has been so long since we have entertained one of our wayward kin!”
The man spoke with a lilting accent accentuated by unusually high notes. His mannerisms put Eofe in mind of a strutting bird. Every statement was too loud and accompanied by some grand gesture, so that Eofe found herself stepping back for fear of being swatted by a stray hand.
“I’m Ludwin by the way. What’s your name, girl?” he asked while leading her towards the camp.
“Eofe,” she said as they passed the beasts grazing in the pasture. They were of a species Eofe did not recognize: bulky, four-legged things, each with two massive horns and standing five to six feet tall at the shoulder.
“Don’t mind the aurochs,” her guide said. “They’re completely harmless. Ilya is a [Beastmaster] who takes care of them for us.”
Eofe figured it would be rude to keep her hood up, so she pulled it down and straightened her hair.
“And here we are,” they stopped in the center of the camp where Eofe met the curious looks of the rest of the Aedwyn. Two men and two women were sitting in a circle in the open space, each adorned with tunics in brighter colors than anyone would dare to wear in the Green, with one more woman stirring a pot just outside the circle. The Elves came in a range of ages, though each appeared to be at least a century older than Eofe, who was still in the middle of a decades-long adolescence. The oldest was a grey-haired matron with a motherly smile who must have been thousands of years old, who looked to be preparing their dinner.
“Look everyone, I caught a Surag!” her guide said.
Eofe’s stomach tightened in a brief bout of paranoia. But the travelers laughed at the joke, so she convinced herself he meant nothing by it. They each introduced themselves, but every name went in one ear and out the other, and Eofe nodded mechanically at each of the introductions. She had assumed Ludwin’s atrocious accent was an anomaly until the others spoke up. Now she remembered how often she heard the villagers at home mocking their distant kin’s manner of speech. She had apparently never spent enough time with the few Aedwyn expatriates-turned-Surag in Fal Tiren to notice it.
The circle of Elves shifted to open up a space for her to sit, which Eofe reluctantly took, settling in like a weed among flowers. Ludwin sat across from her and took up a fiddle and started idly strumming a tune.
“Ludwin’s a [Bard],” Ferin or Ferlin explained—Eofe already forgot her name. “He’s actually quite famous, if you’d believe it. I’m not sure I do myself, what with the randy tales he’s been telling since he joined us.”
Ludwin laughed at the barb. “Oh, Feralin. I would tell more respectable stories, but I do so love to see you blush.”
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
Feralin flashed him a coy smile, then Eofe’s attention was grabbed by a young woman who looked close to two hundred and whose name could have been anything from Alayna to Eryn.
“I love your antlers!” she said, so that Eofe self-consciously touched the two short protrusions emerging from her hair. They were small for now, but would grow with age until she had to worry about bumping them into doorframes and narrow hallways. She knew one man who had antlers so large he had forgone his house completely and lived in the wild. Eofe had yet to decide whether she would begin to trim hers before she reached that point.
“I considered taking the bargain once, you know” the woman added. There were a handful of Surag who had done that, though no one Eofe knew closely. Every now and then, an Aedwyn dissatisfied with their life or their God would walk into the Green and pray to take the Greenwarden’s bargain, whereupon the Goddess would bless them with the Mark of the Wild and welcome them into her domain.
“Why didn’t you?” Eofe asked.
“It was mostly a childish fancy. In the end, I couldn’t give up my family or my faith,” she said, holding out a pendant bearing a silver emblem with a four-pointed star set within a circle. It was the symbol of the Highgod Aedolin, the self-proclaimed [God of Elves]. It was his ascension to godhood ten thousand years ago that drove the split between the Elves of Ilthera. Many of the Elves at the time were unsatisfied with their once king, now God. The unfaithful scattered across seas to make new homes in foreign lands, or fled to the Green where the nascent [Goddess of the Wild] welcomed them into her domain. Eofe herself was not interested in following any Highgod, much less a prig like Aedolin. She had no desire to consign her soul to a Highgod's Heaven after her death. The Greenwarden and the other Earthgods made no such demands. She was not entirely sure what would happen to her soul after she died, but the unknown still sounded better to her than serving in some Heaven until the end of the world. Or, more likely, until someone finally put down the upstart God.
“What’s it like, living in the Green?” Eofe’s conversation partner interrupted her thoughts and leaned forward eagerly. At this, the other travelers stopped their own conversations and listened quietly.
Eofe did not know how to answer. How could she explain to these strangers about everything that was her people and her life? The Green was everything to the Surag. It was their home, the center of their faith, as well as their infliction. It was a wild place that handed out blessings alongside curses, whose bounty was as abundant as its perils.
“It’s home,” Eofe shrugged, and if the travelers were disappointed by her simple response they didn’t show it.
“I’m curious, Eofe,” Ludwin said while idly strumming a simple tune. “What is a child as young as you doing outside the Green? What is your story?” Eofe glanced away so she missed the hungry look in the [Bard]’s eyes.
“I’m going to Orith to be an adventurer,” she said. It was the truth even if it wasn’t the full story. Ludwin seemed to understand so he smiled and nodded.
“I’ve spent a lot of time in Orith, myself,” Ludwin said. “It’s an excellent place for a budding adventurer. I hope to hear tales of your adventures should we meet again.”
Now it was Eofe’s turn to ask the question that has been burning in her mind since she spied this camp. “What are you all doing here?” she asked. Why are you so close to the Green when the Bloom is coming, she didn’t say. What Eofe knew of the Aedwyn was that they primarily lived in walled fortress-cities, and none dared live close to the Green, especially with the oncoming Bloom.
“For the Bloom, of course!” Ludwin said, and Eofe’s jaw gaped open.
“Do not worry, child. We are not soldiers,” the old woman added, now ladling soup into wooden bowls out of the large metal pot. “We aim to learn more about the Bloom by observing it in its infancy. Our people have always been so eager to go to war against the Bloom—and the Surag—that we never stopped to try and understand it. We have learned very little from each of the four Blooms. We hope to learn at least something from the fifth. We are not mad though; we will flee to the cities before the dangers grow too great.”
Eofe thought they were mad. She took her serving from the smiling matron, who surely would have lived through the last Bloom and the wars that followed. She might have even seen the Bloom before that. Of course, Eofe had never experienced the event herself since the last one was over two thousand years ago, but the Surag knew more of its nature than anyone.
When the Bloom started, the Green would expand. It began with seeds and spores cast out of the wild on unnatural winds, from which sprouted rampant growths that grew like weeds to overtake the natural flora of the land. Trees would sprout from nothing and grow by yards every day, while creepers emerged from beneath the earth, writhing across the tamed lands with wild frenzy. Flowers as beautiful as they were deadly would blossom from parasitic vines that sapped the life from mundane trees to fuel their own growth.
The surviving flora of the occupied lands would evolve, mutated by the Greenwarden’s wild magic. Benign plants would often become deadly as they were drawn into the Greenwarden’s embrace.
Then came the beasts. Monsters out of nightmares, savage and feral, stalking new lands for new prey. Creatures the likes of which the outside world only sees once every two thousand years. Worst of all would be the tyrants of the Wildwood, suddenly roaming free.
Finally, the Surag and the Wildmen would follow; those that bore the Mark of the Wild, fulfilling their part of the Greenwarden’s bargain to defend the Green. For a time, the natural order would be upended. Predator and prey together would fall upon tamed lands to claim more territory for the Green.
The world would fight back. The Bloom would end after a full year of rampant growth, each season given its turn. Most of the Green’s gains would be burned and poisoned, the land left desolate for generations to follow. But it always kept some of what it took. Cycle after cycle, the Green expanded.
Eofe ate her soup in silence and listened to the travelers explain their mission in greater detail. Ilya the [Beastmaster], the woman who had once considered taking the Mark, had joined the group to study the beasts that came out of the Green and the mutations of the land’s natural fauna that followed. The old matron, Alana, was a [Historian]. It turned out she had lived through the Fourth Bloom in the safety of an Aedwyn fortress-city and was too young to remember the third. She wanted to see the real Bloom in person just once, from outside the shelter of the fortress walls. Agon was a [Hunter] and Ilya’s husband, who would act as a guard and help to gather rare specimens. Feralin was an [Alchemist] and [Herbalist] whose passion for the craft drove her to want to be the first to gather the novel reagents created by the Bloom and experiment with whatever concoctions she could make of them. Ethriel was a [Priest] of Aedolin who saw their quest as a holy mission. He gave her such a patronizing look whenever their eyes met that she opted to avoid his attention altogether.
Finally, there was Ludwin, who gathered stories like a squirrel hoarded nuts. He claimed he happened upon the group by following a peculiar thread, whatever that meant. Eofe understood that his purpose was to chronicle the people and their stories rather than the Bloom.
The sun dipped below the horizon and dusk turned to night as Eofe listened to their conversations. Eofe couldn’t help but compare them to her own people. They weren’t all that different, really, besides the bright clothing and silly accents. They were less wary than they ought to be, but maybe that was fine in a place where the greatest threat appeared to be tame aurochs. And when the real dangers showed up, they would behind their city walls the same way the Surag hid behind their Wardens.
Eofe waited awkwardly while they slowly trickled off to bed, until Ludwin took mercy on her and offered her his tent. “It is good to sleep under the stars now and then,” he said.
Eofe laid her bedroll down in his tent and pretended to sleep. She waited until the camp had settled down and she could no longer hear anyone whispering or shuffling about. Then she quietly gathered her things and left. She cast [Light Step] and [Leave No Trace] to help her exit the camp. The moon and stars provided enough light to guide her path, reflecting off the gentle river that wound its way to the Southwest. Eofe followed the river partially through the night until she came across a small hillock not far from the bank. She laid her bedding on the south side of the hill, opposite from the camp she fled. There she slept alone until dawn.