[Hlaeth] Ch 2 - Finding the Cause

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            The patrol hissed as they came to halts on the branches of various forest giants. They were almost directly beneath where the explosion had taken place, and the results of it extended out before them, still ongoing.

            Spreading away from them in a broad swath, the entire forest had been chopped apart. Space had come apart, and with it the forest and everything within it, from the highest canopy to the deepest roots.

            Branches chopped off trees. Trunks severed more precisely than a razor could cut paper. Roots chopped apart and unable to anchor the trunks above, toppling the rare few that still stood under their own weight.

            The cracks and crashing of the forest coming down and dying didn’t raise anywhere near the ruckus it should have from anything living. The only birds in the air and insects flying were at the edge of the affected area, around it, and bleeding into it now from outside.

            There was nothing standing intact before them, the whole forest mowed down by a billion demented scythes that had chopped it and every living thing there apart, harvesting everything in one instant of foul magic.

            The sight of it was gut-wrenching, but their captain and the scout leader just pointed grimly.

            Straight down the center of the arc of devastation was a trail of fire. The flames burning on it were sapphire and crystal, gold and silver, clearly unnatural, and had punched directly through multiple tree trunks, all of them now fallen, as well as any branches that had gotten in the way. Black streaks rose up from the flames as they mindlessly and rapidly devoured the wood and greenery around them, but they also seemed to be naturally dissipating, the magic empowering them slowly being quenched and chased away by the rising power and effrontery of the forest itself.

            The forest in the area couldn’t help them move through it here, dead and dying as it was, and the magic they used had to be drawn from the Brown instead of the Green. That was fine, as magic was called on, and primal energy increased their speed, strength, agility, balance, and leaping power. The scouts began to navigate the fallen trunks and tumbled branches with magical leaps and bounds, finding a way through the chaos and following the path.

            They were perhaps halfway to their goal when a sad horn blew, and they converged on one of the archers, who was staring below, tears dripping from his eyes at a partial clearing that had somehow remained, while branches hundreds of feet tall formed a dying canopy above them.

            It was an entire blessing of unicorns, and they were all dead, slaughtered by the foul magic that had claimed so much of the forest!

            They had been chopped apart as randomly and thoroughly as the trees. Limbs severed, heads cut off, bodies split open. Their blood and organs were splayed about the place, sacred hides of pure white and golden yellow and rare blue-black splattered with their own ruby blood, the entire group of ten sliced apart and killed in almost an instant.

            It took great efforts of will for those watching to hold back their tears on seeing such a terrible sight, but the captain finally managed to bow her head and whisper, “Take their alicorns and then bury them in the green. Nothing will feast upon them.”

            Heavy daggers suitable for woodsman’s work were pulled out, and the scouts descended.

            When they left the clearing minutes later, the grasses and ferns were rising with supernatural speed, closing over the bones and bodies of the dead unicorns. Flesh withered and was drawn away with magical speed, bones yellowed and crumbled, and grass and mold reached up and drew the remains down and away into a carpet of green.

            Within minutes, there was no sign the blessing had died there, and the scavengers now flocking to the smell of blood, so much blood from everything there being cut apart, would have no unicorns to feed upon.

            Ahead of them, they could now see that the arc of destruction at Grandmother Dancing Moon, the great Elder weirwood of this section of the forest, the silver lights that danced among over two thousand feet of boughs and leaves giving the great Tree its name. The arc of destruction parted around her, and four of her seven attendant weirwoods had been chopped through and fallen about her, a heartstopping loss of some of the mightiest and eldest trees of the entire forest.

            There, there, and there, they could see the arc also disrupted, as Grandfather Dawnsong, the Sunbloom, had defied the magic, though most of his own grove had been scythed through. Grandmother Sadwind, the Elder Heartlonging Tree, and Grandfather Chimelight, the Crystal Needle Pine, had also endured the blast, creating shelters behind them as they did so, but losing many in their own groves who had not been able to stop the effect.

            The trail of fire led unerringly up to Grandmother Dancing Moon, as precise as a gun.

            Most notably, there were none of the attendants upon the tree that there should have been, raising a hue and cry and alarms, a fact which filled the scouts with even more foreboding.

            With deadly intent and as quickly as they could make it over the fantastically broken ground, the scouts converged on the end of the trail of fire.

------

            I sat there and rebuilt myself, doing nothing but extending my Eyes of Heaven. It was still working perfectly well, dovetailed with my Mask and Permanents, and tracked every living thing in the area around me, or at least that which didn’t live a cold and colorless block to my sight.

            The big Tree behind me was sapient and aware of me, not knowing quite what to think of me until I started pulling at the Primal Magic for some of my Healing, and then it realized I was a servant of the Four Seasons of the Natural Cycle.

            It didn’t take much to put my Whiskers of the Wild into place and be able to chat with the old duffer.

            I first thanked it for stopping me and asked if it needed me to heal the impact wound in its bark. It demurred, it was nothing, and instead it inquired about what the Hell had just happened and how I was involved in it.

            I informed it that an extraplanar invasion had been about to hit it, and the Dimensional Fracturing was an attack meant to clear the area of the landing of anything waiting there in ambush. I sort of had to rephrase it as an invading ecology of the animal sort, one hostile to plant growth and willing to turn the whole forest into a bonfire and harvest the wood for spears and arrows and engines of war to make it understand just how dire the threat was, for which I garnered its thanks.

            In the direction I’d come from, there was nothing alive. Nothing. Not a plant or animal had survived, and even the bacteria looked like they’d been dimensionally cut through. Without enough Soak or dimensional stability from magic, the spell had sliced through their Health and just taken everything apart.

            Pretty sick and disgusting spell.

            When sapients did suddenly pop up, radiating Green, Brown, and Orange, I inquired of the Weirwood as to what was going on. It informed me that they were of the keepers, a humanoid race that trimmed up the trees and saw to parasites and other minor nuisances, sometimes singing to it and sharing magic of the forest. Mostly harmless.

            I readjusted that to creatures that venerated the trees and served as treekeepers in an ancient and primal forest that was not safe to wander about in, and decided that it would be good to be more prepared.

            A Force Shield flickered up, tight and controlled, from my Shardcasting Mastery. I wasn’t concerned about not being able to run away, especially as none of the incoming keepers seemed to be over Ten, but I didn’t want to have to kill anyone if I could help it. Shardcasting let me raise one such Shield a day, which I’d invested in enough to instead do four times… although I couldn’t remember a time when I actually needed to raise four Force Shields in a day, as I’d never been subjected to that much melee or missile pressure.

            Didn’t matter. It had only been a Feat, I’d used it, and there it was.

            My Rings and Staff were unaffected by anything going on around me, and would really be able to surprise people with the variety of spells and effects they could put out. Feature was also almost completely restored and could come out instantly if required. The disruptive experience I had just gone through had messed up most of my Spellcasting Matrix, so I was basically left with SLA’s and special abilities until Renewal set things right.

            Huh, I might actually have to rely on wildshaping or something to get away from here if needed...

            I watched as the first one caught sight of me through the hills of downed skyscraper-class trees, the massive sliced trunks barrier enough, but the broken branches mounding them up to obstructions that could be hundreds of feet high. Still, the incoming beings were zipping through them all with skill and alacrity, meaning they probably had Class abilities related to wilderness movement.

            Rangers or Druids, most likely.

            Huh. Downed weirwoods all around me...

            There was exactly one living weirwood back on Terra-Luna, and it was a baby barely fifty feet high at this time. It was growing at the northeastern tip of Michigan, in the middle of the temperate rain forest that was springing up there with the massive water flow from the Missouri River and the Great Lakes coming together.

            Everyone in the game knew that weirwood was the best wood discovered for making Staves and the like, and likely wouldn’t be exceeded until we came across a World Tree or something similar. I had the remains of multiple weirwoods around me, worth as much by weight as gold.

            Tens of thousands of tons of weirwood, and I wasn’t the one who chopped them down.

            The keepers, however, could not be unaware of the value of the dead trees, so that was a bit of a bummer. I guess I’d just have to be clever about how I appropriated some. Saving them from an extraplanar invasion by orcs was definitely worth some form of compensation, although, based on those Auras, I doubted they were willing to give me any.

            Also, given I couldn’t spellcast right now, it was going to be rather difficult to get away with things.

-------

            A… human?

            His dark skin was reddened, as if freshly burned by flames or magic, but it didn’t seem to discomfit him, although much of his clothing was eroded or burned away by it. It hadn’t affected the silken white of his hair, hanging free and clean, his round ears clearly visible and exposed.

            Humans were known to be a violent race, aggressive and greedy, desiring all that their people had and perfect willing to lie, cheat, kill, and steal not only from other species, but from one another to satisfy their desires.

            That a human was involved with, or even responsible for, this disaster would be an impressive achievement for such savage barbarians, but was not that far outside the realm of possibility, and certainly believable in the absence of other explanations.

            It was hard to tell what this one was. There was a clear indentation on the trunk of Grandmother Dancing Moon, seared and scarred, similar to the patch on the ground directly below it where it looked like the human had landed on fire, and a very, very hot fire at that.

            His build looked that of a warrior, rippling and strong, even if his darkly hued skin, closer to earth then bronze, looked too red at the edges for now. He was still holding onto a staff that looked… to be made out of crystalline wood or something, topped with a clear ruby orb of some kind that was either a serviceable mace head, or indicated a Wizard of some sort.

            Oh, yes, she’d heard before that human Wizards used tools to Cast their spells. They had difficulty channeling magic without them, unlike her own people…

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