Summer 8, 125
Fenrir's mind flashed and she was in darkness, her back pressed against a cold wet wall. At the mouth of the alley, silhouetted against the light were a group of aelves. Their hair was black and coarse, their breath stank of strange flora. She remembered screaming, and she remembered their laughter. Most of all she remembered the look in their eyes as they had approached her cowering in the corner.
Fenrir stepped forward from her group of treants, past the large elysian that led the pack and into the line of sight of this man they called Gandr. His dark eyes snapped towards her, and she was back in that alleyway and could feel it all over again. Inside of her, deep down in the darkness when a flame had been ignited. She could feel it consuming her whole body, enveloping her in fire.
With rage in her heart and fire flowing out of her like a raging river she wanted to attack him. Gandr was an aelf she had deeply hated for a long time despite being coworkers. The kind that would tiptoe the line of legality and was a general pain in the ass for people like her. Oh how she wanted to put him in jail but he was friends with the right people and even with her treants she had never found concrete evidence of wrongdoing. Gandr enjoyed how uncomfortable he made her feel.
The sun had long since set and the night air smelled of roasted pig. In the main camp outside of the town the group of aelves huddled around a small fire. Above the fire was the carcass of a pig, slowly roasting. The flames flared as liquid fat dripped from the meat. With the smell invading Fenrir’s nostrils, she heard her stomach begging to be fed though it needed little actual nourishment. Everyone was huddled around a small table with a topographical map of their terrain. There were markings of where the camp was and then miles south were additional markings. Members of the unit exchanged glances and chuckled. All were eager to fight and some were thirsty for blood.
“Fancy seeing you here,” he said to her, looking at her treants. “There’s less of them than I remember. Did you lose them?”
Fenrir said, “I’m not here to chat. I’ve been ordered to destroy this village as it’s a suspected hub for faelnir dissenters. Kindly move out of the way so I can get started.” It was awfully suspicious for Gandr to be here of all places, but he wasn’t doing anything wrong… just standing around with some of his friends.
He shrugged and waved over one of the faelnir guards. He was a heavy set guy who looked like he’d spent his whole life lifting heavy things. The man had over a foot on her…
“This one lives here. You prepared to take him on? I’d love to see the two of you fight.”
Fenrir ran forwards and her fists slammed into his body and face. She had speed and strength, what she lacked was finesse. She knocked the confused look off his face, and the teeth out of his stupid smirking mouth. She could feel her small hands thud into his thick muscle, and felt it give way. The fiery emotions inside her grew stronger as she kept on pummeling the innocent faelnir who knew better than to fight back.
“I’m sorry, whatever I did I’m sorry,” he said between gasps of breath when she was finally done with him.
“Ooooh, that can’t be good,” Gandr said when a crowd of faelnir started to come closer. “If these people had a poor opinion of aelves before…” he spoke just low enough for only Fenrir and his friends to hear. They all snickered.
“Who cares? They’re all about to be dead.” Fenrir cracked her knuckles and mentally commanded her treants to march forwards. She’d already surrounded the village and there were hundreds of fetch birds flying in the sky to spot anyone that might try to slip through the cracks in her offensive.
The large faelnir stumbled back, taken by surprise of what he’d just heard. “No… my dauchter…” he said. The next thing Fenrir knew, a large hand shot out and grabbed her by the throat. He nearly crushed her windpipe and probably would have if Gandr hadn’t pulled out his sword and cut off the man’s hand in a matter of moments.
“I’ll help you with these pathetic creatures,” Gandr began, the smell of unwashed teeth on his breath.
Fenrir frowned, not liking that there was no time to give a witty retort because Gandr ran into the village. Is that why he was here? Just to have fun killing faelnir? She would never understand him. The bloodshed provoked a sense of nostalgia and sadness simultaneously, only for those emotions to vanish as fast as they had come when an echoing detonation came from the center of the village.
Fenrir prepared to rush into battle as well, but she had just taken one step when she felt that several things were..."off." Her perception of time felt slower, her muscles felt heavier, and overall... she felt weaker. Her treants weren’t affected, just her. Then she noticed that there was something coming out of the site of the explosion. Some kind of smoke or debris that was causing this debilitating effect. If she didn’t know better, she would have thought it was some kind of weapon designed to annoy the fuck out of aelves.
Both reality and gravity seemed to have come to an agreement to come in effect at the same time for the aelf, and with a surprised, muffled grunt Fenrir fell. She managed to direct the fall into landing on one knee. She struggled to stand and failed for she was too heavy. Gandr seemed equally affected and so did a good number of the faelnir. But there were a good number who weren’t, and they had all brandished weapons. The fired arrows and struck out at the approaching treants, but they were an unstoppable force. It took a handful of men to take down a good sized treant without using magic, and there were many treants.
It was very aggravating, but Fenrir took that anger and used it to catch up to the other aelves. The effects were annoying, but she was acclimating quickly. She was going to say something, but a dagger whizzed past her face. The second dagger missed by inches, but the third nearly hit when one of Gandr’s lackeys fell backwards into her. He reached for something in his arm and pulled out a knife. His wound healed over in an instant as he poured saol into it, then he threw it back at the faelnir who threw it, killing him instantly. It’d been a rather lucky throw given how most of his body was covered in armor that would protect against such attacks.
At the center of the madness was a single faelnir who was dressed in robes. He was a mage – each key location part of the brewing faelnir rebellion had at least one competent mage. He wasn’t stupid – he knew that there was no getting out of this situation. All he could do was try to take down any aelves that he could. He spotted Fenrir and he clenched his fist. The aelves were nothing more than bullies. Villains who were used to taking life as they pleased, with little resistance when they sought to destroy the lives of others. He knew that aelves were strong, and in his mind the strong survived and ruled with an iron fist.
"I have no idea how you found out about us, but you’re beginning to annoy me,” the mage declared in a booming voice. He cast a spell that knocked several treants down as they closed in, but Gandr rushed up to him and smashed his fist into him, dropping him to the ground. Blood speckled the ground where he'd coughed it when his innards were smashed together, forcing the air from his lungs. Gandr stood over him, a twisted grin on his face.
Gandr managed to catch the legs of a passing faelnir, smashing him into the ground and pulverizing his bones. A scream erupted from his lips as his leg flattened like a pancake. Laying on his back, he could only watch as the foot raised again, preparing to come down for the killing blow.
"Well that was stupid. You should have fled, but I guess you were in a rush to die," he said, spitting on the faelnir’s back. The faelnir clenched his teeth, but the pain was too intense to jump right back up. When he tried to, he felt a heavy foot land on his head, forcing the side of his face into the ground cruelly. For a moment he forgot that it was an aelf that was torturing him. Pain was pain.
Though his face was pushed into the dirt, he could just see his many friends out of the corner of his eye, cowering against the crumbling wall of a destroyed hut that had once been their home. A look of fear sat on a child's face, then his eyes went wide and it was replaced with an expressionless stare as a treant’s fist tore through his tiny torso. The mage screamed and braced for his own turn, but he heard a dull thud and the pressure on his head disappeared.
The faelnir quickly sat up and saw that someone had tackled Gandr to the ground. Fenrir watched all this as she inched forwards. She was ill equipped to fight against people that had weapons, but she would rather she got torn to bits than another aelf since she could at least revive. She was just about to command her birds to finish off the problem faelnir when another explosion rocked the town. Another wave of debris made it hard to see anything for a short while.
Fenrir’s vision began to turn black, drops of ink on a clear film, spreading and congealing. Soon her vision went into total darkness and the pressure around her throat faded away as she floated in total black. She felt every inch of her body explode with sensation and then disappear, as if that part of her body was gone, lost to existence. Soon she felt as if her entire body was gone and she was nothing more than a cloud, or a splash of water on the ground.
The aelf heard a thud, and felt tingling spreading up her right side. Blotches of light pierced through the darkness of her vision as oxygen began to return to the retina of her eyes. She gasped, suddenly aware of her open throat and the clean air all around her.
Her lungs heaved as she sucked in breath after breath of air, the sudden rush of oxygen leaving her dizzy and unable to move. She lay on the ground, breathing and feeling vibrations all around her as the battle waged. She managed to turn her head to see that Gandr had finally had enough of melee combat. He’d activated an ensorcelled spell on his palm that had forced all the debris straight up into the air.
Fenrir forced herself to her feet, her body swaying to each side as she tried to right herself. The debilitating effects she’d experienced were quickly fading away and with that came a clear enough head to order her treants. Her birds swarmed down, pelting the faelnir mage with their claws and beaks even as he casted spells to try to ward them off. Fenrir had known there was at least one mage among them, but even though he was remarkably talented for a faelnir, he was alas one man without access to enough alkahest to be a bother.
The look in the man’s eyes was one of anguish, but not defeat. His face was twisted in agony and pure hatred, and it made Fenrir anxious to see such anger, waiting to be released like a coiled spring. His face and arms twisted at sickening angles as Fenrir commanded the roots in the ground to rise up and pierce into his body, slowly warping him into a verdant skeleton. Roots and leaves began to sprout from his body, spreading all over his skin. His eyes reddened and shone, as if they were full of blood and his face contorted into a snout and a row of bark-like teeth. His hands bulged and grew a wooden shell around them, and his nails lengthened into claws. He grew into a titan, standing above the faelnir around him like a god.
And then he finally died. The faelnir that still lived and fought stopped when they saw what happened to their leader. That’d been the last straw that had finally broken their resolve. Some cried, a few even resorted to killing themselves. But as of that moment, the battle was over.
“Everyone alright?” Fenrir asked the other aelves as they finally grouped back together.
“Well enough,” Gandr said for his group. “These faelnir are getting particularly crafty.”
“That they are. A lot has changed since I left.”
"Well, that was an interesting turn of events. It wasn't pretty, but it seems the task is done. Whoever it was behind this rebellion is clearly elsewhere. I imagine we will have further trouble with him, but for now I must thank you four for your help. Till we meet again,” Gandr said with a nod before leaving. Of course he wouldn’t stick around to help clean up the mess. Then again, Fenrir was happy that he didn’t. She could do her investigation in peace. She needed to find out what exactly what that explosion was and what kind of drug caused those debilitating effects. And she needed to do something about the bodies if she had enough reserves to make them into more soldiers.
Fenrir glanced up at the moon in the sky. That big beautiful orb from which she gained the energy to keep moving on each and every day. She took a deep breath, then moved onto one of the several faelnir who were still alive. She wordlessly held out her hand and commanded roots to do her dirty work. They threaded through the faelnir, causing pain to burn from all over and it peeled parts of his shirt and pants and then skin away. Even the soles of his shoes were penetrated at the bottom. He started to feel his consciousness slip away and something else inside him, apart from the anger he felt towards aelves and the fear of what could happen to himself and all who were and could suffer at the hand of this cruel fate. He wanted to do more and he didn’t want his life to end knowing his final effort was in vain. He didn’t want to leave behind his family and friends, and he didn’t want the pain to be his last living sensation.
He yelled in protest as roots erupted from his body. The hope he had might have been enough to become a paladin, alas he would not get the chance to solidify that pact, as he was now dead. The roots travelled to the other faelnir, grabbing and grouping them together in a heaping mass that was similar to that of an elder dragon. This feat took hundreds of bodies, basically everything that the town had at its disposal. It took hours, but Fenrir had time as she walked along and gathered evidence – multitasking was fairly simple for someone of her mental fortitude.
She investigated the source of the explosions to discover that there were a couple more bombs left that hadn’t detonated. She had one of her treants safely remove them and store then in her elysian’s storage compartments. She also found a number of correspondences with other villages like this. This rebellion was probably decades away from being viable enough to cause issues, but it was still annoying that things had gotten this bad. There was only one way to deal with it – kill all the dissenters.
The village was different by the time she was finished. The trees had all warped and distorted to form a massive colossus sized treant. It was about half flesh and half flora, though the flesh was encased entirely in wood. The treant looked simply monsterous. It looked humanoid except it was just the top half of the body. The bottom was a mass of roots that served to move the body along the ground. Its arms were massive, similar to the wingspan of an elder dragon which allowed it some seriously scary reach.
Its overall aesthetic was very rough. Its face looked nothing like any particular race – it was more of a scary triangle than anything defined. Its body also needed a lot of shaping and refining, but Fenrir could worry about that another time. Her treants could help shape it out to make it look better later. For now, she was just happy to have finished the body so she could raise it to get it out of here.
The village didn’t have any standing buildings at all anymore. The ground was littered with countless broken materials and blood dotted sporadically as far as the eye could see. Craters and destroyed buildings, even some small fires only added onto the scene and served to make the one responsible seem scarier than she already was.
She closed her eyes after raising the treant and appreciated the silence of the forest. She thought back to the battle… the sound of flesh tearing apart, the sight of blood spraying, and the broken body falling to the ground like puppets with their strings cut. She cackled, lifting her foot up, and brought it down in an eruption of blood as she crushed a skull she’d missed. All in all it hadn't been that bad of a day. She kept her large treant, nicknamed Sweeper, where it stood while taking her smaller one home with her. There, she syphoned Kringlo for his reserves and then went to bed.
Reserves:
4 - 0.75 (coderivative tether drain estimate) - 0.25 (master floramancy with grove discount) - 0.00926 (apprentice floramancy with grove discount) - 0.037 (apprentice raise) - 1 (master raise colossal treant) + 2 (syphoning Kringlo) = 3.95
X1 Apprentice Floramancy – Create verdant skeleton body (1/4 cost in grove)
X1 Master Floramancy (1/4 cost in grove)
Apprentice Raise – Raise verdant skeleton
X1 Master Raise colossal treant (Nickname: Sweeper - Humanoid, top half only. Long arms, triangle face, moves using a mass of roots)
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