Postby Pallas » Mon Nov 08, 2021 1:19 am
( OOC for context. This is the story related by Pallas. It was too long to post here prior to the event. It was produced several years ago for a FallFest forum event, and written as though it was a spoken tale being committed to parchment. )
‘Evil 'midst the Trees’
Two brothers - I don't know the names, those are lost in time - roamed the lands for a while and eventually decided to settle in Verthedge. You should understand the forest then was even wilder than it now is. Wolves roamed, hunting other creatures to be found there, and vultures fed on the remains. Bushes and weeds grew all around, strangling the trees that tried to burst through to meet the light of the 'rifter. And everywhere, massive stands of thistles grew.
The brothers built themselves a cottage, and took to caring for the forest. They looked after the trees, thinning them so that some could grow straight and strong and tall, and they cleared the underbrush that tried to hinder the trees' growth.
Under their care the forest flourished. They worked with plants and flowers, breeding the best and most beautiful, experimenting with crossing different ones to produce ever more exotic blooms.
I can't say what happened to those two men. Over time their minds ... changed. They saw the forest, the trees they'd nurtured, the blooms they'd created, and it must have seemed they hadn't done enough. For cycle on cycle of the 'rifter they'd worked looking after, and experimenting with, strains of plants and flowers, but felt they had achieved nothing.
Maybe it was solitude. Maybe it was some influence from the Dead Zone, or the baleful effect of increasing numbers of demons infesting the forest. Whatever the reason, their thoughts and their work took a darker, more evil direction as they changed their experiments, turning their attention to other creatures that made a home among the trees.
You can maybe understand why they'd want the thistle banks to just move away of their own accord, to save the work of cutting them down and so on. But how can a plant walk unless you breed it to have legs? Or you might somehow join it with another being that already has legs ... and why, as the forest got busier with more adventurers exploring were there so many reports that some just disappeared? As for the wolves - they just got bigger and bigger. Smarter too. Almost as if they'd been given a better brain than a wolf should have. They hunted the forest more cunning than before, catching demons and dragging them back to the cottage to feed, once the brothers had taken what they needed. And the vultures grew too. Maybe because they had more to eat. And maybe for other reasons, who can tell?
Anyhow, what with the breeding, and the demons taken to the cottage, the disappearance of adventurers and the ever-wilder experiments, that part of the forest changed to a foul, blighted place.
The brothers rarely left their home, staying inside and working - always working. Their minds lost touch with the lands beyond their door, and the reality they made for themselves was dark and twisted and evil, full of blood and torment.
One day a traveller - scared half out of his wits he was - came to Dundee, telling wild tales of a cottage in the forest filled with rotting body parts, the walls spattered with blood, and the scattered remains of two bodies inside. A few brave souls went to investigate, admitting on their return that what they'd seen left them retching and trembling 'til they gathered the strength to run. Those crazed brothers must have tired of experimenting on animals and whatever adventurers passed by, and each seen the other as a good test subject - and during whatever confrontation had ensued, they'd hacked each other to pieces.
Since then the cottage seems to have faded from the sight of most, but from time to time people report that they've seen it, and tell of dark mists, and screams, and a crushing feeling of sheer dread.
A half-dozen people thought to find the cottage, burn it down and put an end to things. After a cycle of the 'rifter they'd not returned, and a second party set out to discover what had happened. They entered the cottage ... and of the first group all they found was just a hacked-off hand still clutching a quill, resting on a piece of blood-splattered parchment on which was scrawled 'gods help us ... they're here ... '
They say that those two brothers, whose work began so well and gave us the magnificent forest we now see, became turned and twisted somehow. They might, or might not, be the reason behind the creatures that prowl there now, hunting down each other and any adventurer who sets foot between the soaring trees. They're not remembered for the gift they left us - only for a cottage shrouded in darkness and doom, thankfully rarely seen.
It’s said that the good a man does dies with him - but evil acts, and their consequences, can remain with us.
Forever.
The joke is on the bloke who never spoke a word at all
But whose dreams lay unrevealed 'til they were rotten ...
Lindisfarne 'The Things I Should Have Said'