Unnamed

lore by Alexstrasza






High over the Gladeveins, where the plains meet the reeds and the reeds meet the water, a sea of long-dead trees blankets the marshy earth. The trees, rough-hewn by wind and rain and long since petrified, are mired in the wispy threads of ley energy that drift out from the sanctum to the west. The magic in the wood is twisted and ancient, both of the earth and completely alien - a layover, no doubt, from a time before dragons stirred the seas and moved the mountains. The dragons of the Viridian Labyrinth would see these trees as a thing of some importance were they not irrevocably dead. They instead stand undisturbed in the shadow of the great tree, disinterested as the Gladekeeper’s adherents are in the lifeless reaches of their verdant wood; all the better for the outlanders.

At the heart of the lifeless forest is a small, still lake of sickly turquoise, and at its center stands a single tree. Its wear is deliberate, manufactured, sculpted meticulously into the wood with spear and claw. The barkless structure twists dozens of meters up into the sky, its grasping branches casting long, diffuse shadows over the water below. Massive, lifeless vines slither up out of uncertain depths and wind around the structure, coiling around the stony thorns that jut out of its walls. The taste of the air is acrid with the essence of putrefaction; neither animals nor plants dare make their homes in this dead mire, save for the hardiest of ferns and insects - and Opheodra.

She sees the pursuits of the Gladekeeper’s followers as frivolous vanity projects - affronts to nature that value beauty over function - and wears her distaste for the Nature flight on her sleeve. While she would never dream of letting herself get dragged into cyclical ideological battles, she has criticisms for the Gladekeeper in spades, and works to curb the spread of verdure into the ancient marshland.


The ancient tree - “Bramblespire”, the druid calls it - is more luxuriant than any world tree could ever hope to be. Hand-carved passages twist deep into the ancient oak, all opening beneath its jagged, leafless canopy; the passages empty into a domed chamber at the base of the structure, and this chamber is where the eerie spiral makes her home. Black banners have been hammered into the aged wood, and into their surfaces have been stitched the innumerable elytra of viridescent beetles. Where there aren’t drapes there are frames, all different shapes and sizes, all showcasing the pressed bodies of insects and arachnids.

The torches lining the openings of the passages are few and far between, leaving the center of the room incredibly dim, but that is probably for the best - otherworldly things scuttle around audibly in the darkness, the sounds of their little footfalls and chirping wings compounding into a deafening drone-song. Long mushrooms grow up out of the floor and down from the ceiling like living stalactites, their soft bodies shifting and breathing. The scent of rot is pungent enough here to turn the strongest stomachs, but the decay is true, uncorrupted, pure. Opheodra would have it no other way, for she reviles the Plaguebringer as much as she does the Gladekeeper for her affront to life.

Nature is far out of balance, Opheodra thinks, and it has been for time immemorial; the world has been built on the backs of eleven dragons whose selfish goals have been successfully overshadowed by shows of power and proclamations of divinity. The spiral stews resentfully in her dead tree fortress, her only source of comfort the legions of insects that bend to her beck and call. If anyone has ever shown the world true love, it is the bugs, so selfless they are in their communal pursuits. She has always seen herself as just like them - feeble, many-eyed, never taken seriously by those who see themselves as mightier - and they have always afforded her a great deal of comfort and loyalty.

She can only give them her loyalty and love and return, and the honesty of a true caretaker - when her time comes to blacken the sky, after all, her many million adherents will put their lives on the line to see the deed done. She would be cruel to deny them her affection - no better than a god.