Thinning the Glen, Meeting the Dryad

The Road

I opened my eyes beneath Shadowglen's boughs as though for the very first time, and perhaps I did — I remember no birth, only this: late-afternoon light falling gold and slow through trunks older than memory, and the sure, private conviction that the moon, hidden though she was behind the daylight, had winked at me from somewhere up there. I found my way soon after to Aldrassil, the great tree at Shadowglen's heart, its bark furrowed like the brow of a patient elder listening to a tale only it could hear. Between the glen and the tree I went back and forth more times than I care to admit, footsore and reverent in equal measure.

Battles

Nature, it turns out, needed thinning, and I was handed the shears. Seven young nightsabers fell before me, their cries swallowed by the deep hush of the trees, and five young thistle boars beside them, snuffling and stubborn to the last breath. A grellkin, twisted by whatever wrongness creeps through these woods, gave me a proper start before it too went still, and one weary old thistle boar besides. Fourteen lives, all told, ended by my staff today. I murmured a small word over each of them, as a druid ought — though by the tenth nightsaber the words had worn down to something more like sorry, sorry, truly sorry, rather a busy afternoon.

Deeds

Conservator Ilthalaine set me my first task, fretting that the spring's heavy rains had let the nightsaber and boar populations swell past what the glen could feed — "thin the boar and saber populations," he bade me, "so that nature's harmony will be preserved" — and when I returned he judged that I had "performed my duties well," which I intend to have embroidered on something. Melithar Staghelm then sent me to seek the dryad Tarindrella, whose sudden return had reached him on the whisperings of the forest spirits; I found her, and though she pressed a book into my hands, she also told me plainly that I still had much to learn, which stung slightly less coming from someone so ancient and green. She sent me after that into the abandoned camps of the Gnarlpine furbolg, hunting totems whose engravings might explain their turn to madness, and when I laid the totems before her she called it "even worse than I thought" — nightmares of some great shadow, she said, curdled slowly into rage. Ilthalaine, not finished with me, set a second task besides: to hunt the older mangy nightsabers and thistle boars now that the young ones were seen to. And Mardant Strongoak, my new teacher within Aldrassil, had me carry him a sigil, and spoke of a distant day when the call of the Emerald Dream will take me under for a long green sleep — a day I am, frankly, both terrified of and enormously looking forward to.

Fellowship

So many new faces in one evening. Tarindrella the dryad greeted me with a line I mean to remember on harder days:

Only in Nature do we find purity.

Terunne Bearshaper offered to teach me the gathering of leather from slain beasts, which I accepted with more enthusiasm than the task probably deserved. And as the light was fading, a woman named Dirania Silvershine caught me with real worry in her voice — her friend Iverron had not come by at his usual hour, and she asked me, if I went north toward the cave, to keep an eye out for him. I told her I would. I meant it.

Spoils & Craft

Tarindrella's book now sits carefully in my pack, unopened but promising. I also took my first steps into the practical arts today, learning the working of hides both raw and tanned — humble work for a druid who talks to trees, but even Elune, I suspect, appreciates a good coin purse.

Growth

I felt new strength settle into me before the evening was half done, the kind that makes a person stand a little taller under the canopy. My footing in combat sharpened — both my guard and my staff-work grew surer — and Mardant taught me the Mark of the Wild, a blessing I can now lay upon myself and, I hope, upon friends who ask nicely. Small steps, but Shadowglen does not seem the sort of place that rushes anyone.