The Woodsman's Lament
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| Introduced: | December 2022 Patch |
- Value: 0
- Burden: 10
- 12 of 12 pages full.
- A tale of the spirit of the Mother Pine.
When trying to distill the essence of his life into a few pages, where does a man begin? Like all living creatures, I was born. As a child, I lived with my parents in a nameless hamlet in Aluvia. My father was a woodsman and at times, a poacher. He taught me his crafts.
The years of my youth seemed endless, filled with too many joys and hardships to recount. I grew into my manhood. I built a cabin of my own. I made enemies and friends. I had a wife. But none of that is relevant to who I am now.
As with everyone brought here from Ispar, my life can be divided neatly along one line: what came before the portal, and what came after. The parents, those friends, that wife—they may as well have belonged to someone else. My memories of them are like dreams of another man's life.
That old life ended on a warm afternoon in autumn, while I was alone in the woods setting snares. A voice called to me—a voice I heard only in my heart. It seized me with an irresistable need to go to it, to answer it, so I raced off through the trees, tripping over roots and rocks, until I stumbled out into a clearing and saw the portal standing before me--a pane of purple light so bright it hurt to look at.
The voice called to me, and I was compelled to enter. .
An instant later, I appeared on a hilltop outside of Glendenwood. How long I remained there, stumbling about in confusion, I do not know. But at some point I noticed smoke curling up through the trees. The fires of a settlement. Which meant people. People who might have answers. That smoke was an achor, tethering me to my sanity.
In Glendenwood, I was fed and clothed--and consoled. All was explained. Or all that anyone truly knew. The answers were unsatisfactory. For half a year I grieved for my old life. Perhaps I would have continued that way forever, except the older couple who had taken me in began to weary of my despondency, and it was clear that I would have to pull myself together or suffer greater hardship.
Everyone in this world told me there was no going back. So I decided I would try to start a new life. I was young, you see, and still capable of hope.
For some years I labored as a woodcutter near Holtburg in the employ of an old dame who claimed ownership of the forest south of town. Strange and menacing creatures stalked the woods of this new world, but I was brash and strong, and there was also the lifestone's protection, though I had not yet tested it for myself and naturally did not quite believe. I was soon to put it to the test.
Growing restless with laboring for another's profit, I decided to seek my fortune in the wilds. At that point I did not realize how thorougly the firstcomers had tamed the land around those early settlements. A few days north along the river, my trek came to a swift end at the hands of an ogre. I shall not recount in detail the horror of a violent death, the agony of the lifestone's ressurection. We are not meant to experience such things, and live to remember them.
After several months licking my wounds and recovering my strength, I set out again. The wanderlust was upon me, you see, and after all I had survived. In fact, I could not die. That thought was intoxicating. I was a little god. I could never end--I could only be diminished, and at that time, the fire inside me seemed inexhaustible.
My journey into the far north of Osteth was an unending flight from one danger to the next, never truly safe, never truly able to rest. I recall very little of it—it is a blur of hunger, fear and pain.
Then there came a morning in high summer when I woke among in the boughs of a great pine. I had climbed there in the night to hide from Banderlings, who despite the length of their limbs can no more climb a tree than a fish. As the morning light streamed through the needles, I surveyed the surrounding woodland for signs of danger, but as I did I sensed...a presence. There is no other way to describe it. It was like waking in the night and finding my mother watching over me as I lay in bed.
The wind sighed through the branches, and the presence favored me with what I will call a smile—a touch wry perhaps that I had taken so long to notice its existence.
A spirit inhabited that tree.
My father had warned me of such beings haunting the woods of Ispar. Silly supersitions, I had thought. But now in this world of magic, I had met one for myself, and I believed.
How long I remained there among the boughs, communing with the Mother Pine, I do not know. A week, a month, a year? A lifetime maybe. Her language is a slow one, of images and feelings.
When I returned to myself at last, my hair had grown long and was streaked with silver. But I was neither hungry, nor weary. If I have ever felt more whole I cannot remember it. I was truly at peace.
The trees in the grove are an extension of the mother pine. Like hair, they are continuously renewed. The Mother Pine gave me leave to cut them so long as the wood is treated with reverence. And such wood you have never seen before! No pine has produced wood so fragrant, that splits at the merest whisper of an axe, that yields so readily to knife and chisel and yet once finished becomes hard as stone.
For happy years we lived together in harmony.
Then on a night when all was silent and bitter cold, I woke to the sound of a terrible crack! My mind was addled still by sleep, but I had spent too long a woodcutter to truly mistake the sound for anything else.
It was an axe.
I rolled out of bed and strapped on my beltknife. With a branch from the fire in one hand, and my own axe in the other, I blundered out into the snow, altogether bewildered.
But whatever strange and wayward traveler I imagined I might find, the reality was something else entirely. In the shadow of the Mother Pine stood a creature. He went about on two legs, and at first I took him for some wildman dressed in animal skins, for he was covered in shaggy fur. But then he raised the axe, and by the pale moonlight I could see that the fur on his arms was his own. And upon his head were the great curving horns of a ram...
The beast swung his axe with another terrible crack! And like a rabbit breaking cover, the spirit of the Mother Pine could no longer conceal her presence.
Fear. She radiated fear so powerful it nearly unmanned me. And the goat-man cried out in pleasure, obscene pleasure. He had felt her fear too, and it delighted him.
I am not a brave man. In truth, I am something of a coward. But the spirit in the Mother Pine is more precious to me than life itself.
Before the Krampus could raise his axe again, I staggered forward, waving my torch and axe. I do not know if I even came close to landing a blow--I only remember coming to on my back, my face numb with pain and blood running freely from my nose.
And as I lay in the snow, I heard another crack! And the beast groaned again in sick pleasure. A wave of fear and misery washed over me—both the Mother Pine's and my own. Never have I felt so powerless, so desperate. I was clearly outmatched. So I did all that I could—I begged. On my hands and knees I groveled through the snow, pleading for mercy. I do not know if my swollen lips were forming words, or if I merely babbled, but the creature understood my intention nevertheless.
The Krampus turned his cruel goat's eyes upon me. There was no bargain struck, no haggling over terms. He strode through the snow on his goat's hooves, and hysterical with fear I laughed at the daintiness of his steps. Then he raised his axe again, and fear seized me again and I shut my eyes, thinking, 'My life for hers...'
The Krampus took only my legs. Somehow despite the shock and agony, I have a memory of seeing him from behind as he took his precious little goat-steps through the snow, my legs slung over his shoulder. Or maybe I only imagined that...
Surely I would have bled out in the snow, but the Mother Pine called upon the greater portion of her strength to heal me. She sealed my wounds, but could not regrow what was lost.
Often I have wondered what would have happened if I had been allowed to die. Would the lifestone have restored my legs to me? Or would I have endured the darkness of death, the wrenching pain of rebirth only to find myself in Holtburg still half a man, so many leagues away from my tree spirit that I could never reach her again on my own.
For now the Krampus allows us to live only because he thrives off our misery. I cannot leave the Mother Pine, but I cannot protect her either. She would heal me fully, or let me go, but cannot. And so the purity of what we once had is despoiled, soured by resentment and grief.
Worst of all is knowing that, off in a cave somewhere, the Krampus is in exstacy.
Someday though, he will grow bored of tormenting us, and he will return to end my life and cut down my lovely tree. You, my reader, would do well to be long gone from here when that day comes.
Notes
- Found in Pierre's cabin.