This business with acorns and shadow-battles is lifted from a quest I recall from … I want to say the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. I can't recall the chain in its entirety, but I remember it striking me as very useful in my own story as a way to help a certain little blood elf in his recovery.
It's been so long since then. Wild to think about.
I wonder, often, what Sythius might look like if I manage to write out his story in its entirety, leading up to the current expansion (which, as of this writing, is Dragonflight).
.
Typically, those who followed Sythius into battle rarely had cause to watch him work, and would only ever see the results of the greenhorn druid's conquests on the field; typically in the form of rotting, broken corpses; if they had seen him fight, it was when the spirit of the bear had hold of him and he became a thunderstorm of fangs and claws. Precious few had ever seen Sythius use the spear he carried lashed to his back, with its stone head the size of a man's fist.
He held it tightly at one end, leaving it embedded in the granite of his mammoth left fist; his other hand, up hear the head, was loose, ready to maneuver. The druid's face was awash with excitement in direct contrast to the raving, rabid fury of his shadow-wrought double.
Where his doppelganger had only rage, Sythius had the thrill of competition.
In an explosion of movement, they both sprang forward.
Enveloped in the misty haze of the Dream, neither figure retained much substance for long, and what might have been a sequence of hard, bloody collisions ended up being stiff echoes; neither version of Sythius made contact with each other; it was a visual representation, barely tactile, of a pure contest of wills.
The clangs and sparks of weapon on claw—for Sythius's shadow did not use weapons, choosing instead to use his bare hands—did not come until long, meandering seconds had passed. The elf's grunts and growls of effort sounded like rocks tossed down a dark, dank hole in some abandoned cave: far-off and vanished.
They were equally matched, Sythius and this shadow-thing, and the druid could not have been more pleased if he had hand-built an encounter for himself. The true danger of the Emerald Dream was not the strength and power of these hallucinations, given life by the Nightmare; it was the seduction of finally meeting his own match in single combat. Never before had he felt such a thrill of excitement, such exhilarating catharsis, as this. The closest he'd ever come to this moment was when he'd first stepped into the wilds of Winterspring and stood his ground against a full-grown male Shardtooth bear. Not since then, nearly a century past, had the danger of death been so imminent, so tantalizing, that he could taste it.
Sythius was a creature of instinct, and here in the mists his instincts held sway. He forgot, in most ways that mattered, about his mission in the thrill of battle; forgot, in most ways that mattered, about the pitiful little elfling dying on his watch; forgot, in most ways that mattered, that he was even in the Emerald Dream, and that the acorns in his belt pouch might have some importance to him.
This was his life, boiled down to its quintessence.
Dip, pivot, step, leap, crash!
The druid sank into the spilled green paint of the grass forest floor, rolled onto his back, and pushed his opponent away with his huge legs; muscles built up from a lifetime of hard labor rippled, and he threw the thing over his head, rolled back, and pinned it in the space he'd been only seconds before. He drove his spearhead into a throat that had no substance, threw his head back, and roared.
Back in the true Moonglade, his companions felt their hearts leap into their throats as Sythius's unconscious body arched upward and mirrored that primeval call.
Sythius stood, tossed his head around, snorted. He looked no less than the feral predator he felt burning and bursting within him; his face was aglow with pride at a successful conquest, and he watched with grim satisfaction as the shadow-thing faded into the grass.
He remembered, in time, his mission. He reached down for the acorn he had just won so handily, tossed it into the air, and slipped it into his pouch. He tried to recall what his lady mother had told him about how to return to the living world.
The Shrine of Remulos, came her voice in his memory, and he turned about to take the full scope of his surroundings. He found it, far off in the distance: a landmark he remembered from his first visit to this glade, so many decades ago; it was a tree in the shape of an elf-maiden. As a child, he had thought that Remulos, the great and noble child of Cenarius who guarded the glade, was this tree's companion.
Sythius leaned forward and began to run, full tilt, keeping the tree ever in his sights.
The mission was almost complete.
Kin would be healed, he would wake, and all would be well; never once did he wonder if Anathala might fail.
So focused on these thoughts, he ignored everything; including the hazy shadows of more Nightmare-things, slowly flowing into existence around him, keeping just to the outer limits of his peripheral vision.
