The Bramble Princess
Kuhl stood in a ruined city of bone white buildings. From certain, limited vantages, the architecture looked intact and whole, eerie with silent abandonment but seemingly ready and available to be inhabited again. The elegant crystalline spires of these undamaged buildings stretched up into a twilight sky lit by the below-the-horizon sun and the moon and stars. But a slight shift of gaze right or left from those select vantages revealed the wide crater shaped holes pockmarking the cityscape. Explosions of war magic from the battles which destroyed Cendraine rent gaps in street pavers and made structures next to the intact ones piles of rubble. By Kuhl's reckoning the wild should have long ago overrun the place, but it only encroached, as if the Feywild itself wanted to preserve the memory of the city. Whether to preserve it in mourning for its loss or as a cautionary monument, the half-elf did not know.
"As impressive as these ruins are," Fargas said. "We don't want to linger out here. Not when Yarnspinner warned us about packs of stalking displacer beasts and eladrin vampires."
"He mentioned only a single eladrin vampire lord," Surash corrected. "But vampire minions are implied by the title."
"As fearsome as eladrin vampires surely are," Dawnbringer said in Kuhl's mind. "With me, you are well equipped to face some."
The half-elf wanted to be better equipped in general. Yarnspinner had lured them into the Feywild during a hunting trip, a trip Kuhl didn't bring his shield on. It was left behind in the elven village of Reitheillaethor rather than strapped to his back. Still, better than waking up chained and only wearing your undergarments he supposed.
"Even one vampire is enough to make me want to get out of here," the halfling said, casting a forlorn look at the now non-enchanted web portal which had brought them here. "Although, entering a thorn maze infested by vicious dryads is not much better."
Kuhl turned away from the ruined city and before him stretched the colossal wall of thorny brambles surrounding what had been the Great Central Glade of Cendraine. The entwined vines formed an impenetrable barrier. Impenetrable save for the gaping tunnel maw which seemed to beckon with its dark depths the way the edge of a cliff calls for a leap into an airy void. These brambles were not the plants of summer, full of green leaves and ripe black berries. Autumn red and orange colored the leaves on these vines and no berries were present, no ripe edible ones anyway.
"Kuhl has told stories," Fargas said, glancing at Takari. "Stories that you killed phaerimm, whatever those are, in the battles for Evereska. Is that true?"
"It is," the wood-elf replied, raising an inquisitive eyebrow.
"Just looking for a bit of reassurance," the halfling said. "I figure anyone who can handle phaerimm, again whatever those are, can handle dryads, no matter how vicious."
"In that war," Takari said, gaze going distant, presumably into the past. "The mages of Evereska tirelessly worked to give us arrows woven with death magic and other spells. My quiver has only normal arrows currently."
"Well," Fargas sighed. "That is less than reassuring."
"Take heart, Master Halfling," the wood-elf said. "As you say, dryads are not phaerrim, and are not evil. Perhaps we can reason with them."
With that, she strode forward into the gloom filled confines of the bramble tunnel. Kuhl followed, having to duck slightly to get under the vines growing overhead. Within a few paces the shadowy dimness gave way to full darkness as the growth was so thick it blocked the twilight light of the Feywild. With his dark vision, he could see, but Fargas and Surash would be nearly blind. Although the half-elf had noticed that, for a human, Surash did remarkably well in the dark. Still, best to provide light. Kuhl unsheathed Dawnbringer from his belt, ignited her, and golden radiance danced off the twisted, tangled, thorn covered vines.
The smell of earth and plant pervaded the tunnel and the crunch of their boots seemed overly loud in the otherwise ominous silence as they navigated through the bramble labyrinth. Mostly the path was clear, there only being one way forward, but sometimes they needed to choose between divergent trails. This led to more than a couple instances of curses and backtracking.
Presently, Kuhl tugged his sleeve free from a snagging vine. As the largest of the group, he had the most difficulty making his way through, and thorns seemed to be finding fabric with greater and greater regularity.
"Is it my imagination," he whispered. "Or is the path narrowing?"
"It isn't your imagination," his grandmother replied.
She moved to the side and waved to the way ahead. A tunnel still stretched before them, but vines encroached further and further until even her slight form would be unable to pass without being scratched.
"Did we choose the wrong way?" Surash asked. "Go back and choose another branch."
"Please, no," Fargas huffed. "I'm sick of these brambles. Can we cut our way through?"
"It should be possible," the wood-elf said. "Well, Kuhl, time to use that shiny blade as more than a torch."
"I was not forged to be a bramble machete," Dawnbringer mentally complained. "But I suppose there is no other choice."
Kuhl nodded and he and his grandmother switched places. The radiant blade rose and fell to cleave a path. A rustling started as the first severed vine fell to the ground and the half-elf caught glimpses of lithe feminine forms, their skin brown the texture of tree bark and having red, gold, or orange leaves instead of hair, flitting through briars on either side of the tunnel, unhindered in their passage by thorny vines. He stopped himself mid chop at another vine and held still. His companions did the same.
For his part he stopped breathing as well until the rustling stopped. There was a pregnant moment of silence broken by the creak of Takari's bow as she drew arrow fletching to ear. Kuhl lifted and readied Dawnbringer to swing as well, spinning in a slow circle, gaze searching, rather than focusing on the vines blocking the way forward.
Whispers came. Coming from multiple directions at once. Each feminine voice in time with the other in a chant.
"Harvest hearts and tree entomb;
To make our forest power bloom;
Nature's wrath from victims tears;
Have made our glade a place to fear;
Heart by heart our army grows;
Wood woads sprouting with your death throes."
"Dryads," Takari called out. "We mean no harm to you or your oaks. We seek only passage so I can find my daughter, Janestra."
"What is happening?" Fargas hissed.
The dryad spoke in Sylvan, the language of the fey wilderness, and Kuhl's grandmother answered in kind, a language the others wouldn't understand. The half-elf gave them a warning shake of his head.
"Be ready," he whispered.
"To fight or flee?" the halfling whispered back, clutching his dagger tighter.
Next to him, Surash raised an alchemical vial.
"Both I think," Kuhl said quietly.
"Wood-elf, we recognize your kind as tree-friend," one of the voices from the brambles called back to Takari. "As tree-friend we grant you a boon and one boon only. Which is this - go back and we will not hinder you. Go forward and die. These are the lands of the Bramble Queen, and your daughter is lost to you."
Kuhl's grandmother's green eyes narrowed, and she increased the tension on her bow as she aimed out into the foliage.
"I thank you for your boon," she said, but the way she spat the word made it clear she wasn't thankful at all. "I offer one in return. A warning. Let me pass and retrieve my daughter and live, hinder me and die. For I will have her."
"Thus is the ancient proverb proven true," the same dryad voice called back. "The sapling sprouts not far from the tree. Mother and daughter share the same arrogance and stubbornness."
Vines came to writhing life all around them, whipping forward. Kuhl was ready and a swipe of Dawnbringer cleaved through most of the ones reaching for him and his backswing freed him from ones that caught him about the ankles. Takari's bow sang and an arrow hissed through the brambles followed by a thunk and a scream from her target.
"Kuhl!" the wood-elf yelled. "Cut us a path!"
He tried. Slicing with Dawnbringer as he forced his way forward. Vines lashed at him in a frenzy and thorns clawed leather armor, wool, and also found flesh. Some vines he cut and others he tore away with his free hand. Briefly he worried the thorns might be coated with a poison, but what could he do if they did? He bore their scratches and cuts as best he could and slashed and scythed and scythed and slashed, forging his way ahead step by step - making too slow progress.
Takari, behind him, loosed her bow again and again. More than once a cry of pain answered her arrows' flight. Then came the crackle of breaking glass.
"Fire!" a voice cried out in Sylvan. "Smother it sisters! Beat it to death!"
The vines ahead suddenly stopped writhing and cutting a path became easier.
"I think you are almost clear!" Dawnbringer mentally encouraged. "Look ahead and to the left. Light in that gap in the vines!"
There was light! A twilight glow. Kuhl carved his way towards it.
"We're almost out!" he yelled back. "Stay close!"
Hope gave him a burst of strength and he slashed his way forward with renewed vigor. The glimpse of twilight proved to be no false hope and with a couple of final strokes, Dawnbringer cleaved a path out. The view of an expansive glade lay beyond the brambles.
What the half-elf expected beyond the wall of thorns he did not know, but not a park-like setting that would be a place of beauty even in the elven city of his birth, Evereska. Pathways of smooth, white stone weaved through the glade, wending around groves of ancient trees and connecting civic looking buildings that bordered the space. Streams babbled their passage over water features to collect into pools and ponds. Unlike the city without, no craters marred the grounds and all the buildings looked whole and intact. The branches of the ancient trees formed a canopy reaching up into the soft light of the twilight sky. But Kuhl noticed those branches were either bare or held the leaves of autumn colors, like the leaves of the brambles he just fought through and there was a bit of chill in the air. Fallen leaves also blanketed the ground and the shadows under the trees were deep. And what he first took for grass was actually a layer of moss. The half-elf had the distinct impression that, under the rule of the Bramble Queen, the glade was always like this, and the season never changed. All this he took in at a glance, before spinning back and encouraging the others onward.
"Come on! You're nearly there!"
One by one they came, Fargas brandishing his dagger and Takari bringing up the rear, herding Surash ahead of her. Her bow was strapped again across her back, and she wielded her short sword to cut at vines.
Her face lit in wonder as she saw the glade, then she grimaced as a last vine tried to impede her, encircling her forearm in a thorny embrace. She slashed herself free then ripped the clinging remnants off and tossed it aside.
"Keep moving," she yelled out. "Away from the brambles."
As a group they did just that. The moss was spongy underfoot and fallen leaves crunched beneath Kuhl's boots, bringing with it the dry autumnal smell hinting at leaf rot.
"Trickster's toes," Fargas said, between gasping breaths. "In all the stories dryads charm you, take you to their arbor boudoir, then have their way with you. But unless these ladies are into bondage and vine whips, they're planning something different. What were they saying?"
"My fire did not work the way it should," Surash said, unlike the halfling, not breathing hard. "It smoldered more than burned and was too easily put out."
"This is the Feywild," Takari explained. "Not our world. Fire will work differently here. Especially in the realm of an archfey like the Bramble Queen, daughter of the Green Lord."
They had come to a stop twenty paces or so away from the bramble wall, staring back at it. All of them were scratched and bleeding and parts of thorny vines clung to their clothes, armor, and hair. They stiffened and stopped pulling these off as dryad voices yelled out to them from the brambles.
"Look at them," one scoffed in Sylvan. "Imagining themselves safe from us in our glade."
"How big a woad will the heart of the small one make?" another wondered.
"I like the looks of the one with the sword of light," yet another voice said. "Let him give us his heart to us in another way."
"Will someone tell me what they are saying?" Fargas growled. "I don't know whether to fight for my life or eagerly surrender."
"Nothing good," Kuhl said. "So, the first one."
"Actually, that last speaker was suggesting something other than death for you," Dawnbringer mentally mused. "If she is implying what I think she is implying."
Around half a dozen bark-skinned feminine forms stepped from the bramble wall, vines parting to ease their passage. Takari sheathed her short sword and pulled the bow from her back.
"Careful, sisters," one of the dryads said. "Her arrows bite deep past bark."
They stepped back and the brambles enveloped them in a protective embrace. It immediately became hard to discern their shapes within the vines even though Kuhl knew they were there and actively looked for them.
"Foolish fleshlings," a dryad called. "Better to have let vines bind you tight while we harvested your hearts. Less pain and trauma for you that way. Now you'll be beaten senseless first."
"I suppose it is fine to beat the one with the sword of light senseless," another dryad said. "It will make him appreciate me more when I nurse him back to health."
"Just my luck," Dawnbringer telepathically cursed. "Finally, someone obviously interested in providing scions for you, ones who could potentially serve as my next bearer, and she is a dryad. Any child of hers will be very limited in how far they can wander, having to stay near their oaks and all."
"Yes," Kuhl thought, unable to keep from mentally responding. "That is the main problem. Not her wanting to beat me senseless or carve out the hearts of my companions, one of whom is my grandmother, first!"
"Those are also drawbacks," the sentient sword admitted.
"Ah, you all better look behind us," Fargas said, pointing. "Those don't look like dryads. And for the third time, what are they saying?"
Kuhl followed the halfling's pointing finger. More bark-covered figures emerged from shadowy interiors of the groves of ancient trees in the glade. These were man shaped, though the description only applied because they were far more bulky than the dryads. Where the dryads, other than the tree features of leaves for hair and bark for skin, resembled female elves, these newcomers were misshapen. Far more tree-like with only a vague humanoid shape. Their heads were crowned with a mass of twisting branches, and they stumped along on a pair of trunk-like legs. A club shaped bulge was at the end of one of their arms and the other widened with a thick layer of bark like a shield. These things were made, or more likely grown, for one purpose only and it became clear who or what the dryads planned to use to 'beat the companions senseless'.
"There are a lot of them," Surash said. "Probably susceptible to fire, if it worked the same here as in our world, but I've only three vials left."
Which would only take care of around a quarter of them.
"What nature takes," one of the dryads said. "It can give back. We lost four woads to the champion of the Maiden of the Moon and we have four intruders. An equal exchange once we've harvested their hearts."
"Three hearts for woads," the dryad who favored Kuhl protested.
"That is only if we lose none subduing these four," another dryad said. "Remember how the dark sword of the other chopped and hewed? One of these has a sword of light. We should counter it considering the number who come from that we can harvest hearts from are few."
"You are suggesting we use her against these four?" yet another dryad asked.
"To spare ourselves from losing woads," the suggesting dryad answered from inside the brambles. "And to not be cruel. The wood-elf is tree-friend. She at least deserves to know the fate of her daughter before she dies."
Despite the words, the mischievous, mocking tone implied a desire to be cruel rather than not.
"Very well then. Let us begin."
The lightness in the voice told Kuhl very bad trouble, far more than even what they were currently in, came when the chanting began.
"In twilight glade our voices entwine;
To form a plea with our rhyme;
Even oaks need a guardian strong;
Hence we beg you with our song;
By root, by branch, by trunk and acorn;
Heed our call, princess of bramble and thorn."
"What, by all the watching gods!" Fargas said through gritted teeth. "Are. They. Saying?"
Kuhl didn't answer. Neither did Takari. Something was happening among the brambles. A shifting of vines that eventually brought forth the figure the dryads summoned. She didn't so much as step from the brambles as was disgorged from it, like she was birthed out of that tangled mass. Bark skin covered her entirely, but rather than the smoother texture of trees like the dryads, thorns threatened to pierce anyone who so much as touched her. Instead of leafy foliage for hair she had hair in the manner of humans or elves, chestnut in color, and tangled with briars and leaves. A pair of green eyes stared out from the bark and thorn covered face, green eyes which the half-elf recognized.
He saw similar eyes every time he gazed into a looking glass.
Kuhl had inherited those eyes from his mother who had inherited it from her own. And when the feminine figure reached over her shoulder and drew a sword that seemed to be formed of shadow glass, he knew.
His grandmother had once told him that the dark swords of the Granite Tower of Vaasa could only be wielded by ones from the lineages of the original wielders. And with the glint of twilight against the black blade in the glow of the Feywild, that sword called out to Kuhl in recognition. His blood seemed to answer the call, pounding through his veins, and his palm itched to feel the weight of it in his grip.
"No, no, no, no, no!" Takari wailed. "Janestra!"
I went to a three day writing workshop once... a long, long time ago. We got instruction. We got to have our stuff read. We also got directions and sent back to our rooms to write, in the manner of professional writers. I did absolutely terrible on the 'pro writing assignments'. It became apparent to me that I'd never be a 'pro', able to write about whatever someone told me, but always be an amateur. Only able to write about what I wanted to write. Which is actually fine. Tolkien was the ultimate amateur, by way of example. His buddy CS Lewis used to give them writing challenges and Lewis would turn these challenges into new published novels while Tolkien could only flounder. It had to be what he wanted to write about or he couldn't produce.
Which I get. So, with this, the story kind of popped into my head. The problem with stories that 'pop into your head', as one of the instructors told us at the workshop, is that you don't know if it is complete crap until the editor tells you. And guess what, I don't have an editor! I mean to your own mind it has to be interesting, right? Your mind came up with it. Thus my problem with this story. I'm not following the script of a module (or even going off script). I'm totally off in the wild. Not knowing if I'm misleading you poor readers with a, "Hey, this will be interesting..." when it actually isn't. I'm fumbling my way blind here people and praying it delivers at least a modicum of enjoyment. You've been warned...