Halls of Ivory

Chapter 12 - The Tree

While the Sylvari may not speak like an actual hivemind, they weren't completely individual entities either. After all, they were nothing more than leaves grown from the pale tree. They were all connected to the tree and the tree could see what they saw, hear what they heard, feel what they felt. At the end of their lives, their experiences carried over into how the minds of the next generation were moulded. Whenever the mind of a Sylvari first took shape, it would manifest within a shared consciousness simply known as 'The Dream', wherein their shared thoughts would create a vision for each one where they were forced to perform a task or role.

That vision was all-defining for them, it laid out for them what their calling in life would be, their 'Wyld Hunt' as they called it. Most Sylvari dedicated their entire lives pursuing only their Wyld Hunt and only very few such as Pact Marshal Trahearne were lucky enough to survive beyond its completion.

The four men proceeded with extreme caution, missing no opportunity to trip up potential pursuers, even after they met and joined up with a Separatist scouting party. The other party had come from a different hiding spot near Divinity's Reach and escorted a woman with blond, bound-together hair and a modest, Canthan-style dress in a familiar shade of purple. She shook each one's hand. "A pleasure to meet you. Captain Thackeray, Tribune Brimstone, you must be the Commander of the Pact, and you would be?"

"Grell, don't mind me."

She nodded and bowed with one hand placed on her front. "I'm Lady Thalia Aldryn. I believe we're on the move for the same destination."

As she and the other Separatists moved ahead, the tribune asked them: "Care to clue us in on what you were here for?"

All she said was: "My husband will clue you in if he sees fit." She didn't say much more on the matter, even when pressed on their journey back.

There wasn't much point in pestering her with things they suspected that the minister would tell them eventually. Rytlock instead saw fit to use their journey as an opportunity to clue Logan in on something else. On one night, when they were making camp on one of the plateaus in the mountain range between Queensdale and Kessex, he decided to go ahead. One of the Separatist scouts was keeping watch, he took his time walking about at night and waiting for an opportunity to go through the Separatists' bags. He woke up Logan and told him to get up. The captain rubbed his eyes and spoke quietly, to not wake up the others. "What's going on?"

"Get moving, we need to talk."

They left the smaller cave the party used to rest in and walked further out along the uneven rocky landscape until they got to some patches of grass to sit down under the night sky. After stretching his limbs a few more times, the Captain asked a little more insistently: "Are you going to tell me what this is about or not?"

The Charr handed him a bottle of cheap liquor he had stolen from one of the provisioners' bags. "You may wanna have some of that first."

Logan found this very disconcerting, but he trusted Rytlock enough to indulge him. "If you say so." He raised the bottle and asked half in jest. "You're not taking me around the corner to kill me, right?"

Rytlock sighed. "You wish."

"That bad, huh? I guess I should then." He downed about a third straight off the bottle and put it down. "All right, whatever it is, give it to me straight." So starting slowly, the Charr told him about a subject he, Grell and the Commander had consciously avoided in all their recent days together.

He told Logan about Jennah's journal, about her and Imperator Smodur, all the Charr-Human romance novels commissioned from Snargle Goldclaw and what it implied of Jennah's personal life, Grell confirming it from other journal entries whenever Logan wasn't listening - Rytlock told him everything. As Logan listened with many interruptions on his part, the captain went from shocked, to being devastated and close to tears, to outright angry at times. At several instances, he wanted to spring up and confront the others about not telling him about any of this and he only didn't because Rytlock physically forced him to sit back down.

At one point, the thought of Jennah's perverse excesses left him so nauseous that he had to get up and stumble along the plateau under Rytlock's supervision until he got to a patch of vegetation and threw up behind the shrubs. Rytlock waited patiently for nearly ten minutes until Logan settled down. When he was still supporting himself against the wall of the upper cliff and catching his breath, the Charr asked: "Feeling better now?"

"A little, I think. It's just a lot to take in."

"Figured as much." On their way back to the place they used to talk, Rytlock added: "Everyone knew how you felt about Jennah, you know that right?"

"I know now. But this… Jennah and all of that…there's no way Anise didn't know. She must have known. I thought she was my friend, but if she were…she would have told me." He smashed the ground with his right fist. "Instead they kept this from me. They strung me along. Played me like a fiddle and only the gods know how much they must have been laughing behind my back. When in truth I was never good enough to stand a chance."

"Stop it with the self-pity. You were always plenty good. Jennah was never good news to begin with. I only kept quiet about that because of you. But I did tell you over and over: You put way too much stock in this one woman."

"Yeah. I see that now." At a peace long-needed with knowing what he knew now, the captain got up. Slowly, he wandered towards the cliff, gazing at the rising sun. Rytlock followed him and made sure to be close enough to stop Logan if he were to do something reckless. "I just wish I would have known sooner…we could have achieved so much. We could have killed Kralkatorrik…Snaff would still be with us…Glint would still be with us."

"Not much point in dwelling on that. Now that you know the mess for what it is, all we can do is try to fix it."

He reflected on all his past interactions with Anise, with Jennah, with all the queen's closest confidantes. When those blood legion executioners talked down on him while citing Anise's authority, he thought he was just reading things into it. But when Anise kept even things from Logan like what he had just learned, it told him that the Charr laughed at him for good reason. The Anise he believed he knew was just a facade. The 'new' Anise that she became after Jennah's death, the indifferent, sanctimonious Anise who casually condemned people to either death or shattered livelihoods, wasn't new at all. This had always been the true Anise hiding behind a friendly mask.

Reflecting on the things he found out about Anise, witnessing the atrocities she was willing to commit so nonchalantly, he thought back to his many encounters with Lord Aldryn. And his constant, mean-spirited musings decrying Jennah, Anise and their supporters. He never bought into it and only begrudgingly acknowledged even hearing him whenever he spoke badly of them. But now, all of it rang true. He now fully accepted the unacceptable, because he could no longer deny its veracity: Anise was the enemy. She always had been and she had to be stopped. If that was necessary to stop her, she had to die. And the same went for anyone who still chose to serve her past this point.

Only now did he fully grasp just how bitter and sobering their struggle with the Shining Blade was. And the Separatists seemed all the more sympathetic for it.

The air of Scarycave was much more relaxed than it used to be. All the animosity had faded away in the weeks since the Shining Blade attacked.

When on the next morning, they knocked on Lord Aldryn's front door, the minister threw it open and welcomed them with open arms. "Commander! Captain Thackeray! Your arrival could not have been any more timely. How was the journey?"

"The journey itself wasn't the problem. It's our time in the city that was tough. I had hoped it wouldn't end up being this bloody."

"All-out wars are never pretty. If you want to achieve actual results, spilling blood is unavoidable. Besides, Captain - I don't recall you being anywhere near that remorseful when it came to staging massacres on Separatists. Why the sudden change of heart?"

Logan sighed. "How long are you going to keep this up?"

"As long as I need to - for you to learn it proper. If we are to win this war, you need to show the Shining Blade the exact same indifference and bloodthirst you've shown us in the past. You may know them, you may be familiar with them, but they are not your friends, not anymore." He clapped his hands together and switched subjects.

"Now then, I am overjoyed to say that your mission was a full success. As we speak, my staff is working hard creating copies of it for distribution and safekeeping. The blueprints and instructions on those 'Watchknights' will be useful for identifying weaknesses if Anise decides to deploy them. As for the diary, that is one blessing I didn't expect. All the late queen's secrets, even the most salacious among them, submitted in handwriting from the horse's mouth. The moment I caught wind of the matter, I sent out another party to fetch us a contact from Divinity's Reach."

The Commander raised one palm in confusion. "What for?"

"Isn't it obvious? We'd be fools to bring the journal itself back into the lion's den, that just opens up opportunities for Anise and her goons to take and destroy it. Instead, I'm bringing in an official notary to make notarized copies of it. He verifies their contents and her handwriting and by his authority, we can submit it as evidence. With its contents published and verified in the eyes of the public, I will never have to hear this 'she knows what she's doing' drivel ever again. She will be outed as the narcissistic fetishist that she was."

Until recently, Logan would have felt like snapping at him for talking about Jennah like that. But he felt no need to do that, because Aldryn wasn't wrong. The thought still discomforted him enough to have to swallow down his grievances, but he could cope with it much better now.

The minister paused and his eyes darted back and forth between Logan and the Commander. "What? No backtalk? No offense-taking?" He shrugged. "Fair enough, let's move on. As you may be aware, my wife recently came back from an infiltration of the city. While you wreaked havoc within the palace, she and my other mesmers conjured up illusions of my image and a few of my people, luring about Shining Blade members and delaying their attempts at massing their troops for focused attacks from any position. But helping you was only the secondary purpose of that. The primary one was to identify whose face would draw their attention and whose wouldn't."

"So now you know who can and can't go there without getting arrested?"

"Indeed. Needless to say, the two of you are on their naughty list. You can't walk around in public, at least not as yourselves. Neither can I by the way. Or the missus for that matter."

"So what's the game plan here? If we can't show up to the ministry or the court, how are we going to dispute the treaty?"

The minister waved his hands in a dismissive fashion. "Oh please, I've been doing this for years, you think I didn't expect to be found out? I have a cover set up that will work for all of us. It's airtight. It hasn't been blown in years, it won't be now either."

The Commander and Logan folded up their arms. "I'm all ears."

"One of the larger houses in the Ossan quarter belongs to a wealthy man of Orrian descent by the name of Ordhral. Ordhral Salannah." The Commander recognized the name, but couldn't put a face to it. Ordhral was a noble and a member of the ministry, but his seat was usually empty. "Ordhral Salannah is a merchant who travels across all of Tyria with his many servants, tending to the various establishments he owns, many of which are in other countries…or at least that's what the public believes."

"I'm pretty sure I've talked to Ordhral before. I had to look into him as part of a murder investigation. His businesses, his paperwork, even his line of ancestry, it all checked out. What's the truth then?"

"The truth is that the 'Ordhral' you spoke to was me. The real one hasn't been around for years."

"What happened to him?"

"He had a tragic run-in with a sword."

"Are you sure of that? Because if he shows up, our cover is blown."

"I would hope so, I was the one swinging it. I kept his head around until it started decomposing. As for why, he was an avid proponent of bills to legalize the execution of Separatists on-sight without a trial - which did pass with his help - and his identity was the perfect cover. Even if the Shining Blade were to find out that I was a Separatist, I could just start appearing more often as 'Ordhral', circulate operatives in and out of the city unhindered and no-one would be the wiser. I kept doing it on the regular up until the searing of Gendarran Fields. We still use his identity in other places. The proceeds from his businesses are part of how we finance feeding all of you."

"So your plan is to use illusions and just assume the identities of Ordhral and his staff?"

"Precisely. That also explains to any skeptical minds present, how we have the resources and the nerve to challenge the treaty. The party I sent out this morning is instructed to contact another merchant of similar standing."

"You're hoping to pool resources, you think he'll side with us?"

"I hope so. He's an Elonian, so the odds are in our favor."

And so began the waiting period. The Commander and Logan both were to remain in or around Scarycave for the full duration of the messenger's trip back and forth between here and Divinity's Reach. So they had somewhat of a vacation. Since their first arrival here, the Separatists had set up means to intercept and transport somewhat of a speedy correspondence by means of disguised couriers traveling via waypoint system - if there were any available.

Since their location was all but public now, they also guided the Seraph and civilians outside, showing them little secluded areas with fertile soil where some of them could take to starting gardens. Though witnessing the vast stretches of ground corrupted and covered with rotten vegetation on the way always put a dampener on people's enjoyment of it.

It did however turn out to be a blessing in disguise.

"Such devastation. It's even worse over here." A group of Sylvari in shades of green and blue made their way along the poisoned path. They caught the Commander in the middle of helping Separatists escort civilians home from engaging in their recent hobby. The Sylvari leading the way was a woman made of bright blue fiber, the shade of which contrasted the brown and green of the soil and plants so much, it almost looked like she was glowing. She pointed at him and the other humans and downright commanded them: "You there! Explain yourselves! Are you responsible for this?"

The Commander made sure not to make any sudden moves and slowly gestured along the poisoned path. "Are you referring to this?" She nodded. "This was caused by a weapon. We neither made nor used it. We were its intended target."

His answer did nothing to appease the Sylvari. She marched up closer and pointed her sword his way. "Really? It's rather convenient that you managed to elude its effects, don't you think?"

With none of his weapons drawn, the Commander raised his hands to gesture for her to calm down. "We confronted them before they could use it, but one of them broke it open and unleashed it during the fight. A lot of people died that day." The Sylvari followed him and the other humans north, towards the Skritt hive's entrance. When she kept asking about the poison, the Commander agreed to take them to the source. And on the way to it, he told her about the Seraph's break from the Shining Blade. She appeared to have heard of the recent searing, but little about the interior struggles within Kryta that had followed.

When he showed her the broken container, it was right where the battle had taken place. No-one dared step on the darkened ground to get anywhere near close enough to remove it. "Terrifying. This film of black residue - everything it touches wilted." By this point, the vegetation in the middle of the poisoned path had long dissolved into a layer of dust that wrapped itself along the ground of the jungle. It was only along the edges that one could make out the leaves and grass there once was.

To assure herself of what she was dealing with, she ripped a leaf from a nearby tree and tossed it onto the darkened soil. It wilted within a matter of seconds as soon as it hit the ground. "Its effects are even worse up here…why would someone do this? Why would someone go through so much trouble to concoct pure, lingering death in liquid form and then let it loose upon nature like that?"

"Pure death? Do you know something about the nature of the poison?"

"It has spread much further south from here. Its effects are less immediate and it is less potent towards anything that walks the earth rather than drawing from it directly. But all plant life in its path dies and withers and it has spread and spread and reached a tree that is very dear to me."

She closed her eyes, paused and then turned to face the Commander directly. "I apologize for my harsh behaviour earlier. I didn't mean to blame you for something you didn't do, we suffered a terrible loss, an entire year's work destroyed within a day."

The Commander was well aware that Sylvari tended to be highly emotional about trees or other plants and formed strong attachments to them that could cause them to react this way. "Is it a tree?"

"Yes, the great Terebrinth. In the dream, I saw it shoulder the weight of the jungle's future, and I wasn't the only one. All of us did. When we found it, we planted and shaped a garden around it and tended to it ever since. But this vile poison has burrowed its way to where we lived."

"It went all the way to your garden? Why didn't you come here sooner?"

"The line it came by was so thin, we didn't even notice it until it had already reached the tree. And it took the poison until recently to even get to us. We only noticed it a few days ago."

He was willing to believe it would spill far, but he had trouble believing a substance like this could just 'infect' life around it as though it were a disease. "How is that possible? It's a poison. There's only a limited amount of it."

"We don't know how it happened, but that didn't stop it from happening."

If this poison kept spreading the way the Sylvari implied, that was a problem in its own right that the Commander couldn't ignore. "Could you show me this tree of yours?"

One of the green men behind their leader took issue with his request. "So that you can worsen the ruin you brought us?"

But the blue one shook her head. "No, retreating and sitting idle as our garden wilts away will not bring it back. If there is a chance that someone might figure out a solution, we need to take it. Come with me." She led the Commander down the trail along where the poison had run. "My name is Leigheara. I'm sorry that our encounter couldn't be on more friendly terms." He in turn introduced himself by name and by title.

Their trip took them venturing deep into the jungle, far past where the overtly noticeable portion of the poison ended. Where the area between the cliffs and the hill to the west was less overgrown road and more overgrown valley and the beaten path vanished between the increasingly dense foliage. Then, without needing his attention drawn to it by his guides, the Commander saw it. By the patterns of coloured flowers and the much more elaborate arrangement of exotic greens with circles of wooden blocks or small rocks forming solid bases around patches of earth at varying heights.

This was indeed an impressive garden. Or it would have been, if any of it were still alive. Upon coming closer, he realized how bleak the colouring on all of it was and how bits and pieces flaked off of every leaf and every blade of grass. Visible footsteps with pulverized weeds below marked the twisted paths walked by the Sylvari in search of a solution. His guides walked ahead, right onto the darkened flowerbeds. "The grass is dead but the ground is safe to walk on. Just don't linger on it too long, it saps our strength. We grow sick when exposed to it for too long."

This phenomenon of the vegetation dying actually extended a little beyond the garden itself, to the first line of trees just around it. Even the palm trees on the opposite edge of the garden were affected. Slowly and carefully, the Commander placed one foot on the dead grass. Nothing happened, so far so good. The Sylvari had told the truth. He passed the trees more confidently and followed Leigheara up a hill, to the heart of the garden. There, atop a heap of earth once covered in tall grass, lay a strange tree, with a trunk once twisted into an upright spiral. Now, it had broken off by the stump and fallen onto its side. Most of its leaves had already fallen off or dissolved.

He could sense raw magical energy radiating from it, but any visible glow it once had, had faded. Even the bark itself was brittle. The Commander reached for the tree, carefully so as to not make a mistake. When he touched it softly, even though he did it with so little strength a single blade of grass would have barely bent to the pressure, it gave away and caved into the rest of the tree, catching him off guard. He flinched from a surge of immense pain, he had cut his hand and something made the wound much more painful than an ordinary wound.

Panic overcame him. This must have been the poison, it was in his finger. He pulled his hand back immediately, covered one palm with another and invoked a necromantic spell. He enchanted the blood in his hand and sent a surge through his hand to draw it out - a milder version of 'Blood is Power' except instead of sacrificing a larger amount of blood to strengthen someone's combat abilities, he just cleared out as much of his wound as possible and dedicated the energy drawn from the blood to accelerating growth from within his hand to push out whatever dirt or poison he could.

He would have to have an actual priest or other healer cleanse it properly, but for the time being, it worked. The pain was gone, not even a scar was left. "What could cause a tree to degrade so quickly?"

The Sylvari joined him at the tree. "If we knew, we wouldn't have sought you out. And unless you are capable of genuine miracles, I fear you may not have the answers we seek either. You seem too much at a loss."

"Yes…" He didn't even know what to say to that. This entire phenomenon was strange. The jungle on their way from where the poison trail ended, to where the garden started, seemed perfectly fine. It was only in the garden around the tree where the effects were this visible.

"You said this was sent by your countess? What assurance do we have that she doesn't hoard more of this wretched substance?"

"None. They said it was a gift from Anise's 'consultant', but I don't know who that is or whether they've made more of it."

Leigheara scratched her forehead. "If she won't tell other humans, then simply asking her won't yield us answers either. We have to track this to its source, find out who made the poison and stop them. How can we force the countess to give up this secret."

The Commander paused. His first thought was to propose an alliance, but he recalled how badly it backfired when he forced the Separatists to spare that one Seraph defector. If the Sylvari went around telling everyone that the Seraph and Separatists planned to overthrow Divinity's Reach, word of this would reach Anise one way or another. On the other hand, he couldn't just bid his farewells absent any means of solving the Sylvari's problem.

"You know what, I might just have an idea." He asked for them to follow him back north. To the Skritt hive and down to Scarycave from there. The perfect compromise between both sides of his quandary was to stop them just outside and ask them if they were willing to commit to solving the problem, even if it meant secrecy and facing adversity. When they all agreed with confidence, he introduced them to Grell and Rytlock and sat down with them in a small chamber within the underground city.

They explained in great detail everything that had led to the situation they were in but didn't mention what they were planning to do going forward. There was a purpose to this. He wanted to gauge their caliber, see whether they had it in them to go to full-on war, just to save the jungle. To his relief and surprise not only did they not shy away from the notion, they proposed it by themselves with no-one saying anything to that effect. "Dooming her own people to poverty and death and then condemning the forest itself to slow and painful decay. How can any of you let this stand? We have to do something about this. If this 'countess' Anise is as unreasonable as you say, then we have to take the fight to her and force her to answer for her crimes."

When minister Aldryn heard Leigheara sound the war drums like that, he was very eager to involve her in their planned offensive. But in the same vein, he clued her into how important it was to retain confidentiality on the actual plan to attack. The attack on the palace gave Anise a bloody nose and she had since conceded to letting the Seraph exist for the time being, at least for as long as it took the Shining Blade to lick their wounds. But if they were to find out that the Seraph and Separatists planned a full-scale assault, it would set her off and cause her to make rash decisions. And at a too early stage for the Separatists to adequately address them.

It was a risk, but a risk worth taking and one the minister was prepared for. He agreed to send an escort troop with the Sylvari, so they could safely prepare any arms, special seeds and gather resources to spend their time leading up to the attack planting and cultivating treants.

The Separatists were more than happy to welcome another ally in the ongoing war against the Shining Blade.