Saturday, November 3, 2007

The Black Woods Incident

The Black Woods Incident

It seems the dark elves, who were largely in control of the Blackwoods and had been expanding it at the expense of human territory for generations, had grown disillusioned and impatient with such incremental approaches. They had discovered magics capable of generating gates to other realms, other realities. Deep in the heart of the Blackwoods, a circle of their greatest wizards had opened such a gate, attempting to contact a plane from which they could draw something capable of putting an end to what they saw as the abomination of humanity. They succeeded too well. A swarm out of Lovecraftian nightmare came pouring through the gate, horrific beyond understanding, incredibly varied, yet all controlled by a single will emanating from an unimaginably huge being. The wizards were infested, parasitized and taken over in moments, before they could drop the gate. They remained there, keeping it open, while the dark things spread through the forest, breeding rapidly, and the central being began to come through the gate. It was so huge that the process was to take some years to complete. They threatened to spread through the entire world, ending all other life. Some dark elves escaped, and warned the elves of what was happening. Now the elves, while not massive in number and scattered in many small communities, are both magically potent and immortal. They have, or had, many wizards of great power and sophistication. They showed in this crisis that as a group, they neither ducked nor shirked; faced with disaster, they managed an unprecedented muster of elves from all over the continent. Unnoticed by the world, the elves went to war.

It was a disaster. The dark things were too numerous and too dangerous. Merely encountering them was to court insanity—they were so alien that their very nature awakened fear. The variety was bewildering. Some were large and some small, some invisible, but all perilous. Some leapt upon heads to cling like obscene helmets then punch tentacles in through the eyes to the brain, animating their victim like a living zombie. Some tracked prey by sensing mental emanations. One variety seems like nothing more than an oily fog—but the fog gradually began to digest those within it, defending its vulnerable nucleus with an immune system of bizarre subcreatures. The flower of the elves died that day; most of those that remained were insane, disabled or both. But a few of the most powerful wizards managed, when they saw the day was lost, to put into place a last ditch containment plan. The ongoing contact between worlds was in a strange, subtle way a source of great power. These wizards placed a network of standing stones in a pattern encircling the entire forest, and made of them a mystic barrier like an enormous pentagram. The dark things had sufficient power to break through, save for one thing: The barrier drew its power from the gate, and was linked to it. Should the barrier be broken, the gate too would fail. And the central controlling entity was only part way through the gate—should the gate shut, it would be cut in two. But this was a stopgap measure—given enough time, the being would finish its entry into our world, at which point it would quickly break down the barrier and begin expanding through the world. The world was ending, and hardly anybody knew.

It was a couple of years after these events that the remaining dark elves thought to contact Imric, the exile who had never been informed during the crisis. Having been blissfully unaware of the debacle, he was now one of the more powerful remaining elves, and acquainted with a number of other very dangerous people. The mission they hoped he could undertake, to shut the gate by whatever means necessary—probably the merciful death of at least one of the infested dark elven wizards doomed to maintain the circle. Of course, this would be no small task—the gate was at the centre of the forest, hundreds of miles in, and not only were the creatures incredibly dangerous but many of the elves who fought them had been taken over rather than simply dying; their arcane power now added to the danger. Imric assembled a team of expertly violent people to help with the task—particularly his old friend Too Tall from the Wrecking Crew and Cat from the Velvet Hammer. I'll write up what happened later. For the moment, let it be said that success was achieved but it was a near thing.

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