Upbringing
Bobito was created in the same moment as the
Isethra Tree, way back in the Divine Era. His divine purpose was instinctually imprinted on him, and he immediately made his nest in the hollow of the sacred tree. His early friends were fellow
blinkgliders, who he could communicate with but never truly relate to. When local foraging humans and dryads found the Isethra, he had his first interactions with fellow sentient creatures and fully realized just how different he was from the other creatures that nested around the Isethra. This new socialization with the peoples surrounding the Isethra wasn't all too much better, though. Once it became clear that Bobito was the guardian of the Tree and would enact violence against anyone he considered to be potentially harmful to it, the local peoples stopped treating Bobito as a person so much as the spiritual incarnation of the tree's will. He was treated with formal respect but also fear and distance. He came to see himself as the vengeance and will of the forest, and inhabited the role he was offered. He learned how to calm people and how to frighten them, but little else.
As more and more outsiders flocked to the Isethra for healing and worship, Bobito became more agitated. He didn't know what to do with all this new attention, or how to react to the complex intentions and interactions between all these different groups. When the local peoples gathered to the tree for their annual holidays, Bobito called on them to help him guard the tree - and so the cult of the Isethra was born. Bobito and his warriors set to guarding the tree with a callous and indifferent hand. Whenever outsiders came with intentions other than healing - such as the expedition of
Haru and
Naram - Bobito responded with violence. The more unscrupulous outsiders Bobito fought off, the more pre-emptive his violence became.
The Burning of the Tree of Life
For the first two centuries of the modern era, this trend sharply escalated. Bobito became a kind of forest monster who judged pilgrims and slew the unwelcome. And as the religious-cultural role he inhabited shifted to forest-monster-judge, his behavior crystallized. He started acting out bits of vigilante justice: whenever someone robbed, killed, or otherwise harmed another person in his woods, Bobito would enact vengeance. His cult became full-time warriors, with their own little government propped up by Bobito's support. And in the 200s ME, a new force from the North emerged to face Bobito's regime: the Riverwatch of Eshral (also known historically as the Kingdom of Kemleto), a bandit-federation united into a government that sought to control all traffic to the Isethra for profit and power. When the Riverwatch arrived, they had no desire to harm the Isethra so much as control its waters and access, but Bobito saw their intent as dangerous and immoral and promptly attacked them. There was no diplomacy - he simply ambushed them as they arrived. A terrible war ensued.
The Riverwatch were able to vastly outnumber and defeat Bobito's forces, but they struggled to actually overwhelm the immortal himself. And so they started threatening the holy tree itself, by setting fires around the sacred grove in an effort to scare Bobito into negotiating. This game of chicken escalated, until the Riverwatch sent a contingent of their greatest warriors to capture Bobito (and thereby demonstrate their organization's rightful rule over all of Eshral). The last of the original tribes that had supported Bobito centuries ago charged to meet them, and were slain to the last child. Bobito's rage transcended his fear- never had the Isethra actually been harmed, but Bobito had just seen his extended family killed. So he abandoned the Isethra and pursued the Riverwatch North, to shatter their attempts to hold South Eshral forever. He succeeded, but vengeance was unsatisfying. And the warriors that remained took their own vengeance while he was busy, by setting a grand forest fire around the sacred grove. The Isethra was burning when Bobito returned. The holy tree was scorched and destroyed. Bobito had failed.
Confronted with his loss, Bobito did what his people had once done when there was nothing left to do: he lamented and performed the
Ritual of Tragedy. Against all odds, it worked, and the overwhelmed immortal gave an impossibly vague request - to tell him what to do. The
ghost of the Masked One emerged from the darkness and whispered with Bobito beneath the ashen wreckage of Halcyon's tree. Reality shifted fundamentally in that moment, though no one but Bobito and their new friend knows what was said.
Ultimately, the burning of the Isethra proved to be a false death: the dying tree drank from its own healing waters, and the next day its charred wounds were healed. The God
Haru arrived not long afterwards to check in on the Tree, and Bobito made another friend - someone else who could live as long as him, and would treat him like an equal. Haru taught Bobito the basics of druidism, so that Bobito could remotely message them and the other immortals for emotional support.
Early Life
Over the years that followed, Bobito tended to the forest and helped it recover. The Riverwatch/Kingdom of Kemleto collapsed, and new states cropped up in its place. Bobito learned to talk with people more, and to approach things in a more calm and sociable way. He made it clear that he would defend the tree from those who tried to control it for their own purposes, but that he would seek peaceful alternatives if offered. A few groups tried to take the tree for themselves anyways, but Bobito fought them off with ease. His consistency but reputation for force made others eager to ally with him, and by 400 ME he had carved out a pocket of near-perpetual peace in warring Eshral.
In 434 ME, Bobito met his most curious visitors yet:
Kemegi and
Makoi, a giant dragon and a foreign emperor who arrived to "conquer" the tree and possibly build a teleportation circle near it. After Bobito realized that "conquest" basically meant having the local state give them free housing and supplies rather than actually trying to control the tree, these visitors became fascinating acquaintances for Bobito. They stayed near the Isethra for a year while Makoi made the Teleportation circle permanent, but they eventually headed back North to explore other lands.
In 450 ME, the dragon returned to Bobito alone, spinning a sad tale of Makoi's wrongful death at the hands of another immortal by the name of
Suwota. Bobito consoled the giant dragon and offered to be its friend, and for several centuries made a sincere effort to be Kemegi's emotional support. After a century and a half of this, though, Bobito came to disgust Kemegi. Kemegi reminded Bobito of all the worst parts of his younger self, but deprived of all empathy and morality. Kemegi both ideologically and personally repulsed him, and Bobito began to suspect that maybe Suwota wasn't as bad as Kemegi claimed. The friendship broke down when Bobito secretly reached out to Suwota to hear the other side of the story and tried to get the two to make up, which Kemegi interpreted as a betrayal. After many fights and traded insults, Kemegi stormed back to his volcano in 650 ME.
After Kemegi's departure, Bobito focused on maintaining his pocket of peace. An empire known as the Empire of Eshral rose in the 600s and started investing in the tree's area: guarding the area around the grove, building temples and visitor's housing near the tree, and chasing off bandits. Bobito's job became easier and easier as the empire increased its presence, and Bobito began being tempted away to see the world. He started letting imperial agents he had come to like and trust take over his job for small moments of time while he tried to teleport as far as he could Northward, to visit the parties and scholarly salons he had been invited to in the imperial capital. He taught several students druidism and began to accumulate a circle of Ibithi elites around him: mages,
solar of Haru, even intellectuals from
Runeva and
Zerua.
By the late 900s ME, Bobito began to realize he was spending a lot of time away from the tree. He also began to notice that some of his immortal penpals were having problems: the Lunar Pantheon's drama had escalated to a fever pitch, Haru seemed to be acting strangely, and Suwota was beginning to sound unusually cruel. The Empire of Eshral also was beginning to decline in subtle ways, and their administration was trying to assert more and more control of the Isethra to keep themselves steady. Bobito was deeply conflicted: he deeply adored the world and it felt like it needed him, but he didn't want to risk a repeat of his earlier mistakes. He was having a crisis of identity in many ways: the leisure time the empire gave him allowed him to wonder if his desire to protect the tree was truly
his or if it was something forced upon him. In the end, he decided to stay; that the protective feelings he had weren't his, but that he had his own connection to the Isethra he had made on his own. He retreated to the Tree with those few druids who would follow him, and he decided to train in magic to be able to befriend the tree as a quasi-person to truly make his god-given mission his own.
Later Life
In the mid 1000s ME the Empire of Eshral collapsed, never to reform completely. The power clique that Bobito helped make would go on to be something of a shadow government in the North, and later came to influence nearly all of Ibith's major countries, but they were no longer the eccentric bunch of mages and thinkers Bobito had loved. The governments of
Yozosk, or the region around the Isethra, attempted to involve Bobito in their administrations, but the immortal was always skeptical of himself in government. He paid lip service to the monarch's divine legitimacy and did some benevolent lobbying for charitable causes. This lobbying and involvement did slowly escalated over the centuries, but when one of these governments collapsed and the rulers fled to Bobito pleading for him to reinstate them, he was put off that practice for a while. When Suwota reached out on occasion to talk, Bobito began arguing that even the words of immortals carry such power that they must be used carefully.
Bobito's stances on neutrality swung back and forth like a pendulum, but never as wildly as when he was young. During one brutal civil war, he used intermediaries to organize a truce; other times, he has allowed governments to collapse without comment. All the while, though, Bobito kept the Isethra grove safe and his friendships abroad intact. He never stopped talking to Haru or Suwota, and he even reconnected with Kemegi for a while in the 1600s and 1700s ME. He began using his magic to chat with the Isethra, and his old invisible companion never left him either. Bobito also learned to treasure the mortals who visited for healing, and built his lodge-temple in the late 1700s to provide a space to host guests for fun rather than work. The mundane work of talking with people, housing them, and caring for the sick was tiring but fulfilling.
In the 1800s ME, improvements in sailing technology, increases in population, and increased numbers of magic users led to a constant increase in pilgrims. Bobito was wearing out - his passion for the job was being buried by the raw scale of the job. Rather than consign himself to suffering, he and his acolytes met and organized a solution: the Rangers of the Blessed Wood. The Rangers, the most loyal and disciplined warriors and disciples of Bobito, could both protect the Tree better from larger numbers of people and better keep an eye on the other acolytes. Bobito began offering access to the tree in exchange for work, mobilizing poorer pilgrims into much-needed assistance. Now, Bobito has been given some space to recuperate and focus on the aspects of the job that he loves. That isn't to say the hard work is over: there are still issues of potential rising numbers of pilgrims exceeding the amount of healing water produced that Bobito is looking for ways around, and leading such a busy grove is always a time-consuming task. But Bobito has found his calling, and he has kept his happiness despite it all.
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