Confronting Grovesong

General Summary

Vanya went to the church, and before the service began he saw Grovesong slipping back into the sacristy. He followed her back with an excellent stealth check and heard her talking to Bastion Teodorus Raines, saying she hadn't known they'd hurt The Mother Tree so badly and that she wanted to find some way to take it back. Raines asked ifs he thought what was happening now was worse than whatever she'd seen, and she said maybe this was what she'd seen; Raines asked if she really believed that and she admitted she didn't. She left, and Vanya stuck around for a fire and brimstone sermon about how tomorrow's Darkest Night was only a foretaste of the Time of Unparalleled Darkness before leaving and telling Rose everything that had gone down.
At that point, World Anvil ate my next paragraph while I was trying to put in a link, leading to my darklord origin story.
You confronted Grovesong. She said that she had seen an omen while watching for a lunar eclipse just before the last spring equinox. A comet had appeared in a constellation called The Hound, which is only visible in winter. It pierced the heart of a constellation called The Watcher, which was generally associated with protection and goodness, then passed through the moon just as the lunar eclipse began. Grovesong interpreted this to mean that something terrible was going to happen during the following winter. Since her town happened to have a convenient local doomsday prophet, she consulted with Raines, delving into the apocalyptic prophecies of the Church of Ezra, which seemed to confirm what she'd seen. She thought that if they did something to suppress the Mother Tree's undead aspect, winter might never come (from a metaphysical perspective, anyway). She cast a spell as part of this plan.
I'm going to put the spell in its own paragraph so World Anvil doesn't eat anything else. It's Life Blast.Bite me, World Anvil.
When she cast Life Blast, Grovesong lost her druid powers. She'd brewed a bunch of various cure potions over the preceding several months, though, so while Raines and his acolytes flooded the tree with positive energy she poured the potion over its roots.
You theorized that you could cast Life Blast yourselves and pull all the positive energy out of the tree since it was the only living vegetation nearby (since Grovesong killed all the rest with her last casting of it).
Grovesong told you that Raines was planning to come at midnight with some of his acolytes to reinforce the spells. You went and confronted him, and Vanya had enough truly spectacular diplomacy rolls to convince him that maybe he was distracting himself from the real Time of Unparalleled Darkness by going after the Mother Tree. Raines had clearly had a hard-on for killing the Mother Tree for roughly ever and it was absolutely not because he was racist toward elves (some of his best friends!), but was willing to admit there had been some unforeseen consequences. He wasn't going to help you heal her, but he'd refrain from pouring even more positive energy into her.
You did try to convince him that he was causing whatever doom he'd foreseen by poisoning the tree, and he said that he wasn't because the tree had nothing to do with a phrase he'd heard Ezra saying in one of his visions: "Through his seed, the captive will become the captor." This was the exact phrase Julien had used right after his powers awakened in Nira's vardo: Julien's prophecy about the Dark Man's plans

Related Reports

Previous session: Speaking to the Dryad

Report Date

31 Aug 2023

Secondary Location

Darkon

Related Characters

• Grovesong
• The Mother Tree