The Blood Wood Tree

The following is recorded history of Children of the Night, Ma'ab, The Dark Wood and the Fey from Methuselah the Arcanist while under containment within the High City.

I do not… truly know why they exist. There were stories — there are always stories. People would talk about how a faerie king prayed for a knight to save him from a dragon, and the knight was a man without a soul, or something. We knew about the faeries, even if most people had never seen one before. They lived across the sea, and there was this… this white city on the coast, I can't remember the name, but you could go there and on starry nights the faeries would come and you could trade with them. But the Interlopers… they lived with the faeries, in the woods beyond the sea — or that's what the stories said. They were a Fairy tale monster, , like a boogeyman or a ghoul. Something that mothers would warn their children about at night. Something you'd think of anytime you heard something shuffling around in the dark. A horror lost over time.
I remember the first time we laid eyes on them. It was on a summer night, and there was a dune that rose high above our citadel to the east. You could see them from all that distance - they were these massive things, taller by far than any man, covered in black and grey matted hair, all over their bodies. They were like… like if someone described a man to you, but they had never really seen a man themselves. Their eyes glowed in the dark, and they just… stood there, shoulder to shoulder, maybe fifty of them in a row. We tried to approach them and communicate, but they just stared at us. They made this… this horrible noise, like a child giggling, this half-chattering inhuman laughter, and they would sing these… these eerie songs, in high pitched voices. My master was the High Magistrate, an extremely powerful figure in his own right, and he went out to disperse them, and they…
They just… they pulled him apart. Like he was a toy, they just grabbed him, slowly, and they weren't… they weren't affected by his magic at all. They just started pulling on him, and laughing, and they pulled him apart. Now, this is where I decided to flee, but you couldn't run from them, either. They were faster than any man, and stronger than any man. They couldn't be pierced with a spear, they weren't bothered by arcana. They seemed to dislike fire but they weren't harmed by it. They rounded us all up and bound us in these black chains, and then they dragged us back to their ships on the coast. I… I only survived by laying over the body of an old farmer, who begged and cried for three days straight. By the time we arrived he had gone still, and when I flipped him over everything left inside him fell out — the earth had reduced him by half, like pine against sandpaper.
They took us onto masive carts, and there were so many of us we couldn't even lay down. After the first week things were better — enough people had died and fallen that there was room enough to sit down on top of them. The Interlopers didn't seem to know what to feed us - we got raw meat and sea water, which I was able to at least make potable. After a month we arrived on the shores of the old forest of the faeries, but it was different than what you'd hear in the stories. They dragged us by our chains, living and dead, into the darkness and we… I…
All I remember was how dark it was, and how you could always feel their rotten hair brushing up against you, like they were right on top of you, watching. You'd feel one of them brush by, silently in the dark, and wonder if it was your turn. They hung our chains up in the trees, and they would come by and pull a person off their manacle, like picking a ripe apple, and then they would just… play with you. They'd poke a man so hard their fingers would go straight through you, or squeeze someone so hard their eyes would come out of their faces. There was a… god… a woman, I remember now, who was pregnant — survived on the ship by eating her own dead mother, and she… they pulled her down and started doing their work, and then they… they just pulled her in half. , it was like opening a bag of chips for them, it was… it was nothing, they'd barely react, just make their horrible little laugh and play in the blood. They pulled her… and just crushed it… They… They never slept. Ever. You could try to sleep, but they'd be there watching you, eyes glued to you, and when you slept… it was worse. They were limited by reality in what they could do to you while you were awake, but they were in our dreams. After a while, we… we decided that's how they communicated. They talked to each other in nightmares, and that's why they kept us there, so we would have their nightmares and they could talk. They recorded their whole history in those nightmares, where you could see… we'd always see this, this one where there was this woman, a faerie, and all these other smaller faeries around her, and then you turn around and see a line of Interlopers that stretched out as far as you could see, just watching her. They always felt so… miserable, and sad, and you never really felt like they hated you, just that they didn't think like we did.

On another event, he was asked how he escaped from the Children.

Escape? Hah. Nobody escaped. You escaped when you died, and if you died they'd take your body to their… their god, and they'd throw you in a pit covered in roots. We said, we… we said that when you went into the pit, you became part of the nightmare. Sometimes, while we slept, we would see the faces of our friends — but their faces were always twisted into these… these grim mockeries of what they had been. But the eyes — the eyes, , you could see them in there. Behind the mask of delusion they were afraid. (Pauses) We weren't alone, though. There were others there, faeries of that forest who were bound in the same black iron as we were. They were broken, in some way — I can't quite remember how, but there was something about them you couldn't say, or that would catch in the mouth. They were all shellshocked, you know, they didn't… they weren't built for this sort of thing. I mean, neither were we, but there were those among us who were making plans, hatching schemes. Those who wanted to leave the nightmare, you know? But the faeries, they were just broken. But… we did escape, I suppose. There was this sorceror, Noah, from the old House of Lament. He really put it all together. The Interlopers, they needed us — they had to create horror for us, because their whole culture relied on it. They couldn't even so much as speak to each other without our nightmares. Old Noah always said he had a plan, that he was going to get us out of there, and… well, then he disappeared. We thought he had been taken by the Interlopers, dragged off to meet a cruel end, but… then one day, the sun peeked through the treetops, and all the flowers bloomed at the same time, everywhere.
The next day it rained, and the day after that as well. It kept raining for a week, then a month, and by the time we finally found old Noah his body was just a smoking husk, covered in arcane symbols and fully spent. But it kept raining, and the valleys started to fill up. I remember the first time we, the first time we saw one of them die… the bastard slipped into a pit that had started to flood, and while those in the pit just swam away as the waters rose, the interloper just stood there, flat footed at the bottom of the pit. He didn't float, he just watched the waters rise. The other interlopers gathered around and just stared down at him, singing their songs and chattering, but we realized then that… they they couldn't hear him, because none of us were sleeping, and he just… well, he thrashed around for a bit at the end, but he never came out of the pit, and the waters kept rising.
Near the end, when the sea started to come up over the shoreline, they started rounding a bunch of us up - thousands, maybe, from all over the forest, and dragging them deeper into the woods. That's where their god was. But they got sloppy, or… or maybe they didn't notice, and we managed to sneak away. We didn't go alone — the faeries, the ones who still had their wits about them, came with us. We ran for the mountains to the south, and we had to… the path we took, we could see the forest for miles, once we got over the treeline, you could just see out forever, it felt like, and that's when we saw it.
Their dread god, Ma'ab, The Dark Wood. Monstrous, festering, bloated like a corpse in the sun. It was so dark then, the sky was just black clouds and rain, but you could still see it. Red lights around its base, and people hanging on its limbs. The faeries, the ones who were with us, there were a few who — when they saw it — started weeping, and fled back into the forest. You could hear it, too — moaning and grinding and screaming. But the rest of us kept running, and one day the world was underwater. We lived on that mountain for years, if I had to wager, and by the time the waters receded the world was changed. The interlopers were gone, the faeries had retreated back to the old forest, and the rest of us just… went on with our lives.