The Wytchwood Circle: Keepers of the Breathing Wood
-
THE WYTCHWOOD CIRCLE
Beyond hanging charms and borders no map can hold, the Wytchwood Circle defend their hidden realm. Daubed in luminous spirals, they range through Mildaark in search of things whose worth only they understand. Horns herald their warriors, and wood and bone rise at their bidding. Tales of their merciless wrath sit beside stories of unexpected hospitality, though few would enter the Wood to discover which awaits them.
The Breathing Wood
Somewhere within Mildaark stands the Wytchwood, although those who claim to know precisely where it begins seldom agree about where it ends. Its protectors are Wild Elves, known in the surrounding settlements as the Wytchwood Circle. What they call themselves is another matter entirely.
The borders of their realm are marked by curious things suspended from the trees. Knotted cords, woven grasses, twigs, feathers and fragments of bone turn slowly beneath the branches. Some resemble little figures, others ladders or arrangements whose purpose is harder to guess. Travellers occasionally mistake them for ornaments left by woodland folk. Those who live nearby know enough to leave them where they hang.
Knowing what the markers mean is easier than knowing where to find them. A path used safely for years may acquire a hanging charm overnight. A tree remembered at the forest’s edge may be found deep beneath its canopy, while a clearing avoided for generations may suddenly open upon familiar ground. Attempts to chart the boundary have produced maps that disagree both with one another and with the recollections of their makers.
Some say the Wood grows and shrinks with the seasons. Others insist its borders follow movements beneath the earth, or the passage of things that cannot be seen. There are those who swear the charms hold the boundary in place, and those equally certain that they merely announce where it has moved. Several claim to have shifted a marker and changed the forest, although their neighbours advise them against repeating the experiment.
The oldest explanation is also the simplest. The Wood is breathing in and out.
The Stone Circle
Stories place a clearing encircled by Wytchwood trees at the heart of the realm. Within it stands the great stone circle said to have given the Elves their name.
This is no henge of separate standing stones. The accounts describe an enormous ring assembled from slabs of rock, each some two feet across and at least a foot thick. The whole structure stands upright upon its edge. Its opening frames the trees beyond it until the proper spells are cast and the proper sacrifices made. Then arclight fills the ring, and the Elves who step into it do not emerge from the other side.
Where they go has occupied many evenings of argument. Some say the doorway opens into their feasting hall beneath the ground. Others place a matching circle upon the mist-bound Isle of Caledon. A few lower their voices to insist that it can carry them anywhere they choose, provided the proper price is paid. Those who favour this last account are seldom able to explain what the price might be, but are quite certain that they would not wish to pay it.
There are as many stories about the circle as there are leaves upon a tree. Strangely, nobody telling them will quite admit to having seen the circle, let alone having watched the doorway open for themselves. Their neighbour’s sister knew someone whose husband’s mother saw it once, and that is usually considered sufficient.
Horns Among the Trees
The protectors of the Wytchwood are seldom seen within their own realm. An intruder may pass several hanging charms before discovering that they have been noticed.
Often the first warning is the sound of horns. The calls echo through the woodland, answering from directions that seem impossible to reconcile. A traveller turns towards one and hears another behind them. Those who try to retrace their steps may find that the next call comes from the path they had intended to take.
For the fortunate, the next warning is something they can see. Light opens within the long-empty eye sockets of a skull upon the forest floor. Roots and splintered branches gather beneath it, raising the remains upon limbs assembled from the surrounding detritus. The creature turns to regard them. Elsewhere, a shape they took for a fallen trunk unfolds itself from the leaves.
Others receive no warning they live long enough to describe. An arrowhead appears before them, pointing in the direction they were walking. Only when blood begins to trickle from the sudden blossom of pain do they understand that the shaft has entered from behind. Their limbs grow cold, the forest tilts, and whatever follows belongs to someone else’s account.
Those who survive describe towering figures with long, powerful limbs and hair streaming behind them. Their skin varies in hue, but luminous blue spirals mark them as kin. Bows, spears and blades appear between the trees, while birds of unnatural brightness wheel overhead. The warriors move with a speed that makes even a clear sighting difficult to remember accurately.
The Elves’ own speech offers little assistance. It is heard as something like birdsong, a hidden brook or music whose meaning remains just beyond the listener. When they choose to communicate with outsiders, they use their innate magic to meld minds and convey pure emotion. A visitor may know with absolute certainty that they must depart, yet be unable to explain what was said.
Pointing a spear at the path out requires less interpretation.
The Hound of the Wood
Among the figures most often described at the head of the Circle’s warbands is a fierce warrior wielding a great axe. His streaming hair, luminous markings and the boar-faced ornament at his waist make him recognisable even in accounts that disagree about almost everything else. He is commonly called the Hound of the Wood.
The title comes from those who have felt his attention upon them. They compare it to standing before a particularly large and angry Trollhound while it considers whether they are made of food. Those with whom he has communicated remember that feeling with dreadful clarity. What they understood beyond it is harder to establish.
More troubling are the people who insist that he conveyed it without any apparent attempt to speak to them. Some felt it while he watched from among his warriors. Others claim that the sensation arrived before they could see him at all. Whether they encountered his magic or merely understood their position rather Too well is debated far from the Wytchwood.
Other Elves have been seen following his gestures on expeditions. Nobody has successfully asked him to explain his authority. Stories of his axe-work have done little to encourage further enquiries.
The Queen Under the Boughs
The Druid most often associated with the Circle’s darker rites is known as the Queen Under the Boughs, or simply the WytchQueen. Her green skin and noble bearing might draw the eye were it possible to look past the great Unicorn skull she wears as a macabre crown.
Her face is concealed within it. Anyone standing before her must endure the knowledge that she is watching from somewhere behind its empty sockets, without the comfort of an expression they can read. Several accounts describe the experience as being considered by death itself.
It is said that she can take the measure of a person by reaching into their chest, plucking out their still-beating heart and reading what she finds there. Others maintain that she need never touch them, and that the feeling of having one’s heart examined is quite enough, thank you very much indeed.
That Wild Elves perform blood rites and sacrifices to the spirits of the forest is common knowledge. A description from someone who has actually witnessed the proceedings is harder to obtain. Those best placed to give one have been unavailable to discuss the subject, or any other subject afterwards.
The WytchQueen is credited with raising creatures from the woodland’s remains and presiding over the rites at the great circle. Whether she rules the Wytchwood, speaks for it, or serves something within it is disputed. The skull has persuaded many people that she is a queen. It has persuaded rather fewer to ask of what.
The Shining One
The Circle’s other commonly recognised Druid is a figure with brown skin, flowing dark hair and blue light upon her body and staff. She appears in many of the stories told by people who have found their way out of the Wood. They call her the Shining One, and sometimes She Who Lights the Way.
A traveller remembers brightness between the trunks and a tall figure waiting where they thought no path existed. Another speaks of a hand extended, or a feeling so certain that they followed without needing to be beckoned. A few insist that she walked beside them for hours. Others recall only seeing her ahead until they stepped upon a road they knew.
Of the two Druids, she is generally thought the kinder. Those who have stood before the WytchQueen are particularly ready to agree. Whether the comparison reveals much about the Shining One herself is less certain, but several people owe their safe return to the figure they describe.
She has also been seen accompanying armed warbands. The blue light by which a lost traveller found their way home has been reported among warriors advancing upon less fortunate company. Nobody has established whether she regards these duties as different.
Guests of the Wood
For every account of a trespasser slain there is another of someone allowed to leave relatively unmolested. Most are told at several removes. Someone’s cousin once followed a blue bird out of the trees. A shepherd’s brother spent a night among unfamiliar boughs and woke beside his own gate. Such stories are seldom enough to persuade anyone to test the Wood’s hospitality deliberately.
There are also tales of lost children returned washed and fed. In one often repeated account, a bairn was carried home by a beast of bracken and briar. It lowered the child safely outside the house, then crumbled into a heap of woodland debris, as though the task that held it together had been discharged. The family kept some of the twigs for years. Other families are said to have received their children in much the same manner, although the details change from village to village.
Rowan the Old Maid tells her own story, and will tell it to anyone prepared to listen. In her youth she became so lost and turned about that she could think of nothing to do but follow the sound of music. It led her to a gathering of the tallest and most beautiful folk she had ever seen, their limbs long and graceful as willows in a breeze.
They sang with voices like a babbling brook or the call of a nightingale. They danced with her, fed her the most magically tasting fruits and berries, and took her by the hand. When they led her through the Wood, she found herself upon the familiar path home.
Rowan says she has lived a good hundred and twelve years since that evening. Though she has never married, she has raised enough bairns, grandbairns and great-grandbairns that her age is less readily dismissed than some would like. Her account has outlasted several of the people who first doubted it.
Those who believe the Elves’ food and company gave her those years sometimes call her the Old Made. They say the Wood itself made her old, and has been remarkably slow about letting her die. Rowan is more interested in telling them how beautifully its inhabitants danced. Some say there is more than a passing ‘Wytchiness’ about her, though never where they suspect she might overhear.
Beyond the Markers
Although many villagers imagine the Circle forever watching the Wytchwood’s borders, their warbands have been encountered far afield in Mildaark. What draws them out is no better understood than what they guard at home.
Arcanite is the most frequently offered explanation. Its power runs through their sacred dyes and summoned creatures, and deposits sought by other peoples have attracted Elven attention. Treasure is another. Tales of opened barrows and disturbed burial mounds follow their expeditions, although some insist that the Circle are searching for lost kin and stolen artefacts rather than plundering the dead.
Explorers and researchers have sometimes found themselves aided by the Elves, protected through dangerous country or supported against creatures that threatened their work. Others have been attacked far from any known Elven territory and pursued until they crossed an invisible, unmarked boundary. Their pursuers stopped with an abruptness the survivors found almost as disturbing as the chase.
Such accounts have encouraged the belief that the Circle are changing the size and shape of their realm. Others say their expeditions follow an older geography, whose boundaries have survived the roads and settlements built across them. There is even a theory that the Wytchwood is engaged in a constant struggle with some invisible foe, and that its apparent breathing records the fortunes of that war.
No one has received an explanation they can put into words. The Elves appear to know where they are going, what they seek and when their work is done. Everyone else is left to fit the sightings into a story.
Wood, Bone and Arclight
The Circle’s summoned creatures share the blue glow of their makers’ markings. Woodfiends rise in many forms: figures balanced upon crooked limbs, low beasts with skulls for heads, or substantial pieces of timber that suddenly develop an alarming interest in those passing them. Lichenhawks soar upon bright wings, carrying messages between Elves and descending upon enemies with sharp beaks and talons.
Larger Briarbeasts appear as deer, elk and the horned creature locally called a Unithorn. Light shines between their ribs and through the gaps in their wooden bodies. From a distance their branching shapes can be mistaken for part of the forest, until they begin to run.
Among the strangest accounts are those of warriors who summon Briarbeasts around themselves. The beast’s four limbs take the place of the Elf’s legs, while the Elf’s torso rises where the creature’s neck and head would otherwise be. Witnesses call the resulting figure a briar-centaur. The union is temporary, but that has offered little comfort to those who have watched one race through the trees with a bow or spear in hand.
The Circle’s warriors bear luminous blue woads, except for the Blademasters. Their spirals are red, the sacred pigment mixed with the blood of the fallen before battle. The same patterns that unite the Court become a mark of dreadful preparation upon a fighter whose blades move too swiftly for most observers to follow.
Together, warriors and summoned creatures make it difficult to judge how many defenders the Wood contains. A light glimpsed overhead becomes another in the undergrowth. A skull watches from a branch, then appears to be moving beside the path. By the time an intruder recognises the Elves among them, the forest seems to have gathered around the encounter.
In the settlements nearest the Wytchwood, stories of slaughter, kindness, sacrifice and feasting are told by people who believe each with equal conviction. They can name the Hound, the WytchQueen and the Shining One. They can point out the hanging charms, at least where they saw them last. They can give advice inherited from grandparents who received quite different advice from theirs.
When asked why one traveller came home and another did not, they begin another story.
