The Tale of the Rotwitch’s Visit

Gather ‘round my sweet summer children and let me weave you a tale of a terrible time long ago, when the trees were only as tall as houses and the Eradûn had not yet reached the river.

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Long ago there was a town not unlike this one now. It had its bakers and its bed makers, shoe smiths and shiners, and all the good boys and girls in their best when the temple bells called for The Toll. The farmers were finishing the last of the harvests in the fields while the shepherds were getting ready for the long winter… but they’d never live to see it.

Back then the Ailbic knew the forest-folk were dangerous, but they had thought their worries were over when the war ended. They never knew that the forest did not care for treaties and man-made borders. And so they simply shuttered their windows and turned up their noses when a rot witch came to town.

It was an old woman, with dark green skin wrinkled like the bark that grew on the edges of her face, gnarled old hands like the yew-staff she carried, that just barely peeked out of a thick shawl more like a carapace, made entirely of mushrooms. Skulls rattled from where they hung along her arms as she banged on the village elder’s door with her staff. Plenty of guards tried to turn her away, but no one would touch her out of fear of what her spores would do.

When it was clear she wouldn’t not leave, the lord commander of the military settlement came out to hear what she had to say. Her words, like the whispers through trees on a stormy night, spoke only four words to him:

Your Village Is Marked

With a growl the old man told her to keep your threats to herself or more of her would be rotting very soon. He then told the old witch to leave and if the Vargr invaded, all the knights of the kingdom would be upon them.

“Not a fang nor claw will grace your brow, but you all should take what you can and leave, or join us as wolves. The rest won’t see the next harvest moon.” The words curled out of her mouth and seemed to curdle the air as she turned to leave, with a trail of mushrooms in her wake.

The first problems came when a few families found mold and fungi in their cellars. With the fall coming they still had enough food, but those that didn’t move it fast enough lost it all. This was no normal growth. Spore and strand grew like spider’s webs along the walls while sickly slime turned the stones slick and made the wood weak. Silos full of grain, once infested were burned, but the hardy spores only spread in the smoke. The animals, the sheep, the cows, even the horses, grew wild and enraged, as if the spirit of the wild wood overtook them. When the grain ran low these animals were slaughtered and, in desperation, eaten, but soon those they fed were eating each other. It was at this point that the higher classes, the soldiers and the few gentry, left the village to its fate. Peasants who fled brought new spores with them and soon were put to the blade. Knights marched down and burned the bridge while the lowborn folk still tried to overcome their fate.

As feed and farm became infested, farmers, shepherds, and livestock alike developed painful infections. The fungus spread from bed sheets to toes and up the legs. From basements and sheds to cloth and crotch. Those with itches and rashes clawed at their skin til it bled, then the spores in the air crawled in again. People hardly left their homes when it became too painful to walk. Soon only the monsters shambled through the dusty streets. Very few noticed a yellow haze growing over the village. Few even cared.

Strange creatures - distorted, shambling, wide mouthed monsters with glassy eyes full of black sludge left the homes and barns to escape into the beckoning wilds. Every beats that lived and died became host and home of another - of the mycelium rot that festered and filled with bubbling caps and bursting stalks; all of whom following a pied piper’s call no sane mind could hear into the dark woods of Eradûn. When a few knights rode into town no bell tolled their arrival and no sound except the protest of a few rotted doors impeded their search, but when they saw what had become of the people that stayed, not a soul escaped the accursed place.

Before the first sapling sprouted or the first flake of snow fell, the forest won another battle in its never-ending war. As it always will.