The 100 Acre Wood

[0CE-5CE]

In the year [0CE], the King of Aelbaion presented the Vargr clans with an “experiment”. They called it a challenge. When the clan speaker of the River’s Run region, Halla, told King Aeldebaric that the forest was spreading and proposed that they work together to control its spread, the king requested a test of the Vargr’s skill and trust. One hundred acres of borderland and two hundred peasants in the local villages were allotted to the Vargr to show what their plan was and how it would work over the next ten years. Halla promised it would be done in five.

Over these next five years Halla and her pack, the Bridge Setter Pack, went to work with the help of other packs and clans in the region. Root-ways would need to be dug and planted along the roads so the trees would shape those roads rather than destroy them, whole villages would need to be modified to make better use of their space to farm as the forest spread around them, and the most useful plants would need to be allowed to grow where they are most needed, before more meddlesome varieties take root themselves, and many more terraforming projects would be underway. Most importantly, a water-moving tree would be planted to reroute a stream on the edge of the 100 Acres that fed into the Touluf River and turn it into a small river that would flow through the 100 Acres and ensure that they would never suffer a drought again.

——

The heavy chimes of a ceremony bell rang out across the town like cloudless lightning and the long tones of ritual horns carried their note across the Acres. The seed planting ceremony was about to begin!

At the start of the long canal that would guide the young river, a lone Vargr with a swaddled bundle of silk in his arms, looked at the water and with his boot, drew a circle in the loosened soil.

“Is it ready?” Halla walked up to the man, a large Pegasus helm sat around her painted face, while two skulls sat upon the shoulders of her white fur cloak. Part of her grey hair was woven into a pair of widow’s braids that looped around her ears while the rest hung loose behind her. She wore a breastplate of ribs and leather, along with the other standard garb of a warrior alpha, while her spear stayed home and her guard was replaced with a cult of rot druids.

“The spot is chosen, I can feel the energy in the earth here, and I am as centered as the heartwood and fir. Are they ready?” Measured impatience met casual calmness, though both shared their excitement with each passing syllable. Halla turned to the other druids and with a nod from the lead, who held a young goat in her arms, the alpha raised her hands and the horns blew again.

By the ancients in the earth! The loaming spirits of the soil! And the bosom of the Wild Mother that accepts all souls in their destined time, we bring you a new life! Accept this seed, the seed of the most sacred of your children, and let it grow tall and strong!

High in the air he held a seed for all the world to see. It was at least a foot tall and half as wide and though still half wrapped in silk, exuded the power of the thousands of trees that came before it. Halla stood beside Duke Gauvois and in unison knelt down before the Growth Shaman. Halla’s other alphas and Vigilant warriors knelt to her right while the leading wood wardens, village leaders, and the Paladin, Daventois, knelt to the duke’s left. Most parties tried to overlook the fact that Daventois appeared to glow a little bit as he prayed. It was probably just his armor.

With this tree we ask you, Oh, generous Mother, to guide our mission in these lands and let the forest and our people grow in harmony! Give us clean water for our throats and rain for our crops! Let the land grow as our chosen leaders ask it to, and know that we do so with humility and respect for your unstoppable creation!

At his feet, Halla scooped a handful of soil out of the shaman’s circle and sat back with her spine straight while the duke took his turn to do the same. One after another the circle of project leaders held a handful of soil and watched as the rot witches took their turn to speak.

Goddess of Life! Know that we understand the cost of your creation! With every life given, it grows on the decomposed bodies of generations of the dead. We offer our new child this sacrifice, so that it may grow tall and strong to lead the Hundred Acres for generations to come!

The druids stepped forward and placed the goat in the small hole. While the druids hushed calming words toward it, Halla quickly wrapped her hands around its neck, and broke it as quickly as possible. She laid it down, curled up in the soil and moved back to kneel beside the rest as the rot witches sprinkled a strange black concoction over the hole and broke its body down.

Completing the circle of kneeling people, the growth shaman knelt down between the witches and gingerly placed the seed in the hole. Almost immediately the silk wrap began to yellow and rot, but the seed stayed intact. One at a time each handful of soil was poured over the seed and when the last pile fell, each person rose and took several steps back.

As the tattoos along the shaman’s skin glowed and his hands pressed firmly into the soil, the ground began to rumble and roll before them. The seed sprout burst from the ground with awe-inspiring ferocity. It’s green flesh stretched and grew and it’s branches curled in a wild dance around it before hardening into long slender arms. Hungry limbs lifted and pushed at the soil until it’s eager roots dove into the stream and began drinking their fill. With the help of all the druids present, the sapling took a year’s worth of growth in a matter of minutes and was a good twenty feet before the druids collapsed on their knees and had to be carried out to their tents.

Once the ceremony was over, a feast was held for all the major humans and Vargr in the project and after a night of drinking and half a day of hangovers, their work continued.

——

The first thing that had to happen was the total reconstitution of the duchies’ land as a productive space. Sparse grazing land and new-growth forest would need to be quickened and invigorated with the species and internal connections that were core to the Eraduns’ power. Secondly, the use of lichens to break down stone and continue liberating the nutrients in the tough, rocky soil had to be greatly accelerated, as was the propagation and installation of species that would break down the rock. Generally, the population of the land was well-disposed to the Vargr’s efforts--to some degree. They were herders, and depended on areas where they could graze their stock. They would need to both maintain some open areas and develop a new way to keep their herds fed and watered, which would be the baseline economic challenge for the entire experiment. Duke Gauvois collected most of his taxes in the form of wool duties and readied animals; and his expected tax take would not be modified. While the peasants did not depend on their taxed produce for food, they had to keep the herds healthy in an entirely new environment. To do this, they relied on a trio of environmental modification and mediation steps: the maintenance of open fields by the use of species that would eat just about everything, the creation of new herding areas through dense, yet edible portions of the forest, and the formation of specialty reservoirs for the use of animals alone. Significant changes to how animals were taken care of also had to be made: in addition to retraining of shepherds into ancient (as opposed to more recent) Oursuf traditions, hedgewitches and doorlocks were invited to live at the center of the village and had a secondary quarters maintained on the outskirts where they could make housecalls and tend to sheep. Veterinary practices had to change, accompanied by alterations to farrying and shearing practices. Beyond it, the Vargr had their own foreign ways of growing crops that, with some convincing and some browbeating, were implemented through the villages themselves. The peasants had a good deal of shared customs with the Vargr, but they mostly existed in isolation. The Vargr had to demonstrate how to string them together, achieving a new means of farming in a highly counterintuitive manner. They were lucky that the old druidic institutions of the Nine remained, for these half-wild wood-people remembered how to set up multiple layers of interconnected crop rotation and nutrient-cycling that made a forest farm tick.

The location of the first hydraulic tree in the Kingdom of Aelbaion was originally chosen to feed everything that it could reach, but was a little far from the river for good performance. To that end, the Vargr hit upon the idea of digging dedicated irrigation channels that would be spearheads for eroding the dense and hard rock of the land. Started with pickaxe and fire-breaking, then reinforced with roots and lichens, these channels initially provided water to irrigated tree sections before becoming filled with roots. With a bit of putremantic aid, local rot and fungi were kept at bay and the trees grew as they normally would. By the end of the first year the water-moving tree (who by now was given the name “Little Water Eater”) had reached fifty feet tall. By the end of the second year it had grown another hundred. After that the massive tree slowed its growth down a bit, but was becoming an unmistakable landmark throughout the entire region. During the fourth year a landing platform was grown by the Vargr druids on Water Eater for the very rare pegasus flight, with a winding staircase grown out of its side out of strange moss, fungal brick, and wood.

The drought and famine that led to the duchy’s debt to the Vargr was likely compounded by Eradûn itself, though now they were going to spread the forest through their nation on purpose. So how would they protect their food to feed their people and keep the nation from being destroyed like the countless villages that succumbed to Eradûn long ago? They had to adapt the Vargr way.

One method that many peasants loathed adopting was to half bury the homes they lived in and cover the top in a large dome of soil. This stemmed from a cultural conceit that was present throughout the entire Kingdom: that the area under the earth was for storage, and was not too keen on living on it. To this, the Vargr shot back a fairly unbeatable question: why wouldn’t you want to live where you keep your food? This quieted most of the whining, and for those that didn’t, the threat of a good flogging from some of the members of the Wood Wardens got them back to work. The Vargr had been mostly living underground for millenia and, while digging whole burrows was out of the question, under Halla’s orders when the villages had to be moved or demolished complete, all the homes where the forest was to grow were modified.

At the ground level a small step up would be built with packed mud, clay, or stone, before the door - still wood - that led down a set of interior steps to the home itself, which was outfitted with all the usual peasant ‘necessities. The Vargr generally based a home on a large single room with a mostly covered roof. The wood used to provide scaffolding and foundation was fire-hardened and grown for the job it was to do, then coated with a specialty sealant derived from plant fats and cellulose. The dirt was densely packed around the beams, which were curved and placed in such a manner that they would form a dome-shaped roof. The actual beams of the roof would have roots and vines grafted on and through them. The roof would be solidified with a “fence” of wood grown and sealed around the perimeter with small holes on the sides to funnel out water. This would create a roof of soil that would not easily be washed away in the rain and would help keep the heat in during the winter. On these roofs every peasant would keep a garden of root vegetables and in every village a large, well kept mushroom ‘plantegration’ became a common sight. Multiple mushrooms flushes could be produced throughout the year, with winter stocks comprised of spore and dried mushroom giving these villages an important, local source of calories.

While space to grow crops was one concern - as well as keeping them away from animals - the main concern this solved was in disease prevention. With the peasants able to watch their gardens grow above them, they were also able to check the roots that grew against their silk layered roof for any signs of mold or disease. Every peasant that caught a bad vegetable would be required to pluck it out immediately and take it to the local putremancer for them to study, report, and dispose of. With every farm isolated to a house diseases would have a much harder time spreading and every house would be guaranteed to have food. Any garden unable to grow would be caught by every guest and passerby and within a day new seeds and fertilizer sent to them and a farming authority at their doorstep to figure out what was going wrong. Over the first year half a dozen root diseases were reported and handled.

At one point in the first year, a group of peasants came together and demanded exemptions to the house burying initiative - citing elderly that didn’t want to climb stairs and concerns about worms and other insects making their homes under their feet. That incident resulted in a fistfight between a few of the humans and a few Vargr - led by Vigilant wood-warrior, Argus Oaken Howl, which spread into a full blown brawl and a few arson incidents from both sides, and a report to the local village authorities, who moved the Vigilant and his men to another area of town and put a railing in for the old folks.

One of the most appreciated things the Vargr brought in were their methods of sanitation. One clan leader in particular, Berga Bowbreaker, leader of the Black Stag clan, fervently oversaw the construction of wells across the hundred acres and helped teach medicinal alcohol distillation to many humans. It should be noted that this includes both drinking alcohol and sterilizing alcohol. After a few Oursuf humans made the mistake of drinking the later, as well as the Vargr’s preferred wood alcohol, the humans stuck to the former brand of alcohol and introduced Berga and her clan to their local brews. While some nobles sat in their high castles and made jokes about the “dirt poor peasants” living in the 100 Acres, these peasants at least could say they had cleaner water and more effective medical care than their lords.

While barrel baths and steam baths already existed in Aelbaion, the Vargr helped create a culture of regular bathing, mostly by leading by example, and also by bringing in their best swamp putremancers to give the peasants long lectures on the diseases they can spread by not washing “foul mist” off their hands, what it can do to people, and where it most easily builds up and spreads. After the second village lecture on venerable diseases the putremancers had personally seen and treated, humans and Vargr were reported to be washing their hands religiously before many interpersonal activities.

While Hafgar were always a concern in the bordering duchies, with the 100 Acres doing well and many in court gearing up to open their lands as well, the issue of what to do with the Hafgar came to the forefront of many lords and ladies minds. In the year before the 100 Acres project began, a hundred new Hafgar were reported in the duchy of D’Ambecon. After Halla’s clan moved in or at least made plans to mob in, the percentage of Hafgar increased significantly in the 100 Acres and adjacent. Some would chalk it up to a small sample size skewing the data, no one could deny the fact that there was now more marriages and more intercourse in the 100 Acres, and an increased population of hybrids that cannot easily reproduce on their own.

Because of the importance of the project, each village was given its own putrmancer, but privately Halla and Gauvois drafted a plan to have “traveling putremancers” that would oversee the set up of several villages, and to reach out to more human and Hafgar mages to train more people in the craft. Ultimately, it was their desire to have Aelbaion and all the bordering Vargr packs to have their own local putremancers, but for now the Vargr would “foot the bill” for this.

Putremancers for the villages were given their own large homes at the edge of the town where many medicinal plants and fungi were grown and very large stone-lined and fenced off fermentation pits were dug. For a while the peasants avoided these areas because of the smell and the stigma rot mages have in Aelbaion but after the implementation of the Poop Obtainment Order, whereby every home was given a bucket to defecate in and every whiny Vargr guard (Argus especially) or petty village criminal would come by at noon to take the full buckets to the village putremancer, curiosity got the better of some people. Mostly though, it was the fact that from these “rot witches” homes came fertilizer for their gardens and the fields that seemed to make plants grow twice as large and more like the hardy plants of Eradûn.

Bones, diseased food, garbage, and human, Vargr, and animal feces all came to the pits every day and by the next day would be carted out as “night soil” for their various needs in the village and to help the growth of the countless plants and trees beyond the edge of town. Duke Gauvois would order compliance with the ‘night soil handlers’, especially the fortification specialists, who spent those five years fortifying the village borders with all manner of protective trees and other plants and - with the help of local Oursuf hedgemages, helped cultivate impenetrable walls of foliage that kept the more dangerous Eradûnian foliage out of the villages themselves.

Over these five years the landscape of the 100 Acres changed significantly. In every dirt road in the village there was a tree casting its shade and giving the people produce. Further out of the village centers many areas became almost indistinguishable from the forest, though a trained eye would come to learn which trees were there for their defense and which were a byproduct of the forest’s explosive growth. Besides the many new plants moving into the area, the plants in general began to grow larger after the third year. The duke was quite pleased with the larger he received during the latter end of the five years. Old plants found themselves choked out by strangling roots and oppressive shade while plants that could adapt were found to grow almost twice as large after the first long winter. The Vargr attributed it all to the forest itself, though the locals knew their putremancers had some hand in at least accelerating the process.

At the village borders Wood Wardens and The Vigilant were hard at work patrolling the Acres and reporting the countless large animals that crossed over with the forest. At one point, several wardens were stationed at the river bridges to record day and night what animals came over and back. The Duke was reportedly quite enthused by the size of some of the Eradûnian deer, but just a little worried about the bears that followed them. In response to some unfortunate animal encounters, Halla and the duke approved a new militia corps for the villages and instituted bow and hatchet training for all citizens. The cheap bows made by the Vargr clans - and taught to new apprentice bow-makers in the acres - were particularly great, but they mostly did the job well enough and were a good foundation for better training later. The Hafgar all had to be outfitted with larger bows, and in general were more keen on Vargr to join the new town militias. Some in Aelbaion expressed concerns to the king about the Vargr teaching their peasants how to fight and form militias, but with the oath-bound efforts of Duke Gauvois, who spoke for Halla in the king’s court, the other lords could shut their mouths about it and plan their own better solutions to the encroaching forest. Implementation of these methods would lead to an agricultural revolution down the line.

At the end of these five years the one hundred acres project was given a final, thorough royal review and deemed a success. The goals set forth at the start; to integrate the Eradûn forest with Aelbic villages and vice versa, to increase tax revenues on integrated villages, and to show that the humans and Vargr could coexist well enough, were all achieved with better results than anyone dared expect. It was not easy, the road was still long, but it was a momentous achievement nonetheless.

[collab post between myself and u/OceansCarraway]