>>5840919“Please,” you beseeched him, all of them, “you must have smelled it, seen and felt it… Dragonfire on the wind?”
Festivities dimmed, and laughter quieted as the mood cooled.
“Your girl, demon-touched, dragon-deviled… Does she know of this?” asked the spriggan darkly then. “A true native of the Feywild passed through our lands recently, his mask cracked and clothes dishevelled… He said he’d been accosted by one of the Dark Ones, a dragon that walked like a man.”
“Izirina… The girl who was with me… She’s… Infected. Sick. The reptilians… Dragons, Dark Ones, they’ve spread an illness.”
“An disease from dealings with darkness? Caught from rubbing elbows with evil?”
“She isn’t… She isn’t like them!”
“Have your human ‘family’ seen fit to deal with darkness, little elf?” the spriggan demanded.
“No!”
“Then why was your new queen with the dragon?” asked the spriggan, looming like the great tree he was tied to, voice like cracking tinder.
“I…” you hesitated. “I don’t know, exactly. I don’t work for the Queen.”
“But you do, when you come asking aid for her kingdom,” the spriggan reminded, gently, grandfatherly, as if imparting wisdom. “Humans, we have no love for here. But the Dark Ones… The dragons and their makers… They are something worse. Their world was a world without trees, without sun or moon above, or trickling streams. Just rivers of lava, and of blood, beneath a canopy of darkness, lit by corpse-fires.”
“I’m not here for that, or for them!” you protested, on the back foot. “I’m here for… For a way to stop them!”
Your eyes alighted upon the jackalopes—by now fully bipedal, still small but their forms more natural and recognizable and adolescent in their proportions. They were cowed by the spriggan’s dark recollections of a terrible past, or tidings of a horrifying future, and they cam eto you seeking comfort—to their maker, who now needed the secret within.
“Why should we trust you, cousin and kin though you are, when you come serving the kingdom of a Dark Queen?” asked the spriggan.
“I did bring rather premium treats,” you noted hopefully.
This drew laughter, for the Bonum Chaoticum were never a DOUR folk… But there was quiet afterwards. The quiet was expectant. They wanted more, NEEDED more.
>Promise them to entreat the Queen of Hawksong on their behalf, to protect and Old Maple Hill into a true sacred grove>Tell them of Izirina’s plans for a more perfect word beyond this one, and offer them sanctuary there, from humans and dragons alike>Threaten the hill and its maple—what happens to a spirit so bound to a place that carvings on his tree appear on him, if you burn the tree down?>Enough of this… You don’t need permission! You have the jackalopes, so maybe you can just… Snatch up one of them, and escape with it?>Write-in 