>>5841549>>5841478>>5841460>>5841322>>5841056>>5841038>>5840935>>5842011“I’ll bring you a better treat, then,” you said. “If you do this thing for us—for Man—I’ll speak to the Queen. I’ll protect your tree, Honourable Spirit of the Old Maple. I’ll make this a… A protected place.”
“OLD?” he groaned, as if wounded.
“No offence,” you added.
The (old) spriggan considered this, but ultimately shook his head.
“One hill, one tree… I can protect it myself, if it comes to that.”
“Can you?” you pressed. “I see that heart carved into your bark is ehaling… Slowly. But what if theyever wish to level the hill? To chop the tree down, or to burn it?”
“Little half-an-elf,” the spriggan asked, tone creaking with dangerous intent as he loomed, “is that a threat?”
“N-no! No, no, of course not!” you sputtered, waving your hands frantically. “I’m just saying…”
You hesitated. What WERE you saying? What could you offer?
“What if we were to expand the hill into a… A sacred grove? A REAL one?”
“This IS a real sacred grove!” the spriggan protested, to the cheers of the sprites and pixies present.
“Come on now… One tree isn’t exactly a GROVE, is it?” you needled them. “I mean like in my mother’s lands… The Sylvan Lands. There, the groves stretch for city blocks… As far as the fields around us!”
You spread your arms wide and twirled, drawing their attention to the empty expanse—all roadways and flattened land, the trees cleared away.
“You must remember what that was like,” you said.
“There were other spriggans, in those days,” the Spirit of the Old Maple acknowledged. “But will your Dark Queen really listen to you?”
“She will,” you asserted, speaking with a firmness of feeling that—in truth—you weren’t confident you could back up with action. “She must.”
“Very well,” the patron of Old Maple Hill granted you. “Bring us her promise… And we will save her people.”
“Really?!” you asked.
“Well,” the spriggan corrected, ‘we will try. I do not know your alchemies, or the fleshcrafting and spirit-infecting magics of the Dark Ones. We can only do our best.”
“Same,” you muttered.
“Enough of this serious-talk!” a sprite declared. “Let’s eat!”
“Let’s drink!” agreed a spindly satyr.
“Let’s dance!”
“Let’s sing!”
The spriggan chortled, and nodded his head, holding out a rough and rootlike limb. You took it daintily and once more joined the dance. For a moment that stretched on for time unknowable to human perception, the cavorting continued…