Heavy is the Head that Wears the Solemn Crown

Twenty-Four - As Painful As Love

Wilbur

The tent is quiet. The candles are flickering with minimal sound, struggling to keep the flame that illuminates the entire tent in golden light burning. The wind occasionally enters through the tent flap, whistling like a canary in a coal mine. Distant shouts that sound more like hushed whispers echo in the ravine all the way from the training grounds to the tent. A slow breath in and out punctuates the silence, rhythmically proving that the one man standing in the tent is living.

Wilbur stands behind his desk. His chair has been pushed away to the very edge of the tent. A candle filled with more melted wax than solid sits on his desk, precariously settled at the very edge to make more room for the hundreds of papers that litter the solid wood. Wilbur flips between the papers, trying to make coherent stacks. It's slow work, but the organization is good for him and the process of organizing helps ease the restlessness that's growing in his limbs.

He lifts one of the papers up. It's a report from one of his soldiers. It details the events from a recent battle dubbed the Battle of Greensprings. Pogtopia had been winning the war until Manberg released their trump card. The soldier explained that a creature made from black mist and red light walked cleanly through the battlefield like a boulder cutting a river's current. Anything that dared tread too close to the creature was either absorbed into the black mists or struck with lightning the same color as flowing blood. The soldier managed to escape after his commander called for a tactical retreat, but most of his comrades were lost in the battle.

Wilbur instantly knew that the creature being described was Xornoth. Shrub explained to him once using Lilka's knowledge and experiences of who and what Xornoth was. Xornoth was a demon who was made from the memories of some ancient force. Xornoth would choose a mortal vessel, tearing apart the mortal shell to allow his infected spirit to crawl out. This time, he had been summoned in the body of a gnome. As Xornoth began contaminating his new host, the other gnomes and autumn Fae began slaughtering each other underneath the effects of a curse. He set fire to the Undergrove, thereby killing one of the four sections of the Wildlands. Xornoth in his decimated host's corpse returned to Schlatt to finish his summoning process, and now he was working for Schlatt in order to get his fix of blood and chaos. Lilka believes that Xornoth will eventually turn on his current allies to achieve world domination, but for now, he's Schlatt's most powerful weapon.

Wilbur placed the soldier's report in a pile he used to document Xornoth's actions and movements. So far, the demon had been mainly staying in Manberg. Any battles that were meant to be fought on Manberg soil were swiftly dealt with by Xornoth, when he deemed fit to make an appearance. Wilbur tried keeping his soldiers from crossing the border, but there were some fights that he couldn't keep contained. Wilbur had to trust that his generals knew what they were doing in the heat of the moment.

Wilbur turned his attention to a different report. This one was sent by a village requesting aid from the king. Apparently, their crops had been destroyed by an ever-approaching famine and their animals had been slaughtered in their fields.

Wilbur knew the cause of this one, too. His information came from Duke Sam of the Badlands. Hannah, Sam's daughter, was a powerful Faerie hybrid. Her mother was an archfey with immense power over the Overgrown, the realm of the summer Fae. Whatever had corrupted her had also inverted the way her powers worked. Instead of coaxing life from the earth like Sam explained she used to be able to do, she was causing everything in her proximity to decay. The one thing left behind were stark white roses on thorny black vines. The flowers were known as wither roses, so the famine plaguing the villages was known as the Withering. Hannah was the cause of it. Every battlefield she went to resulted in an entire field of wither roses. They tore up the soldiers and killed any entity that drew too close, from animals to monsters to villagers.