Millenniums Apart

The Life Tree

      My name is Sitha. I'm a Guardian, one of the very few left. I was one of the few who planted the Life Tree at the beginning of the Calamity, thousands of years ago. The Life Tree was thought to be able to stop the planet from destroying itself. It worked the Life Tree did keep the planet alive but turned the tree into something else, something monstrous. Something evil. The roots reached deep into the Shadowrealms extracting an evil that was as ancient as the blood of the planet. If not much older. The roots turned into another, a copy of the Life Tree, a much darker copy. A magic flux flooded the world, people thought it was the Life Tree and became scared. This magic caused the Great War.

        The Great War started when a non-magic tried to set fire to the Life Tree. Not only did the Tree react but all of the Guardians were woken by the Tree's magic. People grew weary of the living stautes and that set the war off. Magic against none, guardian against guardian. Bloodshed and explosions caused by magical warding spells fed the darker half of the tree causing it to grow. The world's magic became stronger and stronger. Meager magicians and illusionists turning into wizards and war mages. Each had powers that came from that ancient evil, each became corrupted and evil. Eventually their corruption and arrogance led to their downfall. Magic was banned and the Life Tree was called a monstrosity. The few mages that managed to resist the darkness of the Life Tree's other half went into hiding. They cast powerful magic onto the guardians to send them back into hibernation before they did more damage. People came forward to watch this gathering of the powerful mages.

        I was one of the few that came because I planted the Tree. It was bonded to me, gave me my imortality, something I didn't want but knew it was necessary. It was amazing when we first planted it to see the way that it grew over the thousands of years that I watched it. Sadly, I am one of the last orginal guardians of the Life Tree, those of us who were not turned into statues. The statues stay in place year after year, the people who transformed into them slowly become what the statue depicts. Lions and bears to dragons and wyverns, the protectiveness of the tree stays but the anger and hatred towards non-magics is something that comes from the Life Tree itself, sentient being capable of these emotions.

        The magic that the mages casted was supposed to ground the Life Tree into another world. One that would allow the magic within both halves of the tree to continue to flow throughout it but not into our world. A magic barrier was constructed to keep the non-magics out and the guardians in. This kept all the non-magics away from the tree and those mages who had been cursed to stay inside the barrier in. Slowly, people forgot about it. Life returned to normal, the normal that had been before the Great War. Although, some of our daily life would be drastically changed. Magic, no longer regularly used, fell out of practice and was soon forgotten.