SISSEKAI: A Brief History of the Silverwood

Prelude

East of Lumberg and the River Samson, and running along the north of the Supernum Valley, lies the vast and verdant Silverwood. Though its name does not, in fact, come from the silver bark of its birch trees, they have long been a key resource in the region, furnishing a dozen different civilisations with lumber in its time. The cities of Lancelot, Ishura, Sekhet, Apollyon and Lumberg have all, in their own times, taken this forest as their cradle--and they have all, in their time, had to contend with its dangers.

Wilderness

It is a well-known aspect of Tiresia that any place mortals do not dwell becomes the dwelling-place of monsters. Why this is the case is less certain; theories abound, and each religion ascribes its own cause to the phenomenon, but the reason changes little about the outcome--a forest as deep and expansive as the Silverwood is the ideal breeding place for woodland monsters.

Historically, the Silverwood is most famous for its population of wolves; the silver wolf is the beast from which the forest derives its name, and its timber-wolves are but dryads that have taken on wolven forms over millennia of proximity to them. Wolves were the signature animal of both the cities of Lancelot and Ishura, emblazoned upon their banners and coats of arms; and the dragonborn of Apollyon believed that the wolf-kings Set and Cyrus were raised by a she-wolf in its depths. Other beasts are hardly lacking in the forest, bears and deer and mink, but it is the wolf that manifests most readily when mortals cross into it.

Beyond beasts, the fae are another frequent sight in the Silverwood. Though in the past the balance tended more towards the benign seelie, the fall of underground Sekhet and the appearance of the Breachwood within the forest’s borders has led the modern-day balance to be tilted far in the favour of the unseelie: thieving goblins and cruel sepsies, bloodlusted redcaps and cunning bowers. Also appearing ever since the Breach are various mutants and aberrations--insects that drip with the black blood of Sekhet, monstrous plants in a variety of colours, and strange half-stone, half-flesh beasts that stalk the forest’s night.

The Hunts

A tradition dating back to the founding of the Old Kingdom of Aulderion, Aldish settlers brought this practice with them when they came to found the city of Lancelot in time immemorial. A distant precursor to the modern-day system of Adventurer’s Guilds, a Hunt essentially consisted of a village or town’s warriors riding out into monster-infested wilderness and slaying as many monsters as they could manage. The practice was rather more ritualistic than an adventuring party going out and doing the same, however: leading each Hunt was the settlement’s chief or mayor or even king. Each one began with a grand sacrifice to Ceruna and Brigid (the Aldish aspects of the goddesses Nerea and Ursa), and ended with a city-wide banquet and merriment.

The benefits that each Hunt brought to Lancelot were twofold: first, culling the local monster population meant that it was safer for the average labourer, such as lumberjacks or foragers, to venture into the outermost layers of the forest and do their work, as well as heading off any risk of a monstrous onslaught building up and assaulting the city at large. Second, each Hunt generated great hoards of monster parts for businesses in the city--Wolfbark for its armourers and toolsmiths, Balefangs for its brewers and mages, Pixie Dust for its prostitutes and entertainers; that which is left behind by a fallen monster is always vastly superior to its mundane equivalents.

And though the customs surrounding the Hunt died out with the collapse of Lancelot and its fellow cities in the Aldish tradition, the general concept did not; future cities in the region would go on to practice their own forms of monster population control and resource harvesting in the millennia that followed. The Ishurans that absorbed the lands of Lancelot sent their painted totem-warriors into the forest to root out the darkness within, claiming not just physical trophies but the forms of wolves for use in their other wars; the sekhati that rose up from below patrolled the areas around their entry tunnels with vicious prejudice, exterminating any beast--monster or mundane--that drew near; and the dragonborn of Sol Apollyon led brave crusades into the very heart of the forest, where many met glorious ends in the hunt for the immortal Vera Lune.

Vera Lupes

Most every adventurer who has grown up in the Supernum has heard--and quite possibly spun--tales of Vera Lupes, the titanic she-wolf purported to lurk at the very centre of the Silverwood. Mentions of her date back to the earliest days of Sol Apollyon; one war-chief’s notes list an entire crusading war-band as having been eliminated in the field, and lists their cause of death as merely ‘Vera Lupes.’ Several priests from that era describe her as a fiendish remnant of ancient Akkardun, a ‘biting coldness’ that ‘resides in the dark core of Embrius Silva,’ though later writings attest her instead as a laurel for Apollyon--a challenge sent down by the gods, meant to be conquered in the name of glory and justice. A few court records even show soldiers having been put to death for claiming to have slain her, what the dragonborn called the crime of false glory; one of the few things that the dragonborn met with capital punishment.

In the modern era, however, her existence is less certain of a fact. As with most wilderness areas, the Silverwood gets increasingly deadly the further into it one goes, and so there is reason enough for most adventurers to avoid its very heart without the need for gigantic wolf-monsters as a further deterrent. Adventurers that near its presumed location have reported some sort of chilling effect that may well be magical in origin, as well as deep banks of fog rife with will o’ wisps and similarly luminescent unseelie that are otherwise unheard of in the north--but those that draw too close are slain, and from that number the few corpses that are recovered bear wounds that could have been inflicted by any number of the Silverwood’s wolf monsters.

Perhaps Vera Lupes never existed, and was merely another one of the dragonborn’s heathen additions to Belladonna’s pantheon of laurels. Perhaps she did and met her end at the blade of some unknown hero, now well and truly cheated of his rightful kudos, in the thousands of years between her first appearance in texts and now. Or perhaps she always has existed, and lives to this day in utter secrecy, having kept a low profile for all these years out of a desire never to face another dragonborn crusade again.

The Fall of Sekhet

And, speaking of dragonborn crusades, one particular crusade was the driving cause of the greatest disaster that the Silverwood has ever seen since the dawn of time, but two thousand years ago. This was waged against the underground city of Sekhet, home to a people known as the sectid or the sekh.

The sectid were a peculiar people, as is typical for those that exist in the layers of Tiresia that lie closest to the Abyss--the Midst. Monstrous in nature, but in some respects far exceeding the mortals of their time in their mastery over certain magical disciplines, the sectid formed a rigidly caste-based society, most akin to the common ant that resides in Tiresia’s dirt. Each caste was adapted, on a biological level, to a specific set of tasks. Those of the warrior-caste were heavily armoured and had tremendous, venomous jaws that could pierce even the toughest of dragonborn hides; the scout-caste were nimble gatherers who could seemingly discern between the slightest of scents to identify both herbs and the tracks of prey; the labourer-caste were tremendously muscular, albeit slow, adapted to heaving beast carcasses great distances underground, bringing them to their queen; and the nurse-caste were capable of producing a healing salve to spread over the wounds of their injured compatriots.

In and of themselves, the sectid were not considered any great threat to the dragonborn for the first few centuries after their discovery. They were creatures of the deep Silverwood, as far as the dragonborn were concerned, and were even amenable to trade--the sectid harvested a number of magical stones from deep underground, and were keen to exchange them for goods found only on the surface, beyond the Silverwood. One dragonborn researcher, however, eventually came to discover that the sectid had not naturally developed in this way; in truth, there was a fifth caste, which never ventured to the surface whatsoever and so had never been sighted by mortal eyes. This was the royal-caste; and their existence was a harrowing discovery indeed.

The royal-caste were physically weaker and far feebler than their soldiers and their hunters and their labourers; but what they lacked in physical might, they more than made up for in their mastery of magic. And, the mores of the surface world having little sway over the unforgiving underground, their particular specialisation was anathemic to the entirety of dragonborn society--the sectid’s ruling class were all, to a creature, masters of blood magic; the profane art of warping one’s basest form. The royal-caste practiced this power prodigiously, both upon themselves (improving their powers of cognition and sorcery) and upon their subjects, and--worst of all--paid due respect to the first teacher of blood magic: Ariana Aphagon, goddess of monsters and demons.

So the dragonborn declared war against the sectid, and delved deep into their underground city, and drove them to the brink of disaster--and the sectids’ great Queen, the royal of royals, chose to strike a calamitous bargain with the Abyss, in the hopes that the one death was less certain than the other.

The Present Day

Despite the new monsters spawned in the wake of the Breach, and the changes in the forest’s ecology that have spiraled out since those days, at its heart the Silverwood has changed very little from the way it always has been. These days, the greatest change to its operations has been the arrival of allogenes from beyond the stars--no more is Lumberg sending its own mortal scions to brave its depths! With these deathless soldiers from beyond on the case, perhaps the deeper mysteries of the Silverwood shall be unraveled yet… or perhaps they will stay mysteries. Certainty is, as they say, hard to come by!