The Twisted Grove

The third of the seven curse-keeps to be delved, and the one that explains what a curse is. It stands at the north end of Gaba Alam, in the forest between the two rivers that meet at Haudh-Gwenn, out toward the Free Folk country. The older tellings were vaguer and did not agree with each other: one put the forest keep east of Loshev and another near the Free Folk, which is also where Chaos Keep is usually put. What they all agreed on was forest and rivers on either side. Vigil lies south of that forest and Wraithblade Keep east of it.

The First Time, Without Knowing It

The Valiant Few walked into this keep’s outer ruins well before they came for it, and did not learn until much later what they had been standing in.

Chasing a bandit crew north out of Gaba Alam, they reached a dead village built of the gray, ore-veined stone that also runs through Loshev’s ancient bridge and its town hall. Kithul was there, and told them what it was: a Mól village, part of the fallen Empire, and not the place that mattered. The place that mattered lay further north, and something dangerous was in it. He gave them one rule for surviving the night, which was to stay on the stone and to shelter in anything with two walls still standing. Mikhail said aloud that night that he thought they were near the Twisted Grove, and nobody could confirm it.

He was right. The vines that grew around their camp in the dark and had to be cut through by morning were razorleaf, doing what razorleaf does, and the ruined town they slept in is the same ruined town the company would later cross on the way to the gatekeep. The plain gray stone is what the outer ruins are made of; the electrum-veined Mól stone does not begin until the inner platform.

Getting to It

The last few days of the road run through trackless wood, and the woods thin of birds and animals as the keep gets nearer. Then a ruined town, and the collapsed rubble of its gatekeep, which is the safest ground anyone has found out there. The ivy on that rubble only looks like the killer.

The stone slabs before it are where a band of explorers was found, two or three days dead, dragged up onto the rock with no grass bent and no blood spilled off it, and largely drained. The wounds were sharpened wood. The count never came out the same twice: five bodies on the slabs, kit and supplies enough for eleven, one more lying alone further on, and later tellings that put it at a dozen and more. The band had been sent by Ebon Ink under a contract called Grove-bound, to judge whether the Twisted Grove was a true post-Mól ruin, for a sponsor whose name the Ebon Ledger does not give.

The Keep

The ground stone changes as you climb the inner platform, from plain rock into the filigreed, electrum-veined Mól stone that marks every keep. What it encloses is unlike the others: an outer wall with a gate house, now collapsed, an inner wall behind it, a small courtyard, arrow slits, and a perimeter service ramp that spirals three or four stories past empty guard rooms and dead-ends with no way onto the roof. It was built heavily, by people who expected to be attacked and meant to hold, and that is the strongest argument that it was a house of the Muharib, the empire’s elite portal-guards.

Inside are a fifteen-foot entry hall, inner double doors barred from the far side, a two-story main hall, a curved second-level passage of four looted quarters, and a room forty feet square with a hole in its roof. An enclosed balcony twenty feet up the back wall, open to the air once, is the easiest way in, and the way the party took after the barred inner doors had beaten every charge and blade they had. Behind where a tapestry used to hang is a stone door and a vault, looted over seven hundred years, still holding an electrum crown behind an electrified Mól keyhole. Every keep takes a different key. Below everything is a pillared basement, and in the basement the roots.

The Two Trees

Outside the keep stands a colossal Eldamar sequoia, centuries old, its canopy over the roof, a species whose seeds will not open without fire. Inside, growing up through the main hall and out through the roof, is its twin: the same species, the same age, near enough seven hundred years, rotted through and still alive. It did not die of fire. It died of rot.

They were one thing. One tree’s roots reach the world of order and inevitability, which is to say death; the other’s branches touch the world of life and essence. Each was deadly and each countered the other, and the link between them was the curse. Fire did not touch either. An axe barely marked the living one, and the dead one’s roots would not burn at all. Down in the pillared basement the roots gathered at a boundary to the plane of death so thin as to be no boundary, and dormant blights quivered in them by the hundred.

The place kept time by them. At dawn the razorleaf outside erupted, thirty feet in seconds, and it is a wicked thing at rest: sharp-edged leaves and thorns that open a horse’s legs, growing by night, reaching after whatever lives near it, darkening and stiffening into rigid deadwood the moment it is cut. It blankets the ruins for a mile and thickens toward the keep, which is how anyone worked out it grows outward from a center. At nightfall the dead tree blossomed instead and the blights came, cat-sized things of twisted twig bound in dead vine, poisonous, regenerating, shy of natural light and drawn to false light, pouring out of the trunk and clawing up out of the ground all round the walls until dawn sent them burrowing back to one point beneath the keep. They were found nowhere else, and they went for horses far harder than for people. The heaviest wave came at both edges of the night, which left a very thin window to cross open ground in.

The assassin vines in the keep are a separate matter entirely, unrelated to the razorleaf beyond sharing the ruin: carnivorous, unthinking, several hundredweight grown out, lying in wait and luring with sweet flowers in the warm months. Hack the mass and it grows back. Cut the anchor roots and it dies.

Breaking It

Only positive energy will strip the death-tree, and a radiance crystal alone will not finish it; radiance is a half-opposite of negative energy, and what it does is take away the tree’s undead nature so that it can be burned. Water from the Rio Vite will strip the aura the same way. Ash from burnt blights, carrying death in it, is what fells the living tree. Then, and only then, an axe.

It has been broken before, three times or thereabouts, and each time unevenly. Once the forest answered with a year of unnatural green; twice with a rot that ran through it. A boundary between two planes has to be severed level or the recoil swings wild, and that rule, which the party built its whole plan around, came out of what happened here. Taking both trees in the same instant is what kept the recoil to what it was; had only one gone, the answer would have been larger, faster and wider than anything the forest has done before.

Campaign Updates

The Elder was found pinned to the wall of the map room by the death-tree’s roots, and it took the better part of an hour of chiselling to get him loose. Freed, and strengthened by the keeps the party had already walked, he said what a curse is, named the sacred geometry on the relief map, and set out the two trees and the way between them. Then he walked them to the gate, blew a path through the razorleaf with the keep’s own gravity so they could get clear of it, and dissipated from the effort.

He was stronger here than anywhere, strong enough to pull the party to this keep from any map room in the seven, though only toward it and never back. That is how they returned: through the map-room door, bridged across the ethereal, to take a crystal grown for centuries at the root-chamber boundary. Mikhail walked into the death-aura wearing the crown out of the vault, which shields him and nobody else, and shook the stone loose with a lute rather than a hammer, since hammering it would have woken the blights in the roots around him. That crystal was charged at ruinous cost to Nancáro and kept back for the living tree.

The hour came at sunrise, some minutes after Haudh-Gwenn and Wraithblade Keep. The party came through the keeps’ linked map rooms and worked the two trees at once. Aldo went up the overhanging arm of the life-tree with the charged crystal, out along the underside of it, to the pinhole where the two planes press together. Mikhail went down among the roots under an aura that made him imperceptible, burned a floor of blights out of his way with a wand rather than lose the door, and forced the radiance crystal into the roots with his bare hand while the negative energy stripped its charge and left only the heat, which melted the stone’s facets into his palm. Koa warped a barrel of oil into the death-tree’s trunk, laid a ring of oil and unlit torches around himself, and set the ring alight while he cut.

The death-tree went up all at once, and in the same instant the giant tree outside was neutralized. The overhanging arm, too long and heavy to have ever held itself up without constant healing, bent under its own weight and broke with Aldo on it. He passed through the pinhole and left his soul on this side, because there are no souls on the inner planes, and fell ninety feet into the arms of the Martyr, who walked out of the ruin carrying him. The roots collapsed into the basement walls behind Mikhail as he ran for the stair, and he and Koa came out of a burning keep together.

What is left is not quiet. The life-tree stands with its arm gone, the copse it carried brought down across the wall and the building, and its leaves turning autumn for the first time in all the years the two trees held each other level. Around it the ground has run riot: moss, mushrooms and blossom out of season, grasses and bushes thickening by the day, the razorleaf tripled in size, and a squirrel the size of a small dog in the branches. Inside, the death-tree burns and does not burn down, in a flame that gives off no light most eyes can catch and sheds cold instead of heat. It is not combustion at all. It is a dense mass of physical negative energy diffusing into a world made of the opposite, now that the plane it belonged to has been cut away from it, and wood carried out of that tree keeps draining whoever holds it bare-handed. The razorleaf came through the break alive and changed, still sharp and no longer reaching. Of the blights there were none left to look at.