Blights

A blight is a bundle of twisted twig bound about with dead vine, running on a great many scrawny legs, and at a distance the first of them were taken for purposeful tumbleweeds coming out of the treeline. Most are the size of a cat. The largest stand as tall as a man, with a matured body of branch and creeper, and those move through a canopy hand over hand rather than running. The vine serves as muscle and tendon and the wood as bone, and the vine is dead razorleaf, which is what a mile of the ground around that ruin is made of.

They fight with sharpened wood, thrown and then collected again, and the points carry a poison that does not kill so much as empty a man out, taking the strength from his arms across a night until he cannot lift what he came in carrying. They bleed a dark rotten ichor when cut and they do not stay cut: a severed limb was seen to grow back on the spot, in front of the man who had taken it off. What they will not stand is light. Daylight and honest flame both push them back, the brighter the further, while a conjured light hung in the air draws the whole mass toward it. They are dry as kindling. Oil, a torch and a doorway to funnel them through is the whole of the method.

What they are is not settled. A naturalist’s reading of the first ones taken apart put them down as constructs rather than creatures, not alive at all. Where the assembling happens, and who does it, was never discovered. The Elder gave them the name blights and said there would be no end to them while the curse held. Both accounts stand. They go after horses far harder than they go after people.

Campaign Updates

They were the answer to the bodies on the slabs. A band of explorers had been laid out on the rock outside the ruined town, days dead and largely drained, and the wounds in them were sharpened wood rather than blade or tooth. The things that made them came out of the woods twice while the company crossed that ground.

The source of them was the dead tree growing up through the keep’s main hall. At nightfall it split open at the base and they came out by the dozen and then by the several dozen, while more clawed up out of the ground all around the walls. The heaviest press came at both edges of the night, dusk and dawn alike, which left a very thin window to cross open ground. The company burned three waves out of the hall and sealed the door on what was left, then went out to a stone platform for the night rather than shelter inside a keep whose dead tree opened after dark. They camped behind a central bonfire and four smaller ones at the compass points, set that way to hold off things that will not come near a light, and fed the fires with blight corpses as they fell. At first light the survivors burrowed back down toward a single point beneath the keep, into the pillared basement where the roots gathered at the boundary of the plane of death, and lay dormant there in the hundreds.

Their ash was worth something. Burned, they carried death in them, and that ash was what could have brought down the living tree once the dead one was stripped. The keep was entered again later, and one of them was still awake in the branches as a sentinel. It could perceive the party through the veil that hid them from everything else, so the Elder cleared it to be destroyed. Below it, in the root chamber, a man worked a crystal loose with a lute rather than hammer it free, for fear of waking the rest. They stirred anyway, and they still would not follow him out into the daylight.

The morning the curse broke, the company came in at dawn against the whole of it. Over a dozen were already climbing into the trunk when Mikhail took the balcony, and one of the tall ones threw itself across the chasm on its whip-arms and was taken apart in a single stroke. What did the real work was a wand: one blast into a packed swarm did three times what it should have, because they are dry and they burn, and a second one thrown far too close for anybody’s comfort killed a whole swarm at a stroke. Then the death-tree caught, and the roots came down into the basement walls with the ones below still in them, and the Elder swept the rest back with the last of what he had while Mikhail ran for the stairs under falling stone.

What happened to the hundreds in the basement was never discovered. The company walked that ground again a few days afterward to see what the breaking had left of the plants and the creatures both, and found the razorleaf sharp and healthy and still growing. Of the blights there were none left to look at.