Return to Earth Eternal Official Lore
25 | ATAN AND THE TREEKIN
The battle against Lord Vinga, Palatine of the Vampires and his Blood Kingdom had ground to a standstill. Atan and the armies of the White Shield had liberated half of Europe but the other half yet lived in the despair of Bloodkin rule. It had been a decade and more since the White Shield last made a significant advance against the Vampires, and it was assumed by all that Vinga was gathering his strength for another all‐out assault on the Beasts of the Covenant.
There was one center of strength in Europe that had not been tapped. The Treekin, hiding in the Great Forest these last two thousand years, had not communicated with the outside world all these years of Bleakness. Surely they could not be blind to what happened outside their borders. Now that Atan and his forces had pushed the Vampires back somewhat, surely they might send aid to tip the balance for the Beasts?
Accompanied by a group of the most senior members of the White Shield, Atan journeyed to the borders of the Great Forest and there they made camp, for they didn’t know how long they would need to remain. The next day, at dawn, Atan rose and went to the very edge of the Treekin domain.
“Lords of the Forest, great children of Gaia, I come to you in humility and with no cause to expect you to grant that which I must have, nor even that you will hear what I must ask,” said Atan. “But nevertheless, I speak for the Beasts, and I will ask this. And we must have this.”
“For two thousand years the Beasts who were as pupils at your feet when our races were young have lived as blood cattle under the fang and claw of the Bloodkin. The noble Treekin protected themselves and what Beasts they could when Vinga cast his shadow across Europe, and for this we are grateful.”
“Now, however, we must ask the Treekin for more. We have nothing to offer in return but eternal gratitude and the resumption of the alliances of old, but yet we must ask it.”
“Children of Gaia, will you lend us your aid?”
Silence. The wind whispering in the trees, but saying nothing. Atan began again, repeating his words. Again, nothing but the pastoral quiet of an apparently empty woodland. Until dusk that day, Atan repeated his plea over and over, with no reply. The next day he arose again at dawn, approached the edges of the Great Forest, and began again, begging for aid. Again, silence.
Waiting
For a year and a day, Atan repeated this ritual until his plea became like a prayer. The members of the White Shield that Atan had brought along began joining him in their daily entreaties, spending dawn until dusk repeating their plea for help, willing the Treekin to respond. Inside the Great Forest, the Treekin were not deaf to Atan’s pleas, nor were the descendants of the Beasts who had taken shelter there before the Treekin had closed its borders. Among the Beasts, who called themselves the Harbored, there was a split of opinion. Some of the Beasts preferred to remain in the small, tranquil world of the Great Forest, cut off from the outside world, while others yearned to fight with their oppressed brothers and punish Vinga and the Blood Kingdom for their crimes against Beastdom.
The Treekin themselves did not participate in the debates among the Harbored, preferring the quiet language without words that they used among themselves. Like the Beasts sheltered in the Great Forest, the Treekin were divided. Many among them remembered the days of freedom before the Bleakness began two aeons before, and all longed to range to woodlands beyond the closed borders of the Great Forest. In opposition, many among them have developed isolationist tendencies, and would have preferred to remain uninvolved in the affairs of the larger world around them, but with discussion it became clear that there was only one viable option.
Though more than a few among the Treekin wished to deny it, it was apparent that this race of forest lords already ancient when the Beasts were born was diminishing. Restricted to a relatively small forest compared to the vast green realm in which they once ranged, the Treekin lost their contact with the source of much of their potency. Older Treekin died off at increasing rates, and many Seedlings were sprouted sickly and weak.
The Borders Open
There was no true choice, and with a certain inevitability, exactly one year and one day after Atan had begun to beseech the Treekin, they opened the borders of the Great Forest and for the first time in two thousand years an outsider entered those green boundaries. Inside, Atan found perhaps a thousand Beasts, living simply and with little capacity to impact the fight against the Bloodkin. Still, it was a joyous moment to be reunited with long‐separated Beasts, and there was a sense of a hope in the act.
The Treekin summoned Atan, alone, to a council of the greatest among them. Were the Tree Lords to pick one amongst them to speak for the rest, it would have been Ilnar Greatbranch, who yet remembered when the Beasts were newly arisen.
Said Ilnar, “My heart tells me that I have found a friend long‐lost, that a new era has begun in which hope supplants despair. But we are weakened by our long years of solitude here inside our walls of leaf, branch, and root. The Vampire Palatine is too strong for us to face directly and thereby risk the utter destruction of the Great Forest. And yet, you have come so far and done so much. The Treekin will lend what aid we are able. When the time is right and what strength is left in us will tip the balance, the Treekin will march to war. Until then, young Atan, we can but share with you what we know and what we remember. Long ago when we ourselves were new upon the Earth, the Amanita walked the forests. In those dawning days they had not yet begun their eternal search and were freer with what they knew. They were birthed at the ending of the Age before, and the beginning of this Age, long before even we of the Trees were, and they saw things and knew things that we did not. They told us of the Maar, or “Iron Children.”
Ilnar sighed the sigh of a slowly creaking oak tree. “A great race of crafters they were, living deep in the bowels of the Earth, where we do not tread. Never have I seen one, but the Amanita in those times had traffic with them, and I have seen a Maar artifact. You would know it as the Boncairn, the Trillium Shard, or the Stygian Eye; all names for the same.”
Atan replied, in wonder, “The Trillium Shard was thought to be only a story. My grandmother told me a tale once of the Bandicoons at the beginning of the Bleakness holding back the Blood Kingdom with a power called the Trillium Shard. She claimed her grandmother had told her the story, and her grandmother’s grandmother before her, and back and back, but I always believed it to be just a children’s tale.”
“If these Iron Children still exist and can be found,” continued Atan, “mayhap we can find a way to enlist their aid. One of their artifacts was enough to allow the Bandicoons to resist the Vampire plague for years in my grandmother’s story. What could we do with five, or ten, or twenty? Friend Ilnar, great Forest Lord, this may be the key we have been searching for. Tell me: Where are the Maar?” asked Atan.
”I do not know,” replied Ilnar. “North, the Amanita said. North and deep below, where Treekin do not tread. That is all I know, and it causes me sorrow that we cannot do more.”
It would have to be enough.