Gou is a dark elf in Warhammer

"Something is wrong!"

Dacha cursed and waded through the mud, flexing her crooked claws, eager to grasp at the source of pain.

Flies gathered around her like a mist, circling in hollows and tumbling over low-lying paths. The flies looked like common insects, but she would not be fooled. She knew the seasons all too well, and fall was transitioning to winter, and swarms of flies should not be buzzing in the woods. As she made crackling noises in the mud, more flies flew out of the reeds, filling her eyes and gathering in her wooden mouth.

A sickening stench hung in the air, but she pressed on undaunted, struggling through another waist-deep puddle and climbing a small dirt rise to get a better view. However, flies spread to the farthest reaches of her vision, clouding the air and giving the valley a strange, ghostly pallor.

"What is it? What did you see? An elf?" The sacred tree ghost Aru followed Daicha's footsteps, creaking up the slope, dragging her tangled bark with a series of spasmodic twitches and jumps.

"No, it's a bear." Daicha reached out her wooden claws and reached into the cloud of flies. She let her thoughts flow through the roots and branches, feeling the pain and confusion in each tentacle. After a moment, she put her claws down, her face cracking into a pained expression.

Aru looked in astonishment towards the place where Daicha's paw had been, but she could see nothing.

Daicha and Alu paused for a moment at the top of the slope, listening to the terrible screams, which were high-pitched and repetitive, loud enough to drown out the buzzing of flies.

"What could make such a sound? What could cause her so much pain?" Alu walked around Daicha, constantly folding and unfolding her fragile limbs, making a clicking sound.

"The whole valley has become strange to me, I can hardly recognize it. Things that should rot are growing, and things that should die are full of life." Dai Cha shook his head and whispered to Aru.

"How come the forest is so strange to you?" Aru folded and unfolded her limbs again, obviously uneasy.

"He did it! It must be him!" Dai Cha's voice was full of venom. Then she hurried to the other side of the slope and plopped back into the mud.

When they found the bear, the sun was high overhead, and there was no shadow to hide the horror of the scene, while they stood there speechless with horror.

Half submerged in the mud, the brown bear lay at the bottom of a gully, screaming like a hungry baby. The left side, though partially hidden in the mud, was intact. The other side, however, was horribly altered, its fur falling off, revealing a pile of sores and pustules, its flank swollen into an angry sac, and Daicha and Aru, standing not far away, could clearly see shapes swimming in the pus under the bear's skin.

Sensing danger, the brown bear tried to stand up, but it was too weak to move. The best it could do was stare at the two of them and continue screaming.

Tears streamed down Daicha's cheeks and she scratched her face frantically, scraping the bark off her face, cursing under her breath. Then she climbed down the gully and rushed to the brown bear. As she approached, the bear tried to fight back pitifully, but she easily dodged the attack and then she placed her tangled claws on the brown bear's chest.

As the bear struggled to raise its paws to strike again, Decha began to sing, her voice dry and low, but the melody was gentle. A wordless lullaby came from the nearby trees, rustling the copper leaves, and the melody made the bear fall back into the mud, finally stopping its terrible scream.

"Sleep, great soul, and suffer no more." She moved closer to the creature's broken head and gently ran her claws over the brown bear's wound.

The bear's breathing began to slow down.

Standing there, Aru first cried, then climbed down the gully and joined the rustling chorus.

Daicha held out one paw and, with a series of snapping sounds, held the bear's head. She then raised her other paw and placed it on the bear's head.

"Sleep, you deserve your rest." She whispered first, and when her voice fell, the claws she placed on the bear's head turned into a sharp thorn and stabbed out suddenly. With the sound of bone cracking, the brown bear stiffened for a moment, and then the brown bear's head fell on her arms.

The brown bear let out its last gasp and lay down quietly.

Daicha stared at the bear for a few seconds, watching in silence as its blood pooled around her knees. Then she stepped back, screaming, a scream so violent that her neck broke and the vines fell from her trembling lips.

Aru knelt down and fell into grief with Daicha, but for a long time they could do nothing but cry.

Finally, as the sun drifted across the sky and shadows began to lengthen across the flooded clearing, Daicha stopped crying and laid the bear’s head on the ground.

"Even in my darkest visions... Aa ...

"You think this is Orion's work?"

"Who else? That invader king is even more foolish than we thought. He released this to us, the result of his arrogance!" Daicha's voice was as fragile as her trembling claws, and she pointed at the infected corpse. After she finished speaking, she scratched her face again, and her words turned into a string of incomprehensible curses, then she closed her eyes and said in a calm tone, "The pain of our sisters will be much less than the pain I inflicted on him."

"We must remove this abominable filth from its flesh. Its soul is ancient and powerful. We must ensure it returns whole and free of any taint." After a moment, she nodded to the brown bear's body and raised her claws after she finished speaking. Her claws turned into sharp blades at her thought.

Aru nodded, and as her paws formed the same shape, the brown bear's carcass began to crunch. Then, with a wet tearing sound, they began to work.

"The pollution is strongest in the heart of the valley. If this filth can infect a noble soul like this, imagine what it can do to the fragile souls of outsiders?" Nearly an hour later, they both climbed out of the ravine, covered in blood and debris, and Daicha pointed to the woods, where the cloud of flies was densest. She licked her ridged lips with her tongue, as if she could already taste the violence.

Alu looked at Daicha in surprise. Just as she was about to say something, Daicha started moving, wading through the mud and flies, bending over to cross the swamp. She hesitated for a moment, then followed him.

As they reached the center of the clearing, the extent of the decay became apparent. The trees were covered in yellow spores, several of them bent and swollen under giant fungal growths, and an acrid smell penetrated the branches and trunks.

Daicha paused before a bent maple tree. She could see the bark ripple like water in the wind. She took a step closer, shaking her head in disbelief, and scraped the bark lightly with her claws. At her touch, the tree burst like overripe fruit. She stepped back and watched as slippery shapes tumbled down the hole, hundreds of maggots rolled into the mud, and the tree began to spasm and tremble.

She had no time to think, and she had to shield her face as the tree toppled over and broke apart, spraying her with grubs and rotting berries. The swarm of flies became thicker, and it was almost impossible to see ahead. She turned and ran, sprinting down another trail, with Aru following closely behind her.

They raced through the mud, splashing and running through puddles and rotting tree debris.

As she ran, Daicha felt the waves of magic passing through the branches. Her thoughts made her steps pause. She seemed to have felt it somewhere, in some existence, but she couldn't remember the details for a moment. Her mind was filled with hatred and malice. Soon, she stopped thinking because she saw something. She nodded to Aru. Then the two of them sneaked into the cover of the trees, turned into shadows and thorns, and approached the watcher silently like ghosts.

Daicha was bound by her master, and she was not allowed to hunt the Asrai. She had promised not to openly attack the Asrai's hall, but after her encounter with the bear, she could hardly restrain herself from lunging at the watcher. Just as she was about to attack, Aru grabbed her wrist and pulled her to the spot. She glared at Aru, but Aru gestured for her to look at the branch where the guardian was.

She looked in the direction indicated, where there were a lot of flies, but when she looked through the mist, she understood why Aru asked her to stop. She frowned. In her opinion, Ariel's idiots were always clumsy, but the scene in front of her was beyond Asrai's standards. The watcher's legs were hanging on the branches, completely exposed to the view below the path.

She no longer made an attacking gesture and quietly approached the tree where the watcher was. As she got closer, the stench became stronger. She knew where the smell came from. She had smelled it around brown bears. Obviously, the watcher was dead. She squeezed out of the ferns and looked around to see if there were any living watchers. After a moment, when she was sure it was safe, she climbed lightly up the branch and came to the hanging watcher.

She let out a hiss of disgust. The Watcher before her was swollen and pus-covered like a bear, his face gray, his cheeks sunken, his eyes replaced by two broken holes. His limbs were swollen into sacs of fluid, his skin crawling with larvae, his chest had collapsed into a wet sludge, where the lungs should have been, a pile of pale, wriggling shapes that rummaged blindly through the rotting skin.

There was a crow on the tree, protesting at her angrily. She knew where the watcher's eyes were. The stench was unbearable for her, so unbearable that she fell to the ground.

"I am very sure that what Orian released was not a simple soul. He released a fragment of the God of Plague and the ancient filth." She said to Aru who was supporting her. Her eyes were empty and her voice was flat.

Aru shook her head, but before she could respond, Daicha, who had already stood up, ran off down the trail without any hesitation.

"Orion is wrong!" Daicha said as she stumbled back into the forest, shaking, barely able to contain her anger. She looked at the sagging and rotting trees around her. She shook her head and waved her claws at the rotten trees. "What's the use of Ariel's promise? Those proud declarations of protection! What are they guarding? Pretends, all pretense, they will die in the winter, killed by their own king, and by spring, there will be nothing left!"

“The forest is eternal.”

"We have been betrayed, we have become strangers in our own home, we have become playthings! I will not die so easily, I must find a way to make them pay for this!" Daicha roared, roaring hysterically, she closed her eyes, trying to see through the spores and diseased wood, after a moment, her sparkling eyes opened, "He knows what to do!" "The Ancient One? He is somewhere else, his mind wandering on paths we cannot follow." Aru's voice was full of fear and excitement.

"He will remember me. His dreams are long and full of foreboding. He will foresee this day and he will know what to do." Daicha's mood brightened as she thought of her master.

"That fake king will die, and I will watch him die!" Dai Cha ignored Aru's confusion, she started running, whispering as she ran.

The seasons lingered within the borders of the Wildwood, and even the cold dared not enter. The leaves remained glossy and dense, covering the intertwined branches of the trees with a thick and impenetrable coat, and it was dusk when Daicha reached the so-called prison. But even at noon, the Wildwood was a gloomy abyss, a realm of shadows and heavy, ominous silence.

Daicha stopped before entering and motioned for Aru to stay where he was and wait. She knew Aru wanted to go in, but she couldn't let him go in. Not every sacred tree ghost could walk out of the wild forest like she did. Then, she started to move forward. Even in the dim light, she could see the slender stone pillars at the edge.

Ariel's witches had put all their craft into these rough granites, and few souls could pass through the granite webs, but she was no ordinary soul. Her memory went back further than Ariel could have imagined, and she had cracked the secrets of the stones in just a few decades, and she could now move through the wild forest with ease as usual.

She had never completely given up on her shadowy home, it held magic far more interesting than the wards that imprisoned it, within its borders lay beings that spanned countless worlds and a hundred different pasts, one of which was dearer to her than any other inhabitant of the forest. Despite her anger and pain, she smiled as she passed the rune-carved stone, knowing that she had returned to the true heart of the forest.

The Urku wind enveloped her, and she let her body dissolve into the slow breeze, blending her voice with the wayward screams of the hawks overhead. The trails spread out beneath her, but she ignored them all, knowing that the wild forest had a mind of its own, and its goals were rarely aligned with those of its guests. She listened to the forest's song, a confusing, labyrinthine rhythm that she had learned many years ago, during the first years of her imprisonment.

Each stanza suggested in some oblique way a different route from the one before, and she wound around as she listened, following the rhythm of the words through the forest, ignoring the most alluring sights. To her untamed soul, the shadowy woodland was a poison, and even the smallest puff was enough to intoxicate her, so she followed the ancient melody like a rope, letting it pull her back to her master.

After three days and four nights in darkness, she found her master.

The Master was huddled at the bottom of a natural amphitheater, surrounded by maids who were just as loyal as she was. The maids knelt in the trees, twitching and moving with excitement, as if watching the Master perform a grand monologue. She was surprised by this, she had never seen so many believers gathered to worship her Master, maybe she was not the only one who heard the call?

Her master was as still as ever, and she stumbled to a stop, unable to approach her master for a moment. She had not enjoyed her master's company for many years, and even now, surrounded by a group of devout believers, she could still feel the calmness of her master that touched her heart directly.

After a long while, the environment gradually stripped Cordial of its form, leaving only a shadowy mountain and the vague rustling of leaves. The song of the forest radiated from it, filling the amphitheater and filling Decha's courage.

"As long as the Ancients live, there is always hope," Daicha thought before sprinting down the hill, letting her Master's melody soak through her tired limbs.

Some of the sacred tree ghosts looked up at Daicha kneeling beside them, then quickly lowered their heads and immersed themselves in worship of Cordier. Daicha could see that their prayers might have lasted for years, their legs had taken root deep into the ground, and vines had extended to their backs, binding them to the ground.

"My Lord, what shall I do? Guide me." Daicha took the same position so that she could bend over and salute her Lord. Her wooden knees clicked as she knelt, and her wrists clicked as she held out her paws in prayer.

She heard no answer, but the wordless song grew more majestic, soothing her shaking limbs and dazzling her with visions. The images were a jumbled patchwork of faces and colors, but she understood the meaning, and she relaxed her limbs and took deep breaths of the cool forest air. As her heartbeat slowed, the Master's song began to make more sense.

Beyond the borders of the Wild Wood, time rushed by, its impatience scattering the stars across the sky and pushing the sun around in its orbit, but in the deepest reaches of the Shadowed Wood, time was forgotten.

Decha gave herself over to the song, listening to the slow, undulating rhythm. As the grass grew over her shaking limbs, the consciousness of the Ancient One became clear.

Cordier sang of the endless web, the essence of the forest that tied the present to the past and wove it into the future. As the melody washed over her, she saw everything clearly. What the elves did to the forest, they did to themselves. A promise here, a betrayal there, all would be remembered, changing and guiding the elves' fate, and reflected back from the forest's lakes and springs.

Then the tune grew darker, the threads that held each other were torn, the filaments that held each other dangling, and the natural order fell into a vortex of chaos. In this moment, Daicha thought of her enemies, and she was filled with hatred, but the ancients soothed her with their cold and majestic song.

“The forest is eternal.”

“Everything that has been done will be undone.”

“Everything has been foreseen.”

Decha was out of time, her soul bound to the song of her master. She had knelt and prayed for weeks, but she was no more aware of some things than of the bird perched on her shoulder.

Her anger subsided as she understood how insignificant Orion was before the bottomless wisdom of the Ancients. The outsider was like an insect, barely noticeable in the grand vision of her master. The song of the Ancients showed her for the first time what Orion had done. Orion's mistake set off a chain of events so extensive she had never imagined.

As the song of the Ancients echoed wordlessly in the amphitheater, images continued to flow through Decha's mind, the words of the Ancients flowing through her soul, and she realized that this was an ancient melody, that everything was connected, that everything was part of a great weave. The threads that had been severed by the false king whipped through time and space, reaching even this remote corner of the forest.

Dacha's heart began to race again, and a new vision of the future formed in her mind, one in which the branches of the Wildwood stretched beyond the forest. The Ancient One let the thought settle in her mind, and then the Ancient One changed the melody, taking her thoughts in another direction, and she fell into a dream of rotting flesh and swollen growths.

She walked through the Black Plague, looking in horror at the flooded forest, twisting, corrupting, and destroying everything she loved. The vision made her dizzy and horrified, but the Ancient One did not stop. The Ancient One cast her thoughts further, through swarms of flies and crows, to the borders of a sickening maze.

It was a spiraling garden of towering fungus mounds and boiling lakes of larvae. At the center of this magnificent scene sat a being she had captured, unbeknownst to her, centuries ago, and whose horror she had not fully comprehended when she first saw it. How could she, young and naive, have grasped the true nature of that being?
But now, through the bitter perspective of aging, she understood that the being was more than a monster, more than a villain, but the claws of a god.

The melody changed again, and she watched in horror as the rotting garden grew, spreading its bright, rubbery tentacles, transforming everything it touched. She flinched, she was afraid, she finally realized what she had done, was there no hope?

The Ancient One remained silent, but the inky body rippled in the void, caressing her twisted body and calming her cries. She returned to her dream again and saw her master's answer. As the Rotten Garden expanded, the Wild Forest rushed to greet it. As the border weakened, the Rotten Garden extended its tentacles freely, and the Wild Forest cut off the tentacles, suppressed the demon's power, and placed the entire forest in blessing.

Daicha gasped, awed by the idea, she whispered as the shadows touched her. This was more than she could have dreamed of, a way to lock down the entire forest, a way to reclaim all that had been lost. She was dizzy with the visions of the Ancient Ones, if these dreams came true, the plague would not be a threat, and the forest would be a new one, its original one.

She staggered to her feet, uttering a silent thank you. When she opened her eyes, she saw that it was not just shadows surrounding her, other tree spirits rose from their prayers, forming a circle around her. She realized there were hundreds of tree spirits, emerging from the shadows, twisted claws extended. The tree spirits' jagged mouths opened and moved in sync with the silent song of the Ancient Ones, and the tree spirits' existence was suddenly explained, something the Ancient Ones had prepared for her.

Cordier raised an army for Daicha.

As time passed, each morning the trees gave up more of their leaves, retreating to the cold, hard wind until only their icy bark remained. Aru waited for Dacha's return, watching the successive pale sunrises, each weaker than the last, and she felt the soul of the forest begin to slip away.

She remained silent and watchful, motionless, invisible even to the most observant animals passing by. Vines crawled up her limbs, stiffened her joints, covered her eyes, but she still did not move. In countless dark moments, the vines crawled away from her eyes, and she moved with a creaking sound.

The boundaries of the wild forest have changed.

The trees moved in the headwind, and she watched in amazement as their trunks bent and trembled, then began to move. At first, she thought the entire forest had become mobile, but she soon realized she was wrong. She let out a hiss of pleasure, and she realized she was watching hundreds of sisters marching toward the cold dawn.

The sunlight flickered on a line of clenched claws and bent, fragile backs, then retreated into silhouette as her sisters expanded to touch the forest and cast shadows. It was an army of roots and thorns, with terrible pride and anger, and it was Daicha who led the sisters.

Aru stumbled through the ferns and ran to greet him.

A ruthless smile appeared on Daicha's face. She stopped when she reached Aru and interlocked their fingers.

"What does this mean?" Aru asked.

"Orion failed, and he will never appear again. A new king, the true king has appeared. The ancients will be reborn in another way, and we must take back what belongs to us." Daicha stared at Aru with a wild light in his eyes.

"It's time to expand our roots." Daicha ignored Aru who was immersed in joy and waved her hand to signal the army to move forward. (End of this chapter)