The Bleeding of the World Tree
Only the most ancient elders remember when our world was alive - when rivers still flowed with shimmering lights, an the air was thick with love and hope. In those days, the World Tree towered above all, its roots binding the earth, it crown brushing the heavens, a sentinel that nourished every living thing beneath its canopy. Peace reigned, broken only by petty quarrels of kingdoms long since turned to dust. But the peace of the World Tree was fragile, and its end came swifter than any could have then imagined.
It was the Elves who dwelt beneath the boughs of the World Tree, shepherds and wardens of life itself. However, they would not foresee the darkness that descended from beyond the stars. Vast ships, like fingers from a cruel god, reached down and exhaled black clouds upon the tree. By an enemy unknown and unprovoked, the Elves were slaughtered before they had even known they were fighting. Their voices silenced, their works unmade, and the World Tree itself began to wither beneath a shroud of blackened corruption.
The nations of man stirred, raising armies and sharpening steel, awaiting the invasion that never came. Days faded into weeks; scouts retuned only with tales of charred earth and vast, hollowed wastelands where life had once thrived beneath the World Tree. In desperation, the rulers of old gathered their hosts for a grand assault. They marched to the Deadlands - the blackened scar left by the invaders - and there they beheld their foe.
The creatures were abominations: draconic in stature, but insectile in form, their swarms appeared endless. They fled at the sight of the mortal armies, drawing them into pursuit - only for fire and sorcery to rain down from the skies. The hosts were butchered before their charge could reach the tree. The World Tree remained defiled, and no banners would return home.
Time crept onward. Magic bled from the world as the tree's strength waned. Sages wept blood as the first of its branches cracked and fell, unleashing clouds of the swarming creatures, but never finding rest upon the blackened earth. A final desperate coalition formed, all peoples bound together in their final acts of defiance. But when they reached the Deadlands, the swarm rose from the tree like a storm. Before their eyes, the tree was devoured, ripped into splinters by a living black tide. Before they could reach its base, only a lifeless, gray stump remained, and above it a new finger of the enemy's fleet began to take shape. By dusk, it had joined the others reaching down from a darkened sky, then, as suddenly as they had come, the invaders departed.
The death of the World Tree marked the death of our world. Leylines cracked and faded, the spellplague raged unchecked, harvests rotted in the fields where they were planted, and plagues swept across the world. Mages, desperate to save what once was, drained the last vestiges of life from the earth itself - first its forests, then its beasts, and finally its people. They became pariahs, hunted and hated by the shattered remnants of once-great nations, now reduced to scavenging tribes.
What remains of our world is a husk. It's barren, a graveyard of dust and ruin, a wasteland where the bones of the World Tree fester. Go now, children - walk the corpse of our dead world and endure. Wander the wastes and carry with you memories of a world long forgotten.
