Sleep was becoming harder and harder for the Sylvan to face, after two nights of nightmare’s she looked pale and tired. She went for a walk in the forest hoping the fresh spring air would clear her mind, the trees were in blossom and beautiful. Bright colorful flowers poked up from the earth promising to be a glorious sight when in full bloom and that made her smile.
With the war being over and spring ushering in, she felt like everything was a new beginning, and walked towards the grove where Christolf incessantly tried to teach her about Gaea. It wasn’t that she didn’t try and see his point of view, but she had her doubting ways, a trait of hers, and her own conception of what a god was.
The grove was quiet and she didn’t see Christolf, so Tehya decided to sit down and lean against an evergreen tree with wide branches that covered her head from the sun until she drifted off to sleep.
The circled area where Christolf usually sat appeared withered and burnt, and her dream turned into a tarnished nightmare once again. She reached for her violin to play with him, since they loved playing and melding different chords of their songs together. The sounds were off tune, yes enough to make a bard’s nightmare quite real. Once, twice, and three songs all turned out to be mashed sounds of notes colliding, worse than one dragging fingernails down a chalkboard to make their skin crawl.
Christolf was no longer himself and totally disappeared, and in his wake a worm like creature burst from the grove, dark black and slimy. It reared its head vowing to kill off every viable beautiful thing in the forest. Tehya picked up the violin again to play and subdue the beast like worm, but no notes were heard and her bow slid over invisible strings.
Dropping the violin she looked down as more worms appeared chewing the instrument into slithers of wood splinters upon the withered grass.
“Please no more!”
Her pleading wasn’t answered this time; and instead worms just like the large one before her began devouring the beautiful blossoms, and even the evergreen trees were no longer covered in soft pine needles but bared twigs stark and naked that drooped by the tree’s trunk, brittle and brown.
They made the noise of a thousand cicada bugs which made her groan and cover her ears, each sound became louder as smaller bushes even the berry bushes she loved so much, were devoured and dragged underground leaving just bare roots sprawled and uprooted. Slowly the forest was being destroyed in front of her eyes, and she knew soon it would appear a vast desert like where S`otanath dwelled.
It couldn’t have been more than a fifteen minute nap, before she woke up terrified and seen the trees green once again. She got up; that multi-colored patchwork cloak flowed out behind her as she ran to her cabin to see if it was safe. Everything was normal, except the bard who was getting wearier each day that passed, not having a full night’s rest since the war ended.