The song of The Reaper

My name is Carnegiea and this isn’t my song - but it’s a song that must be heard. This song was sung to me by my great grandfather, who heard it from his elder. The written records are old and crumbling - but the song stones should last for a thousand years or more, and if fortune smiles on us, the trees will hear it one day and sing it back again. The song comes from a time long ago, when Elves had wings like Fae and slept beneath the greatest trees. We sang to them and they sang back to us. We cared for them and they cared for us. We lived away from the world, in the shadow of two great mountains in the east. Today, only one of those mountains stands tall - the fury of the Mountain Gods descended on our trees, taking them from us in rivers of fire, clouds of ash and fields of death.   The Reaper came to us as the Mountain Gods grumbled. She arrived like the hand of death itself, with fiery eyes and crimson wings, even the boldest of champions trembled in her presence. Where she walked, a wind felt only by the great trees trailed behind her, shaking branches and spilling leaves. Many fled at the sight of her, and more still when she spoke.  

Ten of soldier, five of forest runner, twelve of mystic and six of wizard, she commanded the best of us to walk with her to die. Twenty singers and forty to guard them - the ones she said would be sheltered by another beyond the quiet peak. “Sing of those I’ve taken,” she commanded. “Sing for those who sacrifice themselves to defy the mountain gods.

  Of those she took, only two returned, a mystic and a forest runner. They spoke of a battle against the flaming mountain gods and The Reaper that claimed the lives of the gods. They spoke of magic that shook the earth and lit the night sky bright as day - of monsters of rock and fire that burned the wings off our brethren before dragging them into pits of flame.   Our people fled with the time she bought. The last of our wizards burned alive, feeding their lives into magic that held back the descent of flames for hours as we fled.   What happened next, we can only guess. In the days that followed, those who survived followed The Reaper’s brother, their spirits sustained by the music of his flute and the songs of those who’d sacrificed themselves to the mountain god.   This, the song says, should have been our end. Without our trees, our lives were sure to wither like fruit taken from the vine. An elder returned to our trees, and there he found the Reaper. The scene he described was one of horror - she lay burned and blackened, her wings reduced to stubs, and every tree of our grove had fallen away from her, as though she claimed their lives before the flames could swallow them. The elder brought The Reaper to her brother - who said that he would bring her to a place where she might survive.   The Elder hid, however, the things her body had wrapped around - two long and slender branches, wrapped tight around a shimmering stone. Those slender branches with their tiny leaves were all that remained of our once mighty trees - but one of those branches drifted here - and from it, watered with the blood of our elders and our children as they died, a tree has grown again.