The Woodland Man

5th of First Seed

Cool breezes wove their way round the tall cedar trees, making them groan from old age. Squirrels mazed about the branches of the trees, squeaking in delight of such a warm day amidst the tide of winter. Yismir has held his breath for the day, and the Spriggans had come out to play.

Had this been any other day, their frivolity may have gone unmolested.

Septimus Signus, clean for the first time in months, came bearing the offerings the Mad God suggested- an octopus (which he substituted for a crab with eight legs) and a copy of Ruminations on the Elder Scrolls. Septimus was wholly unable to breathe in the respite offered by Kyne, for he thought only of the balm offered by a Prince.

The spriggans watched the man stumble through their grove, and lay pity on the soul. They thought surely he was in need of the peace only nature could provide, for they knew no other touch.

They should have killed him.

He entered the same clearing in which he had been shown mercy not three days prior, and found he had no idea how to summon a Daedric Prince. It hadn’t bothered him last time, for he was wholly mad, but now it left him with a sense of dread he could not place. The more scared he got, the more lost he felt, which only led to a deeper sense of terror. At least, that’s what he thought was causing his panic. See, Septimus was so insane that he couldn’t see how the forest had changed.

Interlocking tentacles blocked out the canopy, so that the sun would not smart the eyes that had sprouted by the thousands on every tree. All spriggans in the area offended the Woodland Man, and so he bound them and idly snipped away at their bark with his claws, whittling them down to their most useful parts. His boneless limbs snaked up the cedars, crushing the inhabitants as they went; whole families of rodents and birds were swallowed up by the indifferent arms of the Demon of Knowledge.

First his smaller arms began to pull on branches, snapping the weaker ones. Then, once they had made their way up the whole of a trunk, his more massive arms began to pull his body from the ground. Septimus first noticed the gurgling, for it was louder than his ranting, and broke from his trance. The fear he had been feeling was not for his failure, it was because he had succeeded. The geometry of the ooze of eyes and claws vomiting up from the center of the clearing was not of this world. It’s not that Hermeaus Mora didn’t know the geometry of this plane, it’s just that he was generally apathetic. Large tentacles began to slither out of the monstrosity, pushing him up, out of the earth; and the arms wrapped around the forest ceased their pulling.

“I am Hermaaaaues Moraaa, Lord of Apocrypha.”

Septimus held out the offerings, “I bring you these, m-m-my lord.”

Mora’s eyes were somehow more unamused than normal at the sight of the eight-legged crab, but he reached for the book, nevertheless. He turned the volume on its side so that the pages fell in turn, and his many eyes perused the text.

“Such things are useless to me. I was there wheeeen they were written, your opinions on my cousins are of little value; you mutter them in your sleep and I have listened to your madness already. This text is not new to me.”

Septimus felt naked before Mora, now nothing stood between him and the fate of those spriggans.

“But the Maaaad God was more kind to you than you know. Long have I wanted this clearing for my own, and loooong have these infernal spriggans kept its secrets from meeee. But they do little, now.” A few dozen taproot fell from the canopy above and Mora laughed in a slow and disturbing cadence.

“I will accept this payment, mortal, for I know your affliction well, and know just what would help. Just North of your college is a box…”

Mora laid groundwork for his scheme, strangling the life out of the forest as he spoke. By the 6th of First Seed, all that was left of the grove was a raped and tattered imitation of what it once was. Visitors to this day note what sounds like spriggans pleading for mercy, an unnatural humidity, and an unusual amount of hares in the area