This is home base for the group of adventurers known as the Alchemighty, but the structure built into the hollow of a great, majestic tree in the woods is simply home, for you.
The Hearth is uncharacteristically empty today, with most of your party away to far-flung reaches of the continent, fulfilling their own quests and duties to other parties. You are left, as usual, somewhat in the company of the old wizard Philostenes, though you try not to disturb him and his work as much as possible.
Still, as you tend to some plants in the conservatory that you made, his voice booms throughout the hold: "Oriphi."
You know why it is he's called out to you, too, and likewise, he feels no need to say anything else. You've felt it in the wind, in the air - something is amiss.
A young woman bolts through the door, though her voice, too, is audible even from outside.
"Mom! Mom! We've got—" She huffs, "Company!"
It doesn't take you very long at all to take your staff and meet Juniper outside of the Hearth, closing the door to that great tree behind you.
"I know, Juni. Remember your training. And do not stray from the grove, okay?"
With an affirmative nod, the young warrior renews her grip on the handle of her greataxe, striding over to the center of the forest clearing, and you, with your staff, join her, dragging the tip of the staff along the ground purposely before firmly planting it into the earth. With a grand sweep of your arms, you feel the spirits of the very woods you grew and cultivated come to you.
"Ab spiritu humoque aculeus vitisque." By both the spirit of the earth, and the thorn of vine. There is a rumbling in the ground as four trees awaken and uproot themselves, seemingly poised to defend the grove. From afar, you can see that a group of red-robed cultists are approaching in a somewhat gaseous, misty form.
"Mom? Should we take one of them? Dad 3 might want to talk to them, right?"
You consider it for a moment. But you know what these people stand for, and though decades have passed, you still remember like yesterday the day you returned to these woods and found that the cultists' predecessors had utterly razed it to ashes.
"No," comes your answer, "Stay back for a second, little sprout."
The mist coaleces into the shape of people, poised too, to attack, with some preparing to cast spells, some charging forth with their weapons, only to be entangled in vines that sprout up from the ground, or flung back by the branches of the awakened trees. The ones that press through...
Ori twists her staff further into the ground.
"Morta est tuo!"It is your death.
A wall of ice sweeps across one side of the clearing, encasing some cultists fully within. The others are launched into the air rather unceremoniously, to be caught - or worse, spiked - in the waiting claws of the trees. You look to Juniper.
"All right. Go wild."
TL;DR: Vestiges of an old enemy from decades past pay a visit to the Hollow Wilds; whether they seek retribution or anything else, Ori never bothers to find out while she stands to guard their home alongside Juniper. Harnessing her command over nature and the very woods that she herself brought back to life so long ago, Ori displays her druidic power at near-full force, having never forgiven the cultists for what they did to the wilds in the past.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
"Druid Grove"
The memory places you in the Hollow Hearth.
TL;DR: Vestiges of an old enemy from decades past pay a visit to the Hollow Wilds; whether they seek retribution or anything else, Ori never bothers to find out while she stands to guard their home alongside Juniper. Harnessing her command over nature and the very woods that she herself brought back to life so long ago, Ori displays her druidic power at near-full force, having never forgiven the cultists for what they did to the wilds in the past.