The Dogwood’s Pollen Summonings

Session Summary: 06/02/2024

Ahhhh, even the TREES work against them here! The corrupted Dogwood trees of the Glade's inner boundary were not merely plants but guardians of a specific kind: rooted sentinels whose corruption had given them the ability to draw defenders from the pollen clouds they produced, summoning beings of living botanical matter that formed and reformed wherever the dust was densest. Defeating them required destroying not just the summonings but the trees producing them, which meant advancing through a battlefield that kept generating new opposition from every breath of wind.

The battle was fought on multiple levels simultaneously: direct combat against the pollen-summonings in the immediate foreground, tactical movement toward the Dogwood trees themselves through the obscuring clouds, and the ongoing challenge of operating in an environment designed to overwhelm through sheer VOLUME rather than concentrated threat. Charles's fire was the decisive element: burning the pollen clouds before they could condense into new summonings, and eventually burning the Dogwoods themselves when the party had fought their way close enough.

The trees died loudly and resentfully, their corruption making their end somehow more dramatic than the ends of natural trees, their root-systems convulsing as the fire consumed them. The heroes stood in the clearing they had created and took stock of what lay ahead.

They could feel the Glade's center now: a presence in the air like a sustained note at the very edge of hearing, a quality of attention suggesting that whoever and whatever held court in the deepest part of this domain was AWARE of their approach and had been aware for some time. The Withering Man's servants had been fighting a rearguard action for sessions now, each engagement designed more to slow the heroes than to stop them entirely. The rearguard was thinning.

What waited past the rearguard would be something the Fey lord was willing to commit to defending in earnest, and the heroes approached it with the combined weight of everything they had learned and every capability they had developed across months of escalating engagement!