Location: Arbola
Timeline: Sixth Age, 52nd Year, Fall
When last I wrote about Emcorae Azop and the elfess Nathily, the would-be Azoras were on a shared path of frustration. Emcorare had just had his plans dashed by the Arbola Council – he’d ask for them to allow him to continue his Azora training while also harboring his new lover Lynsy Finch – who happened to be the ex-fiance of King Diked of Orkney. The elves wisely said they didn’t want to get involved in human affairs – much to Emcorae’s angst. Meanwhile, Nathily discovered she was in love with her training partner, only to learn Emcorae was in love with Lynsy. It was a messy situation – the kind that mortals are so good at creating.
Emcorae, of course, knew nothing about the destruction that had occurred in Monthaven at the hands of the Myz Kaoz, nor was he aware about Lynsy’s plight in Fubar. At the time of this tale, he was still in Arbola – eager to get home to Lynsy and figure out their life together. But we gods are distant architects, and in the case of Emcorae Azop, although it wasn’t my doing, the hand of another divinity was heavy, suffocating, and strangely jealous. It seems that Alyssa – The Amorosi Patron – had changed her mind about helping Emcorae chase true love with another.
The Autumn Flight
It was the Fall of the 52nd Year, and Arbola was a burst of color. The canopy was like a ceiling of stained glass—shattered ambers, deep crimsons, and the fading gold of the Amorosi elms. To any other soul, it would have been a sanctuary of peace, but to Emcorae, the beauty felt like a gilded cage. Every falling leaf was a moment he wasn’t with Lynsy; every sunset was a day lost in this high-minded elven isolation.
He’d been refused help by The Council and now he couldn’t wait to get out of the woods. Moving with a frantic, quiet intensity, his breath visible in the cooling air, he began to saddle Joanne, his beloved elven mare. In the shadow of a weeping willow, the intelligent horse sensed her friend’s agitation, her ears pinned back as she pawed at the mossy earth.
“Steady, girl,” Emcorae whispered, his fingers tightening the cinch. “We’re going home. No more councils, no more training we don’t want. We’ll get back to Monthaven, grab Lynsy and the others, and maybe head for the coast. I’m done with these woods.”
He had ignored the warnings of El-Janus and the stern, disapproving glares of the High Elders. They had told him he was unready, but Emcorae didn’t care about their ‘wisdom.’ All he cared about now was building a new life with Lynsy, just like they’d talked about. The plan had to be modified now that the elves wouldn’t let them live in Arbola, but he’d already come up with an alternative – he’d ask Merrill Finch to set him up with one of his business partners in Primcitta. They would be safe there in the big city on the coast – far from the reach of Diked. It was a great plan and sure to work.
Excited with himself, and eager to get back to enjoy more of Lynsy’s charms, Emcorae mounted up and immediately spurred Joanne forward, galloping through the emerald mists toward the Northern Veil. He was smiling, picturing the look on Lynsy’s face when he rode into the Finch estate weeks ahead of schedule.
In less than three days he’d nearly reached the forest border – that’s when the air began to thin and lose its magical hum – that’s also when the sky broke.
It didn’t darken slowly. One moment the sun was a pale orb through the gold leaves; the next, the heavens turned a bruised, sickly purple. A sudden, unnatural pressure dropped over the forest, making Emcorae’s ears pop. Then came the sound—not the whistling of a breeze, but a monstrous gale that shrieked with the fury of banshees.
[Although Emcorae didn’t know it, this was no accident of weather. Instead, Alyssa, the Goddess of the Woods, was not ready to let her champion escape her clutches].
The wind hit the man and his horse like a physical blow, nearly unseating Emcorae. Swirling in violent eddies, the guests carried shards like ice that threaded to slice through his cloak like glass. Joanne whinnied in terror, her hooves sliding on the suddenly slick needles of the forest floor.
“Don’t worry!” Emcorae shielded his eyes as he leaned low over the mare’s neck. “It’s just a fall storm, Joanne! Push through!”
But the Goddess was deaf to his logic. Instead the Gale intensified, the purple clouds descending until they were a suffocating mist. The air grew so cold so fast that the sap within the ancient trees began to groan and pop like drumfire.
Still Emcorae tried to press through.
That’s when the forest itself began to turn.
With a series of deafening cracks that sounded like catapult fire, the ancient trees along the path began to buckle. They didn’t fall away from the road; they fell across it, their branches reaching out like skeletal fingers to grab at the rider. Uprooted oaks slammed into the earth, shaking the very foundations of the wood.
“No!” Emcorae screamed, his voice swallowed by the roar of the gale.
He tried to find a way through, but a massive elm splintered just yards ahead, its canopy creating an impenetrable wall of wood and ice. He turned Joanne to the left, but the earth there erupted in a mudslide of freezing slush. He was being corralled. The forest was a sentient entity, and it was herding him back toward the heart of Arbola.
Soon, exhaustion began to set in, the supernatural cold seeping into his marrow. His fingers were white, losing their grip on the leather. Joanne was shivering violently, her breath coming in ragged, panicked gasps. Emcorae looked toward the border—he could see the grey, mundane hills of the world outside just beyond the treeline—but a final, thunderous gust of wind threw them backward, nearly pinning horse and rider beneath a falling bough.
He had no choice. At least for today, he had to turn back. With a heart full of bitter, stinging frustration, Emcorae turned Joanne around. The moment he began to ride back toward the main forest, the wind seemed to soften, shifting from a killing gale to a firm, guiding push against his back. Sensing the change in the weather, he immediately tried to ride north again—only to have the winds and rain fight against him with renewed, screeching malice.
“It’s no use!” Emcorae raged, his voice cracking against the gale. “We can’t make it. But don’t worry, Jo-Jo, we can try again tomorrow. This storm can’t last forever.”
Retreating back to a safe distance, he made camp for the night in the shelter of a glade, huddling beneath a rocky overhang. Despite his own shivering, he remained a devoted horseman, currying the stiff muscles of his tired mare and giving her an extra portion of precious grain to reward her efforts.
When he woke the next morning, he expected to see the aftermath of a storm. Instead, he was met with a waking nightmare. While the forest glade where he slept remained eerily fine—the moss barely frosted—the border of the forest just a mile away was now buried under a veritable mountain of snow and ice, a white wall that reached toward the clouds.
For the next week, he remained camped near the border, stubborn to the point of madness. But each morning, the strange, early winter weather crept further and further into the forest, a slow-moving glacier of divine intent that drove him deeper toward Arbola’s center. He grew more and more desperate; as a Northerner, he knew the math of the seasons. If he didn’t break through now, the roads really would become impassable until the spring.
Every subsequent attempt to “escape” was thwarted by freak occurrences that defied the laws of nature: roads that seemed to shift and lead him in circles, or sudden blizzards that blinded him until he was forced to retreat.
Yet he was not about to give up – Lynsy was surely wondering where he was by now and he wasn’t about to let her down. He tried a new tactic – attempting to navigate a narrow goat path that went through the northwestern reach of Arbola and bypassed the blocked main roads. It was a suicide mission.
As they traversed a slick, narrow ledge, a sudden, localized tremor shook the hillside—not a natural earthquake, but a targeted shudder of the earth. The ledge gave way. Joanne screamed as her hind legs slipped into the abyss. Emcorae lunged forward, throwing his weight into her neck to keep her from sliding, but a falling sheet of ice struck them both.
They tumbled twenty feet down a jagged ravine. Emcorae was knocked unconscious, his head striking a stone, while Joanne’s foreleg caught in a crevice. When he finally came to, the silence was absolute. Joanne was screaming in pain beside him, three-legged and shivering, her left cannon bone swollen and bleeding.
Now only were they defeated and broken, but now they were trapped!
Emcorae dragged himself upright, his head throbbing with a dull, rhythmic ache that sent spikes of white light across his vision. He looked up at the impossible wall of ice and stone that now loomed above them, then back at his wounded mare.
Joanne was a piteous sight. The proud white mare was tucked into a shivering huddle, her breath coming in wet, rattling gasps. Her left foreleg was held at a sickening angle, the jagged shards of the cannon bone having pierced the skin. Dark, steaming blood pooled in the snow, turning the pristine white to a gruesome violet in the twilight. She let out a low, vibrating nicker of agony—a sound of pure betrayal—as she tried to shift her weight, only to collapse back into the frozen slush.
With trembling, clumsy fingers, Emcorae tried to care for her. He tore strips from his fine elven cloak, attempting to bind the wound, but the blood was too slick, the cold too deep. His hands, numbed and clumsy, could barely tie a knot. He leaned his forehead against her velvet nose, feeling the frantic heat of her fever already rising against the biting chill of the ravine.
“I’m sorry, Jo-Jo,” he sobbed, his voice breaking. “I’m so sorry.”
A roar of primal, unadulterated fury suddenly tore from his throat, echoing uselessly against the frozen cliffs. He scrambled to his feet, swaying dangerously.
“Is this your ‘balance’?” he screamed, shaking his fist at the bruised purple clouds that churned above the canopy like a gathering bruise. “Is this your ‘divine will,’ Alyssa? To break a beast and cage a man? Curse you! Curse all of you who sit in the high places and play with our lives like dice on a tavern table!”
The effort was too much. The world tilted violently. He collapsed back against a jagged rock, his breath coming in ragged, steaming gasps. He reached into his tunic, his fingers finding the locket of Lynsy—the twin to the one she wore near her own heart. The cold metal bit into his skin, a sharp reminder of the world he was losing.
“I’m coming, Lynsy,” he whispered into the gathering dark, his voice cracking with a desperate, fading resolve. “I may die in these woods. I may have to crawl through the snow until my fingers rot and my heart stops, but I will not give up. You are my world, and no god—not even Alyssa herself—is strong enough to keep me from you forever.”
But as the first true blizzard of the season began to dump heavy, wet flakes into the ravine, covering the blood on helpless Joanne’s leg, Arbola’s immensity seemed to swallow his vow. The mare gave one last, long shuddering groan and went still, her eyes closing in the dim light.
For the first time in his life, Emcorae Azop understood that the gods did not negotiate; they simply imposed. He was trapped in an emerald tomb with a dying horse, and as the darkness in his mind finally rushed forward to meet the darkness of the storm, he succumbed to his injury. As the cold pulled him back toward unconsciousness, his final, flickering prayer was a plea for mercy: that he and Joanne would simply pass away soon, and that Lynsy was safe in a world that didn’t include him in it.
The Angst
The Deep Winter had settled over Arbola like a heavy, emerald shroud, stifling the forest in a silence so absolute it felt physical. For Emcorae, the months following his failed escape had been a blur of white-hot rage and cold, biting guilt.
He had been found by an Amorosi Protectorate patrol, his body half-buried in the ravine and his spirit nearly extinguished. The rescue came just in time as both horse and boy were between life and a frozen grave. The patrol that stumbled upon the wreckage in the ravine was led by Raison, the Azora novitiate who had sparred with Emcorae and Nathily in the former times. Raison, currently serving a rotation with the Protectorate forces, had seen the unnatural purple hue of the sky and sensed the Goddess’s displeasure. He was shocked to find Emcorae and his mount trapped – since everyone in the forest assumed the former Azora trainer had long since left the vicinity.
“Pull him up!” Raison had barked, his usual competitive swagger replaced by a grim urgency.
Had Joanne been a common mare of human breeding, she would have perished in that hollow, her heart stopping long before the scouts arrived. But the ancient, resilient elven blood in her veins—a lineage tracing back to the first Great Stallions of the Woods—had flickered like a stubborn ember. She had been transported back to the city on a litter of woven vines, overseen by the Cavalier Adarius.
Adarius, that tall stoic warrior whom Emcorae had never quite understood, was Arbola’s preeminent horse-whisperer. He spent the many nights sleeping in the straw beside Joanne as he nursed her back to health. Eventually the mare was able to stand up again, housed in a warm, cedar-scented stable, her shattered bone set in special splints that Adarius designed to help her recover her strength again over time.
Emcorae, however, refused the comfort of the main village. His recovery was more difficult – mainly because of his mental anguish. Although the elves had refused to offer him their assistance to harbor Lynsy Finch, they more than welcomed their former friend back and did everything they could to help Emcorae get well again. Regent Rian had visited his bedside multiple times, offering the grace of the forest; El-Janus had stood over him once, his silver eyes full of a “told-you-so” pity that Emcorae found insufferable; even the ancient Dallegheri had come, clutching a flask of warmed honey-wine and ancient scrolls to distract Emcorae with his stories – which actually did work a bit – until the stories ended, and the pining began anew.
And then there was Nathily – to El-Janus’s quiet but visible disappointment, Nathily had made a choice to put her own rigorous training on hold, setting aside her twin blades and the pursuit of mastery to spend every waking minute at Emcorae’s bedside. Fara had warned her against getting too attached, but Nathily didn’t listen – taking it upon herself to change his bandages, coaxing him to eat the nutrient-rich elven broths, and sitting through the long, feverish nights when the winds seemed to still howl in his subconscious.
As the weeks bled into the heart of winter, Emcoare found himself profoundly grateful to the elfess. In his moments of lucidity, he would reach out for her hand, his eyes softening with a genuine warmth that made Nathily’s heart soar. She saw his progress as a victory for them both; she allowed herself to believe that the trauma was washing away his obsession to go back to Monthaven, and that in the quiet intimacy of his sickroom, the man she loved was finally starting to see her—not just as a sparring partner, but as the life partner who could make his dreams come true.
But hope for Nathily was as fragile as the frost on a windowpane. Numerous times, just as a perfect moment would crystallize between them—perhaps while sharing a cup of Dallegheri’s honey-wine or watching the moonlight silver the pines—Emcorae would shatter the peace. He would look past Nathily with a glazed, dreamy expression, his voice dropping into a tender register that was never meant for her.
“She used to love looking at the moon and stars with me, Nat,” he murmured one evening, his thumb absentmindedly tracing the pattern on Nathily’s palm as if it were someone else’s. “When I get back to Monthaven, we’ll watch the moon together again. I can see it so clearly… the life we’re going to have.”
Nathily’s hand would go cold in his, the light in her eyes dying an agonizing death. He spoke of a future where she held no place, not even as a shadow. It was the ultimate foreshadowing of the angst to come: for every step she took toward him, Emcorae took two toward Lynsy, leaving Nathily to wonder if she was nursing a man back to health only so he could break her heart again.
As soon as Emcorae could walk without a cane, he thanked Nathily for her efforts and got permission from Rian to retreat to a small, isolated bungalow on the rugged northern edge of the Arbolan woods.
The bungalow was a squat structure of wood, vines, and moss, perched where the trees grew thin. He spent his days in a fugue of manual labor and self-loathing. He practice his warrior training on his own to pass the time. Often he blamed himself for Joanne’s pain; he also blamed his own weakness for the fact that he was here, eating elven bread, while Lynsy was likely looking out at the same stars, wondering why her fiancé had vanished into the mist. At night he would sit by his small hearth, clutching Lynsy’s locket, his mind a fever-dream of Monthaven. He could see the Finch estate in his mind—the warm lanterns, the smell of pine-wax, Lynsy’s laughter. He didn’t know that Monthaven was a charred ruin or that Lynsy was currently a prisoner of Diked. He only knew the agony of distance and the mounting fear that she would think he had simply chosen the Elves over her.
“I’m coming, Lynsy,” he would mutter to the flickering flames.. “As soon as the ice breaks, I’m coming. And may the gods help anyone who tries to stand in my way again.”
Unable to stay away, and against her foster mother’s advice, Nathily visited Emcorae regularly, her heart a tangled mess of duty and unrequited longing. When she discovered he had begun training again—dragging his battered body into the cold to strike at hanging logs with a fury that bordered on madness—she offered to help. She framed it as a necessity for her own skills, a way to keep from rusting while her official Azora instruction was on hiatus.
Emcorae, recognizing the practical benefit to them both and harboring a deep-seated gratitude for the elfess who had nursed him back from the brink, gladly accepted. But the sanctuary of their friendship was quickly replaced by a powder keg of unresolved tension.
Emcorae was vibrating with angst, his temper short and his patience non-existent. In his isolation, his mind began to play cruel tricks. Subconsciously, Nathily began to represent the very forest that had caged him. Her ethereal elven beauty, the way the moonlight caught the silver in her hair and the fierce green of her eyes, began to merge in his mind with the imagined face of the Goddess Alyssa. Though he had never seen Alyssa, he blamed her entirely for the “Great Gale” and even the injury to Joanne. Every time he looked at Nathily’s perfection, he saw the divine jailer who had slammed the emerald gates shut. He began to take his misplaced rage out on her, turning every conversation into a skirmish.
To Nathily, Emcorae was a storm she was desperately trying to calm, her heart breaking a little more each time he spoke of his “need” to leave for another woman. She was the one who had stayed; she was the one who had bled for his recovery, yet she was being punished by him and couldn’t understand why.
Their training sessions, held in the frozen clearing behind the bungalow where the black pines stood like silent, judgmental sentries, were no longer exercises in elven grace. They were violent, desperate clashes of iron and ego.
“Focus, Emcorae!” Nathily snapped during one particularly gray afternoon. The sky was the color of a bruised plum, hanging low over the cliffs. Her dual practice blades flashed in a blurred arc, parrying a brutal, undisciplined strike from his practice sword that would have cracked the ribs of a lesser opponent. “You’re fighting the air, not me! You’re swinging like a common tavern brawler! Your mind is a thousand miles away!”
“My mind is exactly where it should be!” Emcorae roared. He didn’t reset his stance; he lunged, pivoting with a raw, muscular ferocity that lacked the Azora’s typical fluidity but possessed a wolverine-like power. He forced her back, step by heavy step, toward a jagged snowbank. “I’m not a statue, Nathily! I wasn’t born to sit in a garden and wait for the seasons to change like some ornamental shrub! I have a life! I have a woman who needs me, who is counting the days until I walk through her door!”
“She is safe in her father’s house!” Nathily screamed back, her own frustration finally boiling over the dam of her composure. She stepped inside his guard, her blades crossing in a defiant X that locked his sword near the hilt. “You act as if she’s in a dungeon, Emcorae! You act as if the world ends at the borders of Monthaven! You’re going to kill yourself—or finish what you started with Joanne—trying to chase a ghost that isn’t even running!”
The words hit him like a physical blow. The mention of Joanne’s injury was the ultimate betrayal. Emcorae’s face contorted, his eyes flashing with a cold, northern fire. He shoved her away with a strength that was far beyond the technical requirements of the spar, sending her staggering into the drifts.
“You don’t know anything about it,” he hissed, his chest heaving as the steam from his breath rose like smoke. “You stay here in your perfect woods and play at being a warrior. I’m going back to the real world.”
The argument ended as it always did: with Emcorae stomping back into his stone hut, his boots crunching loudly on the ice, and slamming the heavy oak door with a force that rattled the nearby pines. He left Nathily standing alone in the freezing wind, her breath hitching in her throat and her eyes stinging with tears she refused to let fall. She stood there for a long time, watching the smoke rise from his chimney, wondering how much longer she could love a man who saw her only as the bars of his cage. Only to make the ride back home – making sure to avoid Fara’s knowing gaze when she retreated to her room.
At night, locked in her room, Nathily often prayed, her hands clasped in a desperate, silent plea to Alyssa. “Please soften his heart, Great Mother. Take the fire out of his blood and let him see the peace of this place. Let him see… let him see me. Don’t let him leave. Don’t let him break himself against the world outside.”
She did not realize that the Goddess had her own plans for Emcorae. She didn’t know it was Alyssa who had orchestrated the blizzard and the mudslides to keep her champion exactly where he was. But the price of the Goddess’s favor was Emcorae’s sanity. For every day he was trapped in Arbola, his resentment grew, and the “peace” Nathily prayed for was being replaced by a dark, simmering defiance that threatened to turn the forest world upside down.
The Apocrypha of Azazel 