The Great Tree felt a disturbance as the battle to take and destroy the massive artillery piece raged on. He could not tell what exactly was happening over in that area of the front, mostly due to interference generated by the wards that he had put up to stem the tide of corruption, but he could tell that something was happening. He was sure of one thing, though. The battle had gone on for far too long, as daylight had finally returned and yet his servants had not returned to their former positions.

He had Hoped that his application of a spell that restored the life energy and stamina of those it was applied to would get them moving, but that did not seem to have the desired effect. While the Elves and Tree-men had assumed that the Great Tree had woven that spell to help them while knowing of their plight, that belief was grounded in emotion rather than fact. The Great Tree didn’t know that they were in quite a bind, instead merely thinking that they were too tired to return to their assigned positions.

That all said, the calamity on the northern front was not the cause of the disturbance that the Great Tree had felt. Likewise, this disturbance did not come from the northern front, nor did it come from the south. No, once the Great Tree expanded His senses, he quickly realized where the change was coming from.

And once he did know where it was coming from, He was utterly terrified by it.

Not too far away (cosmically speaking) was a tree equal in size to Himself. That tree was once His brother, a champion of the cause that was Nature’s Ascension over all things. However, after it had touched the corrupted lands that once were called the Gallows Woods, something in it had changed. Gone was the being that it once was, and in its place was something entirely different.

And, because of that, He was forced to fight His brother to a standstill until the elves arrived. Fleshy bags of meat though they were, being mere animals at best, the elves provided a useful addition to His war effort. He only needed to convince them to swear eternal allegiance to Him to take control of their hearts and minds, though their souls remained utterly unshackled, mores the pity. Those new puppets were more than able to completely turn the tide from a stalemate to a crushing victory in His favor, but now His twisted brother was waking up, and that could not and would not be good for anyone.

Something had stirred His sibling from its slumber, and He knew exactly what that was. The corruption, the death, the destruction, the foul taint of Darksol… these elements piled on top of each other to slowly undo the (unwilling) sacrifice of a hundred thousand sentient animals (namely elves) that had been used as fuel for the ward that had kept it (the other tree) sealed for so long. With a war currently raging, not many could be used as a sacrifice to keep the other tree asleep, and that was a great cause for alarm. However, what made the other tree’s awakening seem out of place was the fact that the war, while costly thus far, had not resulted in nearly the death toll needed to damage the wards.

No, much more destruction would have had to have been wrought upon the world, and more deaths would have been needed. And not just military deaths, but many hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths as well needed to happen before such a crack in the spell could be made. This was where the confusion that He was experiencing came from. Darksol’s bombing raids and shelling had cost lives and brought corruption, destruction, and death, but that had been spread out over many days and many miles.

For such a crack to form so quickly, an entire region needed to experience a death toll unlike any that had ever been experienced prior. He quickly scanned his realm to look for any place where the bastards He was at war with could have stuck without Him knowing, and, to His shock and horror, he found such a place sooner than He would have liked. The entirety of the southernmost tip of Arcfira had been drowned beneath the ocean, the dikes made of ancient tree roots having been busted open by some unnatural force that allowed salty water to flood in.

What was worse than that was the fact that aquatic abominations now prowled the submerged jungle, quickly abducting or simply killing anyone or anything that caught their eyes. He was barely able to even perceive them with all the death and destruction down there, but He was able to peer through the eyes and listen through the ears of his elvish subjects, his binding placed upon them from birth proving to be just as effective as it normally was when wards were not involved.

He eventually ceased the act of perceiving the world through their eyes, deciding to abandon that place and focus on strengthening the northern front. Besides, He was the Great Tree. He was Nature’s Will Incarnate, and He knew that once Darksol had been pushed out He could deal with these unnatural abominations. He just needed more time, and once He had that, he could easily deal with them once and for all. They were just oversized fish people; it wasn’t like they had some colossal, eldritch abomination that could fight Him off for long enough for the evil King of Darksol to fly down and intervene, right?

Besides, His twisted sibling needed to be put back to sleep before it could cause unimaginable damage to His ambition. If nature was ever to rule undisputed over all things, having wiped out all sentient animals and their pitiful civilizations (elves included), then He needed to focus on defeating one enemy at a time, wiping them from the map, and putting their former lands to better use. And, therefore, the first order of business needed to be the act of kicking Darksol out of Arcfira, and then into an early grave.

Once the force that had twisted His brother into the mockery of Nature’s Will that it was had been wiped from the world, He believed that His sibling could be made to see reason. After all, if the thing that His sibling feared and respected so much was gone forever, then His sibling would understand that His ambition was the only way. And if it didn’t want to do as its brother wanted, then He could simply do what he likely should have done so many centuries ago and just end it once and for all.