Something was pulling him from the dark abyss he found himself in. It was a sensation that he thought that he would never feel, but he could tell from the beginning that it meant that his greatest fears had come true. If he was being roused from his slumber like this, and not by the will of his overly ambitious sociopathic narcissist of a brother, then that meant that the greatest threat to nature’s continued existence had returned.

In ages past, he had touched the darkness there in the Gallows Woods and, when he did, he uncovered truths that nearly drove him mad. His brother, for all the twisted malevolence he felt towards all things not under his full dominion, had attempted to stabilize him. This had succeeded, but he was forever changed by what he saw.

He had seen the truth of this world, and he had seen the world from which this one was formed. He had borne witness to the face of the origin of all things here, and he knew for a fact that, one day, that creator would return. If and when he did, nothing would be able to stand in his way for very long, and therefore the only way for Nature to survive was to play by the rules set by the Avatar of the Maker.

While the previous Avatar was cruel, malicious, and monstrous, he quickly realized that, should the Maker and his Avatar become one and the same, the potential for coexistence would emerge. However, his brother’s ambition to rule a world devoid of sentient life aside from himself, his brother, and the tree-men was something that the Maker would never allow to happen. To save Arcfira, to save the world, a new, less destructive path needed to be forged. One not borne of antagonism and genocide, but of tolerance and acceptance of the future order of things.

His brother had not taken his words very well. Though he repeatedly tried to call for peace, though he endlessly held back his superior forces to avoid harming his family and the world, his brother simply would not abandon his position, nor would he abandon the malice that exceeded that of even the Maker’s first Avatar. When the elves arrived, though, the balance shifted. He could have committed his full power, but that would have scarred the world for millennia to come, and he was sure that the Maker would be very unhappy about that.

So, he pulled his forces back and let his brother think that he had won in a landslide. When his brother murdered hundreds of thousands of elves to boost his spells just so he could put him to sleep, though…. It was then that he realized that his brother, the one who now viewed himself as a God, calling himself the ‘Great Tree’, had truly fallen beyond any hope of salvation. He only hoped that his brother would not do the unthinkable and destroy the world in his quest for absolute dominance and power.

While locked away from the world by the spell, he still dreamed. In his dreams, he saw what went on around the world, bearing witness to events both great and small, good and evil, light and dark. However, the first time he felt himself begin to wake up was when Kain, the Avatar of the Maker, rose from his grave. He was not an undead, but also not alive. To call him a mortal at all, let alone a natural being at this point would be like saying that Life is the same as Nonexistence itself. He was, but at the same time, he wasn’t.

This was what clued him in to the fact that his greatest fears could come to pass. He had told his brother of these things, but his brother, that arrogant fool, had brushed him off. Now, however, the Maker had not only set his gaze back upon the world but had fully descended into the body of his Avatar. And when that Avatar was reborn once again with powers unlike anything anyone had ever seen, he knew that there were only two paths available to Nature. Either it would yield to the Maker’s will and work alongside him, or it would be erased from the world, for better or for worse; those were the only two paths for all things to take.

The next time he was tugged towards awakening was when Kain assaulted Arcfira itself, raining destruction down in an indiscriminate fashion. He eventually realized what his brother had tried to do and that his plan had backfired in a spectacular fashion, but Kain left once the truth was uncovered, giving a final insult before returning home. Ever since then, he had been drifting towards the waking world bit by bit, and his woefully misguided elven worshippers were partly to blame for this. he didn’t approve of their insane fanaticism, nor their cultish behavior, but as he was still unable to interact as much as he would have liked, he could not stop them.

Then came the war. His brother, in his typical foolishness, threw so many innocent beings into a meat grinder/ woodchipper, uncaring as to their damage done to all involved. He recoiled in horror when the chemicals came raining down, he wept when the elves, those who had been enslaved for so long that they didn’t even know that they were enslaved, were butchered in pointless assaults. And what made it all so horrible was that despite loss after loss, his brother refused to acknowledge the truth.

Then the dam that his brother had built so poorly down in the southern reaches of Arcfira was shattered, and the sheer amount of death and destruction caused there created enough of a backlash that Nature Itself decided to intervene. The death, the despair, the destruction, the sheer brutality of it all; his brother, the supposed self-appointed Champion and Savior of Nature, had caused all of this, and Nature itself began to reconsider its former condemnation of his own philosophy.

Now the greatest threat to nature was not a being trying to straddle the line between civilization and natural living, but one who, by the power and force of his own arrogance and hubris, had caused Nature to be wounded so heavily in such a short period of time. And that was why he was slowly waking up. Not just because the death toll had caused a feedback effect, but because his mix of pessimism and optimism about how Kain could deal with Nature proved to be a more viable and long-term option than letting Nature itself be wiped away.