Yep, two Christmas scenarios this year. We already had Tim Harford's "The Malletta Caper" and here's a quieter and more cerebral adventure by me. This originally appeared a couple of years ago on my Jewelspider Patreon page. It's a sketchier affair than Tim's, with the expectation that the referee will shape the details to fit the campaign. Here we have a mixture of the pagan nature of magic in the Jewelspider world with the folk horror that infuses a lot of Legend scenarios. Grey heads will not fail to notice also the nod to The Avengers episode "A Surfeit of H2O", the opening scene of which blew me away when I saw it aged 8.
The honeymoon is over...
Theodor of Utherwick (29 years old, medium height, solid and dependable) should be a gentleman untroubled by cares. He has recently wed and set up a house in Cantorbridge with his young wife Epiphany (15 years old, willowy, pale, a little dreamy). He is respected for his bravery in battle, and sought after for advice because of his sober and thoughtful manner. He has prosperous interests and is lord of several manors – including, now, the village of Burstow, where Epiphany grew up.
Yet Theodor is far from being at ease. Two of his friends have died unexpectedly and suddenly. A third has become so nervous that he has shut himself away and refuses to see visitors.
How might the player-characters come into the picture? They could be relatives or friends of somebody involved. One or more of them could even be witnesses to Theodor’s and Epiphany’s wedding, which would bring the threat close to home, as we shall see.
Theodor’s story
The characters meet Theodor at his house in Cantorbridge. It is a crisp day with light, powdery snow falling to skitter in the wind across the flagstones of front path. Beyond, golden and limpid in the clear cold air, the cathedral stands above the rooftops like the ramparts of heaven.
Theodor welcomes them into a hall made snug by thick drapes and a crackling fire. ‘We always have a log from my wife’s home,’ he says, prompting a shy smile from her as she sits a little way off working at her embroidery. ‘The scent of home.’
He fills them in on what’s happened: ‘Clifford of Durnover was the first. He jumped off the parapet of his castle. They say he’d eaten bad mushrooms and they sent him mad. But not long after, Reynaud Longarm was drowned.’
‘Unfortunate. Was he a strong swimmer?’
‘He was found in the middle of a field. Stinking pools of stagnant water all around him, but this was half a mile from the nearest river.’
‘Even so, two deaths… a sad coincidence?’
‘These were found in their mouths.’ Theodor brings out a cloth and unwraps it to reveal two large husks, seed pods about the size of an apricot pit.
‘And you mentioned a third friend?’
‘A neighbour, rather. Caspar the dyer. He’s shut himself up and won’t see anyone. He gave us the covers on those chairs as a wedding present.’
‘Generous.’
‘I’m a good customer. And he was a witness at our wedding, as were the other two, so I suppose he thought a gift was in order.’
Epiphany
Epiphany sits quietly sewing throughout all this. She is a good wife by the standards of her society, where the ideal of womanhood is the Saviour’s mother: gentle, kind, modest, meek and mild.
She would not expect to be directly questioned by any of the characters, and if they do then she defers to her husband to answer. No male character will get anything more than polite remarks out of her. For anything deeper she’d have to be interviewed by a female character in private, or possibly by an elderly man or a priest who could serve as confessor. Alternatively the characters might try questioning her maidservant Joanna – but not her old governess, Sister Shila (50 years old, tough as boiled leather) who most certainly will never betray the family’s confidence.
Therefore teasing out all the details may take some care and patience.
Life stories
Epiphany was raised in the manor hall of Burstow, a village nestled into a fold in the Cullen Woods about twenty leagues north of Cantorbridge. Theodor was her mother’s cousin, and the family betrothed her to him eight years ago, when she was seven and he was twenty-one and just about to set out to Outremer.
A year later her father died in a shipwreck and her mother became deranged and had to be committed to a religious community. Her stern governess, Sister Shila, was left to bring up Epiphany until Theodor, who was also now legally her guardian, could come to fetch her.
Theodor found that Epiphany, not unreasonably, had grown up a withdrawn and otherworldly girl. With no companions except her dog, Burl, she had taken to solitary walks and long periods gazing at the books she found in an old chest in her parents’ room. With no education she had barely been able to figure out what any of the books said, but she occasionally showed pages to the local parson and in any case she enjoyed looking at the pictures.
Reasoning that his bride had to be brought back to reality by putting aside childish things, Theodor gathered up all the books and threw them out. In fact, he gave them to the priest, Father Lucian, who officiated at the wedding.
The wedding ceremony took place in Theodor’s private chapel in Cantorbridge in the presence of the old priest Lucian and four witnesses: Clifford (deceased), Reynaud (deceased), Caspar, and Theodor’s comrade in arms and best man, Kendrick of Heligston.
Secrets
Shortly after her father’s death, Epiphany came across an ancient weathered stone idol in the woods. It was nestled in a tree that had grown around it, so that the leaf-crowned countenance seemed to peer from another world. Perhaps connecting it with stories she’d half understood from scripture lessons, Epiphany thought the diadem of leaves (in fact mistletoe) on the idol’s brow was a crown of thorns and so identified it as the Saviour. She pieced together a prayer that she found in one of the books – a genuine prayer, but when recited in front of a pagan god it could equally be taken as an expression of fealty to older ways. For a while she left offerings in front of the idol, small tokens but yet enough to pierce ten centuries of stony sleep.
Years later, trying to hold onto her books when Theodor and Shila gathered them to sling out, Epiphany tore out that page by accident. She had long forgotten the idol in the woods but now was reminded of it and spoke the prayer again, this time with the force of urgent emotion, and the Wildwood Lord woke. Epiphany’s fervent prayer then was not to wed. She pledged herself instead to her ‘angel in the tree’, supposing that to be akin to the way she had been told her mother was now a bride of the Saviour.
But the passions of youth are squalls that can blow as mightily in one direction as another, and arranged marriages that start out in dudgeon or dismay can alter course towards more sympathetic feelings. Adjusting to Theodor’s presence in her life, and aware that marriage to him was her parents’ dearest wish, Epiphany came to accept the union. Perhaps in time she will even come to be glad of it. She soon forgot her prayer to the ‘angel in the tree’. But in the depths of the wood, a nature god stirred from slumber did not forget.
The Wildwood Lord considers that Epiphany has sworn herself to him. He will do away with Epiphany’s current husband and then claim her as his own. But as Epiphany has vowed before witnesses to ‘honour and obey ‘Theodor and ‘cherish and support’ him, and that conflicting vow has the force of the True Faith behind it, by the relentless logic of faerie the Wildwood Lord must first kill all those witnesses in order to free her of any other allegiance.
Clues
As mentioned above, a lone female character or a confessor could get a private interview with Epiphany and learn some of the above from her. It might be tempting to make Epiphany confident, brilliant and liberated and Theodor a bullying misogynist dolt, which is certainly what a modern 'romantasy' writer would do, but in the context of Legend's society that is neither interesting nor credible. Epiphany is fifteen. She has led a sheltered life. She has had access to books but insofar as she has any education she is largely self-taught. She agrees with the general principle that a wife should be dutiful and obedient because that’s what the Church drums into everybody.
That said, having been left to run wild for the last seven years she can be headstrong and moody, though she feels that’s wrong and she is trying to adjust to married life. No doubt her feelings towards Theodor are conflicted.
Getting Epiphany to talk about her life in Burstow should be difficult at first, but she’s artless and once she starts opening up it becomes easier. Even so, her prayer to the nature god is personal. At times she thinks it’s a sacred trust, at others a juvenile foolishness, so she is unlikely to blurt it out to a stranger. But with careful questioning she may very hesitantly confess to having half-woken in the night to see her ‘green angel’ at the foot of her bed after each killing.
The characters will also want to talk to other witnesses.
The dyer
Caspar the dyer is frightened. He was returning to town at dusk a few days ago and saw what he thought was a figure waiting near a stile. As he drew closer he realized it was a small tree covered with ivy, making it look like a person standing by the lane. But as he passed he felt a blow to the side of his head, cutting his cheek though no one was there. The next day he found green tendrils growing from under the bandage he’d applied, and now half his face is covered with ivy whose roots are deep in his flesh.
Caspar has been in seclusion for days now, praying constantly. He won’t admit his servant to his room, but sent him out to procure holy water from the cathedral. The servant is ‘Joseph’ (originally called Mahad), a Harogarnian who was liberated (if you can call it that) from Ta’ashim slavery into indentured servitude and brought back to Ellesland ten years ago. Figuring that his foreign appearance makes it risky to try filching holy water from the font, he actually brought back a bottle of river water that Caspar has been sprinkling on his foliage-covered face each day to no avail.
Unless the characters can resolve things very quickly, Caspar will be found dead in a couple of days when the plant tendrils reach his brain. The body is found with another of the seed pods in its mouth.
The priest
While talking to Father Lucian the characters will notice he lip-reads because he’s gone deaf in his old age. If they press the point he will admit that he never heard Epiphany’s vows as he was looking down at the order of service. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he hastens to say. ‘The service is a sacrament, of course, but it is just as binding without the involvement of the clergy. I simply officiated as an old friend of both families.’
The important point is that he is not a witness to Epiphany’s vow to honour and obey her husband, and so is not one of the Wildwood Lord’s intended victims. He has therefore not been plagued by visitations such as Caspar experienced. (Or is it because he's a holy man? We will never know.)
Lucian could also be drawn into a discussion of the legality of the marriage. He discussed with Theodor a possible wrinkle in the arrangement, namely that Epiphany had not started menstruating when promised to Theodor, so arguably their betrothal eight years ago didn’t count as formally binding. Still, it was her parents’ wish, which counts in other courts than that of law, and she was seven years old which counts as the ‘age of reasonable consent’ to betrothal.
The characters may intuit from this that Theodor was uncertain whether he should wed Epiphany or not, hence his discussion with Father Lucian beforehand and his request to have Lucian at the ceremony.
The torn leaf
If they ask to see the books that Theodor gave Lucian, the characters may notice that a page has been roughly torn out of one. Part of an image remains that showed the Saviour nailed to a tree, the page bordered with a decorative motif of leaves and branches. Inspecting the rest of the book, a scholar would recognize that it consists of prayers and apocrypha with a noticeably naturistic theme – not a heathen text, but one that could be read as heathen by an impressionable or untutored mind.
The best man
Kendrick of Heligston has been at his manor house and has only just received Theodor’s letter about the deaths. He is not especially given to fancies and so doesn’t believe he’s on a list of doomed souls.
The seeds
If planted in soil, the seed pods found in the victims’ mouths sprout grey-green leaves that if worn as a garland will give some defence against the Wildwood Lord’s power.
The bride has flown
After Caspar’s death, Epiphany runs away. It doesn’t take long to find out that she’s headed back home to Burstow. Sister Shila has left a note, having set off after her. Perhaps, having changed her mind now about marriage to Theodor, Epiphany has gone looking for the torn page with the prayer written on it with some notion of taking back what she wished for. Or maybe she thinks that by offering herself to the ‘angel in the tree’ (which she must surely realize by now is not the gentle and forgiving Saviour of the True Faith) she can stop the deaths.
So the wife is drawn home to her family’s country house and the husband follows – and the characters too. And the stage is set for the final act.
Yuletide in Burstow
Theodor is learning patience. Rather than dragging Epiphany back to town, he indulges her to the extent of proposing they spend Yule at Burstow Manor. He is still very far from linking his wife to the deaths, and he thinks that spending the holidays in her childhood home may help her to adjust more readily to married life.
The villagers are happy to see their young mistress back home. She has always been an aloof figure but her parents were popular and their orphaned daughter was always an object of pity to the locals. In keeping with tradition, and to Epiphany’s delight and Theodor’s indulgent amusement, the manor hall is decorated with a garland of flowers, dried throughout the year and now woven into a long wreath that encircles the beams.
Theodor sets about throwing himself into village life, supposing that is what his wife wants. He joins in a rough-and-tumble hurling match and is injured – not seriously, but Epiphany is alarmed and rushes to his side, insisting on binding up the cut herself. The characters cannot fail to see that after the rocky start to the marriage the two of them are drawing together.
A few days before Saviour’s Day it snows. The night sky is flooded with stars. Magic is on the air in at least two flavours: pagan and dark, and that even older magic of romantic love. But the latter is a fragile spell, still in the early stages of casting. Epiphany is moody, Theodor serious and still half inclined to treat her as a child. Their future would be uncertain enough even without a nature god of olden times bringing a curse down upon them.
Kendrick arrives, having sought Theodor in town. As the roads are now thick with snow, he remains as their guest for the festivities.
The prayer
‘O lord of the living world, I beseech thee, save me from the malice of those who hate me so that their wickedness gives them no power over me and they may not use me for their ends. Guide my steps that I may walk without offending thee. Free me from the hands of my enemies, visible and invisible, above and below, and bring me into thy company, that I may serve thee evermore in body and soul. Enfold me in the arms of thy love.’
The semi-literate Epiphany has garbled this, but the core sentiment of pledging herself to the Lord she was addressing remains.
The characters
How will they find out the key info in the third act, in particular the reveal that the Wildwood Lord is going to end all this by taking Epiphany's life too, once he has freed of her of her vows to another? One way is by talking to a scholar with magical knowledge (that could even be the old nurse) or, if one of player-characters is a sorcerer, by coming across a reference in his/her own books. And of course they might come across the torn page.
The key pieces of information:
- The prayer offers the speaker body and soul to the Lord.
- When the witnesses and Theodor are all dead, there is no rival claim upon Epiphany except for her pledge to ‘the angel in the tree’.
- The idol is in the cleft of a tree in the woods.
- The seed pods can be used to give limited protection against the pagan god’s minions.
- Destroying the idol or getting Epiphany to reject her ‘green angel’ will both serve to break the Wildwood Lord’s claim over her.
Burstow has a mischief night tradition which has servants ruling masters and wives ruling husbands. If Theodor can be persuaded to go along with the game, that provides a key to breaking the fate that the prayer has cursed them with, rather as Gawain broke the Loathly Lady’s curse by granting that she should have her own way.
The Green Man
His appearance: skin pale and greenish-yellow like stripped bark, a holly crown bleeding sap. (This needn’t involve a physical manifestation to the player-characters themselves, it could be Epiphany’s description from her dreams or a victim’s dying account.)
The characters cannot harm the Wildwood Lord himself, though they could destroy any creatures ('ympes') he sends to kill witnesses to the wedding vows. The ympes look like the skeletons of small woodland creatures held together with knotted creepers, and furred or feathered with wet dead leaves. The characters’ best bet is to resist his power long enough to find and destroy the idol or get the wife to abjure him, either of which casts him out for good.
How would they find the idol? For example, they might take Epiphany’s old dog for a walk in the woods and it leads them close to where the idol is, though they will still have to poke around a bit. Destroying the idol will banish the Wildwood Lord from this area.
Of course, it can’t be that easy. Breaking the idol begins to close the Wildwood Lord’s gateway into the present mortal realm, but he doesn’t go quietly or easily. On Yule eve, the garland begins to stir, animating into a furious thrashing serpentine form made up of flower petals, vines and twigs. If your players’ taste inclines towards the old school climactic fight, this last gasp of the Wildwood Lord will give them quite a struggle. Its aim is to slay the remaining witnesses, including Theodor, and then encircle Epiphany and draw her up the chimney (a grotesque reversal of Santa bringing presents, the players may think). If it gets to that then she’s lost, and will be found pale and cold the next day, hanging dead in a tree with mistletoe and holly binding her to the trunk. The characters could fight smart if they notice the flowers and creepers become fresh; they have only to lure the garland outside into the snow and the cold will weaken it.
But a combat might seem crass. Even so, simply to have the Wildwood Lord go without any fuss or fury is a bit of a damp squib. Rather than having the garland murderously animate, his face could manifest in it, making a last demand on Epiphany’s loyalty. It’s still a climactic battle, but now the field on which the battle is fought is the young woman’s soul, and the characters must muster arguments to keep her from giving herself to the ancient nature spirit.
If the characters fail
First all the witnesses will die, then Theodor, and finally the Wildwood Lord will come to claim Epiphany as his virgin queen of winter, dying as the year must die to make way for rebirth in the spring.
If they prevail
Quite possibly the Wildwood Lord if thwarted will exact some last vengeance. Perhaps his animated garland sets the manor house on fire; pagan gods never go quietly and are often petty. But as Epiphany watches her family home burn, shivering in the snow, her husband puts his cloak around her shoulders. The characters spend the rest of the Yule season down in the village, where Theodor and Epiphany are welcomed as guests. Out of the shared strong emotion and life-changing experiences they can grow closer together and – who knows –end up as a genuinely loving couple. It’s Christmas; even in Legend we can occasionally hint at a happy ending.
The Coronet
by Andrew MarvellWith many a piercing wound,
My Saviour’s head have crowned,
I seek with garlands to redress that wrong:
Through every garden, every mead,
I gather flowers (my fruits are only flowers),
Dismantling all the fragrant towers
That once adorned my shepherdess’s head.
And now when I have summed up all my store,
Thinking (so I myself deceive)
So rich a chaplet thence to weave
As never yet the King of Glory wore:
Alas, I find the serpent old
That, twining in his speckled breast,
About the flowers disguised does fold,
With wreaths of fame and interest.
Ah, foolish man, that wouldst debase with them,
And mortal glory, Heaven’s diadem!
But Thou who only couldst the serpent tame,
Either his slippery knots at once untie;
And disentangle all his winding snare;
Or shatter too with him my curious frame,
And let these wither, so that he may die,
Though set with skill and chosen out with care:
That they, while Thou on both their spoils dost tread,
May crown thy feet, that could not crown thy head.
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