Part 1
Orshok made his way along a game trail, surrounded by the thickest, tallest trees he'd ever seen in his life. The murk oaks that held up Zarash'ak were big, but most of them remained hidden beneath the Glum River and they only went high enough to support the City of Stilts anyway. Here, though, the trees were everywhere and they were huge. The ground was drier here than he was used to, and he had abandoned his rowboat in Yrlag. There wasn't enough water to really make use of it, not without being beholden to the rivers.It was so dark, even though Orshok knew that it was late morning. The canopy above him was so thick that only pillars of sunlight managed to penetrate it to the forest floor below. This behaviour of the light contributed to an atmosphere that felt almost magical in the Towering Wood, and Orshok knew that there were Thelanis and Lammania manifest zones around. Best to be careful, he had a mission, and he couldn't afford to go gallivanting with faeries.
He approached the burnt out husk that must have once been the town of Bull Hollow. He had heard the stories from Warden and Kalshana, and he knew that Dah'mir had come here on the warpath. Some of the buildings had collapsed, seemingly from something heavy falling on them. Others had burned down, and yet some seemed to have been left completely untouched.
There were no corpses, Orshok assumed that animals had come and removed what they could. He followed the dirt roads deeper into the woods, where he found the circle of stones.
Orshok had never ventured into the Eldeen Reaches, and though he should've felt comfortable in any natural environment, he was unused to them. Even so, the circle of stones were familiar to him, so similar to the ones back home. He made his way into the circle, again noting that there were no corpses to be found. He tried to think back to what had happened to the dolgrim and dolgaunts they had killed at the Bonetree Mound, and decided that they did leave corpses. He hoped no animals had gotten sick from eating them, if that's what had happened.
The gatekeeper squatted next to the yawning pit in the centre of the circle of stones, the Bull Hole. He couldn't repress a toothy smile as he recalled the name of this particular seal, and in that moment thought himself to be quite childish. Still, it was funny though, and Batul wasn't here to chide him. He closed his eyes, and meditated, and attempted to reach out his senses to perceive the seal.
A slight trembling in the earth, a rumbling in the depths. Orshok could feel the present of the nature spirit that inhabited the hole, the guardian of the seal. He could feel pressure in the air, like the moments before lightning strikes, but there were no clouds above and even if there were, lightning was far more likely to strike the trees than him.
Don't trees explode when struck by lightning? Somehow Orshok couldn't imagine these towering giants exploding.
It climbed, lumbering, out of the hole. A figure that could vaguely be compared to humanoid, in that it was bipedal and had two thick, rocky arms. It was like a miniature mountain had climbed out of the hole, and then it squatted in front of the druid, imitating his own stance. Orshok hadn't known what to expect, and he couldn't rightly say that this was it, if he was being honest.
He smiled up at the guardian though. He didn't know what to expect, but he could understand the significance of the elemental's presence here. The Seal was unbroken.