The Gallows Tree.

It stands in a field, twisted branches reaching towards the sky to try and grasp the very sun from it’s celestial wandering. The branches, long stained with the blood of villains, did once have a more joyous purpose, but to get to that so swiftly discounts the history of the tree which must first be told.

In times long past, before people knew to counts their lives by days, or even before the beats had grown afraid of those who walk on two legs, a tree there was. It was the first tree, that from which every other green things sprang, and of which every other living thing has eaten. This tree was old, old even before the ancestors of the men who walk the earth saw it’s sweeping branches reaching higher and wider than any other things there was. In it’s primeval sap runs the blood of creation, the whispers and mutterings of the world as it was in the crack before light made green things green and shadows dark. This tree was the first, of which every other tree was but a pale imitation, as a spark is to the sun or a pebble to the mountains. It was from this tree, long ago, that a seed was stolen.

Awan, she who was forever more known as Gildren the tree bringer, was for long days seen walking in the barren fields of the world. She trod paths up hillsides and down dales, always looking for more than the brown earth and thin water had to offer her. This world that she saw was less than it could be, she knew. In her wanderings she passed in places long forgotten and never more visited. The sun danced in the sky, content that it was the most beautiful thing in the world, and Awan stood atop a hill. From there she saw what at first she cold not see. A smear, a twisting mass of darkness, a living things that did not move. A dead creature with more colour in it’s petrified bones than anything she had seen before. After a long time of looking, she walked down from the hill and stood beneath the tree’s outermost branches. She was still miles from the great girth of its main trunk. The sunlight under the leaves was no longer the harsh white light that she had grown to know. It was a green, soft and dappled colour. In the wind, which had before been nothing but a clawing nuisance, the leaves moved to a fro, shifting the shadows on the floor. It was while watching these shadows that Awan saw that the ground, while being brown, was not the hard earth, but a deep rich loam of dried leaves. In wonder she fell to her knees, scooping handfuls of the leaves up and tossing them in the air. In the shaking shadows and smooth breeze the leaves swirled in eddies and Awan was pleased by what she saw.

Taken by the urge to see the main stem of the tree, she walked under the spreading lattice of branches sprouting from many lesser trunks on the journey to the world root. She looked up from time to time, marvelling the in new colour the world had, but she became puzzled. As she approached the tree there were less and less leaves on the branches above, and those that were were small and mean. She wondered at this and at many things, and made way to the oldest tree in the world. It was more than her eyes could see. A mountain of wood, with terraces and paths up it’s bloated ancient flanks. Before it’s lower slopes there lay a lake of dark water. A great expanse of slowly lapping, seemingly thick water that seemed to be of evil intent.

The case of the lake is thus. The tree, long delving with it’s mighty roots, found places deep in the earth in which things from a forgotten time had been trapped in rock, never to be released. In it’s everlong quest for water, the roots tunnelled them out, and such was the massive size of the underground fingers that the creatures used them to return to the surface of the world. Evil once more walked abroad in the world. The most evil place was the base of the tree, for the roots ruptured a vein in the black beating heart of the world, and most vile puss oozed from there, gathering in a deadly lake at the base of the tree. Never was there was place of more evil in the world, where the most terrible of the escaped creatures did live. It was to this lake that Awan came in her search for life.

There was no way to pass the lake from the ground, and Awan was made to climb a lesser trunk and mount a branch on which she could climb over the lake far beneath. She was careful and slow, all the while looking down into the shifting darkness below. Ripples disturbed the surface where nothing was moving. Awan knew no fish could live in the water, and she had an unfounded dread of what may be there.

Coming to the tree proper, she climbed its grizzled flank, seeking a place where leaves grew again. High she climbed, and could see the world spread beneath. The branches of the tree made a green canopy in a ring around the trunk, but all leaves stopped at the edge of the lake. Seen from on high, it seemed the trunk was the center to a green ring with a black heart.

Awan climbed on, and came presently to a place where a leaf did grow. It was hidden in a hollow, catching the sun only slightly. Taken by an urge born not of her mind, she lifted the leaf and beheld a seed nestled under it. She took the seed, wrapped it in the leaf and began to climb back down the tree. She was returning on the branch across the lake when a tremor shook her free of the wood and she fell into the dank waters. A ripple on the far side became a definite arrow shape, and she knew that a beast was approaching her. She swam with all her might, and the strength of panic aided her escape. She was caught clambered form the waters edge, and a tentacle, thick a black, whipped form the water and caused her a grievous wound, poisoned with the doom of ages.

With nothing more than what she was wearing, she soaked up the blood with the leaf, staggering under the eaves to return with her hard won prize. The distance was too great, and she collapsed many times until finally she was under blue sky once more, with the miles of dark earth between herself and her home. It was at this time that she heard a horse fast approaching. She knew it to be a horse, but together with the hooves was another sound less common to beasts of passage. The sound of bells drifted to her, and came closer as she once more sagged to the ground.

She was taken, unbeknownst to her in her deathly slumber, to her home, and there set down in a field. She was found, but her hurt was mortal and the people of the village could do nothing but wonder at the strange bandage she had chosen and the small brown stone she had in her pouch. There in that field, Awan passed away and was buried there with all her raiment. In time there grew a tree on the spot of her death, and Awan was forever Gildren, remembered by the celebrations carried out under that tree for generations to come. From this first tree there came many more, and the mothertree spread seeds in greater numbers and on the breeze, so the world turned green.

But the tree was rooted in blood and tainted with evil, and it came to pass that the branches twisted like a dead thing, and the bark became a dark black. Never once did the tree give rise to leaf or flower, and in due course the only use that the village saw fit to grant it was that of a natural gallows to put to death those who had wronged in the village. So it would have been, for already the tree had an evil doom placed upon it, but the first person who was put to death under the branches of the tree was he who is known as Simon the Innocent. The tale of his passage is long and full of woe, and here it is not concerned. Hanging from the branches was not a just reward for his actions, and so the tree was cursed with evil and marked by injustice from that day forth.