MORWENNA

Overview

Three hundred years ago, a coven of witches kept the golden forest that folk then called the Verdant Crown. They named themselves guardians of the natural order, and the kings of that age walked to their trees to ask a counsel the witches rarely gave. Morwenna was one of them, and by every account that survives she was among the strongest they ever raised.

The coven’s vault lay beneath the forest’s heart. Gold and jewels filled part of it, tribute from lords who wanted the witches’ favor or feared their displeasure, and the coven valued that portion least. What they truly kept were the relics of the Age of Wonders: objects too dangerous for careless hands and too potent to unmake, gathered over centuries and sealed away. Morwenna knew the vault’s contents better than any of her sisters. She judged them wasted in the dark.

She meant to reshape the world to her own design, and she believed the relics would let her do it. When she put the matter to the coven, her sisters refused her. They had spent their lives locking those things away, and they would not open the door for one of their own.

So she reached past them. Something old slept beneath the roots of the forest, a hunger that had lain there since before the first men crossed the Alzions, and the few texts that name it at all call it the Devourer, the Root-Dweller, and the Thing That Waits Below. Morwenna struck a bargain with it and believed she held the leash.

It consumed her first — body, soul, and magic — and then it turned on the rest. Her sisters fought, and their workings only fed it. Dying, they spent everything left to them on a single binding that fastened the creature to the forest, and the forest absorbed the price. Golden leaves blackened and fell. Flowers withered to ash. Every spirit caught inside the curse’s spread stayed where it stood, unable to rest or to leave.

Morwenna stood inside that working when it closed. The same law that took every tree, root, and blade of grass took her with them. No sister judged her, and no court sentenced her; she was one more living thing in the wood when the binding fell, which is a colder fate than punishment. Three centuries on, she remains where the roots dragged her down. The histories that remember her at all call her Morwenna the Ambitious and lay the ruin of the Verdant Crown at her feet, and they are not wrong.

Appearance

No portrait of Morwenna survives, and the coven left no likeness of any of its own. The oldest songs grant her little: dark hair worn loose where her sisters bound theirs, a tall woman who stood at the front of any circle she joined, and the deep green the coven wore in all seasons.

What remains of her lies at the lowest point of the Hollow, in a ring of oaks bent inward above a shallow bowl of sunken ground. No frost grows inside the ring. At its center the roots of every tree run down and knot together into a mass the size of a cartwheel, clenched shut. The earth around the knot is scored with furrows, four and four a hand’s width apart, raked deep and then dragged under. Caught in the roots, a scrap of green cloth has rotted almost to lace.

No stone, no name, and no marker of any kind. The coven raised nothing over her, and nothing has grown there since. The place records only what happened in it.

Powers & Abilities

In life, Morwenna practiced the coven’s craft, which drew on a power older than the Old Gods and answered only those trained to it from girlhood. She could quiet a storm over the forest, walk a path no one else could find, and hold a working open longer than any two of her sisters together. She had also spent more hours in the vault than anyone living or dead, and she carried its inventory in her head: what each relic did, what it cost, and which of them her sisters feared most.

The binding ended all of it. Roots have grown through her for three hundred years, and she can rise from that ground no more than the oaks above her can walk. What she has left is her voice and what she knows.

The voice does not sound like one woman. Two speak together out of the knot, close but never quite in step, and no listener can tell which of them just answered. Whatever the Devourer took of her, it did not take her memory. She holds three centuries of the forest’s history, the coven’s workings, and much that died with her sisters, and she has had a long time to consider what any of it might be worth.

Personality & Demeanor

Morwenna was never cruel. She was certain, which in her case proved worse. She looked at a vault of sealed power and saw waste, looked at her sisters’ caution and saw cowardice, and never once entertained the thought that she might be the one who had it wrong. Her ambition was not greed. She wanted a better world, and she wanted to be the hand that made it, and she could not separate the two.

She bargained as she did everything else, from the front and on her own terms. She asked the Devourer for what she wanted, agreed a price, and believed the agreement bound them both. It bound one of them.

Three hundred years underground have not made her sorry. They have made her patient, and they have taught her the one thing she never learned in life: how to wait. What speaks from the knot still keeps a witch’s habits. It weighs before it answers, offers nothing without a price, and has never named a price that sounded like very much.

Notable Relationships

Her sisters of the coven raised her, trained her, and refused her, and all of them died fighting the thing she woke. Their last working caught her along with the forest. Whether they intended that, no account says, and the only witnesses spent their final strength on the binding.

The Devourer took her first and used her as the door. Three centuries later it lies bound in the same wood she lies in, and what passes between them, if anything passes at all, no living soul knows.

Lord Caelmir the Resplendent held these lands when the Verdant Crown fell, and he was young enough to watch its leaves turn black. He never met Morwenna. His own court unmade him a generation later and cast him into the forest she had ruined, and the Hollow made of him the thing the border folk call the Witch-King. Two falls, one forest, and both of them opened by a hand reaching for what it had not been given.

Almeric, the guide who takes coin to walk treasure hunters into Wilderwood, has assembled more of Morwenna’s history than anyone else alive. He tells it at the fire to companies who have paid to hear it, and he tells it as a warning.

Role & Affiliations

Morwenna belonged to the coven of the Verdant Crown, guardians of the natural order and keepers of its vault, and she remains the reason none of that survives. The principality raised on Caelmir’s ruined kingdom keeps her name in its oldest chronicles and nowhere else. Border folk will repeat the story readily enough and will not say the name aloud past dark, which the scholars at Alzion Hall record as superstition and do not otherwise explain. She lies where she fell, at the bottom of the Hollow, beneath the vault she wanted and never opened.