------------- The Shadow Conspiracy – 6 of 7 – General Retreus Fulkhan

“General Fulkhan. What can be said about the man? He was a legend, no doubt.”

“I heard he was a Paladin, one of the Paragons of the Seldarine Church. How could such a man fall?” Nova looked sad and far away.

“Its not so hard to understand, is it? General Fulkhan stood beside Glensheim when others would have strung him up for merely being of mixed blood. He stood beside the Queen when she decided to marry him. He stood beside Rillivan when he retired. The General was close to a thousand years old. He saw the world he’d fought for, the nation he’d bled for, change right before his eyes. And then he saw it destroyed by an evil he’d long warned against, but none would take heed.”

They thought he was just a hateful old man. Young elves, devoured by too much peace and too much,… of everything, wanted all Foxmoor to throw down their swords and bows and take up the lyre and wine tasting. They didn’t understand his old fashion thinking. They learned nearly at the cost of the entire race. The Second Orc Wars killed millions world wide. But never was the cost so high as it was right here. Carellon might have been invaded, with fighting in the streets in the capitol city, the Navy sunk in the harbor. But Foxmoor, the mighty fortress of Rillivan and Glensheim and others going back ten elven generations, was blasted out of existence, and everything around it for miles. The greatest of all elven life trees in the nation reduced to ash in one horrible afternoon. Orcs surged across the land, killing and burning. And right behind the Orcs came the combined forces of the human nations, chasing them into a trap in the fens of Hellenia. And when the armies came to stalemate, it was on Foxmoorian soil they fought.”

Foxmoor was no more. What had been a proud peoples, a peoples gifted with art and music and sword and armor, were reduced to a few backwards villages and bands of refugees that now depended on the humans for their very lives. I remember those times. They were dark and the sky was always filled with ash. The rains didn’t bring life to the woods, they brought misery and ashen mud to a barren and blasted land. You went into the Khang Frontier? It was all like that at the end of the war. It took a cabal of druids some ten years to bring life back to the land.”

I was young and impressionable, terrified out of my mind, but General Fulkhan was living a nightmare. Everything he’d believed in, everything he held dear had fallen. He blamed the foolishness of the youth of Foxmoor, blinded with more hope than good sense. They could not see, with their myopic view, the dangers. They would have welcomed the Orcs and fed them tea and cookies and hoped they’d change their warring ways. I know. I was one of those fools. General Fulkhan had lost everything, his land, his home, and his family. They were all in the fortress of Foxmoor when it was destroyed.

”At the end of the war, he just disappeared. He returned from exile when news of Rillivan’s resurrection spread. He was the first to advise insurrection and bloody revolt against Carellon. Whether by his own agreement, or by his cousin’s persuasion, he succumbed to the Shadows’ plots. He had long ago lost his Paladinhood. He lived only to wage war and kill those who stood against his King and his Foxmoor.”

------------- Credits

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