Caoilte the Asharrow Champion Lore
Centuries ago, before his terrible fall, in a pristine grove shrouded by dense canopy, reigned Caoilte, Earl of Summer Oaks. His courtiers, Elf and Fae alike, admired his steady and compassionate leadership. He avoided conflict, content to charm the trees to grow tall and their roots to run deep. His domain lay close to the Heart Tree, and basked in its proximity to the Rhythm’s source. Caoilte had no inkling that deep within that Tree, there lurked the Seed of Corruption planted long before, waiting for the chance to grow and ripen.
When one of the Shadow God’s servants awoke it, the effects on the Sylvan were devastating. Within moments, most of the Heart Tree’s staunch defenders went mad, the Rhythm seething with malevolent whispers and dark compulsion. The Corruption spread from there, turning beasts of the Mistwood into fodder for the creation of monstrous hybrids, and Elves and Fae into crazed, brainwashed agents of Darkness. Caoilte, living close to the Tree and at the time visiting its exalted boughs, was among the first afflicted.
The Corruption felt like a flame within his oaken body, and he was made to resemble a tree struck by lightning with its trunk ignited. Caoilte resisted with all his will and pulled himself away from the degenerate Rhythm. But this only slowed his decay. As his mind frayed, he desperately ordered his servants and subordinates to flee. A lucky few did so. Many more hesitated, only to be consumed by the Corruption. And yet others, such as his court steward, lngid, were already enslaved by Darkness, lacking the Fae’s formidable mental defenses.
As the fallen members of his lost house dispersed to spread the Corruption like a virus, Caoilte tried to isolate himself so he could not spread more misery. As the Corruption battled him for command over his body, it repeatedly flared in strength like a fire stoked, and each time Caoilte lost control of his actions. In those hours or minutes of full degeneration, he slaughtered whole tree-bastions of Elves with hails of toxified arrows of corrupted ashwood. He sounded his horn, which once heralded the coming of summer and a time of delight and plenty. When the call was answered by relieved and joyful Sylvan expecting the Fae’s help, he butchered or Corrupted them. Later, Caoilte’s horrified mind regained command of his body, aghast at what he had done. He realized there was only one way to truly thwart his own recurring atrocities.
Caoilte reached the coast and commandeered a boat. He raced across the waves and came upon one of the many remote outlying islands off Mistwood’s east coast. He ran the ship aground and burned it to ash with the fire of his own affliction. Moments later, a baleful red glow erupted from his eyes and mouth, and his formidable mind finally broke under the Corruption’s relentless assault. He was marooned, far from his homeland and well removed from those he knew he would have harmed if he had stayed.
Furious at his imprisonment, the Corrupted Caoilte poured foulness into the isle’s vines and plants, making them writhe and twitch and crave corpses to fertilize themselves. The coral turned blood red and the reefs churned with ravenous sharp-toothed fish. The insects grew monstrously large, and the birds and lizards that once preyed upon them became twisted horrors of bone-claw and thrashing muscle. But Caoilte’s new malicious personality was unable to devise a means of escape. His makeshift rafts were destroyed by waves and storms time and again, even when he lashed the bloated bodies of Corrupted animals together with thorny vines and grew plants with float-bladders to aid their buoyancy. The effort Caoilte’s Corrupted persona expended on these attempts exhausted enough of its power to leave a crack in its mental stranglehold. His old self rose up and tried to bridle the raging Corruption, beginning an inner struggle that continues to this day.
Over the centuries, many explorers have noted Caoilte’s island of strange, sickly, reddish—orange trees and vines, and attempted landings. None have successfully surveyed it and lived. Some sickened upon setting foot there. Caoilte’s mere proximity is enough to overwhelm a mortal’s body with foul corruption. Others, he massacred with volleys of his noxious, ashen arrows. To those in whom he sensed greed and malice, by whatever warped standards remained within his addled pate, he showed no mercy. lnterlopers Caoilte deemed ‘innocent’, he drove away in terror, sounding wailing, screeching blasts from his once-sonorous horn. These few survivors say that he speaks only in poetry and laments, singing elegies for himself, a Earl of Summer dwelling in a land of perpetual, twisted autumn. Truly, a fall.