BoG Chapter 161 Rough Draft Part q (Patreon)

Barkroar was trying not to move, but the human was doing things to it that itched terribly. "Are you done yet?!"

"No, but this is almost the last patch. You don't want me to miss any and have to do it again, do you?" Suzette admonished the huge treant and kept scrubbing away at it's bark with a course file and a scraper. She needed to get every last bit of rustblight so it didn't grow back. "Ok, I'm done with scrapping. Relax a minute while I get the acid."

"Do we have to? It burns!"

Suzette shook her finger at the treant. "That's the whole point! It burns off any of the rustblight and cleans your bark. Then Ben can fix you up." She took a large bottle of diluted acid and a rag and cleaned the areas she had scraped clean. Ben followed up with a spell called "Healing Fire". Small white flames moved over the areas where rustblight had taken hold. The fire killed any small patch that Suzette might have missed, and healed the treant's bark

It had taken some trial and error to find a way to permanently deal with the rustblight. First they had removed all of the dead ironwood that was infected with it to a large meadow outside the glade. The ironwood was resistant to fire, but the lichen-like rustblight burned at a low temparature. One thing they didn't lack was oak limbs and leaves. Two rows of fires were made of the scraps left over from logging the oaks and the ironwood trunks were put in-between. The radiant heat of the first quickly reduced the rustblight to ashes. The cleaned trucks were raised off the ground and left to cure for a month and would be carefully checked again. No one wanted rustblight to get into the town.

Zephyr, Aliester, and PHZero were kept busy mixing up vats of diluted acids to treat both trees and treants. Cham and Jon inspected each and every inch of the Ironwood trees, looking for rustblight, trimming dead limbs, and generally caring for the trees. Both of them had been given the special skills Tree-Healing, Tree-Shepherd, and Tree-Speaking by Barkroar, and they were rapidly leveling up the skills.

The had eager helpers in Dot, Libby, and Charlene. The later always acoompanied by her pink lamb, cupcake. The three bunny girls were rarely out of the game now. When Cham had asked about that, they'd told him about their decision to take an extended vacation from real life. All three were retired and had enough money that they didn't need to work. Libby and Charlene had simply put most of their belongings in storage and moved in with Dot for a week, and then all three had checked into a longterm gaming facility that would let them game for a month at a time.

The three women had been accepted by Barkroar and were almost often in the glade, helping to heal the Ironwoods, and deal with the problems in the Glade. Libby had immediately started working on the drainage problem, deepening the streams that led out of the Glade and clearing the obstructions placed by the oaks. As the water from the spring was drained away, the area went from a muddy bog to a damp meadow with several small streams running out of it.

This made it easier for another crew of workers to begin hunting for metal in the ground. People could be seen at all times of the day walking along, poking long poles into the ground and feeling around for chunks of metal. Chunks ranged in size, so it took some patience to do each square yard of meadow, hoping for the tell-tale sound of metal on metal. When that happened the metal tipped rod was traded for a shovel and eventually a large chunk of dark ore was dug up. There was uncounted tons of metal in the large meadow and the woods beyond. Workers would be digging it up for years to clear it all. But the priority was the sunny side of the Glade where the young Ironwoods were planted, and were the blight had first appeared.

An oily patch of water usually meant the prescence of metal below it. But Jon had found two places where the oily water took on a reddish tint. In the mud beneath those patches, they had found what they thought was the source of the rustblight. Both times the metal tip rods had come back up covered in the rusty lichen. Wooden shovels were used to uncover the ten pound chunks of Blighted Metal. There was something wrong about it, making a persons teeth hurt and ears ring. The chunks had been carefully crated up and taken from the glade.

Suzette had consulted her resident faculty about it. It was Titania who had the information she needed.
"Rustblight? And Blighted Ore? Oh, those can be bad. I've seen whole towns crumble from one nail infected with rustblight that was used to repair a wagon wheel. There's an old nursery rhyme about it: Because of a nail, the wheel was lost. Because of a wheel, an army was lost. Or something like that."

"Usually it falls from the sky on a night when the full moon is a sickly green. You'll see the prettiest shower of falling stars, but one of them will bring the curse of the Blighted Ore. Find where it fell, and gather all the pieces. You'll need the hottest of fires and it helps if you can find a priest to add some Holy Fire to the mix. Do it hot enough and you'll end up with a big lump of Blighted Steel. The metal will be inert, and quite valuable to a smith making weapons of destruction and death." She tapped the axe in her belt.

Suzette relayed the information to Jon and Cham who continued their search. Cham found the third piece two days later. This one was larger, nearly forty pounds. After it was out of the ground, Libby began drawing lines in the mud between the three areas. Then she examined an area roughly in the center of them. Her third poke in the ground triggered a heavy buzzing and gave everyone nearby tooth aches. Jon yelled at her. "How the hell did you do that?"

Libby was quickly moving away from the area. "Simple geomentry. Connect the points, bisect and look for the intersection to find the center of the circle."

"Also, that low spot had a nasty red tinge to the grass. Do we start digging?"

Cham was watching the dirt and pud as something pushed up from underneath. "Ah, unfortunately, we may not half too. Libby dear? Could you run over to that group of slackers loading up the ore and tell them we have a something nasty coming to visit?" Libby was only too happy to get away from the area. Her teeth were aching like they were going to split.