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It was raining the day Crannlia cast his son out from the Circle. The boy had always been curious; this was not inherently a bad thing, but it had always seemed to override the virtues of traditionalism and respect that Crannlia had attempted to instill in him. The boy was always running off, this way and that, and seemed to pay little attention to his histories. How was Buchaille going to take over as archdruid for their lady Queen Líle of the Amber Court if he could not recite from memory her ancestral line?
It was that damnable snake's doing. Crannlia felt only shame when he failed to recognize the symbolic significance of his son keeping company with a serpent. The druid had hoped that the beasts presence around his son had meant that Buchaille had been willing to begin embracing his duties as warden of the Circle, rather than his corruption by promises of that witch queen Circe. Crannlia should have been tougher with the boy when he began asking why power should be maintained only by a select few, why was it so hard to see that it was because the masses would have no idea how to maintain it themselves? They would destroy each other and then themselves. It would be Buchaille's duty as druid to keep the secret rites, just as Crannlia's fathers line had done since time immemorial, to dole out their gifts as they were needed and no more than that. When Crannlia found that the boy had taken to sullying his proud elven name by calling himself "Buck," he had nearly exploded in rage. Buchaille was clearly spending too much time around those human and dwarven villages on the outskirts of their kingdom for him to be worrying about how pronounceable his name was to the lesser races.
All this, however, was nothing compared to Crannlia's most horrifying discovery, when they began to find dead beasts in the wood, flayed and disemboweled. Crannlia, of course, confronted his son. Buchaille refused to admit that he was torturing animals, he claimed that they were already dead when he found them, and that studying their anatomy would only aid in his medical practices. Well, even if they weren't alive while they were being dissected, it was no less natural to take them apart and leave their carcasses to rot in the sun. His son claimed that they could still be food for the carrion eaters, but Crannlia would hear no more of it. He forbade any more of there ghastly experiments, and that was the end of that. Buchaille seemed to have been cowed for the moment, and returned to his proper studies for the time being, or so the druid thought, until he began encountering living animals with stitched wounds. That was the last straw. Buchaille insisted that he was in the right, that pharmakeia could be a tool for good, to give the lesser races their own methods of spreading health amongst themselves without needing to study magic for decades as their people did, but Crannlia would hear none of it. This pharmakeia was an aberrant practice: Healing came from natural or divine providence as maintained by its proper stewards, while this crude approximation would only leave creatures scarred and in pain.
Crannlia gave the boy an ultimatum. Forsake the serpent that had filled his head full of heretical ideas and return to his family, or face exile. The boy chose the latter, vowing that he would prove heretical Circe's order to be correct. The druid only wept, his tears mixing with the rain, believing this to be the last he would see of the strange elf he had once called his son.
Re: Perils of the Ashenwood OOC
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