"The Bloodpetal Field was a sad place. Solemn and fragile. But it was peaceful. However shallow and tenuous that peace might have been. It was a place of recovery in a theatre with far too few of those. I know not… I don’t know what it’s like now. At the time I left it… the peace had changed. Less fragile, less tenuous, but harsher. It was a hard change to accept but not one I would risk reversing."Called By Duty describes the Bloodpetal Field to Connie Furr and Seneschal Enfield Kelba.
The Bloodpetal Field is the realm of
Conscript Hodge, the Walking Wounded. Once the site of a raging battle in the Divine War, the Bloodpetal field was a small pocket of tenuous quiet and solitude, surrounded on all sides by the sounds of conflict and the dreadful machinery of war. Now the fighting has stopped, all that is left is the lone
Survivor and the endless stretch of
Bloodpetals, growing strong in the churned-up soil and spilt blood of the Conscript's
Fallen Kin. The flowers' perfume has a soporific effect on any that wander the field and soothes the troubled mind of the Conscript herself.
The field has few clear landmarks, and although it is theoretically possible to navigate by the remnants of battle that still show through the carpet of flowers – broken war machines, craters of mud and blood, tangles of barbed wire and the half-filled remains of trenches – the disorienting soporific effects of the bloodpetals are said to make it difficult. As such, it is presumed that the Walking Wounded, appropriate to her title, has no fixed abode within the plane but rather wanders aimlessly through it, accompanied by the singing of celestial larks above and the distant rattling of what remains of her erstwhile pantheon’s unfathomably vast war machines, now unmanned and damaged beyond repair by successive
Apocalypses but still intact enough to pose a looming threat.
Also said to be wandering the Bloodpetal Field are the haunting remnants of the
Fallen Kin, whose black dead stars surround Conscript Hodge’s own in the sky above Palimpsest. Once fellow combatants in the Divine War, the Kin were slain in battle but retain enough existence through the Walking Wounded’s memories of their companionship that their shades cling to a somber half-life in the haze and mud of the same Bloodpetal Field that now grows where many of them died in the first place. Some
goblin superstitions say that any time a goblin dies in battle before their time, they are not ferried to the
Garden Beyond the Stars but instead go themselves to join the ranks of the Fallen Kin in the Bloodpetal Field.
