Secrets of the Pansir*

NPCs

Aspen Fligg

Aspen Fligg is a happy, go-lucky fungril who, unlike many of the other witches of the Wold, is committed to sharing the knowledge of the Pansir. Aspen differs in this way because he was not raised by the witches. During his mother's pregnancy, she was ill and would have lost Aspen if it weren't for an eccentric, traveling healer visiting the Four Forks. After Aspen's mother, Enebro, went to this healer, she received a potion that would cure her. Enebro drank this potion and was cured of her sickness, but not without a cost. The healer was a witch of the Pansir and they had placed a hex on the potion to mark Aspen as one of the Pansir's own. While Enebro had her suspicions of the witch, she did not know about the hex.
Aspen was born with strange and unusual abilities for a fungril in the Four Forks. Growing up, Aspen was often neglected by his peers because of phenomena that occured around him. His mother never disclosed her encounter with the healer, as she suspected the phenomena had something to do with the potion she received.
Aspen felt "othered" most of life except for when he was asleep. He would have dreams of dark crevice underneath the roots of a dead tree. He wasn't scared, the darkness comforted and intrigued him. He felt lie the darkness was like him. The darkness relied on the light being gone. Aspen relied the light being gone.
When Aspen was old enough, he went to find the darkness under the roots of the tree. He ran away to where he felt the pull of the darkness, which was deep in the Wold of Valoros. Aspen followed the pull until he came to the witch who hexed him, hunched over a cauldron and never completing their final potion. They were dead, but their familiar, a pink fairy armadillo, was still alive.
Though the armadillo could not speak, it taught Aspen the techniques of seidr and the ways of the Pansir. Aspen worked to understand everything the creature could communicate. He read everything he could get his hands on in the old cabin and he eagerly applied what he read. Aspen took to calling the armadillo "mister, and so the name stuck, even when he found out it's true name was something too hard for him to pronounce.
Aspen became a master of what he studied. He decided that the darkness of the Pansir could help people and he was determined to prove it. When he discovered that the Pansir had caused the Tragedy of Squama, he sought to keep it hidden. He cut himself from the Network in order to keep this secret. How much farther will he go to protect the darkness that made him feel at home?

Tragedy of Squama

The Pansir were resposible for the apocalyptic event that wiped out the capital of Jatheador, Tegrel. A few witches sought to end the Empire's reign and performed a ritual that corrupted the land of Squama. This is the real reason why the art of seidr is dying. The druids of the Wold found out and hunted many of the Pansir down while they drove the rest into the shadows. The leading druids kept the Pansir's actions a secret, for if Jatheador ever found out they lost their crown jewel because of Valoros, the wars would never end.
The ritual itself is not seidr. The nine witches who conducted the ritual knew if they used the magic they were taught, everyone would know who caused the disaster. Seidr is mostly used by the Pansir on Cauda, and a seidr ritual complex enough to cause Tergel to ruined could only be performed by the masters of this technique.
The Ritual of Ectopic Tryck pushes energy from one Astrum to another. It is a modified ritual of an ancient technique that the Stellaris, a Liberi syndicate, used. Many attempts to complete the ritual have been made throughout the years. Most have failed and consumed it's riutallists; those that have succeeded have been reversed and tharwted. It has two ritual sites. One being the anchor, the pressure, and the place where the Mortal Realm pushes on another Astrum. The other site is the wrest, the release, and the place where another Astrum is pushed into the Mortal Realm. This ritual is very unstable and the ritualists give most of their magical energy, the energy of the Ourvorax that is in us all, to have even a chance for it to succeed. The ritualists turn into husks of themselves and once they do the ritual could either stop or expand to the rest of the world.
However, the nine witches wanted to ensure that the ritual would continue but not spread to the rest of the world. It was ingenius really, they sent one witch to stay in between the Astrums to ensure both sites stayede connected and one didn't close.
The nine witches wanted to unleash the power of Umbrafose onto Tegrel. Umbrafose is an Astrum of of shadow and silence. An oppressive Astrum of stillness and unspoken order. It doesn't sound to deadly and apocalyptic at first, and it's true it was the least world altering choice, but introducing an entire new ecosytem to an enviorment it doesn't belong is devastating to both that ecosystem and that enviorment.
Four witches gaurded the release site on Squama, four witches guarded the site in Valoros, and one went into Umbrafose. The witches in Tegrel performed the ritual within the city and the site of the ritual has now transformed into a fortress which the Umbravae protect with their lives. And the witches in the Wold performed their part of a ritual deep in a large cave system under the foothills of the Azure Range .
After the ritual was performed, each site was altered drastically by the forbidden magics these witches were playing with. The quaint farmhouse was shaped into a fortress of oppression and darkness as the Umbrafose broke through. The cave system became overgrown and fertile as the Mortal Realm was forced to centralize it's power on the site.