:: Random Location—Fairgrounds of the Emerald Overlord ::

Fairgrounds of the Emerald Overlord

by Wm Jay Carter III, 6/16/15

Attraction: Maypole

Nation: Ranai

Condition: Barren, Maintained

Weather: Strangely Cold

Color: Emerald Green

Keyword: Overlord

Ignoring the signs that clearly discourage wandering off the path, you leave the well-traveled road behind and plunge into the forest. You abruptly stop short as a piercing pain shoots through your foot—a razor-thin blade of grass has lived up to its once-metaphorical (now literal) description. Looking closer, you see that the blade retains the vibrant green of grass, but now shimmers like a perfectly cut emerald, and—as your foot can now attest—is just as hard.

Proceeding on stilts as you were wisely instructed, you enter a clearing full of such emerald grass. Within the clearing, you see a joyous celebration in progress—children playing field games, maidens dancing around a maypole, and vendors selling sugar crystal candy. At least, you assume it was sugar crystal candy at some point, just as you assume the occasion was joyous… You shiver in your skin; everyone and everything in the clearing has been turned to hard, cold emerald...just like the grass.

In the Ranai Forest there is a tale of a fearsome creature known as the Emerald Overlord. Some accounts say he was once a wunderkind who escaped from a kindergarten where the gartner was strict, dominating, and unfeeling. Fleeing to the forest, the wunderkind found a festival in progress and—amid all the joy—only felt afraid and alone. Rather than allow him to suffer, the Fey Realm sculpted his surroundings so there would be neither joy nor sorrow. Indeed, in a world made only of cold, hard crystal, he could feel nothing, and be safe.

Another story says that the Emerald Overlord was actually an avatar of the World Soul who had become so powerful that his body was transformed into pure green crystal. Long since leaving his humanity behind, the Overlord demanded to be worshipped by the first people he found. When they would not, he transformed them all into emerald as punishment.

Realists point out that someone might have sculpted the scene from green crystal and staged it to look like the festival had been transformed mid-celebration—but then, there are none that can explain how a sculptor could undertake such an endeavor with mundane materials within a single lifetime, let alone how or where one might acquire an entire clearing worth of precious gemstone. And even were that possible, to what end?

No matter how truthful the tales of the Overlord may be, the fairgrounds can be found in the forest where everything appears to be made of real emerald. Some have even reported meeting the Overlord and being gifted with blades of emerald grass and other marvelous gifts. Many of those reporting these unlikely encounters happen to be selling the “gifts” they claim were given to them, however, raising suspicion as to whether the Emerald Overlord might have just been a marketing tactic used to prey on the superstitious.