Day 823

As the old saying claims, history does nothing but repeat itself. Wars are fought over the same clashing ideologies, leaders are elected and dismissed for the same scandals, monsters live and live and never die in a thousand different movies.

In East Casterborough (just south of Toxlow-Upon-Sea) they take this literally. Back in the old civil war days when the Roundheads fought the Cavaliers both armies had wrought havoc upon the little village. It was a crucial place for the two armies to seize, each wanting to use it's prime position at the heart of the great forest to launch stealth attacks against the opposing team from any and all sides of the woods.

What it actually lead to was a brutal massacre of both the soldiers sent in and the townsfolk trying to get out. The records from that time only say that the place was lost to both sides, not saying who had the upper hand (if either side did at any point) but repeatedly saying that there were wild beasts about the lands that the locals hadn't warned them about. They said that the bodies had all been dragged up in the trees and it had rained their blood for months.

Surely if the wildlife was that hazardous nobody would dare to live right at the core of it? Not unless they were a part of it or had some deal with it, a symbiotic means to ensure their own survival that had somehow failed them during the battle. Or maybe something even deeper than that, something uncontrollable that caused the townsfolk to vanish and leave behind nothing but unidentifiable bodies hanging from branches like autumn leaves just waiting to drop.

The present residents of East Casterborough are all unusually close, as such small village communities are. Everybody knows everybody else, knows their family and their whereabouts at all hours of the day to an uncanny extent. Ask anyone where someone is and they can tell you how many inches they are from the nearest pub, what clothes they're wearing and, of course, who they are with.

It's been suspected that they all have small trackers of radio earpieces with them but the general area consensus is that they aren't human and that they're all a part of some hive mind. The same hive mind that turned them all into unspeakable demonic entities to slaughter the invading armies, as they apparently have done ever since their ancestors came over from Norway on their longboats.

While similar tales have come from equally isolated Norwegian communities, where armies have been reduced to corpses in trees by locals who were nowhere to be found after the battles, no community is willing to compare their blood to the other. Whether this is for personal reasons or another part of an unspoken pact between them, nobody can say for sure. But the similarities are there and the trees around them echo with the rattles of ancient armour against bark.