Description
An red tinged axe with a black wooden handle

Background
For certuries Blackwood Forest stood surronding a fork in the stream by the rise of a hill. The Living trees inside it grew, bore seed, and fell, living lifetime after lifetime. They were the stately hosts to the communities of nymphs and fae that lived under thier braches, sharing tales and lives with the children of nature.

Man came, they came and built a house on the hill. They built it out of sod at first, then stone. This interested the Living trees, for although not every tree in Blackwood forest was a living tree, the living trees had never seen men before and didn’t rely on the men being able to recognize a living tree if they saw one.

The tree watched, and the men came and went. After years, the house grew bigger, and wood from the Blackwood forest was used to support stone. The house grew into an estate, then a fort, and a castle. The Living trees had been right to be wary of the men, a few fell to thier axes when the castle was built, but the men were frightened of the forest, for the sensed something they could not understand from the Living trees.

Following the building of the castle was war. More men came and vast swathes of the Blackwood forest fell to make engines of war, catapults, trebuche, rams, or just to make room for the men to march over the fallen trees. The Living trees watched in horror as their friends and families dead bodies were hacked and stretched and snapped, flung and burnt and shattered. The children of nature hid, sheltered in the roots and boughs of the few remaining living trees. The trees spoke to one another and the decided to take action, the first action the trees had ever taken.

The oldest of them still standing spoke to the children of nature and sent one brave fae out onto the nightmarish landscape. He returned with thier prize, an axe head. The iron of it was a burning poison to him, his hands and arms dry and blackend with long evil black lines racing up his viens. He pushed the axe head onto an exposed root of the eldest Living tree, then laid down under it’s sheltering branches and fell into a feverish sleep.

On the grave of that noble fae and made of the root of the Living tree, The Blackwood Axe was born.

Magical Properties:

The Blackwood axe has a steel head tinged with red. The handle is a black wood with wide, large grain. It is very sturdy and will not break.

The axe will work just fine on humans or creatures of any type, expect fae or other children of nature, but it cannot cut any wood of any kind, no matter the force of the blow.

If the axe is carried in the hand or otherwise on a person, rather than in a pack or vehicle, the wielder will begin to have desires to use the axe on someone. Visions of the axe slamming and crushing into the person will flash into thier mind. A haunting feeling follows these flashes, a kind of satisfaction, like the attack will mean something, accomplish something, something the wielder would like.

The axe can be thrown away or given away, or otherwise discarded, but a sense of loss and regret come with it, like the opprotunity to do something satisfying was missed. Many men have quested for the axe after having given it away, as if using it makes what they do complete.

If the axe is used and kills something, the axe remembers it. Sleep becomes a memory of the kill, from many angles. The wielder striking the blow, the axe submerging in that hateful flesh, the dead staggering as the axe is buried in them, the scene played out in front of the trees as witnesses.

There is a way to appease the axe. If the wielder journeys to the Blackwood forest and tears down the castle there, the dreams will stop and the wielder will just have a hollow, haunted feeling for the rest of his days. But if the wielder also helps protect the Living trees and renews their forest, he might finally be able to achieve a kind of satisfaction.

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