NogoronBlighted Giant Boar

Nogoron – Blighted Giant Boar

A giant boar of the forest. Local hunters referred to Nogoron as an old spirit of the Fey, one who had lived thousands of years as a creation of Renmaeth. Whether any of that holds true is uncertain, even to the most well-versed druids. Yet one thing now is certain: Dragonblight has gripped Nogoron, and the enormous boar has become a relentless threat to the survivors of the Limlight outbreak.

The forests at the edge of Limlight are old, older than the village itself, older than the kingdom of Draksborne that claims the land they grow upon. The hunters of Limlight have known Nogoron for as long as any of them can remember, and so did their fathers, and their fathers before them. A boar of impossible size, standing at the shoulder of a draft horse, with tusks the length of a grown man’s arm and a hide so thick that arrows have been known to splinter against it. The eldest among the village spoke of him not as an animal but as a ward, a remnant of Renmaeth’s first dreaming, left behind in the physical world when the great goddess fell into slumber and the Fey Plane was born from her rest. Whether any of this holds truth beyond the comfort of old stories, none could say with certainty. What the hunters could agree on was that Nogoron was never hunted. Not out of fear alone, though there was plenty of that. Out of something older, a wordless understanding that some things in the world are not prey.

He kept to the deep wood. In the years before the outbreak, those who ventured far enough into the forest sometimes reported catching a glimpse of him between the trees, moving with a quietness that had no business belonging to a creature of his size. Some left offerings at the treeline. Salted meat, honeycomb, the pelts of animals they had taken that season. It was half superstition and half genuine gratitude, for the old stories held that Nogoron kept darker things from pushing through the wood toward the village. The druids who occasionally passed through Limlight on their wanderings would grow thoughtful when his name came up, never confirming the legends and never dismissing them either, which the villagers took as confirmation enough.

When Phrenic Concordia took hold in Limlight, it reached the forest within days. Whether it traveled on infected birds or carried itself on the wind or crept through the roots of the trees, nobody who might have studied it survived long enough to say. What the remaining survivors know is that Nogoron emerged from the treeline three days into the outbreak, and he was no longer what he had been. The stillness is gone from him. He moves through the village streets with a blind and ceaseless aggression, his hide split in places where the corruption has pushed through from beneath, weeping dark fluid that carries the same faint luminescence seen in advanced Dragonblight hosts. The tusks that were never turned on a human being in a century of living beside them are now the last thing several of Limlight’s defenders ever saw. If there is anything of the old ward still inside him, it is buried deep beneath something that wants only to destroy.