Sacred Ritual! Please Vote for This Story

Soren hesitated.

Lady Midnight looked at him with a hint of pleading in her eyes, but he could not help hesitating. Dryad Dance would, to some extent, draw on his power to restore this forest, and that could cost him levels. Dryads were embodiments of nature's spirit: beautiful, alluring creatures, perhaps among the most beautiful on the Material Plane.

But!

To Soren, dryads were not all that different from the Succubi of The Abyss, the lust demons of Baator Hell, or even the life-draining witches among the fiends. Their souls shared much the same nature. Dryads, too, relied on their innate powers of charm to survive. As creatures of the Material Plane, they tended to be kinder, but they were not all good. Most dryads stood with nature in the Neutral Alignment.

Every year, humans who cut down trees died at the hands of dryads. To stop other races from destroying forests, dryads had killed more than a few people.

But that was not the point.

The point was that Soren could not be sure whether the ritual would awaken the Divine Power Father of Oaks, Silvanus, had left behind. If it did, that would be ideal—the outcome everyone wanted. But if it failed, even Soren would find it difficult to force such a sacred ritual to stop once it began. Without Father of Oaks's power, he would have to spend his own strength restoring the forest.

For an ordinary person,

that would probably drain him dry. Soren would not suffer quite that fate, but losing more than five class levels was almost certain!

The Misty Forest was simply too vast.

Even if everything else fell into place, it would still fail if Father of Oaks had not left behind enough Divine Power Value. Soren might lose levels anyway.

That