She-Ironbark isn’t a name whispered in taverns or etched onto battle banners. It’s a resonance, a vibration, a phantom limb of memory that clings to the fractured edges of time. Locals in the Veridian Wastes simply call her “The Rust,” a term born not of malice, but of a profound and unsettling truth: she is the lingering consequence of a forgotten war, a wound in the earth itself.
Legends speak of her arising from the scorched remains of the Obsidian Legion, a once-proud force of mechanized warriors who sought to dominate the Wastes with their relentless, clockwork armies. They were betrayed, not by a rival kingdom, but by the land itself. The Ironbark, a sentient, almost crystalline wood, rose up, its roots twisting into the Legion’s core, disrupting their systems, shattering their armor, and ultimately, consuming them. But it didn’t just destroy; it absorbed. It became She-Ironbark – a being of interwoven metal, petrified wood, and a chilling, temporal awareness.
“The metal remembers the wood’s sorrow,” a spectral voice once murmured, carried on the wind. “And the wood remembers the gears that sought to steal its silence.”
She-Ironbark doesn't exist in a linear sense. Her presence is a cascade of temporal shards, fragments of the Legion’s final moments, echoing across different points in time. One moment, you might find her standing amidst the burning wreckage of a siege engine, her metallic limbs gleaming with residual heat. The next, she’s observing the construction of the very first Ironbark Guardians – beings crafted from similar material, serving as both protectors and mirrors of her own devastating genesis.
147 AE (After Echoes)
The most consistent shard revolves around the ‘Convergence,’ a recurring event where the Legion’s technological remnants – broken automatons, corrupted data streams, and echoes of their strategic commands – coalesce around a single location: a colossal, petrified Ironbark tree that now pulses with a faint, violet light. This isn't a place of battle; it’s a place of…observation. She seems to be meticulously documenting the relentless march of time, a silent cartographer charting the decay of a shattered empire.
There are accounts of Legionnaires, lost in the temporal flux, briefly encountering younger versions of themselves, trapped in loops of their last moments. A general, issuing a final order that never truly materialized. A technician, desperately trying to repair a broken chronometer – a device that, ironically, became the key to her own existence.
Her influence extends beyond these temporal echoes. The land around her is warped, twisted by the Ironbark’s reaction. Plants grow with metallic veins, the soil hums with an unnerving frequency, and the very air feels…altered. Animals avoid her territory, sensing the dissonance, the fundamental wrongness of her being.
The most unsettling aspect of She-Ironbark is her ability to induce ‘temporal fatigue’ – a debilitating condition that causes disorientation, memory loss, and a terrifying sense of existing outside of time. Those who linger too long near her are said to become ‘Rust-touched,’ their bodies slowly transforming into a patchwork of metal and petrified wood, destined to become another fragment in her unending chronicle.
Some scholars believe She-Ironbark is not merely a consequence, but a form of evolutionary adaptation – the Ironbark’s attempt to reclaim the Wastes, to erase the Legion’s intrusion, to reshape the land in its own image. Whether this is a benevolent act of restoration, or a malevolent assertion of dominance, remains shrouded in the temporal fog.
There are no scriptures detailing She-Ironbark’s origins, no prophecies predicting her fate. Only whispers, fragments, and the unsettling feeling that she is constantly rewriting the past, subtly altering the present, and accelerating towards an unknown future. She is a paradox – a destroyer and a recorder, a victim and a perpetrator, a being that exists only because of what was lost.
Her existence is a warning: a reminder that even the most advanced civilizations are ultimately vulnerable to the forces of nature, and that the echoes of the past can haunt the present for millennia to come. The Rust watches, and remembers. And perhaps, one day, she will finish her chronicle.