Not a creep, but an onslaught. 

 

In a matter of days, tarmac turned green with moss, vines spread long fingers across the concrete jungles of bustling cities, and the rolling hills of Ireland and the British Isles sprouted with choking bramble. 

 

Normal life didn’t quite grind to a halt. If there was something the Fey didn’t anticipate, it was the tenacity of the human race. Weekly maintenance crews were sent out to make train tracks passable and to pull weeds from cracks in the roads. There was a temporary boom in employment — with no one thinking too hard about where the money to pay for it would come from​ —and the daily existence of millions of people bravely persisted.

 

As days grew into weeks, weeks into months, the cracks in society began to show. The harbours were thick with leaf litter and seaweed; ship lanes were the first to falter. Next, the runways fell to disrepair, greenery forcing its way up through the tarmac quicker than maintenance crews could patch the gaps. Imports stalled. Food shortages were rife. Medicine became jealously guarded.

 

With each day that passed, the state of the UK and Ireland became more desperate, more choked by the Verdant. 

 

In the early days, certain vocal groups rejoiced, lauding the creep of the Verdant Wood as a positive thing, nature reclaiming the land that humanity had brutalised. But as supplies began to dry up, even the loudest, most extreme of the ecological warriors fell quiet.

​

When the dead began to rise, unease threatened to bubble into panic. Firefighters who'd succumbed to injury woke, confused but determined. Medics from long-finished battles stumbled out of the green, baffled, and driven. Countless others from days, months, decades and centuries past resurfaced, and religious leaders spoke of the end of days.

​

The rest of the world looked on with increasing concern as Ireland and Great Britain became little more than a cluster of silent rocks in the Atlantic. Communication was patchy, phone lines and network towers damaged and tangled. Efforts to reach Irish or British shores were often thwarted by unidentifiable obstacles in the water, while flights were deemed unsafe, airports and runways too unstable.

 

Messages that did come through spoke of breaches across the globe, barely contained by scattered Avalon agents. Groups of the newly-living gathered near airports and docks, found their way to quickly patched breaches.

 

It became clear that, were Britain to fall, Europe would be next, and the Americas, and every other civilisation the Fey took issue with.
 

Within three months, the island and its neighbours had gone dark. No one was getting in. No one was getting out.

 

*

 

By the time Avalon sends out their desperate call to arms, the land is more forest than farmland, more tangled than tame. Fuel is scarce. Power patchy. Humanity and their Fey-Touched cousins soldier on, but society teeters on the edge of destruction. The call goes out nonetheless. Who will answer?