While everybody believes, rightfully, that the Angleans are the greatest gun-nuts and craziest fighters in the known world, sometimes even the oft-meek Chaladonians manage to surprise the world.
The entire landmass of Chaladon is filled by multiple clusters of trees, that effectively keep a lot of soil under the cover of darkness 24/7.
Such a fact proved to be a problem for the Chaladoninas during the early meetings between the locals and outsiders, as many raiders and outlaws would come from the forests and approach even larger settlements under the cover of darkness.
To combat such a problem the Chaladonians, ever fond of the nature of The Nature, found a way to "weaponize" the trees.
First of all, there is the need to explain that the Chaladonian Willow is one of the biggest kind of trees found in the Island of Chaladon, and they are capable of holding on them even extremely heavy things, and hide them too. With this in mind, let's now explore the birth of the Whomping Willow.
The Chaladonian Defense Council thought about the weaponization in a rare moment of Nature induced enlightenment and chose the Salix Gigas Chaladonis as its main subject given the size of the tree. This project saw the usually peaceful Chaladonians creating big deadly weapons capable of taking down most airships of the beginning of the Age of Flight.
The heavy weapons platform would be placed upon the willow and hidden behind its leaves, the gunner would then shoot with the overglorified Chaladonian version of a flak cannon and take down invading airships, or overkill any man stupid enough to engage on foot such a defence system.
In the early days of Flight, when airships were barely more than flying coffins, visibility was minimal and the design of most air vessels was the most utilitarian possible, so, when another wave of would-be air-pirates tried to reach Chaladon, the first victims of the Whomping Willow were completely oblivious of what hit them and simply made legends about the Fury of the Forest appear.
This knowledge is widespread to the outside world today for the fact that these AA defence systems are outdated and many ships, the Chaladonian own Squid in primis, can quickly outmanoeuvre the WWs.
A nice thing to note is that to this day remains as a tradition in Chaladon to gift a piece of willow root to someone you want to never see again, or even want to kill.
The Fury of the Forest
