Chapter 25: Heavy Lies the Crown¶
Prologue¶
In the Words of Rust Freelox, Pentarch of Revelation
Right. So. Last month.
We fought a warg — big one, gave himself a name, Howl of the North Wind, which I respected. And a troll, which I respected less. Neither of them are problems anymore.
Then there were the murders in Wyrmwatch. We followed the blood, which led us to a house, which led us to a man named Kurmil. He didn’t wait for the full moon. Just turned, right there in the room. We dealt with it. Among his belongings we found a ledger, and in the ledger, a name: Eirikk. Someone was paying Kundal to collect live animals — unharmed, trainable. We don’t know who Eirikk is. We don’t know where to look. The thread is still loose.
And then there’s Elroy. He’s fine. He’s going to be fine. Probably. We’re working on it.
One more thing. We govern, now. We’ve been doing it for a while, and I think we’re getting better at it. We built things last month — walls, infrastructure, the civic kind of things. Perry definitely knows the list. I have a rough sense of it.
New month. The Stolen Lands are still here. The Kamelands are waiting, apparently with six different things that want our attention. Someone mentioned a giant turtle.
Let’s do what we do.
— Rust Freelox, Pentarch of Revelation, 1st of Abadius (Jan), 4711 AR
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
I. The Furnace in Winter¶
Abadius (Jan), 4711 AR
Winter kept its grip on the Stolen Lands through the whole of Abadius. The Thorn ran dark and high with snowmelt from the north, and the sky above Stormfire Reach stayed the particular grey that settlers had learned to associate with the long months between Kuthona’s deep cold and the tentative warmth of Calistril. Drizzle rather than snow. Mud that never quite dried.
The Stormfire Pentarchy governed through it.
The monthly reckoning opened, as these things often did, with a ledger that gave with one hand and took with the other. Athanor’s growing reputation — stories of the Reclaimers’ deeds spreading down the trade roads toward Restov and Brevoy — had drawn new settlers and new notice in equal measure. The kingdom was better-known than it had been just a few months ago, and better-known nations attracted interests that were not all welcome. The settlements were straining at their seams. Olegton in particular had grown faster than its infrastructure could accommodate; the streets were crowded, the queue at the well long, and the goodwill of families sleeping three to a room had a shelf life the Pentarchy was not inclined to test. Unrest moved through the populace the way it always did in winter — quietly, persistently, sharpening into grievance whenever a fire died or a wagon became stuck.
Adding to the pressure: the river crossing between Athanor’s core territory and its western holdings had not yet been formally claimed. The kingdom held two distinct bodies of land separated by an unincorporated stretch of wild march, and every citizen who had to make that crossing alone understood, in a visceral and practical way, that the sovereign protection they had been promised ended at the edge.
Perry moved first. In the capital, he surveyed the available lots along the Thorn’s south bank — measuring, calculating, allocating with the precision of a man who treats urban planning as a branch of applied mathematics — and commissioned a new residential development from the treasury’s construction funds. The work crews moved with unusual efficiency. By the third week of the month, entire city blocks of sturdy timber-frame dwellings had risen where muddy lots had been: real homes, with hearths and roofs and lockable doors, for families who had spent too many nights in canvas. So well-managed was the construction that surplus materials emerged from the effort, available for the next project that needed them. Perry noted the result without ceremony.
The efficiency translated into something more intangible. Stories spread in the way settler communities spread stories — tavern to cookfire to trading post and back again — about the council that could build a city block in under a month and still have timber left over. Athanor’s standing rose another measure among the settlements and homesteads that dotted the frontier roads.
Against the steady pressure of unrest, the Pentarchy turned to Harrim. The dwarven Viceroy of Groetus was not a comforting presence under most circumstances, but his sermons — relentlessly grim assessments of the world’s eventual annihilation, delivered with the conviction of a man who found this fact reassuring rather than troubling — had a peculiar effect on worried settlers. They came to the sermons afraid of the cold and the trolls and the uncertain future. They left having been told in elaborate detail that everything ended eventually, which somehow made the specific things they were afraid of feel smaller. Rust spent the better part of a week working with Harrim on the focus of the ministry, sharpening its aim toward the practical rather than the cosmological. The first effort reached for the sky and caught only air; the second, with the benefit of Rust’s counsel, landed solidly. One less edge of tension ran through the streets.
Elroy worked with Grotdor on the pier. The Thorn River settlement at Wyrmwatch had waited long enough for proper waterfront infrastructure, and Elroy’s experience crossing rivers armed to the teeth translated into focused instruction that Grotdor applied with his characteristic methodical thoroughness. The pier went in solid and serviceable: a proper dock for river traffic, reducing the settlement’s reliance on road supply and opening the waterway for commerce. Perry would feel the benefit in the ledgers within a month.
Perry crossed to Olegton and broke ground on a smithy, drawing on the kingdom’s stockpile of ore and stone. The settlement’s growth had outpaced its metalworking capacity for months — wagons with broken axles waiting for repair, tools wearing out without replacement, the thousand small failures that accumulate when a farming community has no forge. The result was solid work: a proper smithy, smoke already rising from the chimney before month’s end. Olegton, with its new forge and its growing market, stood one structure away from graduating to a proper town.
Rust commissioned Stormfire Reach’s Town Watch — a new civic institution, formalized in municipal charter and funded from the treasury. The Watch would take time to integrate fully into the settlement’s administrative rhythms, but the first patrols walked the riverfront streets before the month was out, and the citizens who saw them understood that the Pentarchy was not merely building structures for commerce. It was building the apparatus of civil order.
Dravyn, Pentarch of Rune and keeper of the kingdom’s territorial ambitions, extended Athanoran sovereignty in two directions during the month. First, he dispatched survey teams into the unincorporated river crossing march, marking boundaries with stone cairns and arcane wards. The formal claim completed the arc of Athanoran territory: the kingdom’s western and eastern holdings were now contiguous, a single unbroken domain rather than two islands of sovereignty separated by unmarked wild. The administrative consequence — the unrest of secondary territory would cease pressing down on the ledger — was the kind of result that translated directly into calmer streets.
His second claim extended the border into the march containing the ruined Temple of the Elk — an ancient Erastilian shrine. Perry, reviewing the survey notes, took a moment of precise silence. The Temple’s restoration — requiring specialized knowledge of old religious traditions that Perry did not yet possess — was deferred to the following month, the groundwork laid and the patience required.
The plains near Olegton had been eyeing cultivation all season. With agricultural guidance routed through Valerie’s office and Grotdor’s hands directing the survey, the formal establishment of a farmstead complex took shape on the river plain — dark, loamy soil that turned the plough cleanly, drainage patterns suggesting good yields without significant clearing. Settler families from three directions had already staked informal claims to plots in the area; the charter gave those claims legal standing and a name. The Pentarchy christened it Oleg’s Bounty, partly in recognition of the trading post that had been the seed of Olegton’s commercial life, and partly in what amounted to a collective ironic tribute to a man who had never asked to become the axis of a growing regional economy. Oleg had heard, by now. He had not commented. But he had been seen, twice, watching the new farmland from the ridge with an expression that was not quite displeasure.
Linzi, the Emissary, spent weeks cultivating the ground for formal negotiation with the Sootscale Kobolds — the silver-mining clan whose caverns lay to the south and whose reliability as commercial partners had been established over the previous year. Perry took those foundations and built on them with characteristic efficiency: a trade agreement, properly documented, with favorable terms that would reduce the friction on future dealings between Athanor and the Sootscale community. The kobolds seemed pleased to have their trading relationship recognized in legal form. Grotdor followed by converting four units of stone from the kingdom’s stockpile into a forward commitment of resources — a straightforward exchange, clean and practical.
Dravyn, toward the end of the administrative month, committed to an arcane working that required the better part of three days in his tower study — pooling the kingdom’s magical expertise into a reserve that could be directed at any single future problem. It cost more from the treasury than he had anticipated, but the reserve was secured.
Valerie, Pentarchy Chief of Staff, sent envoys to Varnhold. The relationship with the neighboring kingdom had been cordial but transactional; her overture made it something more. The first approach did not find its footing. The second, carried by the diplomatic weight of a season of successful governance, arrived as an exceptional success: Varnhold’s foreign aid came through in the form of both material support and a formal willingness to assist with Athanor’s most pressing military problem. The material contribution — additional resources rolling into Athanor’s coffers — represented the largest single external infusion the kingdom had received since its founding.
Grotdor directed that support toward the troll problem. Hargulka’s forces had been named now, in the council chamber, with the weight of a threat that had stopped being theoretical. The kingdom’s frontier defenses held the northern marches; Dravyn’s arcane reserve, applied as a parallel working, pushed the result from near-failure to solid success. Athanoran forces kept the trolls back. But success was not resolution. Fear of those northern marches spread through the populace regardless — one last measure of unrest settling back into the ledger like frost returning after a brief thaw. Hargulka’s name had been spoken. The trolls would not stop until the Pentarchy met them in the field.
The month’s treasury roll came back strong: enough to plan beyond mere survival, with surplus to carry forward and ambitions to match.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
II. Twenty-Five Gold a Month¶
Early afternoon, Abadius (Jan), 4711 AR — Wyrmwatch
The administrative work closed before midday. By early afternoon the Pentarchy was back in Wyrmwatch, standing in the grey drizzle of a Stolen Lands winter with the memory of the kundal’s transformation still fresh. The man had not waited for a full moon. He had turned in the room, right in front of them, and the Pentarchy had done what was necessary. What he had left behind — the ledger with Eirikk’s name in it, the network of animal collection that still ran somewhere in the frontier’s shadows — remained unresolved.
Elroy Jenkins carried a different kind of unresolved in his bones.
The wolfsbane had been purchased at twenty-five gold and consumed before the reckoning began. Dravyn and Rust put their heads together and came up with a ritual to break Elroy’s curse. But the lycanthropy had taken root deep into Elroy’s core, and bound itself to his very essence. They tried several times for several days to no avail.
The curse held.
Elroy Jenkins remained at Stage One lycanthropy, the progression arrested at its current level. No accelerating transformation. No imminent loss of control. But the curse was permanent in its present state, woven into his blood and bone until something more powerful than wolfsbane addressed it. Each full moon would require its own reckoning. Fail one of those monthly tests, and the Pentarchy would learn in very concrete terms what it meant to share a watch rotation with a werewolf.
The practical arithmetic resolved itself quickly. Twenty-five gold per month for the wolfsbane, indefinitely. No adventuring on full moons — a self-imposed restriction Elroy had already internalized with the quiet certainty of a man who understood what he was. A reinforced room somewhere at the edge of whichever settlement they occupied, with heavy iron fittings and walls thick enough to muffle what happened inside.
“If it gets me some additional damage resistance, I might just want to keep it.”
— Elroy Jenkins, Pentarch of Valor
Rust had done the homework. There existed, for someone in Elroy’s condition, a studied dedication to the nature of what he was — a path that led not to uncontrolled transformation but to controlled shifting, at will, on his terms, the wolf as a tool rather than a sentence. The words "shift at will" produced a noticeable brightening of Elroy’s expression. He had an appointment with that possibility in his near future.
With that settled — provisionally, in the way that a great many things in the Stolen Lands were settled — the Pentarchy took stock of the afternoon. It was roughly four o’clock. The drizzle persisted. The Kamelands were waiting.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
III. Into the Kamelands¶
Afternoon, Abadius (Jan), 4711 AR
Perry laid out the situation with the efficiency of a man who had already plotted three marches ahead.
The Kamelands occupied the semi-marshy lowlands to the south and east — rolling terrain below the Narlmarches, where pine grew thick and fast and the canopy pressed down so completely that it was difficult to tell midday from mid-afternoon. Six locales of interest had been identified in the area. Athanor had the treasury to sustain itself. What it needed now was the Kamelands.
There was also the matter of a giant turtle somewhere to the south. Elroy had not forgotten about the giant turtle.
They circled south and east, skirting the Narlmarches’ denser canopy and dropping into the lowland forest as the afternoon light faded from grey to the murk that the Kamelands made their own particular aesthetic. The air thickened with pine resin and marsh water. Birdsong came from everywhere and nowhere, layered over the crack of their footsteps through last season’s vines. The transit was uneventful — the Kamelands offering no immediate resistance to their passage, as if assessing them first.
And then, ahead of them, the sound of a flute.
Light and wandering, a little lost — the kind of melody that reaches your feet before your ears quite register it. The trees parted to reveal a clearing that had apparently claimed a private reserve of sunlight and was not sharing it with the surrounding forest: a small, still pond at the roots of an enormous oak, birdsong in the high branches, leaves floating on still water, dappled light making its way through the ancient canopy in shafts that felt almost deliberate. At the pond’s edge, playing panpipes with the focused inattention of someone lost in the music, sat a satyr — well-muscled, hairy, cloven-hoofed, with blades and a bow lying beside him. And barely visible until they were nearly at the waterline, kneeling in the shallow end with her plant-woven hands trailing in the water, knelt a woman who appeared to be made entirely of living things: bark-like skin, branch-like horns where a crown might sit, hair like wild grain, a pelt of moss and living leaves. She was crying silently into the reflection of the sky. Deep, systematic slashing wounds crossed her flesh. Whatever had done that had been large and deliberate.
Elroy declared the music hauntingly beautiful. The satyr — Falchos, as it emerged — vaulted sideways into the treeline in a scramble of goat legs. The plant-woman rose slowly, hands raised in peace.
Her name was Tiressia. She had lived in this grove for thousands of years. The satyr, now peering from behind an oak with the wary expression of someone who had not yet decided whether this was going to be a good experience, was her companion.
The wounds, she explained, were the work of a scythe tree — a creature from the First World, specifically malevolent, that did not merely kill but consumed: every living thing in its territory stripped bare, fragments of itself scattered in the soil to grow into new scythe trees in turn. The creature had moved into the region recently. If it went unchallenged, it would devour the Kamelands entire.
“Axes work very well against trees. I have been told.”
— Tiressia, Dryad of the Kamelands
She had spoken with the delicate distaste of someone naming a thing they personally found repugnant. Across the Selene River, to the southeast, where the road bent and the deforestation was visible from a distance — that was where they would find it. One condition: no excessive damage to the surrounding forest. The pointed look in that last sentence aimed itself at Grotdor, and at the perpetual heat-haze that surrounded his hands.
"I only can’t burn the living ones," Grotdor clarified, for the record.
Elroy informed Tiressia, with the measured formality he reserved for diplomacy with beings who had been alive since before Athanor was a word, that the Stormfire Pentarchy intended to be good neighbors to the Kamelands. They would take care of the scythe tree. Something in Tiressia’s expression had changed.
The party set southeast.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
IV. The Hollow That Watched¶
Approaching midnight, Abadius (Jan), 4711 AR — the Blighted Hollow
Midnight was approaching when they found the location Tiressia had described.
The hillock rose from the lowland marsh on a ten-foot escarpment of bare earth. In every direction, for hundreds of feet, the vegetation had been stripped to nothing — not burned, not cut, but consumed, removed with the thoroughness of something that ate living matter rather than destroying it. The ground between the treeline and the hillock was churned and grey and silent. At the hillock’s summit, a shape dominated the darkness.
Wrong. It was the only word for it. A shape that was approximately a tree the way a corpse is approximately a person — the structure present, the life absent, the silhouette carrying a quality of deliberate waiting that trees did not naturally possess.
The Reclaimers made the practical decision to camp.
Rust claimed a patch of elevated ground at the hillock’s base and began setting up what could generously be described as the least defensible campsite in the Stolen Lands. He recognized this partway through the process, spent a measure of concentrated effort correcting it, and ultimately produced something serviceable. The process had been briefly undignified. The result was not.
Grotdor, without commentary, threaded camouflage materials through the camp’s perimeter in the methodical way he did everything — a cold piece of fieldwork that raised the difficulty of finding them considerably. Whatever moved in the darkness would have to work for it.
Perry cooked. A hearty meal emerged from the travel stores, the kind of reliable warmth that sustained a person through the next day’s exertions. He also attempted a shepherd’s pie for Elroy, because Elroy had mentioned he was cold and also because something about the evening called for an act of care, however small. The pie was, Perry later acknowledged with the precise detachment of a craftsman assessing a partial failure, not quite right. The potatoes were runny. The crust was wrong. Elroy ate it with the enthusiasm of a very large man who judges food primarily by whether it exists.
All through the night, something circled them.
Not close — never close enough to threaten, never pressing the firelight’s edge. But persistent: a grinding creak of vines being shouldered aside at intervals, the sound of something large moving through undergrowth, pausing, moving again. The Blighted Hollow offered the unsettling impression of being watched by something that had decided on patience. Grotdor’s camouflage had done its work; the presence circled and tested and, finding the camp harder to locate than expected, did not press its advantage. The darkness kept its distance. Dog remained at Rust’s side throughout, wolf’s instincts pressing against the leash of training, tracking the circling sound with flat amber eyes that never quite relaxed.
Morning came grey and warm — improbably warm for Abadius, as if the approaching combat had decided to be comfortable. Rust gathered provisions from the surrounding treeline. The hillock waited.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
V. A Mistake of Wood and Fire¶
Morning, Abadius (Jan), 4711 AR — the Blighted Hollow
Two trees stood at the hillock’s summit.
Perry was first up the escarpment, and he assessed them with the quick instinct of someone who had already loaded fire bolt ammunition into Infernis before leaving camp. One tree — large, scarred, wrong in the particular ways Tiressia had described — was the target. The other, beside it, was simply large and scarred. Perry drew breath, recalled everything he knew about creatures of First World origin, and fired.
The hit landed cleanly. The tree lurched. And from somewhere behind it, with a sound like the world being ripped sideways, the actual scythe tree erupted from concealment.
It had hidden behind the other tree — which was, as it transpired, an awakened tree, a living and conscious creature of entirely innocent disposition that had been minding its own considerable business until a halfling investigator set it on fire. The awakened tree, now burning and confused, registered this as a personal affront. The scythe tree registered the exposed party as prey.
Elroy had been watching Grotdor. The moment the scythe tree lunged — all gnashing burl and thrashing roots, driving itself toward the kineticist’s exposed flank — Elroy was already moving. He planted himself between Grotdor and the impact before the strike could land, taking the full force of the ambush across his own frame. The damage was enormous. Elroy, who absorbed punishment the way a mountain absorbs rain, dropped from full health to barely over a third of it in a single exchange, the temporary vitality from the previous night’s careful preparation burning away in an instant.
The scythe tree pressed its advantage. Two more strikes found air and armor instead of flesh. The escarpment held.
Grotdor, looking at the arithmetic of Elroy’s remaining health with focused precision, chose water over fire. Ocean’s Balm — a cold-water vitality impulse, not his element of preference but one he had spent time learning — poured warmth over Elroy’s wounds. A small amount of health was restored. Grotdor then turned to the awakened tree, which was still burning and still confused, and did something unexpected: he hummed the melody he had heard Falchos playing the previous evening, a wandering satyr tune, while extending his kinetic sense to suppress the fire eating through the innocent tree’s bark. The flames went out. The awakened tree’s branches, rigid with distress, relaxed into something resembling stillness.
From below the escarpment, Perry called out in the fey tongue: "I apologize, grandfather tree. We thought you were the scythe tree hiding."
Rust, at the hillock’s base, channeled a surge of life-force upward — a wave of pure vitality that found Elroy and pushed him back to nearly full health with the warmth of a healer who does not calculate generously. Dog scrambled up the escarpment and circled toward a flanking position.
Dravyn, moving with the deliberate precision of a wizard who had already decided what was needed, traced sigils of descending heat in the air and directed them at the scythe tree. The working drew moisture outward from within the creature’s wood, wringing it dry from the inside. A plant thing, the scythe tree suffered the effect badly — persistent fire settled across its bark and began the slow, cumulative work of burning it from within.
The awakened tree made its decision at the start of the second exchange. Its fire was out. An apology was on record. It uprooted itself with the deliberate dignity of a creature that had been alive for centuries and had no intention of dying in a fight that was not its own, and walked back into the forest without another word.
Perry put the intelligence he had gathered into everyone’s hands and another bolt of fire into the scythe tree’s trunk. The creature’s armor, its reflex vulnerabilities, its elite construction — all of it mapped and shared with the precision of an investigator who reads an enemy the way he reads a crime scene. The fire bolt landed cleanly. The scythe tree dropped from 115 to 101 hit points.
The scythe tree, burning from two sources and holding the high ground, turned its wrath on the party’s heaviest defender. A whirling strike caught Elroy, hammering his armored breastplat. A root wrapped around his leg and pulled; Elroy felt the grip close like a trap. Then a branch swept past him and found Dravyn instead, sapping the wizard of over half his health. The persistent fire from Dravyn’s earlier working rolled over the scythe tree in a burning wave.
Elroy levered himself out of the root’s grip with the pure muscular authority of someone who refuses to be held, and swung his longsword with everything that had been building through the exchange. Missed — and not just missed. The scythe tree’s reaction came immediately: a disarming sweep that sent the longsword spinning to the ground in the creature’s space. Elroy was without his weapon. He raised his shield and roared a taunt at the creature that the Blighted Hollow’s stripped landscape carried for a quarter-mile in every direction.
Grotdor shaped his fire into a single decisive strike — a critical blast that hit the scythe tree with the full force of everything he had been channeling, driving it from 83 to 59 hit points. A second attempt missed cleanly. Rust healed Dravyn back to safety and repositioned Dog. Dravyn took one glaive strike that connected, then deployed a sphere of fire large enough to fill the hillock’s crown; the scythe tree took the hit partially, but enough to push it below 40. The persistent fire kept working.
In the third exchange, Perry fired again, pushing the scythe tree to 17 hit points. The creature, knowing something had shifted, dedicated its remaining capacity to one final devastating attack on the man who had taunted it. The blow was the kind of impact that ends careers. Elroy raised his shield — it absorbed what it could, and what it could not absorbed was enough. The shield that had taken blows meant for everyone behind Elroy Jenkins for three years cracked at the base of the grip and broke apart in his hand.
Elroy dropped to 29 hit points.
The persistent fire from Dravyn’s earlier working rolled one last time. Fifteen damage. The scythe tree stood at two hit points.
Two.
Elroy Jenkins flung the broken remnants of his primary shield aside. He was disarmed, one shield destroyed, standing at 29 hit points on an exposed hillock, looking at a dying creature with exactly enough malice in its remaining existence to kill him if the next few seconds went wrong. He drew the backup shield from his pack — the Sturdy Shield, smaller and simpler, built for exactly the situation of having run out of everything else. He swung it at the creature’s trunk.
He missed.
He reached for the last thing he had, spent it, rerolled — and the result came back as a critical hit.
The damage was ten points. The scythe tree had two hit points. The math resolved without drama, but the image of it did not. The creature broke apart in three pieces, branches and roots flying in every direction, the gnashing burl at its center going still for the first time since it had arrived in the Kamelands. Elroy stood at the center of the wreckage, breathing hard, holding a shield still intact by the grace of a last-moment correction, surrounded by the silence of a hillock that had finally stopped being a predator’s home.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
VI. What the Grove Offered¶
Mid-morning, Abadius (Jan), 4711 AR
Rust, who had stepped away from the hillock briefly near the end of the combat, returned to find the scythe tree in pieces and the situation resolved. The explanation was swift. Rust accepted it with the practical equanimity of a healer who has learned not to require continuous visual confirmation of every crisis.
From within the fallen debris, the party found the creature’s accumulation of taken things — the possessions of whatever wanderers had crossed the Blighted Hollow in the past season. Among them, wrapped in a length of silk that the tree had somehow preserved despite everything, was a Dancing Scarf: a billowing length of fabric adorned with small bells, its weave infused with something that moved independently of wind. Grotdor claimed it before anyone else had registered it was there. It was, by any reckoning, the first time he had called immediate dibs on anything. No one commented on this. It seemed right.
Tiressia arrived from the treeline as they were cataloguing the find. She looked considerably better than she had the previous evening — more composed, the systematic wounds in her bark-like flesh already beginning to close with the natural regeneration of a creature whose life and the living forest’s were the same thing. She had kept her word.
She presented her promised reward: four feather tokens, each a simple feather from some exotic bird, the shaft dipped in gold and marked with a single rune. When pressed into bare earth, each became a living oak tree — sixty feet tall, five-foot trunk, growing as conditions permitted. She also offered a quantity of primeval mistletoe from the deep roots of her grove, something that had no immediate application but that a party containing a runelord wizard and an alchemist-investigator would no doubt find a use for in time.
And she made an offer. If the Pentarchy chose to claim either the Blighted Hollow or her grove as Athanoran territory, both locations would function as places of refuge — protected zones where the fae presence enhanced the kingdom’s ability to resolve difficulties in the surrounding region. The condition: no settlement or worksite built there. Tiressia would tolerate stewardship. She would not tolerate enclosure.
Perry, reviewing the strategic implications with the measured efficiency that characterized every decision he made about the kingdom’s territorial interests, noted that there was no foreseeable reason to plant a settlement in the middle of either location. The arrangement was accepted.
Rust ran systematic treatment on the party in the four hours that followed, working through each wound with the patient competence of someone who had been mending people since before he could see over a treatment table. Elroy’s health climbed back to full. Perry repaired Elroy’s broken primary shield with two careful applications of his craft — the metal bent but not destroyed, the fracture at the base of the grip worked back into serviceable alignment with the steady hands of someone who had been fixing broken things his entire career. The sun was still up. The Kamelands stretched east and south. Two fae refuges were now part of Athanor’s unofficial map.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕
VII. The Nixie’s Pool¶
Late afternoon, Abadius (Jan), 4711 AR — the eastern Kamelands
They continued southeast. The Kamelands stretched out around them, marsh and pine and grey river-light, the afternoon moving toward its close. At a bend in the river where the current eddied wide and still, ringed by lily pads and reeds in a natural deep pool, they found a standoff.
Seven loggers — rough men with axes over their shoulders, the kind who had come to the Stolen Lands because the timber here was old and dense and the competition was minimal — stood clustered around two of their companions. Those two stood with the blank, unhurried expressions of men who had entirely stopped registering the outside world. They were not dead. They were simply somewhere else, their bodies waiting for instructions that were not coming from inside them.
The head logger, a balding man named Korax, turned as the Stormfire Reclaimers approached.
“Look who it is. Right in time.”
— Korax, head logger
The explanation emerged in layers. The loggers had established their operation here because the timber was good and the access was reliable. From the pool, something had objected. Politely, initially. The loggers had declined to leave. The something had taken steps. Korax was in the uncomfortable position of being unable to press his legally defensible case because two of his men had been taken as what the something in the pool described, without apparent embarrassment, as her pets.
That something was a Nixie — blue-tinted skin, elven in feature, webbed fingers trailing in the current, catfish whiskers catching the afternoon light. She was of the fae, of the same deep Kamelands magic that had given Tiressia her grove and Falchos his terrible timing. She had lived in this pool longer than the loggers’ entire civilization had existed, and she had made her position clear from the first day.
The trees the loggers had felled were two hundred years old.
Elroy addressed Korax first, with the bone-deep authority of a man who has spent a career being the largest presence in any given room. The aggression left the head logger’s posture. Then Elroy turned to the waterline and addressed the Nixie with considerably more care — the formal manners of a self-appointed guardian of civic order recognizing a legitimate counterparty. She was willing to listen.
Perry spoke in the fey tongue. The argument was careful: the circle of life, the case for responsible forestry, the argument that a living forest required maintenance rather than preservation-from-all-contact. For every tree taken, two returned.
The Nixie considered this. She had a counteroffer. She pointed to three specific ancient oaks among the felled logs. Replace those. Not with saplings. Properly.
The loggers had no means of replacing two-hundred-year oaks on the spot. The pause stretched across the afternoon.
Perry reached into the party’s stash and produced three of the feather tokens Tiressia had given them not four hours earlier. He activated each one in turn, pressing the golden-shafted feathers into the bare earth of the riverbank. Three oaks rose from the soil in full summer leaf — roots going deep, bark settling into centuries of rings as if they had always been there, which in some meaningful sense they now had.
The Nixie released her pets. The two charmed loggers blinked back into themselves, looking around with the confused gratitude of men who had been briefly somewhere else and found the world largely unchanged.
She made one additional offer. Keep this stretch of river march free of worksites, and she would act as warden for the zone — attentive to disturbances, protective of the river’s traffic and the travelers who moved along its banks. A standing commitment of fae capability applied to Athanoran interests. It was the third such arrangement the party had negotiated in a single day. The Greenbelt’s fae, it was becoming clear, wanted the same thing from every negotiation: leave us space, and we will keep your roads safer than any patrol could manage.
Korax accepted the terms with the pragmatic cheerfulness of a man who had come out of the afternoon with a workable labor agreement, three free oak trees, and two recovered colleagues, against all reasonable expectation.
Three fae refuges now marked the Kamelands along the river corridor: Tiressia’s Grove, the Blighted Hollow, and the Nixie’s Pool. None of them could be settled or worksited without losing what made them useful. All of them would make the region safer for every Athanoran citizen who traveled the Kamelands in the months ahead — provided the Pentarchy held to its word.
The word, thus far, had held.
The afternoon was fading. The Kamelands stretched east and south, six locales now three, the giant turtle still out there somewhere among the marsh grasses and the slow water. Elroy’s lycanthropy remained in its bones, managed and permanent. The name Eirikk sat in Kundal’s ledger, waiting for an answer no one had yet found. And somewhere on the northern march, Hargulka’s forces circled like something large in dark water, patient and unresolved.
Athanor would return. It always did.
⁕ ⁕ ⁕