“Aelin,” Emma grunted through gritted teeth as she soaked a clump of leaves in the steam. It ran through a deep groove in the branch they were on, and they had been following it for some time. After pressing the leaves slightly, she applied it to the bruise on her leg where one of the ‘Veiled-Elves’ had gotten her. “I think it’s time for us to set up some ground rules for our little marry band of adventure,” she gave him a withering glare, and while his face remained passive, with only his usual slight scowl, his fingers tapped the wood beneath where he sat.

“For example, if I were to find myself being part of a very active race war, with another race known, explicitly, for living in a dark environment, and I knew we were heading into a dark area, I would tell you that, and explain why” Emma continued to glare as she bound the leaves to her with long bark fibres, before moving on to the one on her forearm where she had to block a club.

Aelin picked up her heartwood splinter from where she had dropped it and started to sharpen arrows for his bow. Emma continued to glare, even as she washed her bloodied lib, without, of course, smearing leaves in it. Aelin began to treat his own wounds. Emma glared. Aelin sighed.

“I don’t know how fair it is that our new rules seem pretty tailored to me, almost as though you designed them with the purpose of getting me to admit things without you having to, but I suppose I get it given the situation-” Aelin stopped, stood up and squinted into the permanent Darkness of the forest, before gesturing for her to follow him. He then walked in silence with his bow and extra arrows in one hand and the other resting on the string, the arrow between his fingers and ready to be loosed.

They continued to follow the stream carelessly for some time until they found another branch, where they then jumped down messily. Aelin then climbed back onto the stream-branch, waded downstream for some time, carefully made the correct tracks which would indicate that they had resumed their journey there. He then walked back upstream, and jumped down to where she stood elegantly, landing exactly where he did the first time. He then gestured for Emma to begin walking down, before he slowly followed while erasing any sign of their passage.

Eventually, they found themselves hidden under a tent of leaves created by a thick cluster of vines draping from a branch going overhead of them.

“That should confuse them a bit, and if they are smart enough, there should at least only be three of them, rather than six,” Aelin murmured.

Emma stared at him intently.

“I think it’s time someone tells you that glaring has a point where the impact disappears,” Aelin said, before he rolled his eyes and continued to speak, “I guess I'll start at the beginning. On the old world, and no, I don’t know what it’s called, there was two parts. The scorched lands, where the eye of Aianathon could see you and burn your sins away with his harsh yet purifying gaze, and the Veiled lands. I don’t know how it is in the veiled lands, seeing as I have never been there myself, but it was created when the Veil attempted to cover all there was, be it land or sea. Well, all on our world, I suppose.”

“Okay, but what are the Veiled lands? Like, in a purely physical sense.”

“They are the lands held forever beneath the veil, trapped there eternally in darkness. Of course, every day, the Veil attempts once more to take all that there is for itself, and every day, the light of Aianathon shines through its attempts, and show us the way even in the dark as his eye is dimmed. But, still, light returns once again, even if the long border between the two lands still stands,” Aelin explained.

Emma was... confused. To a degree. Some of it made sense, of course, with the nightly invasions being, well, night, and Aianathon’s eye being the sun, which was a bit funny, since they apparently had no verbal distinction between night and day, just day and darker-part-of-day. But then there was the Veil, which was apparently a long strip of permanent night, and she could not begin to imagine how that worked.

“You know what, let’s go straight to the relevant part where you explain why seven elves with incredible mutations and one tag-along bird-guy were, and still are, trying to kill us,” Emma said, cutting to the chase in a way Oliver would have most certainly hated, or rather, have found less-than-ideal.

“The short recount, the only one we seem to have time for before we need to continue further down, will have to do. Though I want to make it clear that we still don’t actually need to go deeper,” Aelin said, irritation laced in his voice now that they were no longer simply exploring in the direction their friend happened to disappear in, but sneaking through enemy lands.

“I do not know the full story, and I doubt anyone else does either, but suffice to say that some elves went into the Veil and embraced the corruption it brought. They twisted the final gift, the Aneart, into stealing gifts from other spirits through rituals of madness and gratification. Eventually, they were found by some who still walked in the light of Aianathon, and they decided to exterminate them.”

“Three things. First, you seem pretty devoted and pious and whatnot, but you still seem to be distancing yourself from the whole ‘let’s start a race-war!’ thing. Second, the Aneart is the healing thing, right? How did they twist that? And third, what is ‘corruption’?”

“Corruption is a dark liquid which spills forth from many plants. It brings short periods of madness with many varied effects, based on the plant, to any who eats or drinks it. But when done so by a Veiled-Elf, it also allows them to steal the gifts given to them by Aianathon, such as claws, wings, or even beaks. It takes what Aianathon gave them to help them thrive, caring nothing for the natural order as intended by him before he dispersed into the entirety of the world to keep at bay the Veil,” Aelin explained, serious, yet exhausted at the same time, like he knew he needed to care, but couldn’t.

What he said about corruption was, however, pretty interesting, given that it sounded a lot like opium that could be harvested from poppy. That meant that Veiled-Elves somehow and for some reason chose the ability to grow animal parts based on which drugs they used over healing.

“As for why I did not tell you, or seem very happy about the war? Well, There is really only one answer to both questions. I’m tired. We first discovered what lay beyond the Veil when my great-great-great-grandparents lived, and since then, the war has been constant. Sometimes the chiefs of the scorched lands call on their people to crusade into the darkness, where the Veiled-Elves kill them one by one with arrows from the dark after they burned a town or two. Sometimes the Veiled-Elves, and whatever leaders they may have, launch raids into the scorched lands, traveling under the cover of the invasions, burning and killing, until they are found under the eye, exhausted, half-blind, and unable to do anything beyond die under their enemies’ spears. I suppose The Madman got to me at some point, as I honestly was foolish enough to hope that with a new, limitless world with something clearly more powerful than either of our gods, we would, if not reconcile, at least learn to ignore each other. But I suppose that is not meant to be, at least not yet. No, both factions still hate each other, and neither side particularly appreciates us, the half-born,” Aelin said, his voice sad, angry, yet beyond all else weary and exhausted as his shoulders slumped and his silver eyes closed.

“That’s where you got your eye colour from, right? I saw it earlier, how all the Veiled-Elves had bright eyes, while the two scorched elves we met earlier had dark eyes.”

“Seems so, even if I would guess that they were from a far-away part of the world, given their lack of hatred, or at least distrust, for me.” Aelin said, bitterness clear in his voice.

Emma sat with him in silence for a moment, digesting everything he told her. She stared out at the darkness and the branches barely visible within it, as she attempted to imagine what their world was like. The concept of this kind of… extreme hatred due to differences in belief was not utterly foreign to her, seeing as she knew about the Israel-Palestine conflict. But even then, in a world where she had read about the history and events of the conflict extensively, she couldn’t truly understand, because it was an incredibly personal conflict that she simply wasn’t personally invested in.

“That sounds horrible,” She said, thinking that while she could not understand what the war meant to him, she could understand that he had experienced something terrible, and that, even if it was a borderline insulting comparison, she had simply wanted sympathy when her dog ran away.

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“I suppose so…” Aelin was quiet for some time, before he stood up with a wince, probably because one of their attackers got around her, and slammed his bone brawn-club into Aelin’s leg. She couldn’t help but wince as she thought back to the fight. It had not gone well, yet at the same time it had turned out way better than she really expected, given her semi-purely-theoretical experience when it came to swordplay, and the significant numbers disadvantage they were faced with. Of course, they certainly had advantages of their own, such as the fact that Aelin had pretty sharp arrows, and she a sword, against unarmoured opponents and their greater levels. But they were ambushed in a place where they could be surrounded, and there were still very real limits on how well it could go in that kind of situation.

Really, it was just lucky that Aelin had made the call to retreat before she got completely surrounded, especially considering that she thought she could take them just because they were all around level six. When she thought about it, it was actually pretty weird that she just… knew the level of anything she looked at. She knew Aelin called it ‘gaze of observation’, but that explained nothing about where it came from, because it certainly wasn’t on her sheet, neither as a skill nor an ability.

‘All right, Emma, what would Oliver do to figure that out? First, he would define what he was working with.’ She thought to herself. So, what was a skill, and what was an ability? A skill was something you could learn, even if you weren’t good at it, you could get better with enough practice. An ability was then the opposite, something you could do, but you couldn’t get better at it, you might be able to do it faster, as was probably the case with the Aneart ability, but that didn’t mean you were better at it, because anyone with the same stats could do the same.

But then why weren’t things like, heartbeat, an ability? It was probably too common, after all, a lot of things had it, but not everything. So where was the distinction made? If she looked at it from a biological perspective and used the two kinds of elves as an example, then they would probably have the same genus, but different species. So, Abilities had to be relatively unique, either to your species, or maybe inside of the species, just so there was some more room for abilities to manifest. Which meant that gaze of observation wasn’t an ability or a skill, but just something everyone could do, probably somehow because mana was suddenly a thing.

Emma nodded in satisfaction at her little theory, even if it probably didn’t cover everything and was closer to natural philosophy than natural science.

She opened her status screen to see if anything changed, given the systems habit of not announcing level ups after the first time it happened, and maybe, just maybe, to look at her new class with more than slight satisfaction.

Confronter

How amazingly impressively brave of you that even after seeing how safe and easy it is to shoot arrows from a distance, you still choose to directly confront your enemies with a weapon in hand. Doesn't speak well of your intelligence, but who really needs intelligence when you can hit things? Sure, you might not be able to hit things well, but you can. Well, you can try.

At every level, the Confronter class gains 2 to all stats, 3 to Dexterity, 4 to Constitution, and 5 to wisdom, with 5 attribute points.

The additional benefits of the Confronter class are as follows: Slightly Increased learning speed when learning skills and spells related to direct physical confrontation.

Name: Emma Ståhl Species: Human

Class: Confronter Craft: Artisan of sap and rope

Mana: 1020 / 1020 Stamina: 1506 / 1690

Class level: 12 Craft level: 6 Constitution: 46 Strength: 70 Dexterity: 60 Perception: 30 Charisma: 31 Intelligence: 31 Wisdom: 37 Attribute points: 0

Skills Abilities Status effects

And, at that exact moment, Aelin barged into their hideout, said “Run,”, and ran. Leaving her behind. The bastard.

Emma quickly began to follow, catching up soon with her superior physical stats, and asked "What are we running from?"

"There were, apparently, a lot more of them than I first thought, and now that they know that there is a scorched elf hiding in 'their territory' they are very interested in kicking us out as quickly as possible, which happens to be down.

“And what would you describe our chances as?”

“Given that I saw at least ten of them, and at higher levels than those we ran into, I would guess that there are even more following them,” Aelin said with a grimace.

They Continued to run, As Aelin explained that their only chance of escape here lay in actually doing what he had pretended they had done back at the stream. Of course, they didn’t find a stream, instead, they found a dead end with no further branches to tread, as their branch had broken off, and there were no further branches below them. There was, in fact, nothing beyond deep darkness below them, which swallowed all light long before it reached whatever lay below, with only a streak of soft blue light giving any indication that there even was something at the end of the fall.

“Do you see any branches we could conveniently jump to with fifty strength?” Aelin asked, even as he glared fiercely at the branches so close above them, yet far too distant for him to jump. He had, of course, already learned that it was his limits that decided where they could and could not go, seeing as the entire tour was purely for the sake of Emma wanting to be completely assured that there was not the slightest chance that she left a friend behind.

Emma remained silent as she marched to where the slope was steepest, to cut off as many ankles as she could before they managed to push them off. She glanced out at the leaves falling even here, after they managed to float down endless layers of branches and wondered if she would fall to see where the leaves ended before she died.

‘Wait.’

“Where do the leaves end?” She muttered to herself.

Aelin, however, clearly overheard. “You accuse me of being infected by The Madman, yet here you stand, worse than even him, wondering where the leaves end up before our final stand.”

“No, it wasn’t some kind philosophical wondering where the leaves are life or whatever, it was a question of, ‘given how many leaves fall all the time, do you think we could survive if we jumped?’”

“… is this a serious suggestion or a way to reason The Madman into being alive down there, prolonging our mission into the dark?” Aelin asked cautiously, clearly ready to finish their quest.

“The first one! I hadn’t even thought of the idea of Oliver being alive, actually, but now that you mention it…” Emma said, a smile spreading on her lips.

Aelin sighed. “We can discuss it, depending on how unfavourable the battle turns,” he said, as he readied his bow.

They stood, waiting in silence, hoping that their many turns and branch switchings had at least thrown off some of their pursuers. Eventually However, they saw them come with their improved perception, their hunters not even bothering to truly hide, apparently used to opponents with such inferior nightvision that it was unnecessary.

Initially, there were three of them, all around the seventh level.

“We will probably survive this,” Aelin muttered.

Then, before they could charge and dispatch their foes and attempt to overwhelm whoever was further behind, three more appeared.

“We might survive this.”

Then four came, weaker, yet still strong enough to be problematic should they encircle them.

“We probably won’t survive this,” Aelin sighed, drawing back the string of his bow and preparing to loose an arrow aimed at their strongest opponent.

Then six further manifested from the darkness.

“We will not defeat them,” He said, still prepared to release.

Emma slumped from her middle guard, her splinter-sword coming up to her shoulder from the high guard it was in before. “Aelin, I think it's time to jump” She sighed.

The Veiled-Elves Looked on with shock as Aelin glanced down at his poorly made bow, then to Emma and her splinter, before looking to the sixteen, now twenty, actually, enemies ready to bear down upon them.

“I suppose you’re right” he admitted grudgingly, before firmly clutching bow in one hand and arrows in the other, so tightly that his knuckles whitened, and leapt from the branch into the darkness below.

Emma Quickly followed, using her advantage of a free hand to gesture rudely at the elves while she jumped.

The Veiled-Elves, meanwhile, were left standing, terribly confused, as one of their ancient enemies and the strange Veiled-Elf slave whom they were attempting to rescue jumped to their death.