"I'm sorry about your work." I raise my sword and try to look like a determined warrior. "I won't let the trolls get away with it."Melaxu looks you up and down and realizes that you mean it.

"It occurs to me that I have never had a hero of my own before. Perhaps I need one."

The tunnel forces you to descend and you lose the moonlight, but then the walls grow straight and regular, braced by old timbers. Soon you see an irregular patch of starlight ahead: the entrance–or in your case, the exit–to the old tin mine. Melaxu rushes ahead to breathe the fresh air.

Following, you find yourself above Hetch, on a low slope covered in ancient and gnarled yews, so twisted that the Pine tribe's woodcutters have ignored them. Moonlight illuminates the bronze speartips and boar-tusk helmets of the redoubled guards arrayed atop Hetch's defensive wall. Para is right to set a heavy guard, as Hetch's wall is nothing but a raised circle of grass that encircles the middle of town and that serves as a grazing commons for sheep. More guards wander the new town beyond the "wall" in groups of four.

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"By the Bee, what happened to the village?" Melaxu gasps, reclaiming the torch and extinguishing it with a flick of her wrist. "There used to be fewer than two hundred people down there!"

Looking down on the hundreds of townhouses, you wonder–not for the first time–how old the nymph is.

"Pon Para!"

It's Gronput, just in front of you. He holds a copper ax. More trolls hide in the

moonshadows cast by the gnarled trees. You can almost smell their madness now, like the stink of a passing bear that drives dogs to frenzied howling. They gibber to one another, something not quite language. A few skulk through the pine needles on all fours. You instinctively flinch away from that madness, as if it may infect you, because you know it is no mere disease or mass lunacy–something godlike lurks in the minds of the trolls. And you fear it has touched you as well.

"Defilers," Melaxu whispers, knuckles white on the ash handle of her spear. She seems ready to rush them like a wild boar, so great is her fury. You might be able to fight your way through the trolls and reach the old town wall. But though the nymph wants blood, you wonder if there is still some way to reach Gronput, despite everything he has done.