The reward for good work is, frequently, more work.

After the circle of boulders was properly sheltered, the Celestin formed groups and made their own camp fires, but Ulric still needed to assist them. All were injured and many had taxed what little strength they had making the numerous climbs throughout the day. Some were already asleep, having laid down on the dirt as soon as the camp was set. Ulric couldn't blame any of them. Which was why he was manning another set of kettles, preparing food for the ad hoc refugee camp.

Playing Iron Chef was fun, in its own way, and it would prove beneficial for the Lowlands folk to get proper nutrition. There would be another long trek tomorrow.

While he gathered water from a bitterly cold, but fresh water spring, Taipan vanished. She returned half an hour later with a wild boar that had skin with what looked like green trefoil leaves growing from it. Its hooves were of wood, instead of keratin and the same was true of a gnarly set of tusks. Ulric was relieved when the tough, bark-like hide peeled away to reveal soft flesh. The [Bough Boar], cute name he thought, added a solid sixty kilos of meat to their disappearing stores. Feeding a small village of half-starved Elves was proving a growing concern and he was ecstatic that Taipan was there to offer her skills.

Meat wasn't the only thing that went into the cookpots, however. Damned near the entire animal ended up there, bones cracked open for their marrow to dissolve, liver, heart, kidneys, brain, even the blood was drained into the pots. Ulric didn't shy away from such a minor detail, he'd eaten worse while surviving alone on the plateau. In fact, these additional tidbits, combined with some camp bread baked while the soup came to a rolling boil, made for a fantastically rich broth. Ulric helped Taipan gather some of the known edibles from this region. This highlands forest wasn't her usual stomping grounds but she knew enough to find the sure bets: starchy tubers of a radishlike plant and something very similar to a carrot. These too went into the pot, finely diced. He waited until the hard boil was done to add the seasonings, so that the high heat didn't overly damage the spices' flavors and nutrients.

Overcooking was a good way to cut the nutritional content of a meal by some twenty to thirty percent, perhaps more, many vitamins were thermal sensitive. It wouldn't really matter here, of course, every drop of broth was going to be drank. Still, it was the principle of the thing.

The Twins snuck behind a nearby fjord shortly after supper was consumed, leaving pockets of Elves huddling for comfort, and a few flickering campfires, though most had burned down to coals. Heat wasn't a huge problem. Spring was on in full and most nights had lost the chill that its early months possessed. Instead of settling in within the rock formation, Ulric and Taipan retreated a healthy distance away and set up their traveling shelter for some "private time". Ulric put the sarcastic female Celestin's suggestion to put his wife into a sex coma to work. She fought back like a demon and they declared a truce when it became clear that pyrrhic victory was the only one to be found. Boneless sleep claimed them several hours after dark.

By the time the Twins next made their appearance, with the moons falling low on the opposite horizon, Ulric and Taipan had already stowed the shelter and made themselves ready for travel. Their refugees, many of whom appeared to agree that the best medicine for broken hearts was another's warmth, were still mostly abed. Ulric wasn't worried about it.

Laying in his lover's arms, he had the good news that the strike force that managed to break the blockade was halted, surrounded, and soon to be doomed and the Havens were emptied. It was a heavy sigh of relief from him at that revelation. Even better, the evacuated Aes'r were now safe upon the [Plateau of Ancients], which meant that some of the time pressure was off him.

The once holy land of the forest folk was now the Elves' sanctuary, something that struck him as incredibly appropriate. He'd lain there, just before sleep claimed him, idly wondering if they would march all the way to the glade to find safety. He hoped so, the Canopy still housed fearsome monsters and some of the beasts were finding their way down to the once only scarcely occupied forest floor.

Without the [Forest Lord] sniffing about at the feet of the giant arbors, those one and two kilometer high trees, living monuments to the Ancients, the [Forest of the Forgotten] would come alive again. It was probably fine though, the Iriel'en were there and they knew how to survive in the old, dark places of the wood.

Another piece of news that brought a smile to the beleaguered man was that Lord Savris Morion of the Zellussin Elves was declared a traitor to Orlethrem for his crimes of slaving, attempted murder of a friend of the Elves, and aiding the enemy in war against his own people. The asshole had been behind the Triad sent to murder him and Taipan after all, and had also been the one behind the scenes, running the Trachn'ir centered slaving ring that he and his wife had tripped across while moving through the lands of the Lowland Forest.

Bald'rt was reportedly burning cold on that matter as he'd deliberately chosen not to kill both the Lord and his Lordling when they had offered rudeness at his hall's Festival of the Lost. Ulric's rightful claim to the glade was challenged by Lordling Sam'sav Morion in a naked gambit to murder him and take the glade, and Taipan, who was Ulric's technical property, as his own.

Bald'rt let Ulric handle it, a show of confidence in him, and which sent a message to the rest that the fledgling [Lord of the Ancient Glade] was both not to be trifled with and had the respect of the Iriel'en. That Sam'sav was a coddled mewling putz who the reforged man, under the insistent urging of the Lord Instinct whispering sweet, sweet ultraviolence, crushed, did little to undermine the [Lord of the Deep Wood]'s position.

All told, the defection of Morion had nearly spelled the end of the Havens but Taipan's run, as it was called, saved the day.

Which was why his wife was a little slim in the thigh, ribs just a bit too proud, and cheeks ever so slightly withdrawn. She'd made that frankly astonishing trek not once but twice. First to take word to save her people's hidden kin, and then, after fighting relentlessly against the invading forces, she'd done it again to rejoin him, but a bit slower and since she had to stop to track him down while he moved. If that didn't warm the cockles in your jaded, bitter heart, nothing ever would.

Since the secondary objective to throttling whoever was behind all this nonsense was to send the Celestin freed slaves home, they needed to get some ships. They would find those ships in Kistalfer. Ideally something not too big, a frigate or galleon or even the intermediate sized vessels like Clan Bitsnez's carrock, the Shor Begone, were too large to operate without a trained crew. Ulric could hire a crew, it was true, but things may not work out that way. He was a passable sailor, if the first mate knew his business and told him what to do and when to do it. The rest of his refugees? They probably couldn't muster the strength to man the sails or even less to pull oar. Then their best bet would be a small schooner and they'd just be traveling nice and cozy like.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Once they secured a ship, Ulric would set course directly to Prosper. He and Taipan would go forth to enact justice on the Merchant Lords, the only way you were ever going to find that rare affliction levied on them. The boat and its passengers would sail on up the Zelus towards the lands of the Orlethrem who would see them taken care of.

And Varda did just love it when Ulric Einar sat down and made such pretty plans.

From another long detour around a fjord, Taipan had spotted something unusual down the long stony slope: a town built upon the marsh on huge stone pilings. They'd immediately got the Lowlands forest kin down and still while the two of them scanned the small village for signs of life and anything that struck them as suspicious.

There were a couple of things that stood out immediately. The first was, who builds a village in the middle of a huge fucking bog in the first place? The second was, who then also builds a big stone wall around said village in the middle of a huge fucking bog? When he directed a questioning lift of the eyebrow to his wife she shrugged and mouthed "beats me" in Elvish. She enjoyed many of his idioms, legacy of old Earth.

Hmm…he was coming up at a loss. The wall was almost normal, Varda liked her monsters, and he didn’t even want to think about what heinous critters called that gigantic bog home. But why a village in the middle of nowhere, with no rode or marked path? Unless there was one and he just hadn’t seen it, that was also an option.

The Twins were just past the apex of their paired trajectory. Even with all the boulders, scrub thickets, and deep water sheds running through the highlands down to those soggy flats, there was little chance that they'd be able to approach completely undiscovered with this group. That meant the Celestin would have to hunker down and stay quietly out of sight.

Ulric might be able to get close, he was getting pretty damned good at moving rapidly from cover to cover. That too was an unnecessary risk, for with them was Taipan, who was one of the best stalkers of a people who comprised the best stalkers of the Aes'r. Under the circumstances, he did what any good man does, and sent his wife to do the errands while he took care of the house. When he said that out loud to his wife, he had to fend her off briefly as she tried to jam her thumbs into a very painful place on his elbows and only subsided when he was bleeding freely from a small bite wound on his hand.

Damnit her teeth were sharp!

Satisfied that her husband and Honor understood his place in the world, Taipan stealthed down the challenging, boulder strewn, slope towards the town that should not be where it was. She knew her maps, had studied the positions of her enemies for years. This place wasn't on any of them.

As she picked her way, carefully keeping her senses sharpened to catch even the slightest of motions, she started to make out sounds from the mysterious walled village in a place where no one would want to get in. Closer she crept and the sounds resolved. She now understood the walls. They were to keep people in, not out. The "village" was arranged in a uniform arrangement of fifteen longhouses. Perpendicular to those and spaced across a large open square at the center of the village was smaller bunkhouses. The square was empty. The walls were not. A guard walkway circled the perimeter of the stone mortared wall which was all of seven body lengths high. It was not made by magic, this wall had been built using the stones up the slope and mortared from the clay and sand of this bog. The sounds were shrieks, moans, agony turned loose into the air to poison it with suffering.

One of the wails took on a fever pitch, its very note painful to Taipan's senses. She felt, more than saw the pulse of corruption that accompanied that cry's end. It felt like a dullsteel lined blanket was thrown over the Twins for a moment, the skies darkening with a profound evil. Her core rang a discordant note as she watched. The sensation fled, the light returned, and the misery song resumed its chorus down below. But Taipan knew she had just witnessed, first hand, a soul broken, an Elf's core weaponized to destroy itself and all other things like it. In the den of sickness below, the Bane core had just been formed. It would be ready to be refined now, alchemically dissolved to create a fine powder that would destroy any of the Aes'r if even the smallest mote of it came into contact with them directly.

Taipan noted the man who ran joyously from one of the longhouses, his hands covered in blood, holding the fruit of his vile labors, a soul killed Elf's core. She would recall the fervent smile on his face, the sheer satisfaction that he had succeeded in atrocity when she needed reminder of what hate leads to.

"Hate blinds the eyes and leads the feet astray. Hate is how the Hunter loses the way." It was a saying of her mother, Vedyr, directed often towards her wayward daughter. Taipan hadn't understood its meaning for the longest of times. She did, now, and what she had seen unfolding below was the end of that insane path.

Hate led a sane creature to embrace carnage like a lover's touch. Led men to become worse than any beast, for they came to relish in the pain they caused. The hurting became an end unto itself. It became clear to her now why her Honor had held such bitterness in his expression before she'd put her hand to his shoulder when first they were reunited. He had witnessed the cruelties being perpetrated and it had wounded him inside, had left a scar of hate against those that had done this thing. That was a wrong, her mate should not hate, should only seek to erase the wrong, not to cause pain. She would be diligent in seeing him instructed properly, and his heart's wound soothed. The twice born Valin sometimes seemed to drink in Varda's pain as if that would lessen it for all. She would be diligent, Taipan promised herself.

Ulric waited patiently as his mate came back up the hill. Even knowing exactly what to look for, even watching her every movement as she left his side, it was like watching a mirage that seemed to fade and reappear elsewhere. No one below would have a snowball's chance in hell of spotting her. When she came back to his hiding place and lifted her obscuring hood, Ulric didn't even need her to say what she'd found. He'd worn a similar expression, he was sure, a mere four days past.

"They're making the Bane down there, aren't they lass?" He asked anyway, softly.

Taipan nodded, and he took her into a gentle embrace, holding her tightly against the tide of memory. They both needed a hug at that. Eventually his mate seemed to achieve her usual alert calm, absent the slight quivers of fresh horror.

She leaned her forehead against his chest and he heard her whisper, "It is not making, Ulric. It is made. I watched a twisted Bane core fetched out from one of the torturers chambers before I returned. I do not know if the rest of the process is completed here or if they transport the cores somewhere else for completion."

Made. Success. A weapon of mass destruction, of targeted genocide.

"Men made such things in the world of my birth once, Taipan," Ulric confided in his wife.

This was not a thing he had ever spoken of to her, not at any length. He had only told her that his world was crippled by wars on a scale unimagined on Varda.

"They used them, too. The entire world burned for their crimes, her skies and seas and lands scalded by radiation for generations." He went on, tone rigid from controlled anger.

Taipan huddled close, "What became of those men, the ones that used the weapons?" came her hushed question.

Ulric patted her head gently, "They were all killed, every one of them. Their family lines were sterilized, where they weren't eradicated. I don't say that I condone that part, but it is what happened. I can't tell you their names because we scrubbed them from history. Those men do not exist anymore. Entropy has them now."

His wife brushed her hand across his cheek and smiled her predator's smile up at him.

"And we are going to bring these this Entropy as well?" She demanded in the form of a question.

"But of course!" Ulric answered instantly, "As soon as the Twins have ceased to shed their light on this part of Varda you and I are going to go down there and kill every single one of them, as quickly and quietly as possible. I will then try to figure out some way to prevent the bane cores, if there is more than one, from being used. Already I have an idea, but it will need some testing to confirm."

That last part was true. Ulric had had a great deal of time to think on his wagon ride through the vast savannahs. He had arrived at a somewhat reasonable proposition for how to eliminate the potent magical effects of the Bane, without requiring being a genius like Shor or having access to the alchemical apparatus she'd used to produce the neutralizing agent: He would use a [Deathstone] pulse.