The three Valin took that message unblinking. They knew then, what was coming. Knew that there could be no peace now between Orlethrem and Prespang, not with those spiders who wove silver threads to capture the City States of Prespang in their web. A line had been crossed, between war and eradication. Someday soon, the Blood Moon would rise over Prespang. They liked not the images that reckoning conjured.

"My line is the shield that shelters Prespang from her enemies, and has been for a thousand years. We have bled for this land, have spent our sons and daughters to protect the prosperity of her people. Do you believe that I can turn aside from all that my forefathers have striven, bled, and died for? I cannot. Will not. You, Glade Chief, [Lord of the Ancient Glade] you name yourself. What role have you in this? Why do you stand against your kin?" Demanded Baron Kistalfer, in a rare break in his composure.

"No kin of mine would savage a child and take him hostage, no matter his heritage, and murder another boy in cold blood. No kin of mine would torture souls until their wills became poison toward their very being. No kin of mine would trade the lives of men and women as cattle, bound by evil magic. No kin of mine would send soldiers to murder the women, children, artisans, farmers, and innocents of an entire people rather than face their warriors in battle. Any that would aid or condone these things is no kin of mine, Baron. Neither is any who lacks the courage to lift a hand to stop what they know to be wrong." Ulric spoke, calmly, at first, and with growing heat.

How was it that the world he'd known was ruined? Simple. The people of that world chose to sit idle, instead of pulling those monsters from their ivory towers and hanging them from street lamps. Ulric would not be idle. He would not be an observer. Justice wasn't real, not when no one enforced it. The Baron cared not for being dyed with that particular brush, Ulric had, in as many words, called him a coward. The wide eyed stares of the woman, Miria, and the elder mage said that all here knew it.

Metal grated against the smooth ebony handle of the great axe as the Baron's fist tightened.

"You think you are in position to lay judgment on me, Barbarian? By what right does a stranger come to mine own lands with such righteousness?" Tras Kistalfer menaced.

"Is a name all that is demanded of a man to rule his people in this land?" Ulric fired back, furious.

Everywhere he went, the ones who should know better ignored what stared them in the face. The ones with the power to rule spent that strength binding themselves in the nets of their real enemy, the one that sought to steal their wills, to lock their futures away with illusions of choice. It was maddening.

"Where was your line's pride when Prosper turned your people into slaves as surely as those wearing collars?! Where was it when a Magister demanded ever more, and all the reply your vaunted forefathers could offer was a bent knee? I watched a good man without weapon in hand stand against many that did, and he died for it, because he knew the worth of a life, and the value of what he protected with it. I have the right to spend mine to see monsters destroyed before they can bring ruin! The same right you were born with and set aside, along with your duty to your people!" Ulric yelled.

The great sword left the back of the towering woman, her helmet left to roll across the ground forgotten. The elderly mage was left to catch the dropped standard and he weezed while he supported it with one hand and his own staff with the other. The massive woman was was raising her equally massive blade to cleave him in half when an arrow flashed past her cheek. Only a second later did the weal of a thin line of blood appear from the razored arrowhead that had grazed her.

Taipan already had another arrow readied, this one intended to slay, where the first was to warn.

A hand firmly pushed the forearm of the sword wielding body guard down, lowering her weapon.

"Enough, Miria, be at ease." Baron Kistalfer enjoined, before turning that cool regard on Ulric once more.

Taipan remained at ready.

"You are correct, Ulric [Lord of the Ancient Glade]. My people are bound, it is true. We live in mortal fear of the Magisters' pens. Their edicts are law, the voice of the Golden Thrones themselves, absent my countenance or objection. All that I have I have because I was born my father's son. Is that what you would hear? Tell me, Glade Chief, how heavy do the lives you carry lie on your shoulders? Mine are bowed from the weight, and I cannot find strength to lift them out from this despair." Uttered the dark man, to the shocked stares of his company.

That caught Ulric flat footed. What the hell?

"If you know, then why play their game?" He asked, as if forced.

He had to know.

"Because, if I did not, they would give my city to a lesser, who would leave them undefended. After they sacked the city. All who rule know the fates of those who sought to break free of Prosper's hold. I would not subject the citizens of Kistalfer to the slavers' whips and the small mercies of the punitive expedition that would be sent to depose me. So, once more, what should I do, to preserve my people?" Demanded the Baron in that forceful, measured voice.

It was a real question, not a rhetorical one. This man wanted an answer, and not some banal generality. He wanted a plan of attack.

Ulric ran his armored hand through his hair, ignoring the pull of a few white hairs as he did. History had one answer to tyranny. Not a good one, mind you. Just the only one.

"Fight." He said simply, plainly, earnestly, "Fight hard. Not you, not your garrison, every single last man, woman, and child of your city. It is the only way. Leave this stone coffin behind if you must. I do not say that there is not a cost, they will come for you, as you say. So destroy whoever they send. Come at them from the dark. Take them while they sleep. While they toilet. While they eat. If you would claim this land for yours in truth then whoever comes to take it must not walk it unblooded. When they grow tired of watering the roots with their lives they will leave. Or, if they are the stronger, you will all die. But your people will be preserved, will be free. They will not be Prosper's slaves."

Taipan beamed at her mate, proud that he was learning, at last, what it took to be a Lord.

The Baron looked to his escort and they passed a glance between them. High Mage Geras shrugged and coughed, hacking loudly for a few seconds before he gasped, "No wonder we never conquered the Outer Reaches, if they're raising them like that over there."

"It is why, in thousands of years, none have laid claim to Aes'r land but the Aes'r. We are of a mind in this." Taipan spoke, standing with her husband.

"It is a death sentence." The Baron foretold.

Ulric frowned. Why so little faith in themselves? Ulric had not yet met this man's match in Prespang. Without [Scan], without trading so much as a feint, Ulric knew the Baron of Kistalfer was a heroic warrior. He had that same instinctive response toward him that he got around Bald'rt and his wives, the sense that Serious Business was in front of him.

So, what had the man so certain? It made no sense, this fella could smash his way through a small army by himself. If the woman at his side was even close to her liege's potency, together they would shred all the men Ulric had fought thus far at the same time. Toss the bushwhacking old thundercaller over there into the mix and there was little the Baron had to fear.

Stolen novel; please report.

So why did he? Especially when he was so calm and composed in almost every other regard? It was like there was some kind of mental block preventing him from even considering rebellion without unreasonable fear. Like a phobia. Sort of how slave collars imbedded their wearers with compulsion to obey…Fuck, no way, right?

Immediately, Ulric let his mana senses, honed fine through endless practice feeling the harmonies of mana to recognize them in the glade, before he’d been given any form of instruction, dialed to ten through [Elementalist] akashic enhancement, and then trained like surgeon’s hands by Gother. He found a faint resonance to the hateful magic of the restraining collars used to convert people to property. Barely a whisper, and frequently drowned out by even minor background variations in the Field of Varda.

"Baron, does Prosper anoint the rulers of its City-States with its badge of office, a token, a ceremonial emblem to be worn to demonstrate the fidelity to the Empire?" Ulric asked, still not really believing the answer could be so simple.

So insidious.

"Every ruler bears the sigil of the Golden Thrones upon his crown, and upon his cloak, a reminder that we bear responsibility toward the prosperity of all within Prespang." Replied the dark man, for the first time not following Ulric's thoughts.

"Might I take a look as said sigil? I have a theory. No, not even, an intuition that may explain much." Ulric said, trying to remain composed.

"We have come far afield of a negotiation for vessels. What is the purpose of this?" The Lord of Kistalfer asked, although he handed over the brooch attached to his cloak.

Ulric took it from a large, roughened hand, the powerful mitt of a soldier.

He turned the gaudy thing over in his hands. A golden coin, with an ornate throne engraved on it. Ulric turned his electromagnetic senses on the coin and found a deeply suspicious thing: buried platinum runes, hidden within the interior of the brooch. His sensitive mana sense barely detected a whisper of mana from the array, it was the work of a master mage, a true artisan of the craft. And also a psychopath.

Ulric delved into the flows of the runes with his magic, following the paths laid out, the course of least resistance within the device. What he found had to be the single most subtle, most complex braiding of aether that he had ever encountered. It was impressive as hell. And disgusting. What flared into his mind was potent paranoia, unreasonable fear of Prosper's fury, the inevitable doom that awaited. For a man who had experienced twenty years of anxiety disorder, what he felt within was the bleeding edge of a panic attack at the thought of opposing the Merchant Lords' will.

Sweet Watcher's tits! The medallion was a mindfuck!

"Bingo! Taipan, verify for me, this brooch is a wicked trap indeed. I need to be certain it is doing what it feels like it is doing." Ulric said, handing the thing to his mate.

Taipan was not an adherent of the mage schools of her people, but she was trained by her Mothers to avoid magical traps and was probably better versed in the arcane than many non-mages simply by proximity to the large variety of magics employed by her people.

Cursing, the Elf woman tossed the device as if burned. Ulric caught if before it hit the ground and continued his inspection.

"Seven Hells! Ulric, why would you hand me a foul thing like that?! It reeks of mind corruption." She cried, rubbing her hands to remove the imagined filth of the enchantment.

"Got a whammy on it, don't it?" Ulric drawled.

He turned to the three ambassadors and dropped a bombshell on them.

"You've been had, Baron. Prosper's bigger bunch of assholes than I ever would have imagined. Your 'badge of office' here? It's a modification of a slave collar. There's a nasty hidden rune circuit in there, projects fear and dread towards offending or resisting the Merchant Lords. Real slick, real subtle, starts slow but builds to near panic. I can't believe how calm you were just talking about opposing them just now, you ought to have been having an anxiety attack." Ulric told the lot, still letting his mana sense roam over the device.

Gother never said anything about this when he was teaching Ulric how to weave mana. Breaking [Scans], resisting enthralling, feeling out fine traceries of magic to do spell breaking, but not this. Gother was probably too decent to mention, maybe to even think on it.

"Don't jest boy!" Mage Geras growled, crotchety smoker's throat making that a rough sound indeed, "Those brooches are heirlooms of the founding of the consolidation of Prespang. They go back a thousand years and not one single whisper of them being tainted by a hex has ever- Hey!"

Ulric broke the brooch with a flex of powerful hands, folding the soft metal in half and tearing it, like stiff putty. He showed the lot of them the edges of the platinum runes that were now peeking from the interior of the thin golden disk.

"Got any explanation for why there's runes hidden inside it then?" Ulric prodded.

He concentrated his magic and dragged his finger, bearing the plasma cutting spell so recently innovated, down the side of the coin, so he could peel it apart. The damned spell wasn't any less harsh on the eyeballs, that was for sure, but he didn't need to circumnavigate the coin, just slice it across its outer edge to separate each side.

"Not really a surprise none of you picked up on it." He said, offhanded, focusing on his task, "You'd have to know just how to look, the signal is faint, buried in the matrix of the material and inverted, like hiding a coded message in static. Elves teach their students how to find traps like this, and it was still a bastard to find. Besides, with my Elementalist class, I’m, basically, cheating."

All engineering students learned to write code, and all students immediately used those skills to try to break into the security of their school and to send malicious software to each other's consoles. It was tradition. Ulric was not one of the gifted ones with that sort of encryption breaking, but he had enough experience with it to know the less sophisticated methods of burying a coded executable. Magic and software engineering was astonishingly similar in its fundamental approaches. Schools of magic were analogous to developing with the ancient development languages, much akin to scripts in python compared to java or C++, fortran, or, gods forbid, MATLAB. Exploits in one often used the same principles versus the other. The cursed brooch was, in many senses, a sophisticated emotional rootkit, delivered by magical means.

"I wouldn't doubt that Geras over there would have been able to spot it, if not for the fact that it is Prosper herself who takes charge of all magical instruction. Being that the Gilded Thrones see to training all the mages in their arts, it's likely they specifically tailored the instruction to preclude ever stumbling across the hex. Like I said, it was a long con, running all the way since the very beginning." Ulric lectured while he worked, squinting against the painful glare.

The onlooking representatives of the great city behind them were treated to a stunning sight of the barbarian mage creating a blinding blade of light that cut the brooch cleanly, sending sparks of molten metal showering to the ground, casually, as if such things were common place, while he narrated the story of their violation.

Baron Kistalfer immediately revised his plans for closing with this [Lord of the Ancient Glade] to eliminate his advantage of magic, should that become necessary. That spell would carve his armor like veal, and the flesh beneath would fare little better.

"I did say that I was retired, did I not?" High Mage Geras reiterated, shaking his beard at the effortless use of devastating magic.

"For a long while now, " Ulric explained to this warlord and company, as he strained and tore the two halves of the brooch away from another, "I have come to believe that Prosper is led, not by men, or even Jormund, but by an outcast Aes'r. Probably an Iriel'en, judging by several events that tell of deep familiarity with the societal workings and training of the Iriel'en that would only be available to one that had lived with them. The course of history in Prespang has to it the feel of a single will, one that operates over time scales that are difficult for one of us short lived creatures to grasp."

"Hah, bastard!" He exclaimed, victorious over the cleverly crafted mind tampering device, before showing the intricate rune circuit within it to the nonbelievers.

"Read'em and weep. The con has been going since the very beginning, Baron Kistalfer. It was planned, all that long time ago. As soon as your forefathers accepted this badge of office, they welcomed its insistent intrusions. It has convinced you all, for generations, that rebelling against Prosper is certain doom. That she then used your own armies to smash any who refused to comply with her will, using their fear to cow them into joining against their own, just reinforced the compulsion." Ulric crowed.

Gods he loved being right.

Baron Kistalfer went pale. Then ruddy, pronounced against his healthy but light complexion. A vein began to pulse on his forehead and Ulric saw the tendons in the man's neck flex as a fury fit to burn cities ate its way through the rigid reserve.

"I will kill every single one of them." The Baron swore quietly, after a moment.

A sort of pressure enfolded Ulric, as if he were under water in a wet suit, except that the sensation was completely restricted to his core's perception of Varda's mana field.

By all the gods of this weird fucking world, I can actually feel his urge to kill rising, Ulric realized, wondering why his arm hair had started to prickle. Somebody was in for it now. Only, Ulric didn't think that somebody was him anymore.

The elder mage rose straight abandoning his slouch completely. Rage fairly radiated off of him.

"All this time…all those lives lost in wars on the frontier, our blood on the rocks to hold the Empire together…all our sacrifices." He whispered, struggling to come to grips with the reality of the rune pattern engraved in the familiar, if altered, circuit of a slaver's control spells.

"It was a lie? A farce?" The pain laden voice rose to a throaty roar, "My sons gave their lives over a fucking thrall collar's hissing in my Lord's ears?!"

Clouds billowed and rolled overhead, white darkening to heavy grey, to the near black of a tempest ready to unleash torrents.

Ulric was suddenly awash in the full potentia of a master mage that had stopped restraining their core's strength. It was heavy, oppressive, tasting of rains waiting to lash, fog to blind, and hail to flog from on high. Side by side, between the rending strength of the Baron and the fury of the Mag's magic Ulric was surprised to find that the old man was the more fearsome of the two. He would have pegged the younger man for the greater threat.

Not with the skies above blackened by the Mage's wrath.

A drizzle began, cold, pelting. Downdrafts flattened the grasses of the plain, before passing into the forests nearby, shaking the treetops.

An armored hand from the Baron laid upon the Nephel Master's shoulder, solid, understanding. It was a rare show of solidarity between the men, who frequently did not see eye to eye, nor particularly enjoy each other's company. They were, however, both devoted to the cause of their City, and its people. They had both fully embraced the losses exacted on them for the idea that it was all to the good of their kind, that it was necessary. To find that a falsehood was bitter medicine in the extreme.

At the calming touch, the old Magus, who appeared even older for his grief, let go his hold of the skies, allowing the clouds to part and the rains to pass. Dark skies would come again, but for others.

"Your sons. My kin. For centuries have we endured pointless wars, and the pain of loss. All so that Prosper and her Merchant Lords could sit atop a pile of bones and coins, the tax to keep them satisfied while Enemy worked their evil upon us all." Taipan said aloud, reminding all here that it was not only the denizens of Prespang that had suffered, that Prosper's crimes encompassed all who stood here.