Woodwork had never been a strong suit for Ulric, especially not without his tools. The intervening months had some good to change that. He'd picked up a few skills, like notching, chiseling, and simple peg/mortis joinery. Mask making was a far more delicate and painstaking project than he'd given it credit. He'd removed a lot more material from the back side than he'd though he'd need to, the curvature from a flat piece was hard to achieve with his limited skills. If he had to do it again he'd have left the damned log round and cut out the segments to leave them rounded on one side, way easier than getting a flat to round again.

He was also missing his collection of woodcarving utensils, which would have greatly sped this up. A glassresin hook knife would have done wonders. So would a chainsaw. But this is where he was and he used what he had. The only advantage he really had to go on was that his knife was way the hell harder than this wood and sharp, having been flintknapped and then ground to polish. Now that had been tedious. This was a walk in the park in comparison. Mainly he had to be careful not to hork off too much wood or create a crack. It took an hour but he finally achieved a rounded back that fit his face.

It was noon before he accomplished a facsimile of a plain wooden mask with two eye holes. It covered his whole face and, the vision wasn't terrible, though it smooshed his nose to achieve that. Two sets of holes punched in the mask and in the hood of his travel cloak let him tie the mask to the hood so that when he pulled the hood up the mask could cover his face and with the hood down the mask would rest inside the hood.

It looked like something an eighth grader with a band saw might produce but he'd take it.

When he finished checking its fit he turned to Brighteyes with his hood up and the mask in place.

"Well? What do you think Chiefling Brighteyes?"

The young elf was giddy. Huh.

"I want one Ulric. This is important, I need a mask too. You should have said you could do this from the beginning. Please, I will give you the [Plated Boar] core in repayment."

It would seem that boys would be boys everywhere. This was the kind of thing that sixteen year old himself would have loved too. For that matter, he didn't hate it now.

Ulric patted the elf on the shoulder. It was rare for him to show such obvious happiness about something, the kid was way too serious for his age.

"One elf mask, coming up. I'll do this one even better, promise."

Midafternoon came and went, the light of the wood starting to golden with the passage of the twinned suns dancing around each other through the cosmos, before Ulric straightened from his task of adjusting the mask to his ward's hood.

Brighteyes immediately put it on and laughed. Laughed!

"Ulric Glade Chief this is like story. We are like heroes from tales now. We will go to Iriel under cover and surprise my father with our adventure. It will be glory." the boy ranted.

This was a watershed moment. Ulric had taken responsibility for the elf since he'd decided to put an end to the men who had oppressed him. In all that time, Brighteyes had been serious to the point of dour, only rarely letting his emotions touch the surface, holding them close while he grieved for both his friend and his childhood. That this simple thing could allow the downcast elf to be a boy again was…impactful…for the man. It was something he'd missed out on in his prior life, being able to create joy. He'd been consumed with his own goals, his own passions, and, eventually, his own failures as a person. Varda had given him the time and distance from himself, forced him outside and to deal with the world with no option to retreat inwards, that gave him perspective on why his previous life had ended as it had.

Growth comes in many forms but making a kid happy seemed an odd way to come to terms with your fuckups. Ulric felt like it was a good place to start. Though he couldn't help but find it strange that a laughing kid could touch him but the slaying of multiple men, scumbags that they were, had left no impression. To this day that memory only felt slightly more significant than hunting game for food, like simple necessity.

The duality of man, Ulric thought to himself. Nice. Best to reign in his companion though before his enthusiasm got Ulric dead. Not too hard though, soft touch.

"I'm glad you like it Brighteyes. We'll definitely show your dad and everything, they'll be real proud of how you led us here like one of your people's hunters. But let's not forget that they're probably beside themselves not knowing you made it and the idea here is to avoid getting killed, not guaranteeing it." Ulric promised, trying to temper his Elven comrade's enthusiasm with reason.

It worked. Mostly. Brighteyes settled himself down and cleared his throat. He only giggled a little.

"Thank you Ulric. This is a fine gift. Masked warriors battling monsters and enemies of Iriel was my favorite stories. This journey is like a tale of my people. We fight monsters, return from place of ultimate danger, and journey escaping from evil men. I will not forget for all of my life."

Ulric smiled. "We told similar stories in my old world Brighteyes. And, yeah, it's been fun. Weird and a little tragic. But fun."

With this declaration, they broke camp and made a long march into late evening. Masked adventurers, returning home from their exploits for one, and stepping forward on a new journey for another. Kilometers passed as golden light filtered through the failing canopy. The calls and smells of the last of autumn were made stark by the quiet passage of their travel. The drastic change in temperature, compared to recent weeks, was accompanied by a wind that was remarkable for its gusty bursts. The Plateau had been characterized by a steady, pushing breeze that only stilled at night. This one though carried the energy of the coming squall that the Elves used to mark Winter's hold on the land. Intermittent chilly swirls served as reminder of the incumbent season.

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True dark had fallen hours ago, Ulric was virtually blind, and even Brighteyes had to summon a pale silver globe of moonlight to continue with sure footing. At the sound of a small stream gurgling amongst rocks they turned from the trail and made a camp by its banks. Shelter was set up in the dark, the moonlight spell shedding ghostly twilight for tasks and only dismissed once crackling flame had grown bright enough to banish its necessity. It would be a short sleep but the distance they'd made would offset the time they'd used to obtain their incognito status. Watch was sorted by the duration for the fire to burn down, with the Elven youth, as usual, taking first watch.

Ulric took his watch, brief as it was. Already the dark outside their camp was ever so much less than its depth as they'd traveled. He decided to take care of all the camp chores, given the elf lad had carried their last night's journey, and let Brighteyes sleep in. There was a moment, while he bent down to fill water bags, when he had a brief spike of worry. A [Heckler monkey] was in a nearby tree and had started cawing obnoxiously. It threw small sticks and spiced things up with a handful of shit, artfully dodged, but made no other aggression. Ulric was halfway tempted to try to harpoon it with his trident but decided against, best not to tempt fate, and the aggravating little beast left him alone when he retreated back to the fire's glow.

A glade garlic and onion stew with "potatoes" and dried meat Ulric had started before sunrise. Brighteyes woke to both daylight and the smell of breakfast, the powerful aroma having summoned him from his blankets. Slurping of bowls announced the end of the meal and they made ready to find Elven civilization.

It had been impossible to tell as they'd traveled at night, but in the dim glow of morning the signs of the Elves' forest domestication became clear. The already sparse undergrowth was cleared, leaving only well-tended clusters of plants, like dispersed herb gardens. The trail they had followed, first a narrow game trail, then widening to a traveler's road, had now become a concourse wide enough to fit a truck, or well, the old rutted tracks indicated probably wagons. Brighteyes had kept them faithfully headed towards the heart of his homeland, using the signs on the guidestones to navigate ever since they'd reached the marked ways.

Ulric felt a distinct oddness, viewing signs of people again. There was a far different aesthetic, a different feel to the actions of the Elven people on the land. Nowhere was the wood damaged or its inherent "wildness" compromised, it had merely been reigned in. Cultivated. Some of the trees had taps in them and barrels, carved like those of his world from staves but secured by vines instead of metal hoops. The steel wood of his axe handle left him no doubt that there might be some greater mystery to the materials used in these constructions that made their integrity greater than one might suppose from their rustic appearance. They saw none of the natives though. When Ulric asked, he was informed that they were in the far outer edges of the province and that it was distinctly out of season for the collection of saps. These taps were closed and the barrels would fill with rain or snow, to be collected sometimes for water but not for a long while. It was also apparent that, while the roads were well maintained, few traveled them in any density. There were no foot tracks, fresh or otherwise.

The gently sloping downhill terrain had transitioned from the base of the Plateau to a sort of vast terrace, where a gentle kilometer long grade would be followed by a kilometer of roughly level ground, followed by another grade, and so on. Small streams had aggregated, merging in the various slopes to form wider runs, eventually forming rushing creeks, and now, they were passing the first signs of true tributary rivers to what would be the final joining of the massive Zalus, damn near a flowing lake rather than a river, thanks to the volume of water that was shed by the incredibly large Plateau and tremendous mountain glaciers. The Elven people had incorporated this terrain and the wood itself into their architecture seemlessly. Brighteyes took them across bridges woven of trees, a process that must have taken decades to complete. Other bridges were more familiar rope style designs, though they sagged not at all under the weight of only the two travelers, despite a size that did not suggest such sturdiness.

Ulric's intuition told him that the Elves would almost certainly not live in densities anywhere close to those of his previous peoples, they would find it too objectionable to their integration with the natural world. Everything he'd seen so far spoke of a culture wherein the people were children of the forest, caring for their elders. They also had a long view. Nobody in a hurry marked roads with carved stones, depicting which path you tread, every ten paces. They certainly didn't weave a bridge across a middling river five meters across of living trees. It would have been infinitely faster to cut a tree, mill it to lumber, and build a bridge.

That observation prompted Ulric to ask Brighteyes about one of the common themes to the myths about these folk from his old world. He couldn't help it, they were crossing a fifty meter span that must have taken a century to create.

"Brighteyes, I hope this isn't a rude thing to ask one of your people, but how long does an elf normally live? For that matter, how long do any of the races you know about normally live?"

His Elven buddy chewed a lower lip briefly before he answered in his own tongue

"This is not a rude question Ulric, though it does remind me how little you know of the way of things. The woodland elves of Orlethrem are considered long lived. My father is three hundred and seventy this year, and is in the prime of his life. Old age takes us rarely, the deepwood is dangerous, after all, and Varda can be a harsh mother to her children, but there are not uncommon ancients of seven or eight hundred years. Of the other races I may only tell you what my tutors tell me. The Svartalfin, the deep dwarves, are rugged peoples and age like stones. They can easily live four or five hundred years and it is hard to tell a fifty year old dwarf from even an old one. Grey beards are truly exceptional, they live harsher lives than we Elves in their tunnels and in the hazards of the mountains. The Beastkin are more varied, as relates to their natures. The Wolven mature rapidly and age quickly, similar to humans, they live maybe one hundred years, maybe one hundred and fifty. The Saurus though, they are slower to age, and slower still to reach old age. It has not been unheard of that you can find a Saurus elder that has seen well over fifteen hundred years. This is rare, of course, most will be taken by some accident or calamity before then, but it is known that their elders are ancient compared to the others. Humans are among the shortest lived of the races, a mere hundred and twenty or so years. The exception to all of this is in the strongest members of each race. When the core of a creature advances it strengthens the rest of the body. Truly powerful humans can easily live as long as Elves. This is as much as I know Ulric, to say more is hearsay and you would be better off to learn directly such things from Loremasters."

Wow. It was a lot to digest, linguistic struggles aside. Ulric was a little proud of how little repetition and questioning it took to decipher that speech. His Elven was improving.

So the wide range of ages betwixt races that was on track with some traditions. The Elven longevity was a reality here, if not their immortality. Incredible. So it was for the other races, the nearest in lifespan being those of the animalistic Beastkin. Perhaps that inferred a more recent divergence between the ancestors of these and humans. Brighteyes had used the term Svartalfin to describe the dwarves, that was perilously close to the old Norse description Svartalfan. But the term elf was used to describe his own peoples. Interesting. Perhaps it was that whatever connection existed between this and his old world allowed a transfer of peoples in bidirectional manner and transfers between cultures had created the mishmash of terminologies. He hadn't thought to ask the Watcher about it. Busy with other things, like dying and living again.

Why would humans have such limited span compared to these other creatures though? They were physically of very similar make up. Brighteyes would have passed as a sort of overly feminine dude with a cosplay fetish back in Ulric's world. Kind of like a prettier blond Leonardo DeCaprio in his youth. It was something he'd have to investigate, Ulric found in himself a powerful curiosity about the peoples that existed in this world. The Watcher had suggested that a sort of guided evolution had been applied to the organisms of this place and that had produced a more efficient, optimized sort of unfolding of speciation. He was no biologist but some of this shit just did not make sense. Until he learned otherwise he was going to blame it all on magical shenanigans. The revelation about core evolution supported that hypothesis.

The irony that a former scientist would now examine a scenario and shrug "Eh. Magic." to explain it was not lost on him.