Afterword - Book 2 - Chapter 47 (Patreon)

Chapter 47: A Little Taste

(Original Chapter Title: Peaceful Days)

Remera is coming into its own. The name is more-or-less cemented, the base is built, the gardens are coming along nicely, and meetings are already terrible wastes of time.

That just leaves Avyna finalizing her enchantments (with Ranthia's generous assistance) and then the couple can focus on getting to know each other just a little better. After all, what else could there be to worry about?

The shimagu not only needed time to prepare to take on a base as robust as Remera, but ignoring your enemy can actually provide a tactical advantage—as Ranthia pointed out, people were quick to get careless. Not that she has much room to talk, she wasn't exactly out trying to track down threats before they manifested.

She was busy with her mail.

Tertia's wife's name finally appears in the prose! Perhaps it'll come up again someday. We also get a further look at her personality; for all Ranthia treated her as naive and innocent, the girl's got a dirtier mind than Tertia ever could. Which probably wasn't a surprise to those that read the past Afterword where I revealed that she was the one that pursued Tertia.

Lemme just say, there's something balefully real about the first casualties in a new military installation coming from the weather and defective equipment instead of being caused by the actual war.

I don't really have anything to say about the scene with Ranthia's imaginative daughter, it's a cute moment, but it's copied nearly verbatim from the OG draft—nothing interesting behind the scenes there. Even if it is a rare moment that Ran actually stretched her image-crafting further. Oh, wait, no, there is one thing I need to say:

The word "medical" appeared in the dialogue here and I... kind of hated to use it. It's not a literal translation, but Avyna would have used a High Elvish word with a (for English speakers) similar connotation. A strong differential from Ranthia's usual... recreational interests in elven anatomy. There have been a few moments where things get weird because I am translating Creation (or High Elvish) to modern English, but this was one of the ones that bothered me more than most since 'medical' has such a strong meaning in BtDEM.

And hey, Night wasn't just messing with Ranthia to win his word game! There really are Skill-using shimagu out there!

Not that it seems to slow Ranthia down much. She definitely didn't clear the small ambush party cleanly—and managed to forget a common tactic she was warned about—but she still managed to cull them all and save the man! (Not all rescues lead to romance, hopefully. Ran's pretty firmly on the other team and is actually happily claimed.)

But the shimagu were pretty clearly hoping to disappear a scouting group unnoticed; things just went awry somewhere along the way (it doesn't come up, but the scouts didn't stay to fight and tried to retreat instead, which got the fight in view of Remus). Which means there's likely something else coming...

But what?