B3Ch72- Cheesing the blackjaws 2 (Patreon)

Long chapter.Good news. Book 2 will be up by saturday!_________________________

They got the iron-banded chest out into the daylight and cracked it open on a flat shelf of rock below the cave mouth, and the guard crowded in around it like men at a market stall.

Jack got there first, of course.

"Ho," he said, and came up with a sword. The blade had a red shimmer laid deep in the steel, and the edge held a faint heat even in the cold. He turned it in the light and the shimmer moved. "Now that's a sword."

"Fire imbued," Harold said. "Whole hoard is. That's a lava king's savings account you're pawing through." He crouched at the chest and started sorting it. "Arms and armor, good stuff, enough to kit four of you out in full plate. Jack. Parker. First picks are yours. Then two more you decide on."

Parker didn't reach for the sword. He came up with a breastplate instead, ran a thumb along the fold of it where the plate doubled at the heart. "The mana in this is thick enough to stop most mana blades," he said, and put it on over his head without ceremony.

"You could've had the glowing one," Jack said.

"You keep the glowing one." Parker settled the straps. "Draw every archer in the range straight to your chest. I'll stand behind you."

Harold nodded the next two forward, and they came up out of the chest with the rest of it, and this was the part he'd wanted to watch. A gorget that drank a testing cut off a dagger and gave nothing back. Pauldrons that warmed to the hand like something with a pulse. A spear whose head kindled a low orange along the edge the instant mana touched the haft — the man holding it looked at it like it had spoken to him, turned it over, fed it a little more, and watched the fire climb. None of them had ever held gear like this. A smith couldn't forge it and a lord couldn't buy it; it came out of dead monsters and old ruins and nowhere else. The envy that went down the line was a warm and hungry and happy thing. Harold made a note of the faces. There'd be more chests.

Then the tokens. Five of them sat in a fold of oilcloth at the bottom, small amber discs, and Harold read the System notation off each without letting his face do anything interesting.

"Perk-combination tokens," he said, and slid them into his pouch. "I’ll hold onto these."

He'd known they were down here — it was half of why he'd come. Then he found the other two tokens inside.

The first sat flat in his palm, and the notation surfaced quietly at the edge of his sight.

*Bronze Stele Relocation Token*

Moves a stele from one location to another within the Lord's territory.

He turned it over once. This would be a good reward for one of his Lords. It was the other token that he was really excited for.

The second was heavier, dull gold and warm.

*Keep Upgrade Token*

Single use. Expands and upgrades a Lord's Keep.

"We have already outgrown the keep as it is now. The upgrade is needed," he murmured, and pocketed it too.

Behind him, Jack had set the lava king's crown down on the rock and was crouched over it, sawing a stray fang of stone off one of the points with a look of pure contentment.

"What are you going to do with that?" Harold said.

"It's a crown." Jack didn't look up. "I bet I can get the dwarves to make me a good helm with this."

Harold left him to it. The heart was already sealed and clasped in its vessel, the blood bottled, a slab of that near-impervious hide rolled and lashed to a mule. It was a week of an alchemist's dreams loaded onto their pack horses.

---

The Rare Named Yrthak-Lividia lived three ridges over, and Harold had been looking forward to this kill. The parts from this kill were needed for some very cool potions he had wanted to make.

They came up under its territory in the early afternoon, and Parker heard it before he saw it — a long, flat crack rolling off the peaks, like someone had split a mountain down the middle.

"That's it hunting," Harold said. "It puts a lance of pure sound through whatever it's stalking. Punches clean through plate. It's blind — no eyes worth the name — so it sees the whole world by sound. Screams, listens to what comes back, and knows where you are down to the inch." He watched the sky.

Parker followed his line up. Something big and pale wheeled against the gray, all leather and wing. "So how are we fighting that thing?"

"Well, we do not want to fight it out here." Harold pointed back the way they'd come, at the black wound of the Silent Cave in the cliff. "We want to fight it in there."

Jack got it first, and started to grin. "It goes in the cave—"

"—and it’ll be damn near useless," Harold said. He rolled his shoulders. "Then we kill it."

Parker was already frowning at the practical end of it. "And it just follows you in? Why would it do that?"

Harold tipped his chin up at the crag under the peak, where a shelf of rock sat tucked back out of the wind. "But there's a nest up there, and there should be a few eggs in it.” He looked back at Parker. "I go up, I take it, I run back. It chases. I just have to still be breathing when I reach the cave."

Parker stared at him. "You're going to climb a cliff, rob a sonic dragon, and outrun it. On foot."

Harold was already stripping down to his clothes. "Can't ride a horse up a rock face. But I can put mana in my hands and feet and go up one like a spider, and come down one faster — and it can't fly in a gully very well. I just have to be very fast once I get down off the cliff." He shrugged. "Then I run to the cave."

"And if you misjudge one of the gaps?"

"Then it's a very short chapter." Harold turned to his shooters. "You six, up in the high rocks on either side of the gully. You guys won't kill it; your arrows will bounce off that hide all day, but if you use the explosive ones and aim for its head, you should annoy it. Every time it gets close to me, you put something in its face and make it flinch. Buy me half a second." He looked down the line. "Everyone else, hide the horses and wait in the cave for me to arrive."

Harold drank two potions. One to temporarily increase his speed and the other to keep him safe in the silent cave, and left Mors stamping and furious at the picket, and went up the mountain alone.

---

The climb was the easy part.

He threaded the mana into his fingers, and the balls of his feet, and the rock face turned into a ladder. He went up it faster than a man had any right to, trusting holds that wouldn't normally work. But he was able to sink his fingers into them better with mana. He got a shoulder over the lip of the shelf, and there it was — a scrape of a nest, bones and wind-dried carcasses matted into a mat, and in the middle of it a single egg the size of a small keg. It was pale and veined and warm when he got it into his arms.

The Yrthak was a speck against the far peaks. But Harold could already see it turning back.

It knew. However it knew, it did. It came around off the wind screaming, the whole mountain ringing with it, and Harold went off the front of the shelf with a stolen egg in his pack and his heart in his throat.

He did not so much climb down as fall, in a controlled and blasphemous fashion — mana slamming into his palms at every catch, swinging hold to hold, dropping ten feet and catching and dropping again. The Yrthak folded, and dove, and the first lance of sound came down and blew a wagon-sized rock off the cliff an arm's length from his head.

"JESUS—" It came out of him high and cracked, half a laugh already tangled up in it, and he threw himself into the next drop before the blast had finished not-echoing.

Then an arrow skated off its wing, and another cracked against the side of its skull, and it screamed and veered.

"YES! THAT'S IT!" he roared up at the rocks where his six were hidden. "Right in its ugly face — AGAIN!"

He scrambled and dropped and flung himself down the broken faces and into the gullies where the thing couldn't follow as fast, and every time it lined up on his back one of his people put an arrow in its face, and he spent the gap the instant he had it. Sound hammered the rock. Stone came down in sheets. A lance cracked past so close the whole side of his head went numb and he yelped — "nope — NOPE —" — and threw himself sideways into a crevice and came out the far end still moving. His hands were bleeding through the mana and he could not have cared less. Somewhere in the middle of it he realized he was laughing — howling with it, actually, terror and joy wound so tight together he couldn't have pulled them apart with a knife.

"This is INSANE!" he shouted, to no one, to the whole grinning mountain. So this was what Sarah felt. All this time. The lunatic. The black mouth of the cave swung up out of the slope below him, impossibly far, coming impossibly fast.

He took the last pitch in a slide on his heels and the Yrthak coming down the sky behind him screaming, and he threw himself the last body-length through the cave mouth as a lance of sound went over his head and resounded through the cave the instant it crossed the lip.

The Yrthak came through after him and the world went to felt again.

It screamed, and nothing happened. Harold watched it try — saw the great throat work, saw its head cock to the side in confusion.

Then they swarmed it. Near a hundred mana blades up and singing when no one could hear the song. Even if they didnt have enough mana quality to shear through the beast. They still had the quality to wound it. Even if it was only by a thousand cuts and as strong as the beast was with sound. The body was relatively frail. They cut into the joints and the wings, and the long blind neck. It tried to escape, but they didnt allow it, and the thing that killed by sound died in silence. It took a while. It was enormous and it tried to fight back. But it never knew what was killing it.

Harold got up off the cave floor, brushed the grit off his palms, and felt the System notification pop into the corner of his eye.

*Trophy Hunter II — Rare.*

+13% damage to Named Monsters.

+13% quality to the materials gathered from your kills.

It had been Rare, +10% and +10%, when he got it from the Stormhorn. It was a decent increase, and it would only get higher.

The egg had come through the whole thing without a crack. He'd wedged it into a cleft by the entrance before the fight started. It was a shame, he thought to himself. There was no way he knew of to tame the thing. It would be a fantastic monster for his air force. Then he smashed the egg.

---

The ruin was a day and a half on.

It was an old watch-keep half-swallowed by the mountain, thought empty by everyone who'd ever bothered to look. But it was not empty. He trained the tier-twos against the things nesting in it, and when the last one died, he walked to a hearth-stone in the lowest room and had two men lever it up, and under it was the stash.

More arms. More armor. Two perk combination tokens and a purse of gold. They were on the trail again before the sun went down.

---

They arrived at the killing garden in two days.

It filled a pocket within a wide pass, and even frozen it was wrong. Every other slope up here was clean rock and snow. This one boiled with green — vines thick as a man's leg, thorns the length of daggers, fat fleshy leaves and gaping seedpods and flowers with teeth, all of it grown wild and vast and knotted into a wall of the mountain. The winter had frozen and slowed it all down. Ropes of vine hung frozen in the act of reaching. A thornhead the size of a cartwheel leaned out over a lip of rock, iced in place, still aimed at the trail.

Harold stopped the column well back.

"Nobody touches anything," he said. "I mean it. That's not a garden."

“ A long time ago an ancient Treant died here. Not a young one either. One of the great old ones, a walking forest with centuries of mana wound through its heartwood. When it finally died, its body rotted where it lay, and all that power leached out into the ground and the roots and every green thing for a quarter mile. It drove them mad with growth. Its rage infected it all. This place will kill anyone who gets close.” He looked out over and turned back to see Jenkins curiously looking at a vine.

He continued. “There were a few Lords who tried with fire, and the garden would regrow. The life in it was too strong.”

"Ok so how are you going to kill it?" Parker said. He'd learned the rhythm of the week.

Harold swung down off Mors and started unlashing a case from the mule. "I cheat."

He took a cutting first — walked to the very edge of the green, no further, and with a mana-sheathed knife clipped the frozen tip off one reaching vine. Even that much made the whole wall shiver. And he backed away quickly. He carried the cutting back and set to work.

He opened the mobile alchemy kit he bought at the auction. It was imbued for stability and had helped him immensely during the travel north. He took the cutting and drew a thread of life-mana from it.

“I am making a potion that will allow my own life signature to match the frequency of this place.”

It was fiddly, finicky work, and it wanted ingredients most men would never see. He laid them out and grimaced at two of them.

"Had to go out of my way for these," he said to Parker. "Spent my last of them on Vera, after she burned her life-thread down. She’s lucky she survived." He ground a root down fine. "I had gathered the original ingredients for this and had to spend quite a lot on adventurers to find these for me. There's a lesson in there somewhere, about that woman and my supply cabinet."

When it was done, the potion was green-gold, and it smelled like a forest floor in high summer. He drank it quickly, and something mana shifted.

He walked into the killing field alone.

The vines that had killed everything leaned toward him and left him alone. He went in under the frozen canopy, past the thornheads and the toothed flowers, none of it so much as tightening, and came to the black, rotted heart of the hollow where the old Treant had died. He took what he'd come for — the richest life-mana harvest on the peninsula, cuttings and the treant's core. And a fistful of seedpods worth more than the Yrthak egg. Finally he found the chest that was hidden with it.

He came out with his arms full.

"Pack these carefully," he told the men. "Some of these ingredients are one of a kind. Get that chest open; let's see what we earned."

---

By the end of the week his hundred had become, quietly, the best-equipped force humanity had anywhere on Gravesend. Not the biggest. The best-armed. Every chest and stash and death zone had given up something, and the something was always the same kind of miracle — imbued gear, System-made, the sort of thing no smith could forge and no lord could buy. Plate that turned a mana blade like it was scolding a child. A spear that took whatever mana you fed it and handed it back edged in fire. An axe with winter laid down its spine, that feathered frost off the edge when a tier-two knight swung it in the cold and left a line of it hanging in the air after the stroke had finished. Blades that woke to life-mana and drank. Weapons with an aspect — fire, winter, life — the kind of thing that decided battles. Harold watched a young knight cut that frost-stroke and stand there staring at where it had hung, and remembered that none of this was supposed to exist yet. Most of it wouldn't come out of these mountains until the second Velthari war, wrung out a piece at a time by people who'd pay in blood for every one. He'd simply gotten here first, with a map in his head and a week to spend.

They'd cut through more Blackjaw goblins than anyone had bothered to count, put down a warg pack that made the mistake of pacing the column at dusk, cleared two more trolls and a cliff full of harpies and a hill of burrowing things that came up under the horses one gray dawn. Half the tier-twos weren't tier-two anymore. Their mana quantity was edging just over into tier 3.

Under his sternum, the Nail had gone quiet and content days ago. A week of killing had made it pur like a cat in the sun.

Mors was having the best week of his life. He'd trampled a goblin flat and looked back at Harold proudly. Every flat stretch of trail, he opened up and ran for the pure joy of it with his ears pinned back and Harold struggling to hang on.

And Harold, riding a switchback up out of the frozen field, was happy in a way he hadn't been in a long time.

He knew these mountains. He'd walked them in another life. There was a peak off to the northwest, sharp and pale and higher than the rest. He knew that Balfiel's valley sat folded away behind it. The old elf would be up there right now grinding his craft in some cold stone room, scoffing at some inane thought the old fool had.

He reined Mors in at the top of the switchback and looked south, down a long wooded fold in the mountains that the snow had barely touched, where the trees grew thick and old, and no smoke ever rose.

"Parker," he said. "Bring the column around. We've got monks to go bother."

He turned Mors's nose toward the hidden valley, and started down.

---

The trees closed over them by mid-morning, old and thick, and the snow thinned to almost nothing under the canopy. The fold in the mountain narrowed as they went, the walls drawing in, the ground steepening under the horses until it stopped being ground a horse could safely navigate.

Mors planted his feet at a slope of loose scree and blew out through his nose, disgusted.

"He's right," Harold said, and swung down. "This is as far as we ride."

He looked up. The trail went on without them — a foot-worn track that climbed a little farther and then turned into rough cut stone steps, no two of them the same height, laid straight up the throat of the mountain and climbing until the trees swallowed the top of them.

"That's a lot of stairs," Corwin said.

Harold stripped off his heavier kit and handed it down. "Carter. Parker. Ren, Corwin. With me. Everyone else stays with the horses."

Churchill's fist tightened on his axe. "No."

"Yes." 

"I go where you go," Jack replied forcefully.

"Not up there." Harold clapped him once on the shoulder. "These people are mostly peaceful. Keep Mors from eating anyone."

Churchill didn't like it but did it anyway, and fell back to the picket line, and Harold started up.

Ten minutes in — long enough for the first burn to wake in his thighs — he stopped and turned on the step to face the four of them.

"One rule," he said. "No mana. We have to climb this the way it's meant to be climbed."

Ren groaned from the step below. "So that's how this is going to be."

"Why'd he pick us?" Corwin groaned to the mountain. "I thought he liked us."

The gorge fell away beneath them. The tops of the old trees dropped until the horses and the guard were flecks of dark in the green, and still the stairs climbed.

Parker got his breath in order enough to talk. "So who are they? The people worth all this."

"Monks." Harold took the next step, then the next. "Tibetan Buddhists, from Earth. When the transition came, a whole community went through together—every monk, and half the village that had grown up around the monastery. A few of them picked lord. But their communities mostly transitioned together and are now hidden all over Gravensend. This is on such." A breath. "Same as we did, near enough. We came through with our own people and made the Landing. They came through with theirs and made a hidden monastery. Different answer to the same bad morning."

"Huh." Parker climbed. "And the no-mana thing. That a test? They watching to see if we're worthy?"

"Sort of. Not the way you mean." Harold stopped, a hand on one knee, and got his breath back. "These stairs are a practice. Climbing them is the prayer — the whole point is that it's hard. Every step you take is meant to burn something off you. Your wanting. The noise in your head. They are meant to keep you in the moment. Keep you focused." He looked up the endless staircase. "The stairs prevent you from thinking of anything other than the next step. A quiet man is a man who can listen. They climb it to empty their thoughts."

"And we don't use mana," Carter said, gasping as he climbed, "because—"

"Because doing this with mana would not prevent everything I just said. It’s important we make a good impression on these people." Harold started climbing again. "If we get to the top  with mana, we will have arrived telling them what kind of people we are." A grim scrap of a smile stretched across his face. “These people were all killed during the second Velthari war when they were discovered. I want to prevent them from dying this time. And they unlocked a path on their own called the Ascetic Monk.” He paused on the step and looked back down at them. “Fearsome combatants and very wise people.” They looked up at him as he drifted back into memory. “I owe the people here a favor I never got a chance to repay.”

Corwin, several steps down, muttered under his breath. "Stupid monks."

---

The day wore on.

Somewhere in the afternoon Ren stopped talking. All of their breaths started to wheeze. Carter climbed like a machine and said nothing. Harold kept his eyes on the tread in front of his boot and just climbed. He just had to keep moving. The next step. A breath. The next step. Another breath. A step. The Nail was quiet. Everything was quiet. Just the burn in his muscles and the climb.

The sun went down while they climbed. The gray thinned to gold and the gold to a hard deep blue. The cold came down off the peak to meet them. Their breath fogged the air. Frost grew on the steps. Their legs were jelly, and still they climbed.

And finally the sky opened. The stone leveled into one last long pitch. Harold groaned loudly as he came up the end of it. Out onto a broad ledge under the stars, the cold was bitter and clean while the whole world fell away below him. He stopped and stared. The last time he stood on this ledge, the valley under it was burning.

The valley opened below him, folded away behind the peak and hidden from every direction but this one, and the last of the day was leaving. Terraced fields stepped down the slopes into the dusk. A town sat at the bottom near a darkening ribbon of water, and two smaller villages held the higher ground. Waterfalls fell from three directions, emptying into a large lake near the center of the land. In the villages, lamps and the kitchen fires were lit, small pools of gold in the dark, and thin lines of smoke rose in plumes in the cold air. Prayer flags ran between the rooftops on lines, dim now, only a hint of faded red and blue and yellow left in them. Somewhere down there, a bell rang, and faded all the way before it rang again.

"Huh," Carter said, beside him, still catching his breath. "That almost looks like it was worth it."

A monk was waiting for them on the ledge.

He hadn't been there a moment ago, or he had, and Harold simply hadn't noticed him against the stone. He was young and shaven-headed. In deep red robes over a sleeveless underlayer that left his arms bare to the cold, like he didn’t feel the cold. He had his hands folded in front of him, and he was watching the four of them curiously.

Behind him, further along the ledge, two more stood with long staves grounded at their sides. They didn't move either. But they were watching.

"You climbed slowly," the young monk said. He had a strange accent in the common tongue they all spoke. "Though most people climb slowly. It is a long way." His eyes went over the four of them, the swords, the packs, the state of their boots, and came back to Harold. "Most people also come with fewer weapons."

"I imagine so. That climb sucks.” Carter gasped.

Harold wiped his face with the back of his glove and pressed his palms together and bowed over them slowly from the waist. The young man's brow rose as he stood to return it.

"I'm sorry I've come without a gift," Harold said, straightening. "In my culture it is rude to arrive without a gift to one's home." He said the words rote, from a half-forgotten memory.

That got a small smile out of him. "Ah, but in my culture, just arriving at all is the gift. So you see, you have arrived with one."

He unfolded his hands. "I am Jampa. You are seeking the Lama?"

Harold smiled gently at the young man. At the words, he remembered. "I am."

Jampa nodded, unsurprised. "This world is very different from our home on Earth. Much more dangerous. Much more worldly. But also more opportunity for karma." He looked at Harold and his men with unflinching eyes. "You bring much karma with you." He turned and started down a switchback into the green, and the two with the staves fell in without a word, one ahead and one behind.

The path dropped through juniper and then out onto the face itself, and the town came up around them out of the dark. The houses hung off the mountain on stacked stone, whitewashed, packed one against the next with their roof lines running like steps down the slope, and ladders went between the levels where the stairs gave out. Wash hung frozen on a line. Somewhere below, a dog started up, and someone shouted at it. The whole place smelled like butter and smoke, and every second doorway had a child in it watching them go past.

Carter made it four switchbacks before he broke.

"Going down is worse. My knees are filing a complaint. Uphill, fine, uphill is just suffering, but this is worse."

"It is good for you," Jampa said, without turning around.

"That's what my drill sergeant said."

"Then he was a wise man."

"He was a fuckin' sadist, is what he was."

"So you have had teachers before." Jampa took the next turn ahead of them. "Then this will be easy for you."

At those words, he smiled and struggled to keep his mind empty and focused on the next step.

They brought him to a low stone hall on the town's edge, warm with a fire and the smell of butter tea, and there an old man sat waiting on a cushion with his hands loose in his lap.

Lama Tenzin was small and folded up with age, his face all seams, and his eyes, when they came up, were clear. He took in all four of them in a single unhurried pass. He gestured Harold to the cushion across from him. Jampa poured tea into rough clay cups and set one at Harold's knee and one at the Lama's, and withdrew to the wall.

"Sit," Tenzin said. "You have managed a hard climb. In hard weather. A foolish thing to do.”

Harold sat. The tea was salty and hot and better than he expected, and he drank it gratefully.

"You are the Lord they speak about on the forums." Tenzin set his cup down and nodded to Harold's mark. Emblazoned on his clothing. "You are a busy man, Lord Calder. I can't imagine why our small community here would have earned your time and presence. Or even how you know of us. We have stayed away from the world. We have no wish to take part in the conflict out there. I fear you are a sign of changing times."

Harold set his down too and sighed. "Perhaps I am." His mind drifted in exhaustion before he focused again. The fire popped. Nobody said anything for a moment. Down the hall the bell rang again, once, and faded. "I do not wish to bring you conflict, but I know that eventually it will find you. Your community is… known to me. Precious."

He tried to collect his thoughts as he looked at Lama Tenzin's face. His eyes looked at him kindly, as if he understood the troubles that were upon Harold's soul.

"You are not the first to find us," Tenzin said at last. "You are the first human to make the climb, though." The Lama chuckled to himself a little. "And you did it without your mana. It is a surprise to find you know of our beliefs." He turned his cup a quarter turn on the stone, reached across to Harold's, and placed his palm on his.

Harold's eyes widened as peace came into him. It spread from his hand up his arm and into his chest and finally into his head.

The old man's breath left him all at once. His shoulders rose to his ears, and his hand shook on top of Harold's. He rocked back off his heels with a sound low in his throat. The cup spilled over on the stone. His fingers opened and closed twice on nothing before Jampa got to him.

Harold's tears came then and kept coming.

Jampa knelt and got an arm under the old man's shoulder, and he was talking the whole time in a low furious rush.

"You did not ask him what he was carrying. You never ask. You are eighty-one years old, and you put your hand on a stranger like a boy touching a stove." He lifted the cup and pressed it back into the Lama's hands, holding them there until they stopped shaking. Then he looked over his shoulder at Harold. "You will sit exactly where you are."

Harold hurried to help, and the Lama struggled to wave him back down.

"You carry more pain than I have ever felt, Harold Calder. Not all of it from this life, I think. Your pain has a different sense. You have carried it a long, long time. You have faced the great cycle, have you not?"

His voice cracked as he tried to answer. "I…" He looked up for inspiration but found none, as the Lama gave him the time he sought. "I have not had an easy life." He replied softly, the tears still falling.

The Lama shook his head and laughed a little. "No, you have not. I don't think anyone would call your life easy. Pain is so easy to come by within you, hmm." He said as his eyes drifted to the nail in his chest. "But you are getting better, I think." The Lama shakily took another sip of his tea as Jampa steadied the cup for him. The pain he took from Harold was still working through him.

Suddenly, Harold felt the Lama's aura expand. It was a hardy, disciplined aura. It reflected peace and lit the room with its presence. But it also represented detachment. And Harold could feel it affecting him as he allowed his own aura to gently push it away from him.

"Ahh," the Lama said. "Your soul is powerful. More so than mine. Perhaps I should be jealous." The Lama chuckled at his own joke. "Though perhaps I should be jealous of how much life you have lived instead. It was not all a good life, hmm." He let that sit a moment. "But I can see your deeds just as you can see mine. We are not so different in purpose, I think." Tenzin shook his head. "I was not always this person. I was created just as you were. We just took different journeys, and still we ended up in the same place, hmmm. We are all created by the lives we have lived. Some of us are given more to work on than others. They called us difficult learners in school, I think."

Harold listened to the older man and smiled. "Like I said. Your people are precious to me. I don't want to change your ways, but this place is not Earth. It will not leave you in peace."

The Lama stopped and nodded. "Tell me your story, Harold Calder. And tell me why you have returned here."

Harold stopped to think about why he'd phrased it that way, then let it go. The old man was always going to see more of him than most.

And he began to speak softly. "I am Harold James Calder. I was born in North Carolina to my parents." Memories drifted through his mind, and he breathed back into his aura and allowed the Lama's to suffuse him.

"We were like most families, I think. My parents, my sister, and I. They may not have been the best parents. They had their faults like any other person, but they loved us. I know that. Then, when I was 19 and my sister was 15, they died in a car accident." He trailed off a little as Tenzin looked at him as if he were telling the most important story in the world. He nodded encouragingly for him to continue.

"That was a hard time," he continued softly. "I tried to continue college. I met my best friend there when we were roommates, but I could only finish my junior year before the money ran out and I had to get a job." His voice trailed off as he struggled to figure out how to continue.

"My sister, Sarah, and I grew close after that. I think most siblings do after losing both parents, as we did. I did my best to take care of her. I'm not sure I did the best job, struggling to juggle school, a job, and her all at once. We both didn't eat enough."

Tenzin nodded as if he understood. Perhaps he did. His aura pulsed as Harold spoke, and he could feel it doing something to him. He knew it wasn't malicious, though, so he allowed it. Though he knew he could have swept it away in an instant.

Tenzin spoke up. "What were you learning? In your school?"

"Chemistry," he replied. "I always liked it. Just seemed to make sense to me. Even back then I thought there was some magic in the process." He shook his head. "My sister is not like me. She is all fire and action. Exploration fills her soul. She saw the laws and rules as confining. The cameras everywhere. How you couldn't live in your own home without your TV listening to you. How it was impossible to get lost anymore." He smiled. "The wild places are gone, she used to say. She was obsessed with the book The Name of the Wind. I think the travel and magic of it enthralled her."

Tenzin listened attentively, and his aura pulsed again, and the dam within Harold broke. So he kept speaking.

"When I dropped out, I asked my chemistry professor if he could help me get a job. And he helped me get a job inspecting chem cargo on rail and ships. It…well, it wasn't what I wanted to do, but what else could I do? I needed the money, and I had to pay for Sarah to get an education somehow."

"A noble sacrifice," Tenzin said.

"I used to think so," Harold replied. He shifted on the cushion and worked his thumbs down the meat of his thighs, and the muscle jumped under them. "And then the transition happened. Sarah and I barely grabbed each other before it happened, and we showed up in a Lords village about two weeks from here." He took another sip of tea before he continued.

"He wasn't a good man. He was taking women when he thought he could get away with it, so Sarah and I left as soon as we could."

"We spent a lot of time traveling the foothills in the mountains. Living in caves. Hunting our own food. Exploring the world. We spent a month once in a cave behind a waterfall. So cliché, I know, but it was fantastic. There was an L-shaped bend in the cave so we could get back in there, dry and hidden. But exploration drove Sarah, so we continued exploring. We would take what we managed to kill to the few Lords we knew were fine and sell what we could for supplies. Sometimes others traveled with us; sometimes they didn't, but she thrived out there. I had a harder time. She was an adventurer through and through." He paused.

Behind him, Parker had stopped moving entirely. He'd been with Harold since the transition, and most of this was new to him.

"I was a crafter, though, and I hadn't quite figured out those first couple years how to manipulate my perks. It's not like now, when I have posted detailed guides on the forums for most things. Knowledge was guarded and prized. Lords did not work together until the wars started. Hell, I didn't even know about Paths until year four. Now, a year in, it's almost anyone can speak of."He turned to see Jampa looking at him suspiciously, but he continued.

"Eventually, Sarah found a small pass deeper within the mountains with a grove of trees and sunflowers that always bloomed. It was….a magical place filled with gorgeous butterflies and dragonflies, and I began living there while Sarah explored with the people she had picked up.

"This was after the first Velthari war and the war with the goblin city. Humanity in the south was in a war on multiple fronts and losing badly. To the west, a couple of nests were pushing humans back. Powerful named monsters were woken by the rising mana levels and rampaged over various areas. Further west, another race had also started raiding deep into our lands, but we were able to control those areas relatively well because of a strong alliance there. About the only place humans had that was controlled by a strong alliance. The Concord, they were called.

"It wasn't great for us, and I spent a lot of time reading the forums and simultaneously trying to ignore it. I spent some time trying to make gunpowder, as half of us did. Dreaming up guns we could use, and I couldn't figure it out. Then one day a grumpy old elf walked up on me and told me to go away." He smiled despite himself.

"I was so shocked I couldn't speak, but Sarah was there right away. I would have left, but by then I had been living there for a couple of months, and I knew something was special about the place. I couldn't figure it out, and she knew I didn't want to leave, so she bargained for me to stay. She noticed the bandolier of potions he had around his belt and bargained for him to teach me. Humans had just started to learn about alchemy and Imbuing then, as Lords came into contact with the various races on Gravesend and began to learn." He kept smiling.

"Of course the elf refused, but Sarah insisted. They almost came to blows, but he relented and set her a task. She was to find a few different ingredients for him." He snorted. "Little did we both know at that point that he gave her an impossible task. He wanted her to find a jackalope. A vanishingly rare creature. Impossible to find, and somehow Sarah did it. She never told me how." He trailed off lost in the memory. 

He shook his head. "But that forced Balfiel to teach me Alchemy. And I spent the next four years there learning from him." He hesitated. "He was a harsh man. Not quite cruel, but his standards were exact. At the time I think I resented him, but now…I find I can only look back on it with fondness."

"If you only do what you can do. You will never be more than you are now." Tenzin said wisely before laughing a little. "I'm kidding; I stole that from Oogway, but very true."

He couldn't help but smile in reply before shaking his head and continuing. "After those four years, I left. I couldn't stand the elf anymore, and we got into a great fight. He wanted me to stay and keep learning. I had barely begun, he kept saying. But the second Velthari war had begun, and I wanted to help, so I left and joined. I should have stayed." He whispered.

At the wall, Jampa's hands came apart and went back together again.

"The battles were vicious. By then, they were bonding with real monsters, and they would sweep down from the skies and up from the earth and set upon us. That was when I earned the path Battle Alchemist. The fighting was always desperate. People were desperate to kill them and rise in the reputation rankings so they could access the system store, get more power, and do it all again. And they were just as desperate to do that to us. It's a vicious cycle the system has set us on, and we lost very badly. We had our moments. If nothing else, humanity does love a valiant last stand, and we did that in spades."

He took a moment to collect himself before continuing. "By that time the south had been almost completely lost. Billions of dead, lost to the monsters and the other race from the south. The west was surviving better. There were natural barriers that allowed them to fight, but they had a difficult time as well, and they were brutal in their methods."

"Eventually the war ended, and I met a woman." He paused and took a sip of the cold tea.

"We settled down in a little town led by a Lord who wasn't interested in trying to upgrade to a city and the fight that comes with the upgrade test. And we lived happily for a few years. I worked as an alchemist for the town and continued my own research. I loved it. I loved how it related to chemistry and, more importantly, how different it was. It was real magic. Water to wine and all that, you know."

"But Gravesend forces growth whether you want it to or not. My sister was exploring one day and beset by soldiers from a Lord who wanted her to join his Harem."

The memory came up through him, and he gently let it go. "She resisted and was killed trying to escape. Some of her old teammates found out about it and sent me a letter explaining it. And I lost it. My marriage fell apart. It was over before then, I think, but that was the last straw."

"And I set out on revenge. I spent a couple of years terrorizing the Lord's towns and villages. His city. Anytime one of his patrols would leave, I would be there. Anytime adventurers would leave on a quest. I would be there."

He shifted his weight off one hip and grunted at what his legs had to say about it. "Eventually, anytime his people would leave to work the fields I had worked to destroy. I would be there. Anything I could do to hurt him."

Tenzin frowned a little but pulsed his aura, urging him to continue. He sucked in a deep breath. "They called me the mad alchemist then. I would laugh sometimes, oftentimes. As I worked. And I grew powerful. Especially for a crafter then. I stacked a lot of fire and alchemist perks. A few of my potions would breach gates, and I could call up fire to sweep across a field. I eventually killed the lord who killed Sarah. Not that it helped, of course. I was deep in my own head by then. And I began to travel. I helped in various wars and battles. Against monsters. Had moments and times of lucid thought, but the truth is I was lost. I spent a lot of time searching for ingredients. Finding ingredients to make a potion that would allow me to get another ingredient to make another potion that would allow me to make another one."

He sucked in air again and continued. "Then I was offered something. By then the south was gone. The peninsula was gone. By year 15 or so, half of the area Humanity started in was gone. At least I think it was year 15. Even now those years are hazy."

Tenzin nodded understandingly. Perhaps he even did understand.

"Anyways. He offered me a place to continue my work with unlimited ingredients. I had some special potion recipes, and he wanted me to make them for humanity. It would also let me continue my personal work, so I agreed."

Behind him, Parker had gone so still that Harold could hear the man breathing.

"I was wrong," he said calmly. "They put me in a very nice cell and put me to work. I churned out potions by the thousands. But it was too slow. So they said give me the recipe, and we will work on it together. But by then I knew something was wrong. I hadn't been allowed to leave. People would disappear sometimes. So I refused. Figuring it would give me leverage. They couldn't kill me if I had something they wanted, right?"

The words were leaving his mouth faster now. "Well, I was right. They wouldn't kill me. But they would torture me till I did." He said it simply; the pain of the memories still hurt, but he was finally building scar tissue over it. "I would like to say I resisted gallantly, but it would be a lie. I folded after a week of their attention. They were very thorough."

Tenzin leaned over and refilled his cup without being asked, and the butter tea steamed between them.

"I don't suppose there's any chance of coffee up here."

"There is tea," Tenzin said. "A great deal of tea. Perhaps in the future we can share a cup."

He smiled gently and continued. "Well, they allowed me back to work; that cycle would continue for years. Work and torture. Torture and work. Whichever they wanted at the time. Depending on their mood and if they wanted something from me. Until eventually one night I made my magnum opus. Lost in the haze of my madness as I was, I made a legendary potion."

He paused, working through the haze of memories. Mens Perfecta had done its job well. It had used the trauma in his head to refine his mind. The memories were still there. They still hurt. But they didn't affect him the way they used to. His mind was stronger now because of it. It was probably the only reason he could relate to the nail the way he did.

"Back then I was obsessed with making someone so strong they couldn't be hurt. To be invincible. To heal from anything. To make everyone fear you so much they would never hurt you. It started with my body improvement potions. And I kept improving them. Until I made the one that gave me the perk that let me start over."

Tenzin replied calmly. "Karma. It is a powerful force."

"I don't know how it happened. I just know I did, and I have been trying to make up for my faults and mistakes ever since. I met one of your people during the second Velthari war. He, too, had the perk that let him carry someone's pain. He told me about your home here and how I should visit sometime.” He paused again as he figured out how to continue. “We were good friends, and we looked out for each other in battle, but during that war." He paused. "Your home was destroyed. Most of you were all killed defending it. Almost none of you escaped. I don't care that you have discovered your own path. That you are powerful warriors. I don't care about any of that. I just owe my friend, and it is something I need to repay."

Tenzin was silent for a long moment as he considered Harold. After a moment, he retreated his aura as well until they were just two men sitting across from each other.

Then Jampa spoke in his strange common accent. "Who was the warrior you befriended?"

And Harold looked up at him with a large smile. "You, Jampa."

They smelled the grove before they saw it. Even covered in snow, it smelled vibrant.

Harold put a fist up, and the column stopped at the treeline.

"This is the place," he said. "Nobody goes past this. Not one step under those trees."

Parker looked at the wall of green ahead of them. Outside the eaves it was the same frozen mountain they'd ridden through all week, bare branches and old snow. Past them it was a snow-covered summer. "That's not natural, thought if everything you’ve said about these dryads is true, I think I want to go in," Parker said.

"It is natural; it’s just also magical." Harold swung down off Mors. "This grove is one of the oldest within the Blackjaws." He handed his reins off. "The place used to be a death zone until we understood what was in it. The moment you cross under those trees, you're going to feel good. Better than you've felt in months. You're going to feel like there is nowhere in the world you'd rather be and no reason on Gravesend to leave."

"Sounds like a dream," Corwin said.

"It is. People walk in, sit down happy, and never come out. They forget they had anywhere to be. They forget their own names eventually." Harold looked down the line. 

Churchill looked uncomfortable. Probably because it wasn’t something he could hit with his various blades. He walked to the eaves and stepped under.

It hit him all at once — a warmth in the chest, a loosening, a voice with no words in it telling him he was tired and he had come far enough and he could stop now, he could let down his load, that he was home. 

Harold opened his aura and let it out, and the warmth broke against it and slid off him like water off oiled leather. He immediately missed the feeling; it wasn’t often he got to feel so good.

Behind him, Jampa stepped under the eaves, took one slow breath, and kept walking, entirely unbothered.

Harold glanced back at him curiously.

"There is nothing here it can offer me that I have not already released," Jampa said mildly. "It is just a very loud room. Shall we?"

"Show-off," Harold muttered and continued.

She came out of the trees like she'd been poured out of them.

She was tall, and barefoot on the moss.  Wearing almost nothing — a wrap of leaf and vine that had been arranged to the edge of decency and nothing beyond it, all warm brown skin and green-shot hair. A mouth to die for. She came toward Harold slowly, hips swaying, and the grove's warmth thickened around her like she'd brought it with her.

"You walked in on your own feet," she said. Her voice did half the work the pull had failed at. "So few do. You must be so tired, coming all this way." She reached him and set one hand flat on his chest, and leaned in. "Stay. Just a while. Sit with me and tell me your story. You've earned a rest, haven't you? A man like you."

Harold looked at her and struggled not to let his eyes wander.

"I'm here to speak with Mother Hollin," he said.

That stopped her. Her hand stayed where it was. "Mother is not for—"

He reached into his coat, took out the seed, and held it up between them on his open palm.

It sat there, small and gray-brown and unremarkable to any eye that didn't know it, and the notation surfaced quietly at the edge of his sight.

Dewblossom Seed 

Seed of a faerie tree sacred to the small folk. The last of its kind are dying, and the little cousins die without them. Vanishingly rare.

The dryad's whole face changed. The seduction fell off it like a dropped veil, and under it was a young woman near tears. She gasped, and her hand rose toward the seed and stopped, not daring; then she turned and fled into the green, calling out ahead of her in a language that sang the leaves.

Harold closed his hand around the seed and let out a breath.

"God," he muttered, mostly to himself, "I am glad Adeline isn't here to watch this."

"You did well," Jampa offered. "You held very still. Except for one very tiny, tiny part of you."

"Shut up, Jampa."

Mother Hollin took her time.

When she came, the grove came with her — the light bent her way, the warmth pooling where she stood. She was cut from the same cloth as the first one, her hair the gray-green of lichen and her skin the color of wet bark, and she wore her near-nakedness the way a queen wears a crown. She would have been an endless number of guys' wet dreams on earth. She looked at Harold curiously.

Harold nodded to her. 

"Mother Hollin," he said. "My name is Harold Calder. I've come to make you an offer, and I'd rather make it plainly, if you'll let me."

"Not a fan of foreplay, are you?" Her voice was low and sultry. When she spoke, it sent shivers down his spine.

"I am the Count of the Basin in the south." He let the seed sit on his open palm again where she could see it. "I am building a garden and filling it with cuttings and some of the richest things on the peninsula. I want to give them a home. And I want to plant this at the center of it." He lifted the seed a fraction. "So the little cousins can also have a home there."

She came off her patch of moss and crossed to him, and she circled him slowly.

"You know what this is?" she asked, of the seed. 

"Of course, I asked some of my people to recover it. The little ones are precious to us all. " He held still while she moved. "I would like you to move there and care for the garden, ensure the tree grows strong. Build a home for all of our peoples."

She stopped in front of him and laid one long finger flat in the center of his chest, where the first dryad's hand had been, and drew it slowly up to the hollow of his throat. Harold looked back at her and did not move. Her bosom bounced as she moved, and she leaned in where he could see everything if he wished. She reached up and ran the same finger through his hair, tipping his head a half-inch with it and turning his face to the light.

"You do not want me," she observed.

"No, ma'am. No offense meant."

"None taken. It is rare enough to be interesting." Her hand paused against the side of his jaw. Then she went still, and her eyes narrowed, and she took her hand back like she'd found a coal in the cloth. "You have been marked."

His eyes narrowed when he heard that. "Marked by who?"

"By a lady of Winter." She was not playing now. "Frost sits on you. You have dealt with the high Sidhe of Winter, mortal." She studied him with new, colder attention. "We do not align with either court; we treat with them both fairly. But the fae do not mark someone they do not plan on treating with in the future, and their politics are complicated. It tells me what you are." She paused a beat, and he struggled not to watch her chest rise and fall. "But not who your people are. The two are not always the same thing. I have watched good men build unkind houses."

Hollin was quiet for a long moment.

"The Basin," she said at last, and something moved under the old bark of her face. "You do not know what you are offering me, I think."

He cocked his head in thought, but he thought he did know what he was offering. "Tell me?"

"We lived there. Long ago, before your kind had a word for it." She looked south, through him, through the trees. "It was warm, and it was kind, and both Courts loved it and left it be, and we grew there in the open with nothing to fear. We came north when it changed hands. We have held summer in a fist up here for a very long time." Her gaze came back to him. 

"Then be welcome home." He said.

"And there is the other matter." The coldness came back, but it was aimed past him now, at the sky, at the season, at something under both. "This grove will not stand. You feel it, do you not, in the mana. You are a catalyst; the cycle is turning. It rises. What is coming will crack these mountains, and our fist will not hold against it. The little ones will die here; my grove will likely die here." Her jaw set. "I have known it a while. My people move slowly. And now here you are offering another option." She almost smiled. "You will forgive an old thing for wondering where the trap is."

"If it helps," Harold said. "I have the Verdant Mushroom; that will help your own growth as well. Once you plant your roots deep into the lands."

Her eyes closed, and she breathed in deeply. Her green knotted skin rose and fell smoothly. "And you said you don’t like foreplay." She looked at the seed a final time, and then at him, and the decision settled into her. "It is a cautious yes, Harold Calder. We will come south. For that" — she nodded at his palm — "and for the little cousins." She stepped back. "Do not make me sorry. I have a very long memory, and so does the ground. You will have to move our trees."

"I understand." Harold closed his hand around the seed and bowed over it again. "I'll send people you can trust to bring you down. He hesitated. I will be attempting to recruit other groves. I hope that won’t be an issue."

"We know the way. But yes, someone will need to help move our trees. Especially mine." She turned back toward the green. "Recruit who you want, Lord Calder. As long as mine roots are planted first, they will join my grove."

Outside the eaves the cold hit him like a slap, and it was almost a relief.

The guard was a sorry sight. Half of them sat in the snow with their backs to the trees and stupid, contented smiles on their faces. Churchill was on his feet, but only just, swaying, his eyes soft and far away.

"Up," Harold said, and started hauling men off the ground. "On your feet. Show's over."

Parker shook himself like a wet dog and blinked hard. "How long were you—" He stopped. "It felt like ten minutes."

"It was two hours." Harold got Churchill turned around by the shoulder and pointed his face down the mountain, away from the trees, and the man came back into his own eyes by degrees. "Walk it off. Nobody's sitting down again until we're a mile from here."

Jampa walked out behind him unhurried and entirely himself. He took in the row of blissed-out soldiers with the mild interest of a man watching ducks.

"They look happy," he said.

"They'll be embarrassed in about an hour. Don't let them off easy."

"I would not dream of it." Jampa found his horse, considered it, and climbed back into the saddle with grim resignation. "That was well handled. The women were quite beautiful."

"I have good days." Harold swung up onto Mors and turned him, and the column got itself sorted and moving, men rubbing their faces and refusing to meet each other's eyes.

Harold pointed Mors towards a familiar peak.

"Come on," he said. "One more stubborn old man elf."