Ulric's waking from dreams of being chased by a giant cobra wielding a laughing crimson sword in its mouth while dragons circled overhead did not bode well. The misapprehension that followed through the morning meal was not misplaced when that day went much like the one before it. Ulric got his ass kicked, metaphorically, physically, and magically, for an entire week.

Instructor Gother began, in his usual fashion, and then saw fit to bless his students with an exceedingly thorough rendition of the trade purposes for refined Azure Cedar bark, the historical and modern trade routes, both domestic and foreign, for it, the customs laws of those nations through whose borders the bark passed, and, finally, the market environment for bark product sales. Ulric was starting to see the point of the exercise, as each day unfolded into the next. A comprehensive whole of Elven civilization was starting to emerge in that dusty dry room, listening to that dusty dry Gother.

Elves didn't teach from a set of specific fundamental concepts and then try to use a specific example to elucidate the concept, at least, that wasn't Gother's philosophy. The wizened creature introduced a common or obvious object and then began to unwind the role that object played in Elven life. From its location for foraging or proper cultivation, to its harvesting, then its usages as an edible, construction material, medicine, or more arcane applications as alchemicals, then to the methods utilized to process it, depending on those uses, and then to the means and methods for its transport and distribution to market. At all times the old Elf told the story from the perspective of the gatherer or craftsman or trader that was interacting with the item in question. The lessons were then deeply rooted to the role of the individual, there was no doubt as to how the instructed material applied to a particular elf's life, all was immediately applicable, if not for every single individual.

The concepts being taught were not outright stated, there was no lesson whose objective could be: Trade Laws of Orlethrem. Instead, if one paid attention, they began to grasp that each nation taxed and tariffed items according to their own needs for goods or to protect their own production. The important over-arching ideas became self-evident as the Elf went through the seemingly arbitrary description of the "lineage" of usage for the item in question. By the fourth item, this one being cores of Lesser beasts, Ulric was catching onto how Orlethrem society, economy, and governance operated and how it interacted with the other nations, with a special emphasis, of course, on Iriel's role in the confederation.

That role turned out to be fascinating. Iriel was mostly self-sufficient but acted as the main economic source of procurement for high-rarity commodities via the Hunters of the Deep Wood, who were tasked with venturing into the extreme danger of the wilderness to gather valuable herbs or reagents. Hunters were both the main persistent military arm of Iriel and its most critical economic asset. In addition to supplying the bountiful plants, insects, or saps unique to the region, which were highly sought after in other nations and thus whose procurement brought astronomical wealth, they would also hunt and harvest specific monsters, oftentimes those deemed too hazardous for a regular Iriel'en hunter or forest materials cultivators and gatherers, called Gardeners, to handle. Hunters would also scout the forest to reconnoiter and guard locations for craftsmen to make temporary camps where they would procure and process materials at a larger scale than a single scout, on-site, from more remote locations distant from the settled regions of the wood.

Then Hunters, alongside their Gardener companions, acted as cultivators of the entire forest. Safe trails for travel were scouted and marked, symbolic annotations describing dangers or boons to the particular length of the trail, which was then tended by the Gardeners creating an effective Elven highway system through the wood. Because the Elves did not set up permanent camps in the deep wood and those camps were moving frequently, so as to leave the harvest sites alone long enough to recover swiftly, the wilderness was relatively unscathed. Years could go by between harvestings, meaning that there was a relatively minimal impact on any particular region by their activity. It was a completely sustainable model of civilization, the Iriel'en took only enough for their needs and never to the point of damaging the land that supported them.

This is where it got interesting.

Because the Hunters were so good at it, other tribes hired the Iriel'en Hunters to do the same for them. They had their own craftsmen, their own means of production, their own specialties, and their own traditions, but none did what Iriel'en Hunters did as efficiently or as well. This made the Hunter not just an instrument of raw material acquisition but a critical part of Orlethrem policing. Because the Hunters were always out, always roaming the lands, they had the additional role of stopping poaching, smuggling, and border control. That resulted in these scouts serving as the backbone of Orlethrem's military coordination.

Reports were sent to the local village heads, sent to the regional tribe rulers, kept those leaders abreast of the goings on of their more remote lands. That information would then travel to Iriel itself when the Hunters rotated home, their reports going to the ruling Lesser and Greater Houses, and, eventually, to the overlord of Iriel, Bald'rt, [Lord of the Deep Wood] and his inner circle. That meant that Iriel had a particularly sensitive role in ensuring the bedrock effectiveness of trade and defense, it was the hub for information gathered from across Orlethrem. While other lands had far more importance for logistics or production, or for economy, such as Aktinia with its fishing, oceanic salt production among other goods, and a vast network of shipping routes, or Zelussin with their great water-driven mills and their transportation along the great river that bisected the continent, it was the Iriel'en that served as the first responders, cartographers, and minute-men of the Elven confederacy.

As he sat in his rooms jawing through a hard, though tasty, bread and a bowl of some mystery stew, ten beating days after the recommencement of his bargained instruction, nagging details started to accumulate, building an itch in his thoughts.

Slowly, the picture began to come into focus for Ulric. There had been many question marks earlier on, starting with his encounter with the not Viking raiders and Brighteyes. He'd shelved it then, having more pressing matters. It had arisen again as, the more he learned about the Elves, about Orlethrem, and about their relationships with their northern neighbor, ruled by the heavily maligned Prosper.

As his lessons had continued, his short discussions with Geyrt here or a chance meeting with Brighteyes there, a random statement from Idra, when he wasn't making millimeter corrections to Ulric's joints, and an afternoon spent studying a set of maps, sent by Duty at a request paged to Bald'rt, all of it added up and he got a better feel for what sort of world he had been dropped into as well as the current geopolitical climate. The more he learned, the less sense any of it made. And then, as he learned more still, sitting here in his borrowed room, suddenly the more sense it made.

The northern nation of Prespang, consisting of a bunch of pseudo-independent city states of Beastkin and humans, was unified under rule by the leadership that built and occupied their fortress city Prosper some eight hundred years ago. Historically, Prosper was reliant on Elven trade to access the Southern seas and the resources of the great forests. However, by controlling the access point of Zelus with the vast continent splitting inland sea Vatyn, they were heavily dominant over the northern half of the continent, and lusted greatly after sea access to expand their power.

They also needed those trade routes to access the dwarven craftsmen located in the Heaven's Reach Divide, the massive mountain range that split the Eastern side of the continent, between Vatyn, who ran all the way to the frozen glaciers of Everwinter in the North, and the Eastern Ocean. The Elves had colonized the Southern reaches of the continent long before human and Beastkin settlers came to the land, thus the great river, nigh unto a narrow moving sea itself, the coasts, and the only two large navigable passes through the massive mountain range, were all under the umbrella of at least one of the tribes of Orlethrem, giving them massive influence on procurement and movements of goods on the continent. The ruling party of Prosper, which had been explained to Ulric by Brighteyes to consist of a consortium of Merchant Kings, was angling to break the Elven control of the Southern half of the continent, having become aggressively expansionist and ever more chafing at having to accede to Elven trade agreements, despite the bounty they brought.

One way to do that was to gain control of the Zelus, though it lay in the near geographical center axis of the continent and thus ran directly through Orlethrem. It was also jealously guarded by the Zelussin. Another way was to forge across the Northern reaches to the East, and establish ports on the North Eastern Coast, which had been done, though that ran into problems in the Eastern Ocean that hadn't been clarified to Ulric and took much longer. It wasn't efficient enough to leverage power from their Elven neighbors, at least not with acceptable profit margins for the heads of Prosper. Or, they could try to seize one of the two great passes from the Melondi, the highland Elves. That was open war, which had been avoided for the same reason as wrestling control away from the Zelussin.

The Western expanse was even worse, but due to geography. The winds blew East to West and crossed the continent by first climbing the Heaven's Reach Divide. Passing over the mountains the prevailing winds then continued on over the continent, including the inland sea Vatyn, before reaching the Ancient Plateau, with its colossal forest, before descending to rush over the Western expanse to the ocean. That meant that the Eastern coast was a rainforest as the air currents were forced over the mountain range, cooled, and dropped heavy precipitation. The rapidly cooling air also produced the permanent snow coverage and glaciers that sat on the mountains and fed the Zelus and Vatyen. Thus, in this passage the air became more arid. Vatyn recharged the winds somewhat with moisture but then that skyward current hit the plateau, the great, several kilometer high wall pushing the flows up rapidly to cool again, raining heavily over Iriel and Celestin, before continuing on over the plateau where it was then harvested of its water by the kilometer high arboreal monoliths.

All of this added up to make the Western expanse of the continent a vast desert. Water was nearly impossible to find, most of it having either dropped at the face of the plateau or been scraped from the air by the hungry trees that towered above. No rivers flowed from that side of the Plateau of Ancients to the Western coast. The desert, called the Great Dracla, killed nearly everyone who attempted to cross it. Establishing trade routes From the Vatyn to the plains was difficult, but done. Pushing those trade routes from the northern part of the continent, around the massive plateau, then West across the Dracla or South to the sea, was impossible for the Valin kingdoms and city states.

Even with the assistance of magic.

The Elves could have done it, with their long lifespans and incremental persistence over centuries, but they had never seen the point, and left the desert to cultivate its sand in peace.

That left the plateau itself. The land was uninhabited, except for the monsters, a wealth untold if one survived to claim it, and rich with resources untouched for eons. It was easily navigable. It spanned half way from the northern half of the continent to the southern half of the continent and provided a large enough coastal access to build a trade colony on the Western Ocean. For the purposes of the powers that be in Prespang it was perfect. Except for all those pesky Elves insisting that it be left alone. And the murderous Greater beast, the Forest Lord that killed everything that crossed the threshold of its domain that couldn't flee to the canopy fast enough.

The Forest Lord was no more.

A tale as old as time then, in Ulric's mind. A bunch of rich old men wanted to get richer. Somewhere there was a land rife with unexploited wealth being guarded by a bunch of inhuman savages, who also, somehow, had a civilization too strong and prosperous to destroy outright. The solution was clear: dissolve that civilization through infighting, graft, assassination, and, if needs be, war against its weaker tribes, if it could be done without mobilizing the greater part of the Orlethrem. The objective was to gain, through one of these means, access to a militarily unbreakable chokepoint or leverage to hold a massive economic advantage or both.

The problem was that the current head honcho of the confederacy was a hardliner with a chip on his shoulder. Bald'rt Iriel held the reins of power and had no love for Prosper, thanks to events long out of living memory for the current leadership. Any attempt at aggressive action now, against either Zelussin or Melond would almost certainly have the Elves mobilizing all forces. The same was likely true if they tried to colonize the sacred woodland to harvest from the Forest of the Forgotten in its canopy. Some way was needed to neutralize this leadership or to cast doubt on it such that a rapid, concerted response would not be available should Prosper's gambit to take control of either the plateau, or a mountain pass be attempted.

The river was out. Too centralized, too long, too easy to be cut off and destroyed. That left an attack on a potentially fortified defensive position packed with Elves, or, a try at grabbing the Holy Land of the savages. Ulric knew which one he would try.

Ulric was starting to get suspicious about those supposed poachers. How would a lowly group of poachers get so deep into Iriel undetected? The more he learned about the Deep Woods folk, the less likely it seemed that they would have allowed such an incursion to reach so far. Add onto that, not only had they penetrated a dense, dangerous, foreign territory undetected, but they had also, by sheer chance, stumbled across the young son of the single man who was the lynchpin of the Orlethrem defense, alone?

No sir. No, that just did not add up in Ulric's mind. Nobody gets that lucky.

What then? Ulric concentrated on the separate pieces, laying them out, as his spoon circled idly in the stew broth, his fingers snapping away beneath the table. A group of poachers, but too many to be poachers, more men made harder hunting and more chance of discovery and only three or four would be needed to take most Lesser beasts. They weren't very experienced at slaying beasts either, as they had demonstrated against the wounded Shadow Panther and Venom Bolt Viper. Poachers that traveled in too large a group to be effective and also sucked at hunting beasts?

So, obviously, they weren't poachers, now that he'd had time to mull things over. Probably more like a squad of special action folk, either domestic operatives good at flying under radar or a very effective mercenary group. Probably more likely to be mercenaries, the attack on the Greater beasts didn't make any sense otherwise. That reeked of a lack of discipline, a perceived chance to get rich in spite of the risks to their objective. A well-trained group of stealthy state actors would have kept the mission in mind and passed on by, leaving no traces, and taking no chances. Then there was the fact that they had attacked an Elven royal with his attendant and friend, alone, with a scenario that felt more and more like a setup.

That took intel. The good stuff, times and places, a who, where, and when sort of thing. How the fuck had they gotten that kind of information?

And then, they had taken their quarry and, instead of crossing through Iriel East to the Zelus or north to pass through the lowland forest and plains to get to Prespang, they ascended the Ancient's Gate to the plateau. Nobody did that, nobody who wanted to live long, the Forest Lord was waiting up there. Unless, somehow, you knew it wasn't. Again, intelligence of surpassing quality. Those child-murdering fucks had way too much information to not have a backer with deep pockets. The more he turned it around in his head, the more he felt like he was onto something.

Consider also that Bald'rt Iriel, in all his years and with three surpassing advisors in his wives, had immediately locked down the entirety of Orlethrem and sent its people into their hidden sanctuaries. Zero to Mach fuck it, and without a single body to make the judgment. No, they'd spotted it already, all the way back then. Not poachers, hired guns there to take a hostage and try to force one of Prosper's most dangerous adversaries off the field. A silent declaration of war, to which Bald'rt had responded immediately by putting his people on defcon 5.

Ulric was now certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that whoever was running things in Prespang had exactly no fucking idea who they were dealing with. Even if they'd gotten Brighteyes all the way back to some secret prison, gotten proof of his capture to Iriel to try to force negotiations with the Orlethrem Crown using his son as collateral, what then? Did they honestly think they could just keep Brighteyes a hostage for the literal centuries he would live? Or that the Elves would just sit and allow a royal family to be murdered?

Ulric would bet all the gold in the world, nothing was going to keep skin on those idiots when the shit hit the fan. Forget about Geyrt, who would likely have made sleeping a capital offense for any Prespang soldiers in the field, Ulric didn't want to even think about what would happen if Vedyr went to work on them. Shor probably had tactical nukes in her cleavage and a joyous itch to use them. He'd watched Bathe jump across a football field size arena like you'd sidestep a puddle and strike a man hard enough to launch him through dense hardwood furniture like it was balsa wood. And then there was the man himself, the Blood Moon.

Bald'rt had, by all accounts, decimated Prosper when he had learned of his son's murder by pirates hired by the merchant lords of that city. He killed so many people his lunar mana soaked with blood, turning crimson, and left that place in shambles after having slaughtered the ruling lords and their families. All of their families. It was a deed he much regretted, and, while the Moonlit Berserkir class carried some element of memory loss during the rage that eased his burden, he worked to avoid subsequent conflict in the coming centuries. Still, the violence did have the intended result: peace. The raiding, the pirates, the mafioso thuggery, it all came to a halt overnight. No one wanted to risk the ire of the young [Lord of the Deep Wood].

Stories were told. Centuries passed. Stories became just that: stories. Myths. A ghost tale around campfires meant to spook children with the horror of that nightmarish happening. The old greedy bastards, once culled, were replaced, eventually, by new greedy bastards. Inevitably does the cream of humanity seem to rise to the top.

Now, here they were.

Ulric had come into Varda at a turning point in history, had seemingly become something of a fulcrum about which the region would be directed into the future. He had slain the aged beast that had, for millennia, closed the plateau from serious consideration. Now it was back in play. And now, time enough had passed that men born to power, unwise in its use, and uncaring of the lives lost in its exercise or expansion, had turned their gaze from history's lessons to gaze on a gilded future. If only they could do something about those blasted knife ears.

A tale as old as time, Ulric thought again. History repeats itself, locking peoples into a grand cycle they cannot see because it stretches through generations, unless someone records it.

A new dawn's light poured into Ulric's room. He'd been so exhausted by the rigors of his perpetual training that he'd slept early, not far after sunsdown, and rose late, just in time to greet the Twins as they crested the horizon of frosted branches. Standing under the iridescent glimmer of Winter mornings in Irielhos Ulric ran through his new morning tradition of a balance beam routine under a blindfold. Of course, the balance beam was in his head and the blindfold was his eyelids, tightly shut and no peeking thank you very much. Still, his feet moved with increasing sureness from day to day. He wavered, he windmilled, and, at times, he planted his bare ass on the floor hard enough to resolve to do better on the next go. Ten times going and ten times coming. Every morning and every night. It was becoming a very zen way of life, this kinesthetic hello and goodbye to every day. Doing the evening runs with shaky legs, courtesy of Idra'se, and the beating throb of a mana exhaustion headache, from one of three bewitching tormenters, just added spice to the thing.

Life is suffering. Pain is weakness leaving the body. Failure is the cocoon of success. There is no spoon. Ulric used every mantra he had to persevere through this hell week. In the background of it all was the budding conception that, maybe, he had started a war by being born. Reforged. Whatever. The reality was that portentous times were coming to this little corner of Varda. War loomed like the Winter's Herald, foretelling a season of bleakness. For somebody at least; increasingly Ulric was sure it would not be for the Elves of Iriel.

Like sandpaper pulling the rust off an axe blade, the warriors of the Iriel'en ground to a razor's edge in their combat readiness. Disciplines that had languished in peacetime were honed under the hawkish eyes of career soldiers and the more bloody-minded Hunters. Nowhere was that more apparent than under the tender mercies of Idra Halb'rt, that greatest practitioner of the Dance, leader of the Iriel'en royal guard, and who could be considered the first sword of Iriel.

Veteran guardsmen, hardened fighters with literal centuries of experience under their belts, vomited onto the floor and burned with fatigue. Mock duels, formation fighting, shooting drills, and combat routines involving being struck with wooden poles while executing maneuvers all of these were employed to burn weakness from their form. Before any of that though, first and foremost, stance work. Footwork was where a warrior was born and footwork was where he or she died for Idra'se. It was grinding, the endless adjustments, the numbing repetition, the exhausting pace. Geyrt had become a full-time stance chiropractor. Movement, adjustment. Movement, adjustment. Like waves in the ocean. He didn't feel like he was getting any better.

Once, in a moment of tired stupidity, Ulric asked when he would be taught how to fight with a spear, knife, or sword. Idra had, incredulously, asked him "What in the hells he thought he'd been doing all this time?". Ulric had answered unsatisfactorily to which Idra told him that "You can barely walk correctly, I cannot, in good conscience, confuse you with something to occupy your hands." and summarized his position as he had at the beginning: "Any time that you believe yourself ready I will accept a spar."

Ulric avoided that trap.

As well he had.

Two visiting warriors from other tribes, one from the plains folk, the Lagranel, and one from the mysterious clan Narii' that had no specific home that they would admit to, the Hidden, asked for a spar from the fabled weapon master. They got what they wanted, and Idra beat them with a shortsword made of some kind of rubbery sapling that made a sound like a bullwhip when he struck, which he did often and with such precision that not a single wound overlapped with another. Pride kept them going well past sense, they didn't want to concede in front of their host brethren. Pride earned them significantly more pain than silence, another lesson that the attendant warriors were eager to learn, at another's expense, from their commander. Never a hair of the elf's head did either one of those warriors touch, nor did they, at any time, get a practice blade so much as halfway through a strike without being parried, counter attacked, or found themselves swinging at empty air.

Idra'se fought like a particularly hateful breeze. No one of the attendant Elves laughed. They all knew he could, and would, do it to them as easily.

One younger warrior, at a tender sixty-some years old, had become fast friends with Ulric. They bantered at one another regularly: criticism levied at one another to spur them on, physical deformities mentioned in passing, inferences about the origins of their parentage, it was all in good fun. Despite the seriousness of their work, the brown and green flecked eyes of the elf always seemed to hold a joke just on the verge of utterance. The young elf, named Kryr'st, was promptly bequeathed the simplification to simply 'Christ' by Ulric for his insistence on a near-daily spar with Idra.

Christ claimed, with some sound reasoning, that if he was going to daily be beaten by the best, he might one day become him. That the young elf had, at an exceedingly rapid pace for Iriel'en warriors, proven himself worthy to be a royal guard indicated his talent. He remained humble in the face of his living god Idra, however. He didn't go to the extremes of the former two Elves but instead bowed out gracefully after what amounted to three mortal blows.

As he had done this daily, however, he had a growing collection of wounds, hence the nickname 'Christ' for the long-forgotten flogged god of Ulric's ancestors. Idra thought it amusing and wasn't as harsh with the youth as he might have otherwise been. For his own part, the young elf, handsome, tanned, though not dark as Geyrt and her ilk, and with straight brown hair shaved along the sides of his head gathered into a short bushy tail on the back, wore his growing bruises with pride, and drank knowledge like a sponge from the master.

Elsewhere, the old boy was not fucking around these days and as Winter's cold sharpened the air, so did Idra harden his men. After his reprimand and the "spars" Ulric redoubled his efforts, shut his gob, and worked to learn what Idra'se had to teach. Which was frankly more than he would ever be able to take in. The Elf shat with better swordsmanship than any other warrior in the citadel.

Outside of the physical punishment, his lessons with the Ladies Iriel were picking up steam. Vedyr had recreated each of his original spells or shown him their likenesses that she had already mastered. Speed, power, control, all head, and shoulders above what he'd managed. The only exception to that rule was in two areas: his [Absolute Zero] and his Ceraun spells. Shor said that [Absolute Zero] was locked behind knowledge Ulric alone possessed, a philosophy that, even after he attempted to convey it, somehow was too lacking for them. They were certain that an attempt to cast that specific spell would be lethal. Ceraun, for similar reasons, was an elemental form at which Ulric found he had talent. He was on his way to theorizing a construction he was certain would produce potent magnetism.

Between Shor's conceptual groundworks and Vedyr's direct coaching Ulric was put through the process of shaping mana, manipulating it into spell works considered common for novices. Gathering water from the air to make fog, a globe of light, smoothing rough stone or roughing smooth stone, a small vortex of air that could lift heavy dust, a zone of air that would resist heating so long as it remained in close contact with the ground, that kind of thing. Minor workings, Shor called them. Heavy improvements in utilizing his mana, is what Ulric called them.

He did also learn to make a series of between four and nine dense, remarkably hot, marble sized fire balls that could be fired in sequence or all at once or which could be made to spin to form a basketball-sized shield of flame capable of stopping arrows. Geyrt proved it by shooting a few at him, unbidden, when he had asked what it could do later that night. The small streams of cinders that bounced off his clothes when they passed through his shield had not harmed him, but he cursed at her soundly and, the next day, Shor wrapped her in a coat of ice and made her wear it for the entire duration of the lesson, having, somehow, learned of the event. He knew not from where, as he'd not mentioned it. Eyes in the portraits, and the walls had ears, he supposed.

Geyrt had apologized later for the prank when they were in private, so at least she was scared of something, if not of him. That didn't stop Ulric from dumping a surreptitiously gathered globe of chilled to near-freezing water on top of her while they bathed. She declared the bath off-limits for pranks after the howls of laughter from present kin eventually stopped. Ulric agreed, satisfied that his point was made, and not wanting to lose that one bastion of solace, though lose it he would if she persisted in that kind of uncalled-for tom-foolery. Arrows were dangerous, and he was far from a master spell caster. If he'd blown the spell, he'd have been perforated and he only had one liver, so far as he knew.

He had come to awareness, probably slower than he should have, that his Shadow had not fallen so far from the clown tree as she first seemed. The woman was engaged in a guerilla war, setting small ambushes, and planning minor nuisances, all under the guise of feigned innocence and prim decorum. She probably thought he hadn't noticed, mostly because he wasn't sure how he was going to retaliate and so pretended ignorance. He could just order her to stop but that was no way to go about winning the game. No, he would have to be better than that. For now, he was willing to take small losses while he crafted a deeper victory.

Spellwork continued. He had been unable to manage any other completely new spells, other than the [Cinderpearls] and their [Cindershield] evolution. What he had managed was to improve all of his current spells by at least one rank. [Stone wall] was at rank IV and he was getting better at making it into definite shapes, rather than crude blocks. He felt like he was on the cusp of something involving moving liquified regions of stone around the ground, like a puddle he controlled. If he put that under someone's feet and locked it solid, they'd be trapped until they could break the stone free. [Ice Blade] was denser, sharper, and chilled things faster at rank III. [Windscythe] reached rank V yesterday, after he'd played around with the vacuuming effect that he'd employed to accelerate it, following some casual suggestions from Shor and steady coaching from Vedyr's own more mature Caelum spells, many of which were complex things that cloaked her form from sight with twisted air, deadened the sound of her steps, and permitted her to stride across empty space like a ghost.

The spell now had a form of auto-targeting. It created a wind tunnel for itself from its destination that both accelerated the compressed air blade and drew it to its target, his control had grown to create blades dense enough that they would no longer disintegrate. The tunnel could be curved allowing Ulric to create several small blades that had unpredictable attack vectors. Coupled with their near invisibility, it was a hell of a spell for inflicting wounds on unarmored targets. Best of all, unless the opponent used a spell or mana pulse to shed the tiny threads of Caelum that anchored it, it would not miss and would follow them at ever-increasing velocity, meaning that the harder they worked to avoid it, the more dangerous it got.

Bathe's instruction proved to be the most fundamentally important, as it represented an area in which he had no real prior experience. Evoking was a matter of practice and concentration, understanding the nature of the arcane was like a physics lesson, but body magic on the level of Bathe's was a completely different thing altogether. Bathe used her core to saturate her entire body with mana, binding its tissues in a protective layer of magic that also enhanced it. Most master mages managed to do something similar, to heighten their physicality. Nearly every nonmage class possessed some form of body augmentation skill, at some point, though mostly of a damage reduction variety.

Ulric didn't even know where to start.

Infusing mana into his flesh was not the same at all as circulating it through his core. It had to be done extremely slowly, at his level, with tiny amounts of mana, and with the utmost precision. Bathe could, for all intents and purposes, do a full body Overcharge that let her multiply her strength exponentially. At the more casual levels, she was merely five times as strong as she should have been. If that doesn't sound like a lot, wait until someone uses one finger to lift you off the ground or moves faster than you can see to kick a hole through a rock wall without so much as a scrape. He had been suitably impressed until she had Vedyr hit her with a softball-width copy of his [Hydrocutter] and tanked it without a bruise.

Ulric had carved through Forest Lord bone with that spell. When he realized that the dainty, beautiful creature in front of him could probably have beaten one of the great terrors of the continent to death with her fists, he became more appropriately terrified of her. She hadn't done anything to reduce that when, in his first two days of struggle with the process, even with the other two assisting him, he couldn't figure out how it was supposed to work, this fickle inner magic, so, she laid a casual hand on his chest, directly over his core, and moved his mana for him. Directly, with no effort on his own part, Bathe Iriel highjacked the mana inside his body to move it according to her direction, showing him the way to properly manipulate his own magic. Just as easily she could have turned his mana against him, destroyed him from the inside.

She was a Chi-wielding mana Monk dialed to twelve out of ten. Fucking hell.

Ulric was slow in this practice, but he could feel the benefits. Ever so slightly he had bumped up the toughness of his body to the point that his belt knife only penetrated his finger with a fair bit of pressure, instead of the near-instant wounds it produced at the slightest touch before. These were the sorts of improvements that could keep him alive in a place full of monsters. Both those that roamed the wilds and those that walked on two legs.

So it was, on this eleventh day, he found the slightest optimism blooming in his heart. Troubles were a coming, but they just might be biting off more than they could chew. A knock on the inner door showed growth of a different kind. By all that was good and growing, his Shadow had learned common courtesy. Somewhere between the ice prison, the frigid water bath, and whatever the hell went on between her and her Mothers while he was having his mystical juices squeezed like a tropicana, she was almost ready to take places.

Ulric was under no illusions. A rose, by any other name, would not sting the hand any less than should one brush up against Geyrt Iriel. Their running gag war would not abate and, Ulric had to admit, she kept him on his toes. Easy to relax over much when you were being as well kept as he was under Bald'rt's hospitality.

He dressed into a set of regular old warrior silks, they having quickly become his favorite go to clothing. That leather and bone armor would feel like canvas the next time he wore it. Decency, at least of out appearance, obtained, he called to permit his Shadow entry. The carved door, all leaves, limbs, and woven patterns, vaguely Celtic, swung open to reveal the tall, dark-skinned beauty that had, through various acts of foolishness by the both of them, become his effective servant, man at arms, and personal assassin.

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In she walked all leopard grace and deadly intent. Veridian eyes flecked with bronze scanned the room, cataloguing everything in it, before fixing him with its habitual glare. Even after the near two weeks of his stay in Irielhos, her entry still acted like a too bright light, capturing his attention by instinct. At least he no longer went all deer in headlights around her.

Just as well, she'd probably find a way to bother him if she knew to what extent her sudden appearance disturbed his inner peace. She already had a tremendously annoying way of finding that exact moment wherein silence had reigned long enough for him to grow comfortable to lay a non sequitur on him and thereby prevent his ever forgetting she was there.

It was on purpose. She knew it, he knew it, and she knew he knew she knew it. He should have told her to come in while he was still naked, the sight of his tanned hairy rump punishment for her perpetual distraction. But no, she had knocked and he couldn't break the unspoken rules of courtesy. Another way then.

"Good morning, Geyrt. I trust the morning finds you well. No bruises today bargained for by trading lip with your mother?" He asked.

A slight flinch, followed by a grimace. Ahh, he sighed internally, Wunderbar. He hadn't been sure, not entirely, but she had been slightly too adamant about standing during dinner, claiming an ache in her leg. A mild hitch in her step when one of those pouches strewn about her belt came down a little too jarringly against her hip on the stairs. It was worth spending an arrow, and rewarding when the shot struck truly.

"My bruises, or their absence, will not interfere with my duties Glade Chief. They grow easier by the day as your movements slow." She lilted at him, her tone trying to hide temper.

The remark passed wide of its target, he had watched a seasoned soldier have to have a medic use healing magic on crippled legs when they'd cramped from stance work so hard the muscles had pulled. If you weren't in pain after Idra's training you weren't trying. The only reason he wasn't completely incapacitated was his freakish physiology. Briefly, he was tempted to fight dirty and openly lament that she could not share his suffering by joining them in training. That was a blow too low though, it very much wounded Geyrt that she was no longer welcome among her old comrades as one of their members. There was a difference between trading barbs and trying to truly wound. A different tack, since she'd brought up the topic.

"I am glad that your service does not burden you. I would free you, if I could, but alas, your Father insists that the terms for your duty are lifelong. What was it that Lady Bathe said about master mages trained in body magic, such as she has been teaching me? That they are known to live for hundreds and hundreds of years, well beyond the span of most of their kin? I am afraid that long indeed may be your indenture, if you do your job well." He rejoined, scoring another point.

He could see it scrawled across her face, as it had been when Bathe had told him in her hearing before they parted, that archmages were so long lived. She had been prepared for her sentence to last a century or so. That it might continue well into the lifespan of even her kin was despair. It did not bother him that she should be so aggrieved at the thought of the duration of her term; he would have considered suicide, if it were him.

Fresh this blow was, across stinging revelation, and she bit her lip without returning fire. He was in fine form today, and she knew it. Geyrt knew when he was on top of his game and chose silence rather than take any more punishment. Ulric took his win with some degree of smugness. Taking points off any of the Iriels was a thing well done, they were, to a one, not easy targets.

It was odd, that they should engage in this ritual of casual sparring. But sarcasm was Ulric's true language and Geyrt seemingly didn't know how to talk to anyone but Brighteyes and Idra without demeaning them. Certainly, her cheek was landing her in hot water with her Mothers, now that they had taken a more direct hand in her education. A short talk with Brighteyes, in response to Ulric's half-sarcastic question about how Vedyr hadn't drowned her daughter, revealed that in those days following the Blood Moon rising over Prosper, and the closing of Iriel to any but Elven kin or those directly permitted, Vedyr had been much absent, hunting intruders and border runners.

She had driven like her Heartwood Spear namesake into the organized efforts to undermine the seclusion announcement. Like the Act of Seclusion of old, buried beneath the sea Japan in his world, there had been many who stood to turn a profit breaking the embargo on movement between the North Western part of the continent and the South Western coast, with Iriel lying between. Apparently, hanging the bodies of a couple of dozen of their leaders at a time from the wood line discouraged even hardened smugglers and border runners. But it had taken time and, in that time, Geyrt had been left largely to her own devices.

It had not served her well. What her self-imposed isolation and relentless pursuit of vengeance had done to increase her Hunter's craft, it had only magnified in her insociability. Which, Ulric had to admit, he understood well. It closely mirrored his own descent into hermitude. That was why he was convinced that her Mothers were trying to break her bad habits, and why he didn't so much take it personal that she had a bad attitude towards being, essentially, a bodyguard man servant.

What she needed, badly, was a friend.

He was pretty sure that he couldn't be that, and her Honor, her keeper, not at the same time. That was even assuming he would be able to find enough common ground with her to achieve such a monumental task. Ironic, that he could so easily see now in the alien woman what he'd failed to see in himself before it had, essentially, killed him. He'd imploded under the weight of his own largely avoidable pressures and his spiral of self-destructive behaviors. Death was amazing therapy, really gave a man some perspective.

Having established that, today at least, he was the more able verbal jouster, Ulric beckoned to the tray of breads, cheeses, fruit, and a delicious tea that had been brought early this morning for breakfast. It had been a simple thing, to ask for a breakfast tray, and the Duties had done wonderfully with their choices of repast. He needed to give them something to thank them for their incredible efficiency. Put it on the list, Ulric thought.

Silence, as usual, accompanied the meal. It had been a little odd at first, the no talking while eating custom. People in his old world had made discussion during a meal a near ubiquitous norm. A guy could get accused of being sullen if he stayed quiet over dinner. But here, you just enjoyed your meal in peace. It was nice. After the meal, of course, you could chat away. It gave one who did not wish to engage in small talk an easy, polite, out: they simply held a biscuit, or roll, or anything really, on their plate and that bought them a free pass to remain out of the conversation without insulting anyone. Geyrt had fidgeted with a slice of toast until it fairly well evaporated. Those crumbs, those were the crumbs of a battle won in Ulric's heart.

Instead of plying one another with small talk, Ulric took the opportunity to review his personal imprint on the Akashic record, his status. He had done so with increasing rarity, having received fewer *pings* to mark drastic changes while also scaring the living shit out of himself. It seems he had more or less settled down, especially with the Thaumaturgy. The quick gains were over now, he would have to really study to improve those workings, except for the new ones, these cinder spells that he reviewed with no little pride.

Cinderpearl

Condensed Incendere, solid flame forms a jewel of almost completely enclosed heat which can be released at the caster's will with destructive release of trapped energies or held to burn through struck objects until the integrity of the Thaumaturgy is compromised and it explodes.

Cindershield

Coordinating jewels of flame creates a barrier of Incendere, burning objects that attempt to pass through the focused heat of the array. This shield absorbs heat into the Cinderpearls that make it up soaking Incendere that touches it until the constructs are too strained to hold more energy, causing them to explode.

Even Shor said those solid fire constructs were fascinating. Combining geometric optics, total internal reflection, and a sound working knowledge at thermodynamics and heat shields was a beast at directing fire magic. Ulric had nearly as much success wielding flame as he did lightning. Ice magic he hadn't done much with since he couldn't figure out how to weaponize it, but that was a creativity problem, not a skill issue. He wasn't anywhere as good with water, air, or earth magics, although the wind magic was coming along nicely. After several attempts that produced nothing worthwhile, he'd abandoned attempts at Sano, life magic and healing, as well as German, plant manipulations. He didn't have the touch, there was something wrong with his understanding about to compel mana to do anything useful. A guy can't be good at everything, even with alien knowledge helping, he supposed.

The hovering image of his Akashic imprint gave him the willies, as usual, but he was growing ever more comfortable with Varda's mysteries, not that he got so much closer to unraveling them.

[Status]

Name Ulric Einar

Class: Elementalist

Subclass: Warrior

Might

19(+12)

Height

2.08m

 

Grace

17(+12)

Weight

102kg

Impetus

17(+12)

Age

Error! 43/26

Cogitation

21(+9)

Sex

Male

 

 

 

 

Wisdom

16(+14)

Core Resonance: Tempered-Unaspected

 

 

Ingenuity

18(+7)

Sapient Race:

 

 

Durability

16(+12)

Valin* (Highlands tribal)

 

 

Soul

18(+20)

Status: Healthy, rested, mild hangover,(healing), slight deyhydration, alert, sturdily clothed (Forest Lord leather jerkin, slacks, overcoat, deerhide long boots), Mana saturation

Core Reserve

120%

Core Regen

125%

Base Traits

Reforged, Field Conduit, Core Capacitor, Warrior's Instincts

Titles

Twice Borne, Lord of the Ancient Glade, Destroyer of the Forest Lord, Snake Charmer

Class Traits

Elemental Refinement, Battlemage

Class Skills

Core Pulse, Overcharge

Subclass Traits

Armor Fitting, Basic Weapon Proficiency, Longbow Proficiency

Sublass Skills

Battle Rhythm

Thaumaturgy

Voltaic Grip (V), Flame Crash (III), Hydrocutter (III), Stone Wall (IV), Windscythe (V), Ice Blade (III), Absolute Zero (III), Lightning Javelin (III), Voltaic Riot (II), Cinderpearl (II), Cindershield (I)

Ulric was delighted to see that his base stats were increasing.

When he'd first awakened to Varda, had inspected his stats then, they had been decidely high, for what was considered an average man in the Before. Especially if he thought back to his physical potential on Earth, he'd never been what you might call athletic. At his best he'd have been called fit. Upon reforging and his time in the glade the bush wizard had grown to be head and shoulders above what could be thought of as even exceptional on his home world. After being pushed daily well beyond reasonable human limits for nearly two weeks, by this point, he was pushing into the unknown.

If ten were considered average he was somewhere close to double that in many of his base stats. With the bonuses conferred by various accomplishments, codified by titles in the Akashic, a mystery that still fucked with his brain when he considered it, he was well beyond even that mid-twenties mark. Some of those stats sat just above triple what an average, unenhanced human should be.

He felt it too.

His body weighed nothing, unencumbered. Even the absolutely killing work-out regimen with the royal guard was becoming slightly less exhausting, though the damage was accumulating and he needed a recovery day. He would heal from those slight muscle tears, the joint abuse, the bruising, far more rapidly than was normal. Mostly with just a good night's sleep.

Mana exhaustion daily was pushing his core to grow similarly. He was definitely channeling more mana than he had when he'd arrived. This growth was more subtle, magic was less well defined than the explicit stats, a more fluid concept. Ulric could tell when he concentrated on his core that he was more "full", that his reservoir of energy was greater. Maybe only enough in the last week to cast one or two extra spells. But that was definitely not nothing, not even close. The Dragons he'd been training with had each been surprised at how many spells he could use or how long he could sustain a particular spell work before tiring. It was unusual, they had said, for one of his age to have that kind of volume.

Dangerous, was what Shor called it. His core was still refining pure mana, pure mana that, in great enough concentration, liked to harmonize explosively with literally any other strong mana source. Like the sun. Or fire. Or the air. Or the ground. Or living creatures. Which meant basically everything could set up a chain reaction. Spooky. But that was a problem for Future Ulric, today's Ulric had received a message this morning, indicating that he should attend the Great Hall for an important meeting with the Lord of Iriel and he was, with his Shadow in tow, on his way.

The Great Hall was as impressive as ever. Midmorning found him, accompanied by an evidently recovered Geyrt, standing before the gilded doors. The guardsmen at the door, now familiar fellows in suffering, wordlessly opened the doors at the sight of the two of them. Leaving the crisp air to enter into the comfortable interior was, as he had become accustomed to as of late, another small miracle of magic.

The barriers placed upon the fortress city locked the air temperature into one that would be ever so slightly chill for the unclothed. These same barriers also prevented the apparent gaps in trellised wood windows or woven branch walls from permitting air through them at any noticeable speed lending the place a fresh, almost outdoorsy, atmosphere, without the draft. Yet another trick he was going to have to reverse engineer for his home in the glade.

At the dais, in his customary not quite slouch, sat Bald'rt in his King's chair. To the sides in their highbacked miniature thrones sat the Ladies. Wordlessly, Ulric approached to stand in the presentation area. Idra was a few steps off to the side and nodded his greetings. Various other guards stood their positions. Probably more for the safety of any fools who got lost and stumbled inside than for any of those who sat in the positions of honor.

"Well met Ulric! I am glad you could come early, we will have time for a Midsunsrise meal, if you should like, after we discuss matters of state." The Elf King boomed warmly.

Ulric responded in kind, "And to you Bald'rt, and your Ladies as well. It is good to find everyone in high spirits, even as Winter's grip tightens. I, for one, enjoy the bitter cold, but I know not all are as fond."

Bald'rt smiled then, "Not all of us, or any but you, as it happens, wear a Winter Wolf across our face, Glade Chief. But I do agree, the weather has been mild for this season and this is why I have summoned you." Lord Iriel declared, joking, of course, about the beard Ulric wore, and which none of the Aes'r but old Gother did.

"We had agreed to escort you back to the glade to give you the opportunity to set your home in order for a more extended stay and now, with the snows growing thick in the mountains and across the lowlands, I feel it is a good time to come through on this aspect of our agreement. You have had time to settle into Irielhos and to adjust to our customs, quite well, I might add, there has only been one killing, and that one who should have been culled years ago." The man chuckled.

"The Iriel'en have seen your commitment to making good on your status and my wives speak well of your progress, doubters though they may have been when I first vouched for you." The Elf King turned a smug glace to his wives, who greeted him with a collective eye roll before he returned to the discussion.

"Now, with travel within Orlethrem growing sparse, I can spare the men to guide you back to the Forest of the Forgotten and your home in this Ancient Glade." Intoned Bald'rt.

There was a lot to unpack in that; as usual, the Elven King put many balls in the air at once, probably on purpose. He did seem to enjoy a fast pace of discussion. Ulric was glad to know that his suffering over the past few days was, at the least, acknowledged as his giving it the old college try.

"Thank you Iriel Chief, and also thanks to your wives and your gift of Idra'se's time. I have learned more in these few days than I would have in months, if not years, of puzzling things out on my own. I hope I have not pulled them away from important matters, in trying times." Ulric said earnestly.

No exaggeration there, he had been given a radical jump start to his mage craft and a foundation on which to learn how to fight, something which he had been, to an extent he had not truly known, truly lacking. It was a gift to be able to watch truly competent artisans work their trade. You didn't necessarily prevent all the mistakes you were going to make watching a master machinist ply his tools, but if you paid attention, you saw a hundred ways to save time, to build efficiency into your own experience. So it was with his training here, he had had his eyes opened to many aspects of spell work and combat that drastically increased the pace of his improvement. There really were no shortcuts on the road to betterment, but it made a great big damn difference if somebody cleared the path in front of you.

A wave of his hand discarded the thought of troubling his wives, Bald'rt having made monopoly on that business.

"Of course not, of course not. Believe me, they would have only put that time to finding more ways to inject trouble into my…erm..." Bald'rt's boisterous voice trailed off with a nervous glance towards the women seated to his left, who had not so much as twitched.

He coughed once, lightly into his hand before continuing.

"My apologies Vedyr, I meant to say that it has given my ladies a fine…distraction…from other more tedious matters." Finished the Lord of the Deep Wood, who, Ulric could swear, was bleeding freely from a nearly invisible slit in the side of his robe.

Shor casually loaned her fellow Wife a cloth with which to wipe her knife, in advance, the woman herself having used hers, for the same purpose as now, and given it up for cleaning earlier that day.

Lady Vedyr Iriel, let the blade Ulric hadn't seen her draw slide back into its sheath with a loud snap of guard to scabbard, and spoke without heat, her intended "correction" of her husband coming more from habit than from true anger.

"Apology accepted husband, I do wish you would practice better diligence; it would save the laundresses a goodly amount of time. So too the tailors. Back to our discussion, Ulric's improvements have been acceptable. We have some concern about the unaspected nature of his core and the surety of his need to, at some point in the near future, awaken it."

Shor interjected then, with more urgency than her marital comrade, "It must not be put off too long. The Eternal Gaze may have provided a substantial boon in the formation of your core, Glade Chief, but that does not mean the nature of it is far different from any other. You stand upon the precipice of crisis, closer now than ever for our efforts; either you attempt the awakening, cripple your core's growth to achieve stasis, or risk runaway mana reaction and explosive resonance."

Bathe chimed in calmly, offering Ulric some good news to offset Shor's worrying statement.

"It is well in hand, we are laying the groundwork for a successful awakening Glade Chief. You improve in your mana manipulations with Sister Vedyr, your Way is growing more firm as Sister Shor instructs, and I have seen to providing you some ability at infusing mana, you have most all of the tools to advance, Ulric, so long as you do not wait too long."

Geyrt's expression remained impassive but Ulric couldn't help but wonder if she was on team explode. He couldn't fault her for that if she was. Doubtful he'd ever really know though. Not important, he decided, he was no mind reader and he wouldn't think less of anybody for what they might feel about his untimely demise. Gods knew that was an exercise in paranoid neuropathy.

"I'm glad that you're confident, but, just for my peace of mind, would you mind explaining exactly what sort of process the awakening requires? It'll give me some perspective for the trajectory of my training if I have concrete objectives." Ulric requested, just a tad nervously.

Overprepared was minimally successful, in his experience. His engineer's training had made redundancy and overbuilding keystones to plans not collapsing at their first real stress test. Especially when it was his very own priceless keister on the line.

Shor indulged him.

"The resonant reaction of unaspected mana exponentially rises with the density of that mana. To aspect your core is to evolve it to become capable of automatically resonating with mana as it is refined from the free mana of the world. In a way, it has similarities to casting in that you must intentionally tune the mana inside yourself to a specific form, what form is mostly irrelevant. Cultural and pragmatic reasons push most Elves towards aspecting their cores towards the Lunar, Sylvan, Caelum, Helios, and other elements most prevalently found within the territories of Orlethrem. This is also due to the difference between Elves and Humans." Began the fiery-haired Elf.

"An Elf has a core that is more intimately tied to the land than a Human's. It synchronizes not only with the mana surrounding the body but with the ley lines that flow deep within Varda, and the webs of energy that make up the entire world around the Elf. When inside the region where the core is tuned an Elf has nearly triple the mana regeneration of even the most enduring of Human or Beastkin magi, a thing we call our Homebond. Effectively, Elves on their home territory are immune to mana exhaustion. Outside of this region though the dissonance of strange mana currents and energy flows to which the Elven core is not adapted hinders its ability to extract mana from the surroundings, cutting the regeneration to a fraction of its normal potential. This is one reason we do not often travel far outside our familiar territories, it takes weeks or a very intensive ritual to reconfigure our homebond. Interestingly, Elves born…" Shor continued on with her lecture until Vedyr coughed loudly into her hand.

Realizing she had gone long into a tangent, the tips of her ears reddened in the first serious display of a loss of composure he'd seen from the woman. Looking sidelong at the darker woman to her left in thanks she nevertheless returned to her original point.

"Anyway, I have digressed. To evolve your core first you must actively tune the mana inside it to the element you intend to aspect. This requires the utmost precision, all of the mana must be in harmony or fluctuations can arise that create cascading waves inside your core, resulting in its destruction. While this is happening you must also be cycling the aspected mana throughout your body's mana channels and infusing it into your flesh, to better force any unaspected mana to resonate with only the element intended and none of the surrounding energies. Lastly, you must then build a web or shell of pure aspected mana around yourself, isolating your entire body from the world around you, to cut off contaminating influences. Once you have achieved this you must maintain it for an extended period, minutes to an hour, to force your core to become harmonized to this one and only mana form. To fail at any of these tasks is to perish." Shor finished, grimly.

Ulric didn't like the sound of that very much. It sounded like juggling while standing on a unicycle and jumping through flaming hoops. He wasn't too worried about tuning mana, he had a pretty good feel for that from all of his practice in the glade and his recent experiences in Irielhos had contributed greatly to a finer sense of elemental energies. The cycling was also not a big problem, but infusion was certainly not something he was ready to do and do anything else. He'd only just barely started picking it up and only after Bathe had, metaphysically, held his hand. The shell thing sounded kind of like an Overcharge, a holding of a spell form while you empowered it with mana. If he hadn't been doing that since the beginning he very much doubted he would be able to just add the process into the rest. The real issue was that it all had to be done in concert. Any one thing? Sure, he was confident he could pull it off. Everything at once? That's a yikes.

No sir, this whole thing sounded finicky to him. Worse, it was probably going to get harder to do the closer to crisis he got. If his own internal mana was beginning to react randomly it would put strain on his core, he probably would have to invest some of his limited attention to just keep things under control, adding another layer to the mental gymnastics required doing during the awakening process.

Frowning, Ulric was about to open a line of inquiry to dig out exactly the mechanics of each of those processes until Bald'rt interjected.

"There is a better method Glade Chief. My Shor is a purist, Ulric, she believes everything must be done the hard way. It is easier than this if you cheat." Spoke the Elf Lord, ignoring the daggered stare that stabbed at him from his side.

Also metaphorically. For now.

"When you go to awaken your core, simply do so in a place that is already concentrated, saturated with the intended element. Lunar Elves tend to wait until a full moon and find a high place. The Sylvans climb a particularly old Heartwood tree deep in the forests. Many who would atune Caelum use Winter's Herald, stand in the open to let the whipping wind saturate themselves. If you can arrange it, this will hasten the process, make it easier to isolate and resonate with a pure elemental form. Most Elves who awaken do it this way." He continued glancing wryly at his Crimson-haired partner.

"Not all are as gifted in the arcane as you dearest wife. Glade Chief you have done well, if you don't mind me saying, for one of your kind and your relative experience, but most would have spent years preparing in advance of their core reaching its saturation limit. It would seem the fates are rushing you down your path at a perilous rate, I would suggest you sway the odds in your favor however you may." Advised Bald'rt seriously.

This was advice Ulric was going to take to heart. Stacking the deck in his favor was well worth some consideration. It would seem that he needed to make choices about which elemental form with which to synchronize his core and begin thinking how to make arrangement on Bald'rt's suggested exposure therapy.

Shor did not look exactly pleased with her husband's "alternative methods".

"Glade Chief, there are ways to do things and then there are correct ways to do things. My husband is not wrong, immersion in the mana you attune does facilitate the awakening, but what he has forgotten is that it also makes it harder to resist being consumed by the essence of the mana and become an elemental." A sidelong glance at her husband accompanied the statement.

"He would not consider that a possibility because his head is harder than the rock that anchors mountains, but many find their wills shaken during the awakening." Shor spoke, her sister wives tilting their heads in agreement as she continued.

"Indeed, the transformation of your core is the first step to being an elemental but mages maintain their identity and condense the mana inside themselves, drawing it through their body and expelling it into the shell which isolates. This is done to protect yourself from excess elemental energy to prevent it from becoming overwhelming. If you do not learn the proper way and go into it thinking you do not have to execute the awakening with dedication, you will not survive." Concluded the Crimson Sphinx.

Bald'rt didn't seem to mind being called stubborn. It was probably akin to someone announcing that the sky was blue. He said nothing though, content to have given Ulric a slight edge on surviving the event without disturbing his mate too greatly.

Ulric, in the meantime, was quietly chewing his lip while he tried to absorb this information. He wasn't sure how much time he had to mature his technical skills in manipulation of mana, especially the complex multitasking. He remembered the feverish experience of his first days, before he'd learned to harness mana, when his body had been unable to properly handle being saturated by the heavily mana laden environment of the Plateau of Ancients. The major difference being that all he'd had to do then was actually utilize his core to expel mana, driven to it through desperation, terror, and the instinctual desire to live of the Forest Lord attack. This awakening would require actual skill, concentration, and full cognizance of what he was doing. Stupid magical wonder, with its stupid magical booby traps. He should have known there'd be a catch.

Ulric remembered then that when he'd scanned Brighteyes, the elf had an aspected core, Lunar to be exact. Didn't that mean that Brighteyes had done this already? Surely something a boy could do Ulric could do. When he said as much the attendant Elves sighed loudly. Uh oh.

It was his Shadow that saw fit to enlighten him with a quiet whisper in his ear.

"Ulric Glade Chief, Lumyt'seit is, how we say, born to his magical nature. My brother attuned his core while watching a full moon when he was ten, a few weeks after having first tempered his core. None had even explained what awakening was, there had been no point, it would have been decades away. He did it on instinct, naturally. It would not be wise to expect that you will do so as easily, almost none are so gifted." Geyrt explained in hushed voice.

Ah. A genius. He might have suspected as much, given the boy's parentage. Now Ulric was looking he didn't see the kid anywhere. Probably studying. His birth mother, Bathe, had put him on house arrest until he'd finished his combat and spellcraft training, in a fit of motherly overprotectiveness.

Well damn, looks like it was going to be the hard-hoed row for Ulric.

"I see, that is good to know Geyrt." He said to the form hovering over his shoulder.

Turning back to the dais he continued in a forced cheerfulness "Never mind then. Thank you for the advice, my hosts, it is more clear now what must be done to prepare for this eventuality. If it helps, I don't notice any particular strain on my core yet, nothing out of the ordinary, so we probably have some time."

Bald'rt clapped his hands and said, with actual cheer, "Indeed, this is so! Let us return to the matter at hand then. You have need to return to your glade and make ready for the months that Winter will sit upon the land. I have detached four warriors from Irielhos and a royal guardsman, a young Elf of promise who requested the duty, Kryr'st. These will accompany you through the deep wood and on past the Ancient's Gate to your home. They are also going to be scouting the lands above, I have heard tell from the birds of odd movements that I wish made better known. These are ready for travel even now. I advise you begin your journey today, Glade Chief, after we have lunched, the snows will deepen swiftly and the blizzards are not to be chanced later."

A sound plan, if announced without as much heads up as Ulric preferred. He couldn't think of any good reason to delay. The Winter wasn't going to be going anywhere for awhile. In point of fact, it had already been longer than he'd originally planned before returning. He was going to miss the baths, so, so much.

"An assessment I agree with Bald'rt, and thanks again. Let's enjoy lunch then, if you have no other matters of import. It will be a good week before I return to your hospitality, two days going, two days coming, and a day or three, depending on what needs tending to in the glade." Ulric said graciously.

The royal family descended the dais and they all took seats at the table, chatting amicably of this or that once the plates were clear. Over a weak and deliciously spiced wine Bald'rt told tales of the history of the Orlethrem and of his marriages to his wives, political arrangements all, though not entirely. His wives were upfront with Ulric about their initial doubts, but that the love of the Lord for his people and his winsome charm were enough to sway them, alongside the advantage of tying their clans to a warrior who had proven himself to be one of the greatest spell-blades in an age.

That they had then created a consortium capable of leading the entire Elven confederation was a sort of mutual goal, their children destined to join noble lines throughout Orlethrem to guide the tribes toward greater prosperity, and they were determined to preserve their kin through the upheavals to come.

Vedyr told humorous, to Ulric, stories of the rather lengthy, and semi-murderous, courtship she ran her husband to be through before accepting his proposal. Bathe spoke of a previous husband and son, both lost in wars several centuries past, long before her relatively recent marriage to the [Lord of the Deep Wood]. Ulric nearly gawped when Shor spoke of her eight daughters, and he swore Bald'rt's eyebrows tried to waggle off of his head until Bathe lightly drove a finger onto the stab wound Vedyr had left earlier. All told, it was a pleasant way to spend the morning. Eventually though, the meal and post lunch talk ran their course and it was time for Ulric to depart Irielhos for the glade.

Ulric was terrible at goodbyes, so he wished them the best and headed off to make ready for travel. The old armor, quaint now that he'd seen more professional stuff, was nevertheless effective in its workmanship. He moved more easily in it now, courtesy of his conditioning with the guardsmen. Geyrt had his bow now, so he traveled only with a light pack, his spear, and his bone knife. The woman herself had returned to her usual Hunter's attire, out from the heavy layered robes of her casual wear. The thigh-high boots were still best, in his eyes.

The two of them joined up with the assigned soldiers at the bottom floor of the fortress city. Greetings and well wishes from the busy craftsmen and warriors had followed him the entire way down, making him feel awkwardly welcome in a way he'd never really known. After a brief greeting with his travel companions and some casually exchanged insults with Christ they set off to return to the glade. Ulric found himself slightly down at leaving, in a major surprise to himself, for how much he'd looked forwards to going home.

He was going to miss these odd folk, they had grown on him.

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