He stared at her. She had to be making this up. Brighteyes was a kid. A sharp kid, a great kid, but a kid.
He's older than you are, Ulric, in whichever world you want to think about, his traitor brain whispered.
"Is…he ready for that kind of responsibility? I mean…he's pretty young to be ruling a nation, isn't he?" Ulric checked.
Taipan considered that for only a moment, deciding that this was more of her Honor being unused to the ways of this, his new world.
"None are ready for the mantle of Kingship Ulric. They can prepare as they like, but to feel the weight of your people's lives on your every word is not a natural thing." Said his Shadow.
That was…a surprisingly wise thing to say. He forgot, at times, thanks to her nature and her appearance, that the lovely lady had been around the block a few times.
"Fair point, Taipan, fair point." He conceded.
"Brighteyes is in charge then. How safe is he? I don’t know about any of you but I thought Irielhos was untouchable. The way I understood it, your kin would know an enemy was coming for a thousand kilometers. That dick bag mage caught me with my pants down." Ulric probed.
He'd actually almost literally had his pants down, he'd done up his belt a couple of seconds before he got his shit roasted.
Now was that hateful scowl on Taipan's face, but not directed towards him. Blood, pain, and death spiraled around in her emerald eyes, shimmering metallic flecks seeming to flash in her irises.
"The beasts of Prosper used an artifact. We found its remains on the Cryomancer archmage who led the attack. It had been burned through, its powers destroyed, but our Loremasters identified it. It was old, from the time of the Ancients, and it cloaked those near it from our wards and detection, in the mundane and in the magical." Taipan revealed, the shock of their veil of safety being broken still lodged in her heart.
"They used the artifact to break the wards on Irielhos, the shields that guarded it against the elements and magical attacks. That was not the intended use for the device, the energies consumed it, but it worked. The forces that conspire against Iriel used it, for years probably, to weave in and out of our protections. They created channels, hidden paths of safe travel through our wards to move undetected. That is why they were on the Plateau. They were setting up a base of operations, to be able to hold a high ground from which to launch attacks through the Ancient's Gate." His Shadow explained, disbelieving.
"My mothers, your Dragons, found the anchor points for these invasion routes and destroyed them, along with the ones facilitating their creation. Twenty-seven agents for the Merchant Kings, bought for gold and paid with death for breaking the peace and making war against Orlethrem." Taipan said, an evil set to her features.
"It was this closing of the gaps in our defense that triggered the attack. They saw their window to hurt us closing and were forced to spring the trap before it was truly ready." She continued, laying out the full scope of the conspiracy.
"In the spring, when they intended to launch their attack, the intent was to have this assault accompanied by their ground forces, moving into Orlethrem and bypassing its defenses to strike us from multiple angles from positions that should have been impossible. It would have been a catastrophe. The Orlethrem are strong but much fewer than Prespang. Always we have used the space to punish invaders, to funnel and control their movements and thus spare most of the population from danger. This plan, had it worked, would have had us pinned into corners from the beginning. A great many Aes'r would have perished, even if we were able to find eventual victory. More likely, Orlethrem, as it exists today, would have been shattered."
Ulric whistled softly. That was, more or less, the worst case scenario. The mage assault would have decapitated the Orlethrem confederation's leadership, crippled the predominant force projection of the Elves, the Iriel'en, and delivered a mortal blow to the morale of the Elves while carving them up with superior numbers.
Total war, with a sprinkle of genocide. Humans really did seem to be the same wherever you found them. All it took was a couple of sociopaths wielding the power of nations to inflict horror on the rest of the world. A song of many names, and a dance with the same eventual steps.
"What changed, Taipan? From what I've heard there has been a peace, uneasy though it may have been, for hundreds of years. Why now?" Ulric asked, not even certain if it mattered.
His Shadow shrugged, clearly of the same mind.
"Who is to know the minds of these people Ulric? There is a reason the Otherkin are not welcome in Iriel. We simply grew tired of trying to understand why they brought their evils to our lands, why they did as they did. It was enough to know that they would, eventually. I painted you with that brush, unjustly, perhaps, but not entirely without reason. I regret that immensely, but I hope you can understand now some of it." Taipan pled.
It didn't taste good, no sir. Could he truly blame her for her attitudes?
Yes, he decided, yes he could. That was the point, after all. Every man is responsible for his own actions, and only his own actions. Every individual is given the right of being treated as they deserved, instead of being treated as the worst of their kind. There was no wrong in hating someone, some people deserved that contempt, some people earned it. But it was important to hate them for their choices, not for who their parents happened to be or for where they were born, or what they looked like.
"I understand it Taipan. I do. It doesn't make it right, but I do." He offered. "Unfortunately, my home world had records detailing, in painful detail, the excesses a man might commit against another man, for no better reason than he was different in appearance, or had resources they wanted, or prayed to a different cosmic ghost."
Old drowned Japan came to mind. They'd essentially declared their lands off-limit towards foreigners, and went almost ninety-nine percent pure isolationist. It didn't solve the problems and eventually boiled over into a global crisis. They'd done things that didn't bear mention lest it recall the ghosts of the victims. That was just a little slice of what humanity could offer to itself. Later, other peoples had done worse, punctuating it with the burning of the world with radiation.
"I was onto something, a hunch, before the attack Taipan. The pieces were starting to fall into place, and I meant to tell your Father about them when we met that evening. Then…you know…everything happened and I never got the chance." Ulric told his Shadow gently.
He walked her through his thoughts, his conjectures, his best approximations of what was happening. The appearance of a concerted, long-term strategist, a guiding hand that was moving the normally too disjointed Prespang forces into a united, and, worse, subtle, enemy.
Taipan considered him with fresh respect. Her Honor was many things but he had not impressed her greatly with his disposition towards war and tactics. This, though, this was a scenario so plausible that she was surprised none of her Father's inner ring had considered it. Except that it was nearly impossible to even conceive of a multigenerational strategy from the changeable and far more ephemeral races. Still, enough pieces seemed to fall into place that it represented a potential blindspot, easily seen from the perspective of an outsider. Then he surprised her again.
"What are the odds it isn't a human at all calling the shots here Taipan?" Ulric said suddenly.
"You fae folk always take the long view, you criticize the Valin and Jormun for their short-term approaches, and, from a strategic framework, that's valid. They get outmaneuvered because you Aes'r can afford to draw things out beyond the lifespan of any single human, and they get impatient. So, what if someone who lived as long as you do, who had the time to play the long game from behind the curtains, moving the leaders of Prosper in a predetermined track for several generations was really in charge?" He mused, mind spinning down new trails.
Taipan looked like he'd swatted her between the eyes with a brick.
"Impossible! None of Orlethrem would do such a thing. Not even the meanest Zelussin pig!" She nearly shouted, clearly disturbed.
He was a natural tenth man, willing to play devil's advocate until a topic was nailed down to be as airtight as possible. He might not be the sharpest tool in the shed but he was sharp enough to force the rest to defend themselves properly or be cut.
"Yeah, but what if? Maybe the long peace wasn't a peace, it was a slow draw up. They were letting their forces multiply, getting their supply lines established and fortified. They were setting up a decisive move with a lot of little conflicts like feinting with jabs so you can load up an overhead that comes out of nowhere." Ulric hypothesized.
"I'm sorry Taipan, but if your folk have one weakness it's that they look down too much on us short-lived people. Properly organized, outfitted, and mobilized, they could bury you under sheer numbers. Especially if they got the jump on you, which is what they were trying for here. To a certain extent, the gamble paid off. Bald'rt is out of commission, even if we can save him, he won't be ready to spearhead the counterattack in the spring. Idra is laid up too. We lost a big chunk of infrastructure, and, a bunch of your best warriors are gone." He summarized, brutally honest.
She didn't like it, not at all, but she didn't complain either. He could see her making the same conclusions for herself.
"What if we do the same to them?" He asked abruptly.
Taipan blurted "What?!"
"Well, yeah, you guys are all about being defensive and everything, and you do it pretty well, but what if we just send a couple of real crackerjack Hunters to wipe out their leadership?" He proposed.
She made that cute little scrunched-up thinking face. Eventually, she tossed her shortened hair to dissent.
"It will not work. Elves are too scarce in human lands to avoid attention, especially Iriel'en. We do not leave our borders to any real extent. Even what trading we do is performed through intermediaries with the Zelussin, the Aktinian, or Lagranel. The river, the sea, or the plains, these are the only contacts we have with Prespang, and none of them direct. Iriel'en Hunters would have to pass through a very great distance and would have to do so completely undetected, the first whisper of Iriel'en would put them on full alert. They haven't forgotten what happened when the Blood Moon rose over Prosper, even if they didn't learn anything from it." Taipan countered.
"Yeah, I get that, so why don't I go?" Ulric asked.
"What?" She replied, completely baffled.
"Yeah, I look like a human, I'd blend right in. Hell I could probably walk right into Prosper, knock on the door, and they'd just let me in, and, you know, boom goes the dynamite." Ulric proposed earnestly.
She was still reeling from the previous question when he dropped that on her. He gave her a minute to digest it. Her lips parted a few times to counter him but closed, her having answered her own argument.
Eventually, she managed to work herself out.
"Why would you volunteer to do this, Ulric?" She asked, not suspiciously exactly, but genuinely curious. Which seemed silly to Ulric, given the circumstances.
"Hello? Earth to Taipan? They tried to kill me and got closer than I like to think about to doing it right. I'm on their hit list already. I owe them about seven kinds of hell and I got this little voice in the back of my head that is whispering just sweet, sweet, awful shit that I'd like to do to them. Besides which, they sponsored child abuse, genocide, and hurt my friends. I'd MDK them all for, like, half of that." Ulric said flatly.
"What…what is this Em Dee Kay?" Taipan asked.
"Murder-death-kill, it's an Old Earth thing, means killing them as hard as physically possible. Suffice it to say, the only thing I'd like to do more than get my hands on them is put my hands on you." He told her honestly.
She blushed furiously. Blushed and smiled at the ground! All of this, and that's what gets her knees weak? Sometimes he forgot how hardcore the Iriel'en were. They liked peace and quiet and carving beautiful furniture but piss them off and no daisies were these Apache-spirited bush hippies. Underneath their love of life was a cold iron will to destroy anything that threatened their people or their lands.
He was of a mind with them, and more so by the day. Odd that he could find more in common with these frequently bewildering grove tenders than he ever had most of the humans in his old life. Maybe that Watcher hadn’t been full of shit with its talk of souls mixed across worlds.
The two of them were silent for a while each buried in their own thoughts.
Shor bustled, her glassware coming together, her ingredients sorted neatly. A small, ornately carved box, like a cigar box, of ash, mixed with sawdust. The fine particles within shimmered with that crawling mirage that accompanied near to invisible movement. The sawdust was trying to heal. To form a solid piece. To revive itself. Ulric couldn't believe the sheer vitality of that stuff. By most metrics he could come up with, [Heartwood] was, effectively, immortal.
Next to the box, was a vial of what was clearly blood. The bubbles and a small bandage on Shor's arm, indicated that it was freshly gathered. The vial she emptied into a container that held water, but with the optical refraction of brine, a saltwater bath? Oh! A hypertonic bath to extract water from and lyse or break open the blood cells! The diluted blood swirled in her hand evenly. Shor looked intently into the glass, seeing some sign that Ulric couldn't discern, and poured the fluid back into the vial through a funnel that held a layered cloth filter. Ulric had no idea what was in that cloth but as the red dripped through into the vial, only three-fourths the original volume, the cloth turned into what Ulric could only generously refer to as a scab. Clotting cloth. A selective filter that had removed coagulants. As some natural materials did, apparently the Elves knew how to generate battlefield trauma hemostats.
Shor discarded the cloth and filtrate, literally dropping them to the ground, only they burned to ash halfway. She didn't even glance towards the smoke that drifted upwards, focusing instead on her vial and taking up the box of [Heartwood] ash and dust.
The normally expressionless Elven woman mixed these into a clear, crystalline, glass bottle, vaguely Erlenmeyer flask-shaped. First, the filtered blood was poured into the flat-bottomed glassware to sit around a quarter full, next came the sawdust and ash, mixed vigorously as it was poured using a stone spoon. Soon a thick almost paste had formed.
Shor did something with mana and the air around the glass shimmered with heat. The concoction began to bubble almost immediately. The stirring did not stop. For five minutes, the heated mixing continued. Another piece of spellwork, so fast, so precise that Ulric couldn't feel it, and Shor released the spoon, which continued to stir as she assembled the distillation apparatus, which had many of the familiar though unexpectedly sophisticated shapes of glass, with which Ulric had worked before.
A set of bamboo-looking scaffolds to which all the pieces were anchored with fine cord, hopefully thermotolerant. The three-way adapter, a still head, was secured such that the bamboo frame could simply be lowered onto the reagent flask to begin the distillation proper. A spiraling tube inside of another tube, which was incredibly similar to a Graham condenser, was connected to that still head. A smaller wide-mouthed collection flask mated with the condenser in its neck, through a port that had a rubberish, gasket to seal the pieces together. The top of this collection flask was sealed.
Shor cast again, a spiral of water running through the outer tube of the long double tube device, the inner spiral of glass remaining empty. It was a Graham condenser! Carefully, whispering to herself she moved her hands along the condenser, and frost collected on its surface. She was using some kind of Infrig spell to cool the water, maybe even super cool it, to catch every bit of the vapor coming off the distillation flask. This guaranteed that even the most volatile of the gases would be forced into liquid phase to fall into the collection flask. Similarly, the collection flask got the frost treatment. Whatever she was making, it must be volatile as hell to need that much cooling.
Thus readied, Shor extracted the stir spoon and mated the distillation head to the reagent flask, and plugged the top with a simple glass column the third neck of the head got another rubber plug, this one contained a device with markings with which Ulric wasn't familiar. He would have bet his underpants it was a thermometer though. This setup was too finessed, too refined, to be operating without a specific temperature range.
No wonder Shor hadn't wanted his help. She'd left out a lot of the details of her synthesis.
Moving to the reagent flask she did something to increase the temperature, watching the pips on the thermometer glow in increasing number. Once it hit a certain value, whose exact nature Ulric knew nothing of, it could have been just water boiling temp an even hundred Celcius, it could have been triple that, all he knew was that the thick sludgish, dark brown mixture was at a rolling boil and had begun to go a darker grey.
It appeared that the timing was not accidental. The initial time was a cookoff to drive off the water in the blood. Instantly bubbles of a red-gold liquid had begun to form in the spiraling tube, condensate. These built until a flow was established, at which point the condenser began to drip into the collection flask. Fascinating. Ulric hadn't expected to see semi-advanced chemistry but here it was.
A quarter-hour, maybe more, and the reagent flask had cooked down to a very thick black sludge, carbonized remnants. In the collection flask sat a heavy, viscous red-gold liquid. And there was a serious bit of magical fuckery going on here if he was looking at what he thought he was looking at because that was NOT how distillation was supposed to work.
You can't distill blood cells, really. They carbonize and burn up, what should have been in that reagent flask was the destroyed organic goop of the blood and sawdust. The only thing that should have been in the collection flask was water. Not whatever the fuck he was looking at, which he was at least somewhat certain was a type of spirit tree cellulose organo-metallic Elf magic complex keyed to Bane poisons through mechanisms he doubted he'd ever understand.
Suddenly he wasn't so sure about his plan to use alcohol. There were other things going on, other interactions, probably thanks to mana, that made the rules different here. Not all the way different, clearly, but different in ways that made it impossible for him to predict the ways that substances interacted.
Sorry Taipan, looks like Shor gets to kill me he thought morosely.
Still, he couldn't help but observe the crimson-haired woman in her surgically precise workflow.
To the cooled flask she added a black liquid, from a teardrop-shaped ampule she'd pulled from her belt and which she broke as if it contained nitroglycerin. A few drops, no more, down into the red gold liquid. As the droplets fell through the liquid they swirled violently black and then, somehow, silver. Shor seemed relieved so he guessed that was supposed to happen.
She placed her hands on either side of the now silver mixture and Ulric watched as ice crystals thickened on the surface of the flask. The silver mixture separated, a pale yellow seed growing on the bottom of the flask, expanding fractally as it did. The crystal of whatever the fuck soon occupied the bottom of the flask, a much smaller, maybe two-thirds of the silver remained.
Shor swiftly collected a darkened glass, its smoky charcoal-amber color nearly impossible to see through, and decanted the silver liquid into it. With a relieved sigh, she drew out a pouch and dumped what could only be powdered Elf ivory into the mixture. It did something fluorescent inside there, and, from what he saw through the obscuring glass, turned into a marble-white liquid, still viscous, though less so, if the swirl of the mixture as she shook it was any indication.
Placing the smoked glass bottle on her bench top she looked up for the first time and held Ulric's eyes.
"Thus is the Bane Purifying Powder created. In a few hours it will dry finer than the finest chalk and can be spread to neutralize the remaining Bane in an infected area. What it will not do, is mix with water to be administered." Shor said, slightly reproachfully, as if she already knew the outcome.
"We will see." Ulric said, though unable to keep a small hesitation from his voice.
That entire process was both extremely similar to things he'd seen and done and also so wildly different as to be completely alien. But he was committed now. He just had to hope that the general idea was sound. Physical principles had translated pretty well so far, at least as far as fundamental forces went. He just had to hope that the emergent properties associated with mana being infused into matter on this wild land called Varda didn't completely scare off core chemical interactions.
About that time, Choric limped into the chamber, bleeding freely from a half dozen cuts and missing the sleeve of his left arm. There were chew marks on his armor. Cradled in his arms was the clay amphora of spirits. Where exactly the hell had they hidden that stuff?
"I am arrived, Lady Shor. The Vanished Night was where I left it, beneath the menagerie floor. The [Shadow Panther] did not care for me digging into its bed but I was able to retrieve the amphora. The [Shadow Panther] will live, minus a few teeth and half of its front left leg. The bastard." Choric nearly punctuated his statement by spitting on the floor before he remembered where he stood and swallowed it.
Ah…that Elf had climbed some thirty flights of stairs to fight a Greater beast at the end of it, salvaged a clay bottle, and got back in time to see the end of Shor's little chemistry project? His estimation of Choric went up several notches. So too did his concern that such lengths had been gone to, to keep Bald'rt out of it. What in the name of all that was holy was that stuff? Moonshine that would get god shit-faced? Not important Einar, so long as it's proper alcohol it'll work. He hoped.
Now, all the materials were in place. The great working underneath the [Heartwood] core was ongoing. Bathe, appeared to be struggling greatly. At Ulric's glance, Shor informed him that the golden-haired She-Elf was circulating Bald'rt's mana for him and also destroying the Bane in his core as it formed, so that it did not escape to continue to poison him. Doing both of those things, at the same time, for a week without pausing was considered to be, impossible. Only the support of this place, bathed in the mana of the Irielhos allowed it. That and the fact that Bathe was Bathe.
They waited.
An hour turned to two.
Silence settled into this place, only the thrumming of the living wood around them said that time passed.
Shor stood without warning, startling everyone in the room, except for her sister-wives, who were too engrossed with their task to be aware of anything else. She inspected the darkened glass container and poured a small amount of glittering white crystals, like diamond dust, into her hand, a small satisfied twist to her lips. A difficult chore completed to perfection. Her eyes took him in and she nodded solemnly.
It was time. To live or to die, based on the half-remembered science of a dead world.
"Hey, uh, Shor. Since this might not work and all, do you mind if I…uh…you know. Take a sip? Seeing as how you're gonna kill me if it doesn't and all." Ulric proposed.
She hummed briefly tapping her lips with a long fingernail. A fingernail he hadn't noticed earlier being shaped like a vicious claw.
"I do not see any problem with this, no. But just a sip Glade Chief, and I hope that you work swiftly, the Vanished Night is quite potent and exceedingly abrupt with its effect."
"Gotcha, gotcha. Thanks, Shor. Okay, do you guys have any intravenous drip bags? Like a water bag but with a small tube and a hollow needle, to deliver fluids into the blood of a wounded Elf that cannot drink?" He checked. They could probably get the stuff into Bald'rt without it but it was good to see if there was a better way before you defaulted to a worse.
They did not. Typically, a syringe was used to put fluid down the invalid's throat. Damn. Fine.
Ulric then explained his need and, by his description, within half an hour was there a water bag, sterilized, which was filled with pure water, and a long, flexible, hollow vine, also sterilized, fitted with a dart for the administering of poison, because of course that's what needles were used for around these parts, and it too was, you guessed it, sterilized. Ulric worked a hole into the bag and fitted affixed the vine in firmly. He applied a sticky resin until no more water seeped from the bag to vine interface. Whammo! One Sylvan intravenous bag!
Taipan dubbed it a "Sleeper's Drink."
Three more were constructed, to provide a steady supply of chelator, for as long as that proved necessary.
Soon, the I.V. bags or "Sleeper's Drinks" were placed before him. He was as ready as he would ever be.
No sense in risking losing any product by transferring it. Ulric lifted the Amphora to his lips and took a great swallow, feeling an intense rush of molten metal down his esophagus and then a blissful nothingness.
Then he poured the amphora, every remaining drop, into the smoked glass with the Bane Purification Powder. He shook it vigorously, seeing the tiny glitters of crystal refracting what little light made it into the container. He looked over at Shor while he did.
"You'll need to mix this with pure water and then cook off most of the remaining alcohol, reduce it by about half the volume; at least, that's how it's down in my world. If it works, you'll be able to hook up the I.V. bags inside an hour and start delivering the chelation." He told her, just in case he lost his ass from the night, night water.
Hopefully, if there was enough similarity between this world and his old one, the alcohol would dissolve the crystals without destroying them, creating a solution that was then capable of being miscible with good old-fashioned pure water. Such was the art of the chemist, a simple idea, just rinse with alcohol, based upon exceedingly complex interactions of electron densities and who the fuck actually knew what else? The idea was, to make the powder able to save Bald'rt's life, it needed to be able to diffuse into his body to reach all the infected tissue and bind the Bane poison, all of it, stopping its damage and preventing it from renewing itself as Vedyr, Bathe, and Shor worked to eliminate it with their spooky tree ritual. In other words, the spirit booze would allow the powdered magical bullshit powder to do the thing with the magical water on the King Elf.
"Oh," Ulric said, suddenly confused. "That stuff hits like a truck."
He blacked out.
**************
Once again, Ulric woke to stare at a strange ceiling, a state that had become far, far too common for his liking.
Say this for the Elves, each room was immediately recognizable for the unique reliefs and carvings that decorated it. Each chamber of the fortress was its own little monument to the love of the Iriel'en for their forest homeland, its running rivers, its wilderness, and the critters that they shared it with.
Ulric sat up and immediately regretted it when some invisible jerk-wad put a railroad spike between his eyes.
Fortunately, the murderer rethought the error of their ways and replaced the spike with a nice kick bass, set to the metronome of his own heartbeat. Considerate bugger, for a brain murderer.
He opened his eyes to the too-bright room. The pace and timing of events somewhat eluded him. He'd been "escorted" which was a way of preserving his dignity rather than say drug helplessly like a child, to the secretive heart of Irielhos, the chamber of light and magic, unlike anything he'd ever experienced. He'd seen the ritual being carried out by Bald'rt's wives in their desperate bid to save the life of the [Lord of the Deep Wood]. After finding out more about the nature of the remedies for Bane poisons, the magically targeted Akashic poison of a torture-corrupted soul, he had gone out on a limb to create a slight modification to the binding substance they used to turn it into a true chelator that could be administered. He'd taken a swallow of the exceedingly potent liquor, the alcohol source for the final step of the chelation synthesis, and then….nothing.
He wasn't actually sure how long they'd been down there. Or how long he'd been here. He felt somewhat rested, despite the hangover. There was a sort of shallow crick in his neck that he tried and failed to massage out.
Though his body might have rested, it wasn't recovered. He couldn't see outside so he remained in a foggy nether place as it regards to time. His instincts said it was a new day, but where inside that he was absent any clue.
Ulric laid back down, letting a comfortable downy comforter envelop his chest. At least, whatever had happened to him involved the acquisition of a new bed. This one was as fine as the one in his former, now destroyed, apartment. The perfect blend of firmness and softness, his body sought to become one with this mattress. The silken fabric of the sheets, somehow always remaining just ever so slightly on the cool side made his eyes close with tactile joy.
If a man just had to die in bed, this was the bed he ought to do it in. No telling the difference between here and heaven, Ulric told himself with a small laugh. He doubted very much that heaven would exist, which made this bed an even greater promise of reward than that fiction. Yes. I will start the cult of the bed. And Lo! We will all of us, brothers, go to our just reward, the space between its sheets if only you dedicate your bodies, your very souls, to my orders! Repent! Cast off your masters and slave yourselves to this, the only Lord who brings you eternal rest! And I, the Speaker of the Pillows, will guide you to the promised land!
They would rule the world, if only they knew what they were all missing here, he lamented.
His budding religion was cast aside without warning when the heavy door to the room swung inwards and a marvel of feline grace, sensual power, and feminine beauty entered the room. She replaced his bed as his new god because she had donuts. Glazed donuts. He smelled the sugar, the crisp exterior, the oven smell. And her. She had her own spice to add to the bouquet.
The Angel of Donuts approached, her arms cradling a large tray of the incredible smelling glazed, fried, bundles of doughy joy. He didn't cry. He only wanted to.
As she settled the tray on an end table he observed her hips, noting the curve and subtle geometry. Was it wrong to touch that which was made for holding? No. No that could not be right.
"Eyaah! Ulric, you! You! MMmm. Alright, fine, have your fill." She strangled before mellowing. Turning, she pushed her hip against his stroking hand.
He closed his eyes so he could focus his existence down to that one appendage and its little attendant appendages. Such softness coupled to strength. Shaped just so, a miracle of form and function. Perfectly balanced, with its mirror on the other side of her.
Ulric came to the slow realization that he was actually still smashed. Distant reason jotted down a note as to why the bottle was hidden under a vicious animal's bed.
His eyes opened and he saw his Shadow, unclasping her belt. He also noticed a wall-length mirror that he'd, somehow, missed earlier. The crick in his neck was identifiable as a series of bruises that matched suspiciously with the even rows of neat, pearly teeth smiling hungrily at him right now. Aha! Now the mystery was solved! Donut Angel had gone to keep herself from consuming him in her eternal hunger.
Forgive me donuts! He screamed internally as her coat and shirt descended hatefully to the floor, promising cold futures instead of prompt consumption of the treats. His hand came away as she performed a minor miracle of balance and flexibility to pull off the thigh-high boots while standing, arching backward like a ballerina with her leg extended upwards behind her. She repeated this feat with the other leg and shimmied out of her coarse, sturdy trousers. Turning to him he saw primal energy in her eyes and a challenge in the set of her stance. Or he was simply extremely hammered and she was just her normal, naked self, which caused his hormones, in concert with the loss of frontal lobe activity, to project his own needs onto her. Potaytoe. Potahtoh.
Ulric threw aside the covers and beckoned her on.
Come on thou predator! Take what you may to fill thy gullet!
Some few minutes later, Ulric was finally starting to sober up. Possibly thanks to not having any liquid left in his body. Panting gently, he turned to the dark woman next to him who was humming a merry tune.
"I understand now, why your Mothers hid the Vanishing Night from your Father. That stuff…It's dangerous." Ulric admitted, somewhat apologetically.
Taipan was, for her part, smirking at him and did not seem unpleased. This was the second time he had evaporated a night with an otherworldly beauty by way of near brain death. I will not find excess in my cups again, he decided. The loss was simply too great.
"It is for special occasions, Ulric, or for when they wish to spoil themselves. For anniversaries, Birthdays, Full Moons, that sort of thing." She explained.
"Father used to like to slip it into their cups as a prank, after everyone had already gone and they were in private, of course. I believe that is what is responsible for three of Shor's daughters." Taipan continued, her disappointment in her Father's behavior obvious.
"Vedyr caught him in the act, once, though, and beat him viciously. He swore to never be caught doing such a thing again. I am not sure if that meant he would not do it again or if he would merely never be apprehended. Father Bald'rt is never one to say a single thing when he can squeeze more than that into a single utterance."
He had learned something new. About his host, about himself, and about the ancient crone next to him.
The drumbeat in his skull eased up as they sat abed devouring cold donuts. The past two days were as near to paradise as he'd ever come. He knew it in his heart.
That suddenly reminded Ulric that he hadn't so much as thought about protection.
"Taipan am I knocking you up?" He asked.
She patted his leg comfortingly, once she had him explain what that idiom meant, "No, Ulric, you are not. Elf women come into season once every other year, for a period of around two weeks. You would know if that time had come. Either she goes into isolation, if she does not wish children, or she drags her chosen sire into her chambers and he is not seen again until that time is done."
"My season was early this past spring, and, of course, I was in isolation. In truth, I was in the deep wilds evading a [Gilded Queen's Rose] that had my scent. It had been eating Harvesters and was near ready to blossom. A good Hunt." She recalled to him with pride.
"Your dad suggested I go get the core from one of those once. How bad an idea is that?" He asked, hoping she'd go into further depth on her escapades. She really did like to recall her time in the wilds, he knew it was where she'd found happiness.
"Very, Glade Chief. You see, the petals are slathered in toxic dust that confuses the senses and triggers powerful hallucinations, the barbs on the vines contain an acid that will melt bones and flesh in moments, the trick you see is……" Her excited voice rolled over him as he lay there.
He hadn't asked about Bald'rt. Or how things had turned out. But she seemed more relaxed than at any point before, as if a weight had gone. Part of him knew she had been using him to comfort herself, as a balm to soothe her pain at losing him. If that was how she intended to use him, go ahead and sign him up for the full package. For himself, he was glad that he had a…whatever they were, and that she wasn't trying to shove needles into his eyes at every opportunity.
At last, when she'd exhausted her, admittedly incredibly comprehensive knowledge on the hunting, killing, harvesting, and revenue-generating potential of the [Gilded Queen's Rose], Ulric stepped into the pause with the idea he was tossing around.
"So, Taipan, I think it's about time I took this whole learning to kill people stuff a bit more seriously. I'm not one hundred percent yet, but I feel the strength coming back pretty quickly. I'd like it if you started teaching me every way to kill a man you know about." Ulric requested.
"We don't have that long, but, until the spring, I will show you everything that you can do." Taipan promised.
Good enough.
He stared at her. She had to be making this up. Brighteyes was a kid. A sharp kid, a great kid, but a kid.
He's older than you are, Ulric, in whichever world you want to think about, his traitor brain whispered.
"Is…he ready for that kind of responsibility? I mean…he's pretty young to be ruling a nation, isn't he?" Ulric checked.
Taipan considered that for only a moment, deciding that this was more of her Honor being unused to the ways of this, his new world.
"None are ready for the mantle of Kingship Ulric. They can prepare as they like, but to feel the weight of your people's lives on your every word is not a natural thing." Said his Shadow.
That was…a surprisingly wise thing to say. He forgot, at times, thanks to her nature and her appearance, that the lovely lady had been around the block a few times.
"Fair point, Taipan, fair point." He conceded.
"Brighteyes is in charge then. How safe is he? I don’t know about any of you but I thought Irielhos was untouchable. The way I understood it, your kin would know an enemy was coming for a thousand kilometers. That dick bag mage caught me with my pants down." Ulric probed.
He'd actually almost literally had his pants down, he'd done up his belt a couple of seconds before he got his shit roasted.
Now was that hateful scowl on Taipan's face, but not directed towards him. Blood, pain, and death spiraled around in her emerald eyes, shimmering metallic flecks seeming to flash in her irises.
"The beasts of Prosper used an artifact. We found its remains on the Cryomancer archmage who led the attack. It had been burned through, its powers destroyed, but our Loremasters identified it. It was old, from the time of the Ancients, and it cloaked those near it from our wards and detection, in the mundane and in the magical." Taipan revealed, the shock of their veil of safety being broken still lodged in her heart.
"They used the artifact to break the wards on Irielhos, the shields that guarded it against the elements and magical attacks. That was not the intended use for the device, the energies consumed it, but it worked. The forces that conspire against Iriel used it, for years probably, to weave in and out of our protections. They created channels, hidden paths of safe travel through our wards to move undetected. That is why they were on the Plateau. They were setting up a base of operations, to be able to hold a high ground from which to launch attacks through the Ancient's Gate." His Shadow explained, disbelieving.
"My mothers, your Dragons, found the anchor points for these invasion routes and destroyed them, along with the ones facilitating their creation. Twenty-seven agents for the Merchant Kings, bought for gold and paid with death for breaking the peace and making war against Orlethrem." Taipan said, an evil set to her features.
"It was this closing of the gaps in our defense that triggered the attack. They saw their window to hurt us closing and were forced to spring the trap before it was truly ready." She continued, laying out the full scope of the conspiracy.
"In the spring, when they intended to launch their attack, the intent was to have this assault accompanied by their ground forces, moving into Orlethrem and bypassing its defenses to strike us from multiple angles from positions that should have been impossible. It would have been a catastrophe. The Orlethrem are strong but much fewer than Prespang. Always we have used the space to punish invaders, to funnel and control their movements and thus spare most of the population from danger. This plan, had it worked, would have had us pinned into corners from the beginning. A great many Aes'r would have perished, even if we were able to find eventual victory. More likely, Orlethrem, as it exists today, would have been shattered."
Ulric whistled softly. That was, more or less, the worst case scenario. The mage assault would have decapitated the Orlethrem confederation's leadership, crippled the predominant force projection of the Elves, the Iriel'en, and delivered a mortal blow to the morale of the Elves while carving them up with superior numbers.
Total war, with a sprinkle of genocide. Humans really did seem to be the same wherever you found them. All it took was a couple of sociopaths wielding the power of nations to inflict horror on the rest of the world. A song of many names, and a dance with the same eventual steps.
"What changed, Taipan? From what I've heard there has been a peace, uneasy though it may have been, for hundreds of years. Why now?" Ulric asked, not even certain if it mattered.
His Shadow shrugged, clearly of the same mind.
"Who is to know the minds of these people Ulric? There is a reason the Otherkin are not welcome in Iriel. We simply grew tired of trying to understand why they brought their evils to our lands, why they did as they did. It was enough to know that they would, eventually. I painted you with that brush, unjustly, perhaps, but not entirely without reason. I regret that immensely, but I hope you can understand now some of it." Taipan pled.
It didn't taste good, no sir. Could he truly blame her for her attitudes?
Yes, he decided, yes he could. That was the point, after all. Every man is responsible for his own actions, and only his own actions. Every individual is given the right of being treated as they deserved, instead of being treated as the worst of their kind. There was no wrong in hating someone, some people deserved that contempt, some people earned it. But it was important to hate them for their choices, not for who their parents happened to be or for where they were born, or what they looked like.
"I understand it Taipan. I do. It doesn't make it right, but I do." He offered. "Unfortunately, my home world had records detailing, in painful detail, the excesses a man might commit against another man, for no better reason than he was different in appearance, or had resources they wanted, or prayed to a different cosmic ghost."
Old drowned Japan came to mind. They'd essentially declared their lands off-limit towards foreigners, and went almost ninety-nine percent pure isolationist. It didn't solve the problems and eventually boiled over into a global crisis. They'd done things that didn't bear mention lest it recall the ghosts of the victims. That was just a little slice of what humanity could offer to itself. Later, other peoples had done worse, punctuating it with the burning of the world with radiation.
"I was onto something, a hunch, before the attack Taipan. The pieces were starting to fall into place, and I meant to tell your Father about them when we met that evening. Then…you know…everything happened and I never got the chance." Ulric told his Shadow gently.
He walked her through his thoughts, his conjectures, his best approximations of what was happening. The appearance of a concerted, long-term strategist, a guiding hand that was moving the normally too disjointed Prespang forces into a united, and, worse, subtle, enemy.
Taipan considered him with fresh respect. Her Honor was many things but he had not impressed her greatly with his disposition towards war and tactics. This, though, this was a scenario so plausible that she was surprised none of her Father's inner ring had considered it. Except that it was nearly impossible to even conceive of a multigenerational strategy from the changeable and far more ephemeral races. Still, enough pieces seemed to fall into place that it represented a potential blindspot, easily seen from the perspective of an outsider. Then he surprised her again.
"What are the odds it isn't a human at all calling the shots here Taipan?" Ulric said suddenly.
"You fae folk always take the long view, you criticize the Valin and Jormun for their short-term approaches, and, from a strategic framework, that's valid. They get outmaneuvered because you Aes'r can afford to draw things out beyond the lifespan of any single human, and they get impatient. So, what if someone who lived as long as you do, who had the time to play the long game from behind the curtains, moving the leaders of Prosper in a predetermined track for several generations was really in charge?" He mused, mind spinning down new trails.
Taipan looked like he'd swatted her between the eyes with a brick.
"Impossible! None of Orlethrem would do such a thing. Not even the meanest Zelussin pig!" She nearly shouted, clearly disturbed.
He was a natural tenth man, willing to play devil's advocate until a topic was nailed down to be as airtight as possible. He might not be the sharpest tool in the shed but he was sharp enough to force the rest to defend themselves properly or be cut.
"Yeah, but what if? Maybe the long peace wasn't a peace, it was a slow draw up. They were letting their forces multiply, getting their supply lines established and fortified. They were setting up a decisive move with a lot of little conflicts like feinting with jabs so you can load up an overhead that comes out of nowhere." Ulric hypothesized.
"I'm sorry Taipan, but if your folk have one weakness it's that they look down too much on us short-lived people. Properly organized, outfitted, and mobilized, they could bury you under sheer numbers. Especially if they got the jump on you, which is what they were trying for here. To a certain extent, the gamble paid off. Bald'rt is out of commission, even if we can save him, he won't be ready to spearhead the counterattack in the spring. Idra is laid up too. We lost a big chunk of infrastructure, and, a bunch of your best warriors are gone." He summarized, brutally honest.
She didn't like it, not at all, but she didn't complain either. He could see her making the same conclusions for herself.
"What if we do the same to them?" He asked abruptly.
Taipan blurted "What?!"
"Well, yeah, you guys are all about being defensive and everything, and you do it pretty well, but what if we just send a couple of real crackerjack Hunters to wipe out their leadership?" He proposed.
She made that cute little scrunched-up thinking face. Eventually, she tossed her shortened hair to dissent.
"It will not work. Elves are too scarce in human lands to avoid attention, especially Iriel'en. We do not leave our borders to any real extent. Even what trading we do is performed through intermediaries with the Zelussin, the Aktinian, or Lagranel. The river, the sea, or the plains, these are the only contacts we have with Prespang, and none of them direct. Iriel'en Hunters would have to pass through a very great distance and would have to do so completely undetected, the first whisper of Iriel'en would put them on full alert. They haven't forgotten what happened when the Blood Moon rose over Prosper, even if they didn't learn anything from it." Taipan countered.
"Yeah, I get that, so why don't I go?" Ulric asked.
"What?" She replied, completely baffled.
"Yeah, I look like a human, I'd blend right in. Hell I could probably walk right into Prosper, knock on the door, and they'd just let me in, and, you know, boom goes the dynamite." Ulric proposed earnestly.
She was still reeling from the previous question when he dropped that on her. He gave her a minute to digest it. Her lips parted a few times to counter him but closed, her having answered her own argument.
Eventually, she managed to work herself out.
"Why would you volunteer to do this, Ulric?" She asked, not suspiciously exactly, but genuinely curious. Which seemed silly to Ulric, given the circumstances.
"Hello? Earth to Taipan? They tried to kill me and got closer than I like to think about to doing it right. I'm on their hit list already. I owe them about seven kinds of hell and I got this little voice in the back of my head that is whispering just sweet, sweet, awful shit that I'd like to do to them. Besides which, they sponsored child abuse, genocide, and hurt my friends. I'd MDK them all for, like, half of that." Ulric said flatly.
"What…what is this Em Dee Kay?" Taipan asked.
"Murder-death-kill, it's an Old Earth thing, means killing them as hard as physically possible. Suffice it to say, the only thing I'd like to do more than get my hands on them is put my hands on you." He told her honestly.
She blushed furiously. Blushed and smiled at the ground! All of this, and that's what gets her knees weak? Sometimes he forgot how hardcore the Iriel'en were. They liked peace and quiet and carving beautiful furniture but piss them off and no daisies were these Apache-spirited bush hippies. Underneath their love of life was a cold iron will to destroy anything that threatened their people or their lands.
He was of a mind with them, and more so by the day. Odd that he could find more in common with these frequently bewildering grove tenders than he ever had most of the humans in his old life. Maybe that Watcher hadn’t been full of shit with its talk of souls mixed across worlds.
The two of them were silent for a while each buried in their own thoughts.
Shor bustled, her glassware coming together, her ingredients sorted neatly. A small, ornately carved box, like a cigar box, of ash, mixed with sawdust. The fine particles within shimmered with that crawling mirage that accompanied near to invisible movement. The sawdust was trying to heal. To form a solid piece. To revive itself. Ulric couldn't believe the sheer vitality of that stuff. By most metrics he could come up with, [Heartwood] was, effectively, immortal.
Next to the box, was a vial of what was clearly blood. The bubbles and a small bandage on Shor's arm, indicated that it was freshly gathered. The vial she emptied into a container that held water, but with the optical refraction of brine, a saltwater bath? Oh! A hypertonic bath to extract water from and lyse or break open the blood cells! The diluted blood swirled in her hand evenly. Shor looked intently into the glass, seeing some sign that Ulric couldn't discern, and poured the fluid back into the vial through a funnel that held a layered cloth filter. Ulric had no idea what was in that cloth but as the red dripped through into the vial, only three-fourths the original volume, the cloth turned into what Ulric could only generously refer to as a scab. Clotting cloth. A selective filter that had removed coagulants. As some natural materials did, apparently the Elves knew how to generate battlefield trauma hemostats.
Shor discarded the cloth and filtrate, literally dropping them to the ground, only they burned to ash halfway. She didn't even glance towards the smoke that drifted upwards, focusing instead on her vial and taking up the box of [Heartwood] ash and dust.
The normally expressionless Elven woman mixed these into a clear, crystalline, glass bottle, vaguely Erlenmeyer flask-shaped. First, the filtered blood was poured into the flat-bottomed glassware to sit around a quarter full, next came the sawdust and ash, mixed vigorously as it was poured using a stone spoon. Soon a thick almost paste had formed.
Shor did something with mana and the air around the glass shimmered with heat. The concoction began to bubble almost immediately. The stirring did not stop. For five minutes, the heated mixing continued. Another piece of spellwork, so fast, so precise that Ulric couldn't feel it, and Shor released the spoon, which continued to stir as she assembled the distillation apparatus, which had many of the familiar though unexpectedly sophisticated shapes of glass, with which Ulric had worked before.
A set of bamboo-looking scaffolds to which all the pieces were anchored with fine cord, hopefully thermotolerant. The three-way adapter, a still head, was secured such that the bamboo frame could simply be lowered onto the reagent flask to begin the distillation proper. A spiraling tube inside of another tube, which was incredibly similar to a Graham condenser, was connected to that still head. A smaller wide-mouthed collection flask mated with the condenser in its neck, through a port that had a rubberish, gasket to seal the pieces together. The top of this collection flask was sealed.
Shor cast again, a spiral of water running through the outer tube of the long double tube device, the inner spiral of glass remaining empty. It was a Graham condenser! Carefully, whispering to herself she moved her hands along the condenser, and frost collected on its surface. She was using some kind of Infrig spell to cool the water, maybe even super cool it, to catch every bit of the vapor coming off the distillation flask. This guaranteed that even the most volatile of the gases would be forced into liquid phase to fall into the collection flask. Similarly, the collection flask got the frost treatment. Whatever she was making, it must be volatile as hell to need that much cooling.
Thus readied, Shor extracted the stir spoon and mated the distillation head to the reagent flask, and plugged the top with a simple glass column the third neck of the head got another rubber plug, this one contained a device with markings with which Ulric wasn't familiar. He would have bet his underpants it was a thermometer though. This setup was too finessed, too refined, to be operating without a specific temperature range.
No wonder Shor hadn't wanted his help. She'd left out a lot of the details of her synthesis.
Moving to the reagent flask she did something to increase the temperature, watching the pips on the thermometer glow in increasing number. Once it hit a certain value, whose exact nature Ulric knew nothing of, it could have been just water boiling temp an even hundred Celcius, it could have been triple that, all he knew was that the thick sludgish, dark brown mixture was at a rolling boil and had begun to go a darker grey.
It appeared that the timing was not accidental. The initial time was a cookoff to drive off the water in the blood. Instantly bubbles of a red-gold liquid had begun to form in the spiraling tube, condensate. These built until a flow was established, at which point the condenser began to drip into the collection flask. Fascinating. Ulric hadn't expected to see semi-advanced chemistry but here it was.
A quarter-hour, maybe more, and the reagent flask had cooked down to a very thick black sludge, carbonized remnants. In the collection flask sat a heavy, viscous red-gold liquid. And there was a serious bit of magical fuckery going on here if he was looking at what he thought he was looking at because that was NOT how distillation was supposed to work.
You can't distill blood cells, really. They carbonize and burn up, what should have been in that reagent flask was the destroyed organic goop of the blood and sawdust. The only thing that should have been in the collection flask was water. Not whatever the fuck he was looking at, which he was at least somewhat certain was a type of spirit tree cellulose organo-metallic Elf magic complex keyed to Bane poisons through mechanisms he doubted he'd ever understand.
Suddenly he wasn't so sure about his plan to use alcohol. There were other things going on, other interactions, probably thanks to mana, that made the rules different here. Not all the way different, clearly, but different in ways that made it impossible for him to predict the ways that substances interacted.
Sorry Taipan, looks like Shor gets to kill me he thought morosely.
Still, he couldn't help but observe the crimson-haired woman in her surgically precise workflow.
To the cooled flask she added a black liquid, from a teardrop-shaped ampule she'd pulled from her belt and which she broke as if it contained nitroglycerin. A few drops, no more, down into the red gold liquid. As the droplets fell through the liquid they swirled violently black and then, somehow, silver. Shor seemed relieved so he guessed that was supposed to happen.
She placed her hands on either side of the now silver mixture and Ulric watched as ice crystals thickened on the surface of the flask. The silver mixture separated, a pale yellow seed growing on the bottom of the flask, expanding fractally as it did. The crystal of whatever the fuck soon occupied the bottom of the flask, a much smaller, maybe two-thirds of the silver remained.
Shor swiftly collected a darkened glass, its smoky charcoal-amber color nearly impossible to see through, and decanted the silver liquid into it. With a relieved sigh, she drew out a pouch and dumped what could only be powdered Elf ivory into the mixture. It did something fluorescent inside there, and, from what he saw through the obscuring glass, turned into a marble-white liquid, still viscous, though less so, if the swirl of the mixture as she shook it was any indication.
Placing the smoked glass bottle on her bench top she looked up for the first time and held Ulric's eyes.
"Thus is the Bane Purifying Powder created. In a few hours it will dry finer than the finest chalk and can be spread to neutralize the remaining Bane in an infected area. What it will not do, is mix with water to be administered." Shor said, slightly reproachfully, as if she already knew the outcome.
"We will see." Ulric said, though unable to keep a small hesitation from his voice.
That entire process was both extremely similar to things he'd seen and done and also so wildly different as to be completely alien. But he was committed now. He just had to hope that the general idea was sound. Physical principles had translated pretty well so far, at least as far as fundamental forces went. He just had to hope that the emergent properties associated with mana being infused into matter on this wild land called Varda didn't completely scare off core chemical interactions.
About that time, Choric limped into the chamber, bleeding freely from a half dozen cuts and missing the sleeve of his left arm. There were chew marks on his armor. Cradled in his arms was the clay amphora of spirits. Where exactly the hell had they hidden that stuff?
"I am arrived, Lady Shor. The Vanished Night was where I left it, beneath the menagerie floor. The [Shadow Panther] did not care for me digging into its bed but I was able to retrieve the amphora. The [Shadow Panther] will live, minus a few teeth and half of its front left leg. The bastard." Choric nearly punctuated his statement by spitting on the floor before he remembered where he stood and swallowed it.
Ah…that Elf had climbed some thirty flights of stairs to fight a Greater beast at the end of it, salvaged a clay bottle, and got back in time to see the end of Shor's little chemistry project? His estimation of Choric went up several notches. So too did his concern that such lengths had been gone to, to keep Bald'rt out of it. What in the name of all that was holy was that stuff? Moonshine that would get god shit-faced? Not important Einar, so long as it's proper alcohol it'll work. He hoped.
Now, all the materials were in place. The great working underneath the [Heartwood] core was ongoing. Bathe, appeared to be struggling greatly. At Ulric's glance, Shor informed him that the golden-haired She-Elf was circulating Bald'rt's mana for him and also destroying the Bane in his core as it formed, so that it did not escape to continue to poison him. Doing both of those things, at the same time, for a week without pausing was considered to be, impossible. Only the support of this place, bathed in the mana of the Irielhos allowed it. That and the fact that Bathe was Bathe.
They waited.
An hour turned to two.
Silence settled into this place, only the thrumming of the living wood around them said that time passed.
Shor stood without warning, startling everyone in the room, except for her sister-wives, who were too engrossed with their task to be aware of anything else. She inspected the darkened glass container and poured a small amount of glittering white crystals, like diamond dust, into her hand, a small satisfied twist to her lips. A difficult chore completed to perfection. Her eyes took him in and she nodded solemnly.
It was time. To live or to die, based on the half-remembered science of a dead world.
"Hey, uh, Shor. Since this might not work and all, do you mind if I…uh…you know. Take a sip? Seeing as how you're gonna kill me if it doesn't and all." Ulric proposed.
She hummed briefly tapping her lips with a long fingernail. A fingernail he hadn't noticed earlier being shaped like a vicious claw.
"I do not see any problem with this, no. But just a sip Glade Chief, and I hope that you work swiftly, the Vanished Night is quite potent and exceedingly abrupt with its effect."
"Gotcha, gotcha. Thanks, Shor. Okay, do you guys have any intravenous drip bags? Like a water bag but with a small tube and a hollow needle, to deliver fluids into the blood of a wounded Elf that cannot drink?" He checked. They could probably get the stuff into Bald'rt without it but it was good to see if there was a better way before you defaulted to a worse.
They did not. Typically, a syringe was used to put fluid down the invalid's throat. Damn. Fine.
Ulric then explained his need and, by his description, within half an hour was there a water bag, sterilized, which was filled with pure water, and a long, flexible, hollow vine, also sterilized, fitted with a dart for the administering of poison, because of course that's what needles were used for around these parts, and it too was, you guessed it, sterilized. Ulric worked a hole into the bag and fitted affixed the vine in firmly. He applied a sticky resin until no more water seeped from the bag to vine interface. Whammo! One Sylvan intravenous bag!
Taipan dubbed it a "Sleeper's Drink."
Three more were constructed, to provide a steady supply of chelator, for as long as that proved necessary.
Soon, the I.V. bags or "Sleeper's Drinks" were placed before him. He was as ready as he would ever be.
No sense in risking losing any product by transferring it. Ulric lifted the Amphora to his lips and took a great swallow, feeling an intense rush of molten metal down his esophagus and then a blissful nothingness.
Then he poured the amphora, every remaining drop, into the smoked glass with the Bane Purification Powder. He shook it vigorously, seeing the tiny glitters of crystal refracting what little light made it into the container. He looked over at Shor while he did.
"You'll need to mix this with pure water and then cook off most of the remaining alcohol, reduce it by about half the volume; at least, that's how it's down in my world. If it works, you'll be able to hook up the I.V. bags inside an hour and start delivering the chelation." He told her, just in case he lost his ass from the night, night water.
Hopefully, if there was enough similarity between this world and his old one, the alcohol would dissolve the crystals without destroying them, creating a solution that was then capable of being miscible with good old-fashioned pure water. Such was the art of the chemist, a simple idea, just rinse with alcohol, based upon exceedingly complex interactions of electron densities and who the fuck actually knew what else? The idea was, to make the powder able to save Bald'rt's life, it needed to be able to diffuse into his body to reach all the infected tissue and bind the Bane poison, all of it, stopping its damage and preventing it from renewing itself as Vedyr, Bathe, and Shor worked to eliminate it with their spooky tree ritual. In other words, the spirit booze would allow the powdered magical bullshit powder to do the thing with the magical water on the King Elf.
"Oh," Ulric said, suddenly confused. "That stuff hits like a truck."
He blacked out.
**************
Once again, Ulric woke to stare at a strange ceiling, a state that had become far, far too common for his liking.
Say this for the Elves, each room was immediately recognizable for the unique reliefs and carvings that decorated it. Each chamber of the fortress was its own little monument to the love of the Iriel'en for their forest homeland, its running rivers, its wilderness, and the critters that they shared it with.
Ulric sat up and immediately regretted it when some invisible jerk-wad put a railroad spike between his eyes.
Fortunately, the murderer rethought the error of their ways and replaced the spike with a nice kick bass, set to the metronome of his own heartbeat. Considerate bugger, for a brain murderer.
He opened his eyes to the too-bright room. The pace and timing of events somewhat eluded him. He'd been "escorted" which was a way of preserving his dignity rather than say drug helplessly like a child, to the secretive heart of Irielhos, the chamber of light and magic, unlike anything he'd ever experienced. He'd seen the ritual being carried out by Bald'rt's wives in their desperate bid to save the life of the [Lord of the Deep Wood]. After finding out more about the nature of the remedies for Bane poisons, the magically targeted Akashic poison of a torture-corrupted soul, he had gone out on a limb to create a slight modification to the binding substance they used to turn it into a true chelator that could be administered. He'd taken a swallow of the exceedingly potent liquor, the alcohol source for the final step of the chelation synthesis, and then….nothing.
He wasn't actually sure how long they'd been down there. Or how long he'd been here. He felt somewhat rested, despite the hangover. There was a sort of shallow crick in his neck that he tried and failed to massage out.
Though his body might have rested, it wasn't recovered. He couldn't see outside so he remained in a foggy nether place as it regards to time. His instincts said it was a new day, but where inside that he was absent any clue.
Ulric laid back down, letting a comfortable downy comforter envelop his chest. At least, whatever had happened to him involved the acquisition of a new bed. This one was as fine as the one in his former, now destroyed, apartment. The perfect blend of firmness and softness, his body sought to become one with this mattress. The silken fabric of the sheets, somehow always remaining just ever so slightly on the cool side made his eyes close with tactile joy.
If a man just had to die in bed, this was the bed he ought to do it in. No telling the difference between here and heaven, Ulric told himself with a small laugh. He doubted very much that heaven would exist, which made this bed an even greater promise of reward than that fiction. Yes. I will start the cult of the bed. And Lo! We will all of us, brothers, go to our just reward, the space between its sheets if only you dedicate your bodies, your very souls, to my orders! Repent! Cast off your masters and slave yourselves to this, the only Lord who brings you eternal rest! And I, the Speaker of the Pillows, will guide you to the promised land!
They would rule the world, if only they knew what they were all missing here, he lamented.
His budding religion was cast aside without warning when the heavy door to the room swung inwards and a marvel of feline grace, sensual power, and feminine beauty entered the room. She replaced his bed as his new god because she had donuts. Glazed donuts. He smelled the sugar, the crisp exterior, the oven smell. And her. She had her own spice to add to the bouquet.
The Angel of Donuts approached, her arms cradling a large tray of the incredible smelling glazed, fried, bundles of doughy joy. He didn't cry. He only wanted to.
As she settled the tray on an end table he observed her hips, noting the curve and subtle geometry. Was it wrong to touch that which was made for holding? No. No that could not be right.
"Eyaah! Ulric, you! You! MMmm. Alright, fine, have your fill." She strangled before mellowing. Turning, she pushed her hip against his stroking hand.
He closed his eyes so he could focus his existence down to that one appendage and its little attendant appendages. Such softness coupled to strength. Shaped just so, a miracle of form and function. Perfectly balanced, with its mirror on the other side of her.
Ulric came to the slow realization that he was actually still smashed. Distant reason jotted down a note as to why the bottle was hidden under a vicious animal's bed.
His eyes opened and he saw his Shadow, unclasping her belt. He also noticed a wall-length mirror that he'd, somehow, missed earlier. The crick in his neck was identifiable as a series of bruises that matched suspiciously with the even rows of neat, pearly teeth smiling hungrily at him right now. Aha! Now the mystery was solved! Donut Angel had gone to keep herself from consuming him in her eternal hunger.
Forgive me donuts! He screamed internally as her coat and shirt descended hatefully to the floor, promising cold futures instead of prompt consumption of the treats. His hand came away as she performed a minor miracle of balance and flexibility to pull off the thigh-high boots while standing, arching backward like a ballerina with her leg extended upwards behind her. She repeated this feat with the other leg and shimmied out of her coarse, sturdy trousers. Turning to him he saw primal energy in her eyes and a challenge in the set of her stance. Or he was simply extremely hammered and she was just her normal, naked self, which caused his hormones, in concert with the loss of frontal lobe activity, to project his own needs onto her. Potaytoe. Potahtoh.
Ulric threw aside the covers and beckoned her on.
Come on thou predator! Take what you may to fill thy gullet!
Some few minutes later, Ulric was finally starting to sober up. Possibly thanks to not having any liquid left in his body. Panting gently, he turned to the dark woman next to him who was humming a merry tune.
"I understand now, why your Mothers hid the Vanishing Night from your Father. That stuff…It's dangerous." Ulric admitted, somewhat apologetically.
Taipan was, for her part, smirking at him and did not seem unpleased. This was the second time he had evaporated a night with an otherworldly beauty by way of near brain death. I will not find excess in my cups again, he decided. The loss was simply too great.
"It is for special occasions, Ulric, or for when they wish to spoil themselves. For anniversaries, Birthdays, Full Moons, that sort of thing." She explained.
"Father used to like to slip it into their cups as a prank, after everyone had already gone and they were in private, of course. I believe that is what is responsible for three of Shor's daughters." Taipan continued, her disappointment in her Father's behavior obvious.
"Vedyr caught him in the act, once, though, and beat him viciously. He swore to never be caught doing such a thing again. I am not sure if that meant he would not do it again or if he would merely never be apprehended. Father Bald'rt is never one to say a single thing when he can squeeze more than that into a single utterance."
He had learned something new. About his host, about himself, and about the ancient crone next to him.
The drumbeat in his skull eased up as they sat abed devouring cold donuts. The past two days were as near to paradise as he'd ever come. He knew it in his heart.
That suddenly reminded Ulric that he hadn't so much as thought about protection.
"Taipan am I knocking you up?" He asked.
She patted his leg comfortingly, once she had him explain what that idiom meant, "No, Ulric, you are not. Elf women come into season once every other year, for a period of around two weeks. You would know if that time had come. Either she goes into isolation, if she does not wish children, or she drags her chosen sire into her chambers and he is not seen again until that time is done."
"My season was early this past spring, and, of course, I was in isolation. In truth, I was in the deep wilds evading a [Gilded Queen's Rose] that had my scent. It had been eating Harvesters and was near ready to blossom. A good Hunt." She recalled to him with pride.
"Your dad suggested I go get the core from one of those once. How bad an idea is that?" He asked, hoping she'd go into further depth on her escapades. She really did like to recall her time in the wilds, he knew it was where she'd found happiness.
"Very, Glade Chief. You see, the petals are slathered in toxic dust that confuses the senses and triggers powerful hallucinations, the barbs on the vines contain an acid that will melt bones and flesh in moments, the trick you see is……" Her excited voice rolled over him as he lay there.
He hadn't asked about Bald'rt. Or how things had turned out. But she seemed more relaxed than at any point before, as if a weight had gone. Part of him knew she had been using him to comfort herself, as a balm to soothe her pain at losing him. If that was how she intended to use him, go ahead and sign him up for the full package. For himself, he was glad that he had a…whatever they were, and that she wasn't trying to shove needles into his eyes at every opportunity.
At last, when she'd exhausted her, admittedly incredibly comprehensive knowledge on the hunting, killing, harvesting, and revenue-generating potential of the [Gilded Queen's Rose], Ulric stepped into the pause with the idea he was tossing around.
"So, Taipan, I think it's about time I took this whole learning to kill people stuff a bit more seriously. I'm not one hundred percent yet, but I feel the strength coming back pretty quickly. I'd like it if you started teaching me every way to kill a man you know about." Ulric requested.
"We don't have that long, but, until the spring, I will show you everything that you can do." Taipan promised.
Good enough.
