Taipan led the travelers through the wilds of her homelands with the familiarity of a man tying his work boots. She didn't even need to look at the ground, always her eyes were up, scanning the trees, the rises of hills, the surrounding snow for signs of dormant predators arising from their winter hibernation. There would be a dangerous season soon as the Deep Wood came alive and did so with a cavernous hunger.
Ulric let his less potent visual attention shift constantly from the snowy trail beneath his feet, to the denuded brush to his left, to the grasping branches on his right, and then a quick check of their six, or rear, before repeating the pattern. He didn't do it because he had doubts about the ability of his Shadow but more from a habit developed up on the Plateau.
The two of them had lapsed back into familiar silence and a chastised Glade Chief focused on keeping the half-scabbarded sword on his back from tripping him. He'd always kept his spear or trident in his hand and used it as a walking stick. The long covered blade on his back was new to him and liked to clip things along the sides of the trail, being near as tall as he was. If Ulric had seen a person with a weapon like that back in his home world he'd have told them they played too many games and had no idea what they were even going to do with that much metal. Out here? Just from the things he'd seen already, not to mention the various horrors that he'd heard tell of, you wanted as much distance between your arms and the things you were trying to fight off as possible.
Once, when the men who had kidnapped Brighteyes had stopped to make a little cash from the corpses of two nearly killed Greater beasts locked into a lethal draw, Ulric had seen a [Shadow Panther] on death's door bite a man's arms off, the large scimitar in his still gripping hands falling to the leaves while his life blood poured out of ruined forearms, in a snap that made him think of scissors trimming fingernails. No sir, he was now aware that the long blades were not for killing men. They were for killing things higher up the food chain.
He'd seen an Elf named Cleaver, named in Ulric's head for the massive two-handed blade like a butcher's cleaver for giants, carry the instrument like a carving knife. According to the Royal Guardsmen and his partner Taipan, Hunter triads almost always had at least one member who was versed in the use of a similarly beefy weapon for scenarios in which the more reserved tools of the scouts were not sufficient to handle.
Ulric had long since had his assumptions about the right-tilted average physical ability of the peoples of this world confirmed. The average bar out here was higher, perhaps dramatically so, compared to his old vanilla humanity. Granted, the Elves had somewhat skewed his outlook by having already pulled the vast majority of their noncombatants out of their city and into hiding, leaving behind only the fighters and the support elements for those fighters.
Taipan, gliding along the snow up there like a human-shaped serpent, with boneless grace coupled to impossible flexibility, was even worse for his perspective. Even amongst her peoples, she was a freak, her status had a title that read Paragon, the embodiment of her race's potential. Ulric, wearing a gods-crafted meat coat, was only just able to outrun her and overpower her. He came nowhere near her in terms of sheer fluidity of motion and coordination. Stats in the status weren't something he understood, intuited, or even wanted to think about but he knew now that anything in the thirties was well outside what he thought of as possible for a human. The elite Elven warriors made him think of the old folk hero of drowned Manhattan, the Spiderman, reacting almost as if precognizant. and with an agility that was awe-inspiring.
There was not a little anxiety in Ulric for meeting creatures that were to Taipan and himself as they were to the more normal peoples of the world. Something like an [Stonecrest Ogre] which could rip tree stumps out of the ground with its brute power. Many of the Greater beasts had such characteristics, and that was outside of the host of spell-like abilities and traits they carried courtesy of their awakened cores, each manifesting according to their magical natures.
Classed peoples were another consideration. Classes somehow enabled a warrior to tap the Akashic pool of experience of the world to draw on the collective knowledge to grant them heightened ability than they possessed by birth. The deeper their commitment and experience in the class, the more in tune with that class they became, the greater they could tap the Akashic connection to grow in power. Ulric was a newbie he was fresh on his path and so his classes were extremely basic, foundational starting points really. His Elementalist class was just a bit obscure since many mages preferred to focus on individual mana forms, lacking Ulric's decades of formal instruction into the natural world, but not to a great extent since older unawakened mages almost always learned to handle enough manaforms to access that class.
According to Christ, his young, for an Elf, sparring partner and friend amongst the Royal Guard, advanced classes enabled a relatively average baseline individual to do superhuman feats such as fight without using their eyes, or throw a javelin through thin stone walls, or imbue their weapons with flame to burn, even as they cut. Ulric was almost certain to encounter such opponents on his mission to decapitate whoever had instigated the coming war and ordered his death. He did not currently have any such benefit of the Akashic propping up his abilities, it took experience and training to develop those skills and he was simply too lacking in real-world application of his abilities. Other than his magic which had progressed in fits and starts, but that Elementalist class was an odd one, subtle and passive in its enhancements, for the most part.
What Ulric had, that few others possessed, was competency in magic to accompany his raw physical stats. Battlemages were rare. Combining the manipulations of energies with one's core and academic training with proficiency in weapons and movement was difficult. Most who did so cheated on this, their class making up the shortfall and sort of giving them a leg up. Ulric was a natural. He'd need to leverage his core's potency in the coming days which meant he couldn't neglect relearning to harness his power now that his core flavored all of his mana with Ceraun.
The Twinned suns were falling in their spiraling dance, shadows throwing long from branch and brush across the dusted landscape when Taipan pulled up and called for a halt. The temperatures, consistently subfreezing, were dropping to their nighttime lows, cold that would drive even Ulric's tolerance to its limits. The two of them established camp swiftly, poles driven into snow then enshrouded by the hide shelter, followed by a fireplace laid atop of woven [Steelwood] bark mesh, to act as a sort of mobile hearth. The flame-resistant bark wouldn't last forever but would allow them to get a fire going on top of the snowpack without having to dig down. Iriel's winters included enough snow to have them, at this time of year, sitting an easy two meters above where the actual ground lay.
Taipan had a fire going in a matter of a few minutes, faster than Ulric could manage it, somehow, and he was collecting dead limbs from the trunks of trees with his bone camp axe. The one-time cripple couldn't have imagined attempting to carry back a load of wood he shouldered currently and his Shadow declared the bundle sufficient to last the night. Water boiled in its pot, the smokeless fire driving it to turbulence. They made a traveler's stew of dried rations and ate in customary silence.
Ulric had been glad to find that, for the most part, Elves didn't need to fill silences to be comfortable socially. It was a habit of his own people that tired him mentally, having to keep up with a steady stream of word vomit and pretend engagement with uninteresting babble. Not that he didn't enjoy the occasional bullshit session mind, but just that they had to do it All. The. Time. None of that shit with the Elves, Taipan was happy to go entire days without saying a single unnecessary word. Brighteyes had been more garrulous, but he was also a child and they were given to be more explorative, especially in the company of a novel experience like a world jumper living in a place no one had been found for thousands of years.
So it was that the evening passed in tranquil silence and the pair were neither of them dissatisfied by its being undisturbed by circumlocution. They retired to the dense fur bedrolls and Taipan forgave him his ill-fated attempt at humor. The bumping of uglies was retired to a previous world's usage, and he paid the price of a new scar for suggesting her uglies were any such thing. Life had a way of balancing out.
Morning rose on the two to find all parties awake and plotting their course. Ulric had no reason to dispute Taipan's suggested route but insisted on a detailed description of the intended bearings to obtain a mental map of their journey. If and when all their best-laid plans went to hell Ulric wanted to have enough of a background to be able to readjust on the fly. Just because he didn't obsess about the future anymore didn't mean he didn't consider how best to deal with it.
Varda punished mistakes. It was a mantra he held close to his heart.
It fell to his Shadow then to outline their planned ingress into the heart of the Otherkin merchant empire of Prespang, the fortress city of Prosper.
They had made around forty kilometers along a roughly North-East track the prior day. They were to take the due Northerly trade routes an additional two hundred and fifty or so kilometers from Iriel into the realms of Celestin, the low lands forest Elves. They would rest a pair of days in the Celestin city of Trachn'ir. From there, it was another four hundred and fifty kilometers, about a hundred leagues, of Northern roads to cross the territories of the Celestin to reach the great plains of the Lagranel Elves, whose royal family had been murdered in the previous season by assassins believed to have been hired by Prosper directly.
Taipan was sketchy about stopping in many places where she might be recognized and thus, somehow, tip off their foes to their movements so she planned to rough it through the Lowland forests as much as was possible. Once in the plains, the nomadic plains tribes of Orlethrem were a different problem.
The Lagranel were the border folk, their lands most at risk in a direct conflict from the armies of Prosper and also the least likely to suffer actual damage from them. The Lagranel lived in mobile cities and were fully capable of simply disappearing into the plains. They would poison the wells and springs behind them and thus force Prespang to carry water the entire path of advance, stretching supply lines all the way through Orlethrem. It was a tried and true tactic of previous wars and Ulric was certain it wouldn't work this time. The enemy was playing a different game, they were wise to the Elves strategies and Ulric had a feeling that plans had been laid to counter this old ploy.
There was no guarantee of actually meeting a Lagranel settlement caravan but odds were good and Taipan was fairly confident that she could recognize the signs they left to guide one another to the normal meeting points. In any case, it was another three hundred kilometers East North East to reach the Prespang border town of Kilok, a major trade hub.
Kilok would, in normal times, see the passage of incredible volumes of goods and people. Now? Taipan wasn't willing to commit to a confidence level of being able to enter the town under her own lead, Ulric would likely have to take charge of their party. If Taipan was to be believed, and he had no reason to doubt her, Kilok was the center of an astonishingly prosperous slave trade. Elves captured in border skirmishes and raids, Beastkin from the outer reaches, Humans, even some prisoner Svartalfin, all were enslaved and transported in volume through the trade roads of Kilok on their way to the other cities of Prespang. That would give Ulric and his Shadow cover to move between townships, a barbarian with a quality slave to sell to the flesh merchants of Prosper wouldn't draw much attention. At least, that was Taipan's planned approach.
Ulric gave that a coin toss to actually play out as she intended and tried to favor a flexible mindset.
In any case, Kilok lay a mere hundred and fifty kilometers due East of the port town Bartala, whose ports on the great inland sea of Vatyn would see Ulric and Taipan on a trade ship directly to the docks of Prosper, some two hundred leagues mostly South, whose fortified capital guarded the tangled delta that emptied the Zelus into Vatyn.
All told, his Shadow's planned journey would take the two of them most of the way through the civilized portions of the continent, staying well South of the Barbarian lands where savage tribes of Beastkin and Humans were known to make for dangerous travel towards those who had no direct connections with the tribes to certify safe passage. It was some 1,150 kilometers of overland peregrinate, followed by a five hundred kilometer seafaring. Taipan estimated they would not reach their destination of Prosper until mid-spring, near to three months after they began their journey, if all went well.
It was a journey about half as long as the infamous Northameric Trail of his homeland. He'd made that trek once, in segments. It had taken him two years. The only saving grace was that the terrain would be gentler as they moved towards the plains toward Vatyn.
Ulric sat back in the shelter and took in the enormity of what he was attempting. This was different from his little jaunts back and forth between Irielhos and the glade. This was a true trek, whose scale was beyond what Ulric could really internalize. It was an adventure, but with a slightly more malevolent bent than most. After all, at the end of this trip was going to be very, very intentional murder of whoever had tried to have him incinerated and had used magical weaponized Elf cancer. His companion instinct murmured vague sibilance in the back of his mind as he considered the people who had invaded his home, for reasons still unknown, and declared themselves his enemies.
"Holy fuck, what a haul Taipan." Ulric summarized.
"This is so, Honor. But, if we succeed, it is a death knell to the enemies of Iriel and Orlethrem." Stated Taipan simply.
"The Merchant lords rule with an iron fist, they are the ones who have brought this down on the heads of their own kin. Without their coin, without their influence driving the city states of Prespang to a united front, they will shatter against Orlethrem's combined forces. The Aes'r will carve them apart and the war will end. If we cannot do this thing, it is likely the war stretches years, if not decades. Many thousands will die. Mostly them, but enough Elves to soak tragedy again into my kin. You do not owe my people this Ulric, but I will gladly go with you to see it done." His Shadow confirmed, gentle voice not hiding the steel in her will.
Ulric had been over this with her already. Just as she refused to stay behind to guard her little brother and her home, Ulric could see no way to hide behind his thin claim to humanity, to ignore the insult given and the harm brought to a bunch of people that almost made him hopeful about not everybody being selfish assholes.
"I might not owe it to your people Taipan. Maybe not, though you know my arguments to the otherwise." He paused only long enough to fail to completely suppress a simmering rage that had burned in his soul since he'd woken to find himself half-charbroiled.
"But I'll be thrice damned if I don't owe it to theirs for what they pulled." Ulric reasserted grimly.
Any hint of the pacifist in him was gone now.
Ulric had come to a realization while under the influence of a cocktail of Elvish drugs and racking pain, a new perspective on his role in this new world. For better or worse Ulric Einar Twice Born, [Forest Lord] Bane, was now the guardian of that beast's former realm. He was the new [Forest Lord] and if the old one had inspired such fear as to prevent desecration of the jewel of the Ancients, so too would he.
A supple hand placed over his unconsciously clawed mitt pulled him from murderous contemplations.
Small ribbons of arcing violet light dimmed away from his form, his core having summoned power without his notice, something that had not happened before. So in tune was he now, it responded to his emotional state. Violent wrath desired an outlet. Ulric saw his own Shadow's determined anger and her expression that said patience would bring them to it, inevitably.
Ulric took a deep breath. Then another three. Finally, he pulled himself together and the two wordlessly set about breaking down camp in the predawn gloom.
Taipan set off at a silent run, taking no visible note of the weight of her pack and travel gear. Ulric fell into step behind her, less obviously effortless. Maybe that had to do with the extra thirty kilos of weight to his gear. Lacking his Shadow's sheer agility and refinement of motion, Ulric was, nevertheless, leaps and bounds more powerful. If only he wasn't so clumsy he couldn't properly employ that strength. Time and adherence to Idra'se's regime of training routines would remedy that.
Someday.
For now, the man plodded along behind his guide, deceptively fast behind her obviously light step, the two devouring the snow laden terrain. Ulric, trying to take his Shadow's scoldings to heart, kept his eyes and, most importantly, mind, on the woods. His attention rewarded him. He saw every variation of tree Iriel had to offer and that was legion.
The Deep wood was rich in timber of a staggering array of diversity. Smooth barks, striated, ridged, whirled, and knobby, all on display without the masking of verdure to hide them. Sometimes trees grew limbs that reached outwards in radial, straight patterns of stunning symmetry, others were merely tidily regular in their branches, while still others embraced the chaos of random tangles of limbs without pattern. The surprising variety of evergreens in the Deep Wood kept the pallet of brownish-grey barks interspersed with dim blue hues and even a smattering of faded reds and oranges. In addition to the trees were more flavors of mosses than Ulric could have ever imagined; tangled [Svartalfin's Beard], spidery silver draped from limbs, blue-green carpets almost completely hiding the hard stone beneath rough outcrops or small bluffs, and a host of others in a bryophile's wet dream.
Even in the depth of Winter, Iriel was exotic sylvan beauty in every square meter of it.
One step became two, became decameters, became kilometers transforming into leagues. Gentle bounce of gear securely rigged to bodies beat a steady rhythm of time turned to distance. The only pause was a brief respite for a midday meal, cold dried travel food consisting of some kind of Elven nutbread, a jamfruit spread, and a jerky of [Stone Plate Boar]. Ulric had to smash a hole in a small creek to refill their water bags, the only significant sound either of them had made all day.
Taipan led the travelers through the wilds of her homelands with the familiarity of a man tying his work boots. She didn't even need to look at the ground, always her eyes were up, scanning the trees, the rises of hills, the surrounding snow for signs of dormant predators arising from their winter hibernation. There would be a dangerous season soon as the Deep Wood came alive and did so with a cavernous hunger.
Ulric let his less potent visual attention shift constantly from the snowy trail beneath his feet, to the denuded brush to his left, to the grasping branches on his right, and then a quick check of their six, or rear, before repeating the pattern. He didn't do it because he had doubts about the ability of his Shadow but more from a habit developed up on the Plateau.
The two of them had lapsed back into familiar silence and a chastised Glade Chief focused on keeping the half-scabbarded sword on his back from tripping him. He'd always kept his spear or trident in his hand and used it as a walking stick. The long covered blade on his back was new to him and liked to clip things along the sides of the trail, being near as tall as he was. If Ulric had seen a person with a weapon like that back in his home world he'd have told them they played too many games and had no idea what they were even going to do with that much metal. Out here? Just from the things he'd seen already, not to mention the various horrors that he'd heard tell of, you wanted as much distance between your arms and the things you were trying to fight off as possible.
Once, when the men who had kidnapped Brighteyes had stopped to make a little cash from the corpses of two nearly killed Greater beasts locked into a lethal draw, Ulric had seen a [Shadow Panther] on death's door bite a man's arms off, the large scimitar in his still gripping hands falling to the leaves while his life blood poured out of ruined forearms, in a snap that made him think of scissors trimming fingernails. No sir, he was now aware that the long blades were not for killing men. They were for killing things higher up the food chain.
He'd seen an Elf named Cleaver, named in Ulric's head for the massive two-handed blade like a butcher's cleaver for giants, carry the instrument like a carving knife. According to the Royal Guardsmen and his partner Taipan, Hunter triads almost always had at least one member who was versed in the use of a similarly beefy weapon for scenarios in which the more reserved tools of the scouts were not sufficient to handle.
Ulric had long since had his assumptions about the right-tilted average physical ability of the peoples of this world confirmed. The average bar out here was higher, perhaps dramatically so, compared to his old vanilla humanity. Granted, the Elves had somewhat skewed his outlook by having already pulled the vast majority of their noncombatants out of their city and into hiding, leaving behind only the fighters and the support elements for those fighters.
Taipan, gliding along the snow up there like a human-shaped serpent, with boneless grace coupled to impossible flexibility, was even worse for his perspective. Even amongst her peoples, she was a freak, her status had a title that read Paragon, the embodiment of her race's potential. Ulric, wearing a gods-crafted meat coat, was only just able to outrun her and overpower her. He came nowhere near her in terms of sheer fluidity of motion and coordination. Stats in the status weren't something he understood, intuited, or even wanted to think about but he knew now that anything in the thirties was well outside what he thought of as possible for a human. The elite Elven warriors made him think of the old folk hero of drowned Manhattan, the Spiderman, reacting almost as if precognizant. and with an agility that was awe-inspiring.
There was not a little anxiety in Ulric for meeting creatures that were to Taipan and himself as they were to the more normal peoples of the world. Something like an [Stonecrest Ogre] which could rip tree stumps out of the ground with its brute power. Many of the Greater beasts had such characteristics, and that was outside of the host of spell-like abilities and traits they carried courtesy of their awakened cores, each manifesting according to their magical natures.
Classed peoples were another consideration. Classes somehow enabled a warrior to tap the Akashic pool of experience of the world to draw on the collective knowledge to grant them heightened ability than they possessed by birth. The deeper their commitment and experience in the class, the more in tune with that class they became, the greater they could tap the Akashic connection to grow in power. Ulric was a newbie he was fresh on his path and so his classes were extremely basic, foundational starting points really. His Elementalist class was just a bit obscure since many mages preferred to focus on individual mana forms, lacking Ulric's decades of formal instruction into the natural world, but not to a great extent since older unawakened mages almost always learned to handle enough manaforms to access that class.
According to Christ, his young, for an Elf, sparring partner and friend amongst the Royal Guard, advanced classes enabled a relatively average baseline individual to do superhuman feats such as fight without using their eyes, or throw a javelin through thin stone walls, or imbue their weapons with flame to burn, even as they cut. Ulric was almost certain to encounter such opponents on his mission to decapitate whoever had instigated the coming war and ordered his death. He did not currently have any such benefit of the Akashic propping up his abilities, it took experience and training to develop those skills and he was simply too lacking in real-world application of his abilities. Other than his magic which had progressed in fits and starts, but that Elementalist class was an odd one, subtle and passive in its enhancements, for the most part.
What Ulric had, that few others possessed, was competency in magic to accompany his raw physical stats. Battlemages were rare. Combining the manipulations of energies with one's core and academic training with proficiency in weapons and movement was difficult. Most who did so cheated on this, their class making up the shortfall and sort of giving them a leg up. Ulric was a natural. He'd need to leverage his core's potency in the coming days which meant he couldn't neglect relearning to harness his power now that his core flavored all of his mana with Ceraun.
The Twinned suns were falling in their spiraling dance, shadows throwing long from branch and brush across the dusted landscape when Taipan pulled up and called for a halt. The temperatures, consistently subfreezing, were dropping to their nighttime lows, cold that would drive even Ulric's tolerance to its limits. The two of them established camp swiftly, poles driven into snow then enshrouded by the hide shelter, followed by a fireplace laid atop of woven [Steelwood] bark mesh, to act as a sort of mobile hearth. The flame-resistant bark wouldn't last forever but would allow them to get a fire going on top of the snowpack without having to dig down. Iriel's winters included enough snow to have them, at this time of year, sitting an easy two meters above where the actual ground lay.
Taipan had a fire going in a matter of a few minutes, faster than Ulric could manage it, somehow, and he was collecting dead limbs from the trunks of trees with his bone camp axe. The one-time cripple couldn't have imagined attempting to carry back a load of wood he shouldered currently and his Shadow declared the bundle sufficient to last the night. Water boiled in its pot, the smokeless fire driving it to turbulence. They made a traveler's stew of dried rations and ate in customary silence.
Ulric had been glad to find that, for the most part, Elves didn't need to fill silences to be comfortable socially. It was a habit of his own people that tired him mentally, having to keep up with a steady stream of word vomit and pretend engagement with uninteresting babble. Not that he didn't enjoy the occasional bullshit session mind, but just that they had to do it All. The. Time. None of that shit with the Elves, Taipan was happy to go entire days without saying a single unnecessary word. Brighteyes had been more garrulous, but he was also a child and they were given to be more explorative, especially in the company of a novel experience like a world jumper living in a place no one had been found for thousands of years.
So it was that the evening passed in tranquil silence and the pair were neither of them dissatisfied by its being undisturbed by circumlocution. They retired to the dense fur bedrolls and Taipan forgave him his ill-fated attempt at humor. The bumping of uglies was retired to a previous world's usage, and he paid the price of a new scar for suggesting her uglies were any such thing. Life had a way of balancing out.
Morning rose on the two to find all parties awake and plotting their course. Ulric had no reason to dispute Taipan's suggested route but insisted on a detailed description of the intended bearings to obtain a mental map of their journey. If and when all their best-laid plans went to hell Ulric wanted to have enough of a background to be able to readjust on the fly. Just because he didn't obsess about the future anymore didn't mean he didn't consider how best to deal with it.
Varda punished mistakes. It was a mantra he held close to his heart.
It fell to his Shadow then to outline their planned ingress into the heart of the Otherkin merchant empire of Prespang, the fortress city of Prosper.
They had made around forty kilometers along a roughly North-East track the prior day. They were to take the due Northerly trade routes an additional two hundred and fifty or so kilometers from Iriel into the realms of Celestin, the low lands forest Elves. They would rest a pair of days in the Celestin city of Trachn'ir. From there, it was another four hundred and fifty kilometers, about a hundred leagues, of Northern roads to cross the territories of the Celestin to reach the great plains of the Lagranel Elves, whose royal family had been murdered in the previous season by assassins believed to have been hired by Prosper directly.
Taipan was sketchy about stopping in many places where she might be recognized and thus, somehow, tip off their foes to their movements so she planned to rough it through the Lowland forests as much as was possible. Once in the plains, the nomadic plains tribes of Orlethrem were a different problem.
The Lagranel were the border folk, their lands most at risk in a direct conflict from the armies of Prosper and also the least likely to suffer actual damage from them. The Lagranel lived in mobile cities and were fully capable of simply disappearing into the plains. They would poison the wells and springs behind them and thus force Prespang to carry water the entire path of advance, stretching supply lines all the way through Orlethrem. It was a tried and true tactic of previous wars and Ulric was certain it wouldn't work this time. The enemy was playing a different game, they were wise to the Elves strategies and Ulric had a feeling that plans had been laid to counter this old ploy.
There was no guarantee of actually meeting a Lagranel settlement caravan but odds were good and Taipan was fairly confident that she could recognize the signs they left to guide one another to the normal meeting points. In any case, it was another three hundred kilometers East North East to reach the Prespang border town of Kilok, a major trade hub.
Kilok would, in normal times, see the passage of incredible volumes of goods and people. Now? Taipan wasn't willing to commit to a confidence level of being able to enter the town under her own lead, Ulric would likely have to take charge of their party. If Taipan was to be believed, and he had no reason to doubt her, Kilok was the center of an astonishingly prosperous slave trade. Elves captured in border skirmishes and raids, Beastkin from the outer reaches, Humans, even some prisoner Svartalfin, all were enslaved and transported in volume through the trade roads of Kilok on their way to the other cities of Prespang. That would give Ulric and his Shadow cover to move between townships, a barbarian with a quality slave to sell to the flesh merchants of Prosper wouldn't draw much attention. At least, that was Taipan's planned approach.
Ulric gave that a coin toss to actually play out as she intended and tried to favor a flexible mindset.
In any case, Kilok lay a mere hundred and fifty kilometers due East of the port town Bartala, whose ports on the great inland sea of Vatyn would see Ulric and Taipan on a trade ship directly to the docks of Prosper, some two hundred leagues mostly South, whose fortified capital guarded the tangled delta that emptied the Zelus into Vatyn.
All told, his Shadow's planned journey would take the two of them most of the way through the civilized portions of the continent, staying well South of the Barbarian lands where savage tribes of Beastkin and Humans were known to make for dangerous travel towards those who had no direct connections with the tribes to certify safe passage. It was some 1,150 kilometers of overland peregrinate, followed by a five hundred kilometer seafaring. Taipan estimated they would not reach their destination of Prosper until mid-spring, near to three months after they began their journey, if all went well.
It was a journey about half as long as the infamous Northameric Trail of his homeland. He'd made that trek once, in segments. It had taken him two years. The only saving grace was that the terrain would be gentler as they moved towards the plains toward Vatyn.
Ulric sat back in the shelter and took in the enormity of what he was attempting. This was different from his little jaunts back and forth between Irielhos and the glade. This was a true trek, whose scale was beyond what Ulric could really internalize. It was an adventure, but with a slightly more malevolent bent than most. After all, at the end of this trip was going to be very, very intentional murder of whoever had tried to have him incinerated and had used magical weaponized Elf cancer. His companion instinct murmured vague sibilance in the back of his mind as he considered the people who had invaded his home, for reasons still unknown, and declared themselves his enemies.
"Holy fuck, what a haul Taipan." Ulric summarized.
"This is so, Honor. But, if we succeed, it is a death knell to the enemies of Iriel and Orlethrem." Stated Taipan simply.
"The Merchant lords rule with an iron fist, they are the ones who have brought this down on the heads of their own kin. Without their coin, without their influence driving the city states of Prespang to a united front, they will shatter against Orlethrem's combined forces. The Aes'r will carve them apart and the war will end. If we cannot do this thing, it is likely the war stretches years, if not decades. Many thousands will die. Mostly them, but enough Elves to soak tragedy again into my kin. You do not owe my people this Ulric, but I will gladly go with you to see it done." His Shadow confirmed, gentle voice not hiding the steel in her will.
Ulric had been over this with her already. Just as she refused to stay behind to guard her little brother and her home, Ulric could see no way to hide behind his thin claim to humanity, to ignore the insult given and the harm brought to a bunch of people that almost made him hopeful about not everybody being selfish assholes.
"I might not owe it to your people Taipan. Maybe not, though you know my arguments to the otherwise." He paused only long enough to fail to completely suppress a simmering rage that had burned in his soul since he'd woken to find himself half-charbroiled.
"But I'll be thrice damned if I don't owe it to theirs for what they pulled." Ulric reasserted grimly.
Any hint of the pacifist in him was gone now.
Ulric had come to a realization while under the influence of a cocktail of Elvish drugs and racking pain, a new perspective on his role in this new world. For better or worse Ulric Einar Twice Born, [Forest Lord] Bane, was now the guardian of that beast's former realm. He was the new [Forest Lord] and if the old one had inspired such fear as to prevent desecration of the jewel of the Ancients, so too would he.
A supple hand placed over his unconsciously clawed mitt pulled him from murderous contemplations.
Small ribbons of arcing violet light dimmed away from his form, his core having summoned power without his notice, something that had not happened before. So in tune was he now, it responded to his emotional state. Violent wrath desired an outlet. Ulric saw his own Shadow's determined anger and her expression that said patience would bring them to it, inevitably.
Ulric took a deep breath. Then another three. Finally, he pulled himself together and the two wordlessly set about breaking down camp in the predawn gloom.
Taipan set off at a silent run, taking no visible note of the weight of her pack and travel gear. Ulric fell into step behind her, less obviously effortless. Maybe that had to do with the extra thirty kilos of weight to his gear. Lacking his Shadow's sheer agility and refinement of motion, Ulric was, nevertheless, leaps and bounds more powerful. If only he wasn't so clumsy he couldn't properly employ that strength. Time and adherence to Idra'se's regime of training routines would remedy that.
Someday.
For now, the man plodded along behind his guide, deceptively fast behind her obviously light step, the two devouring the snow laden terrain. Ulric, trying to take his Shadow's scoldings to heart, kept his eyes and, most importantly, mind, on the woods. His attention rewarded him. He saw every variation of tree Iriel had to offer and that was legion.
The Deep wood was rich in timber of a staggering array of diversity. Smooth barks, striated, ridged, whirled, and knobby, all on display without the masking of verdure to hide them. Sometimes trees grew limbs that reached outwards in radial, straight patterns of stunning symmetry, others were merely tidily regular in their branches, while still others embraced the chaos of random tangles of limbs without pattern. The surprising variety of evergreens in the Deep Wood kept the pallet of brownish-grey barks interspersed with dim blue hues and even a smattering of faded reds and oranges. In addition to the trees were more flavors of mosses than Ulric could have ever imagined; tangled [Svartalfin's Beard], spidery silver draped from limbs, blue-green carpets almost completely hiding the hard stone beneath rough outcrops or small bluffs, and a host of others in a bryophile's wet dream.
Even in the depth of Winter, Iriel was exotic sylvan beauty in every square meter of it.
One step became two, became decameters, became kilometers transforming into leagues. Gentle bounce of gear securely rigged to bodies beat a steady rhythm of time turned to distance. The only pause was a brief respite for a midday meal, cold dried travel food consisting of some kind of Elven nutbread, a jamfruit spread, and a jerky of [Stone Plate Boar]. Ulric had to smash a hole in a small creek to refill their water bags, the only significant sound either of them had made all day.
