“What’s with the ears?” I asked, one of the avyd queen’s weird carapace protrusions held between gauntleted fingers. “Were these things taking trophies?”

  “Ears?” Nora asked and came over to where I knelt amongst the blood and mud, Iona’s touch till present.

  “Look at the corpse.” I said. “The weird skirt is just dried rabbit ears.”

  Nora did so, careful to avoid kneeling on any workers. After her own brief inspection, she picked up an ear only to drop it back down, where it resounded against the carapace with a dull hollow thud. She shivered at the sound and stood back up, muttering a curse to some Divinity.

  “What do you guys know about how species become enlightened?” Maggie asked, coming over to stand behind us.

  “Not much.” I said, which seemed to be the general sentiment from everyone, including Ellen and Mika, who walked over to join us when Maggie had.

  “The standard explanation is pretty basic. Once an animal becomes strong enough to achieve sapience, it echoes throughout their DNA. From the moment an individual becomes enlightened, every one of their descendants, until their death, gets an echo of that sapience.

  “Usually, the echo results in weird quirks. Like our girls here making clothes out of rabbit ears.” Maggie elaborated.

  “So, some distant ancestor of theirs achieved enlightenment, and now they all have some kind of quirk?” Nora asked.

  “Essentially. Sometimes the echo skips a generation. But quirks like these are how the Guild monitors whether a species has become perfectly sapient.”

  “Does the Guild know who the enlightened ancestor is?” Mika asked, an accusing finger pointed at the younger queen.

  “It does. Remember that island the avyd are originally from? The sapient avyd queen has completely driven the tribes from it and taken over. Think of any avyd we see outside that island as an expeditionary force. Something the Guild fought against for centuries now.”

  “Why?” Nora asked. “If these things are basically sapient, why are we trying to eliminate their expeditionary force?”

  “Because they’re not enlightened. The Guild estimates that there’s three avyd who’ve achieved enlightenment. The rest remain animals. Animals with a developing proto-culture, sure. But avyd remain one of the most expansionary and fecund animals we know of. If the Guild or any force allowed them to establish a foothold on the continent proper; they’d sweep across it like a swarm of locusts. Hence the bounty.”

  ~~~***~~~

  It took two hours to finish looting and destroy the hive. Mika was the only one able to go into the hive proper. The rest of us forced him to use his golems to crush the hundreds of avyd eggs in the hatchery. I had the pleasure of breaking open the avyd corpses to check for mana cores or rare mutations that might sell well at market.

  I only found one mana core, hidden within an avyd who’d died a foot away from the entrance. The only mutation I found amongst the dead was a single avyd with mutated paw like feet. Its legs ended in three digitigrade claws rather than the smooth points of its brethren.

  Mutation was an uncommon event, but one that was studied relentlessly. Mom had several journals dedicated to the research of how mundane animals evolved. A fact that always stuck out to me growing up was that animals that lived in mana-deserts mutated and evolved at a rate thousands of times slower than animals who lived within the continent’s normal density.

  Ellen had the honor of breaking down the queens and extracting anything that could be of value. She wasn’t the most experienced, but she had Maggie, who hovered over her shoulder, to watch and offer advice.

  Nora was stuck on silk harvesting, as her water blade spell was our best option for the job. Not to mention she seemed almost giddy to practice her mana control. Nora was told to start at the top of the hive and work her way down. Two hours later, Maggie called for her to stop.

  “Nora, you’re good! Leave the rest.”

  “How come?” Nora asked as she descended from the hive like a monkey.

  “It’ll make a good den for whatever comes next. The leftover Dao might even create a new variant.” Maggie answered.

  That mollified Nora. The Dao was everywhere and in everything, everything with its own unique Dao. In living beings, our auras were how we brought forward our Daos. Our understanding of the universe made into a tool to affect the world. In the Divine, their Daos manifested as domains.

  While the hive was unlikely to impart any genuine change on whatever came to occupy this next. It could produce a valuable hunt. Nothing here seemed to have a high understanding of the Dao, and even if it did, the Tier of the avyd, and the materials they used to build, were too low for any real portion of their Dao to seep into the world.

  The Dao wasn’t something I thought about very much. I knew as I grew stronger and my level progression slowed down, improving my aura, and Dao would be my primary way to gain power. Right now, it just wasn’t something I had the experience to truly grow.

  Sure, I had a Dao now, but the insight and understandings it contained was little more than the thought of an egg compared to the Dao of some of my trainers. Growth in my Dao would come with time, training, and directed meditation. Thanks to the increase in Aura with each level, [Grove Guard] would provide me with some growth.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  ~~~***~~~

  I had no desire to ask the Grace Mother to guide the avyd to their next incarnation. Instead, I knelt down in the mire of bodies before the hive and dipped my thumb into the muddy blood. I smeared the blood in two lines from the bottom of my lips to the top of my chest that fanned out in the center to create a circle around my throat.

  The rite I was about to perform didn’t require I mark myself with the avyds’ blood, but it was a tradition amongst my year in the Order. Where I marked myself made no difference to our self-made custom, but unless I was beseeching Ylena or her daughters for a gift, I tended to mark the bottom of my jaw.

  Grace Mother, Ylena. Witness my deeds. I dedicate the Decay and Stagnation of these beasts to you. May they provide nourishment to your eternal Renewal.

  From my bond with Ylena, sensation filled me. The new spring sun on an iced over pond. A mother fox curled around her cub. The warmth of a sparrow’s feather as it bathes in the dappled sunlight. A fawn, unafraid with its herd around it. An oak tree’s roots finding new pockets of water. The flower accepting the bee’s weight on it. Warmth and acceptance in all its many forms flowed to me.

  The tether that connected us, usually kept to the background of my awareness, now surged with pride as Ylena viewed the fight from my eyes. Her presence faded soon after the rush of sensation started and returned to its dormant state. She had seen my offerings and accepted it. What she did with the offering was up to her.

  Congratulations! You have leveled up! [Grove Guard] is now level 3!

  +2 Constitution +1 Strength +1 Aura +1 Free Point Awarded!

  Status:

  Name: Bran

  Class: [Grove Guard] LVL3

  Attributes:

  Strength – 17 (+1)

  Dexterity – 11

  Constitution – 20 (+2)

  Endurance – 24 (+1)

  Wisdom – 6

  Intelligence – 10

  Aura – 8 (+1)

  Luck – 5

  I felt my entire body creak and groan as the new attributes rushed into me and made me more. For my free point this level, I invested in Endurance. It’d started my highest stat by far, though Constitution would soon overtake it. I figured it never hurt to invest in the areas you’re talented.

  ~~~***~~~

  By the time we got back to the emperor’s highway, all our packs were significantly heavier. Unlike with the dead tusk, Maggie refused to transport the carcasses in her storage ring. According to her, the amount a party could carry was a key part of how fast an adventuring party progressed through their apprenticeships.

  The groups that couldn’t or wouldn’t carry much continued to level, but could never make as much money as the groups that harvested their kills. That, more than anything else, slowed progress. It hadn’t taken long for me to accept the rationale and load up my pack where ever I could with parts I thought valuable. At their core, adventurers were small, independent military units, and every unit lived and died by their logistics.

  As we walked, I fiddled with a couple of pieces of carapace I’d taken from avyd who mutated to have interesting patterns. One of which had its sand brown coloring streaked through with a brown the color of chocolate, and a red the color of ripe berries. Ideally, once we got to Dustreach, I’d have the pieces I took commissioned into a toy for Helena. What the toy would be, I didn’t know, maybe a squirrel or something like that. Hells, I might even carve the bulk from stone myself and commission a toy maker to finish the rest.

  Nora was the only other member of the party to take some of the cooler looking pieces. What she intended to do with hers, neither her nor I knew, she’d just wanted them because they were pretty.

  The next day and a half passed without incident. When we bedded down the previous night, nobody’d seen any carrion wyrms on shift. A first for the march, and meant we were finally out of the territory of that arch wyrm. Which also explained why the city hadn’t dealt with them. We were still at least a day away from the very outskirts of Dustreach.

  ~~~***~~~

  Beautiful oranges, reds, and pinks flooded the sky as the sunset, the world alight in every direction with colors. Sunsets were never as vast in the forest, surrounded and enclosed by the canopy as we were. You either had to look through small gaps in the canopy or climb a tree. But even if you breached the canopy, you had to spend more time watching for predators, then you could watching the sky.

  The closer we got to Dustreach, something fought with the sun for dominance in the sky. A pale aquamarine light clashed with the sun and slowly grew brighter as we marched. In the areas they met, neither could overcome the other and instead mixed, like two paints, the color like oxidized brass.

  “What’s the green?” I asked. “Anybody know?”

  “That’s the glow from Dustreach’s walls.” Maggie answered.

  “Dustreach is pretty old, right? I thought I read somewhere that its at least six hundred years old. So it’s not the runes. What’s causing the light?”

  “No, it is the runes.” Ellen added.

  “How? I mean, the walls have got to be old enough that the runes melded. There’s no reason for them to glow like this.” I said and gestured to the painted sky.

  “They actually repaint the runes with fresh ink every year.” Ellen continued. “From what I know, they make the ink with a plant native to the Under Tunnels, so the color is unique to Dustreach.”

  “Wouldn’t that be expensive? Surely they aren’t taxing people for a vanity project?”

  With the new expansion to Twin Oak, we’d painted runes onto the new buildings at an incredible expense. Not only did you have to compensate the master carvers and enchanters to actually make the runes, we compensated people for the herbs, for the labor to make the runic ink, and for people to actually apply it. Not to mention the time cost of growing all the required ingredients or sourcing them from out of the forest.

  “They do tax a little bit per person. It’s like eight coppers per person, but it’s all part of this massive propaganda campaigns every year. Duchess Katherine wants the common people invested in the city’s identity, so the repainting effort gets turned into a massive festival every year. Neighborhoods even throw contests to see who will be their official painter.”

  “How are you so aware of Dustreach’s propaganda strategies?” I asked.

  As far as I knew, noble society was supposed to be a massive power game. Disclosing your propaganda efforts to other noble houses seemed an easy way to have them flipped against you.

  “My uncle and the duchess had a kid together. I asked my cousin about the festival the last time I visited.”

  “Ajax right?” Maggie asked.

  “Yeah, I wasn’t born when the scandal broke, but my dad says aunt Verity nearly tore down the keep to get at him.”

  “Scandal?”

  “Yeah, uncle Ajax and the duchess aren’t married, so when she legitimized Irene as her heir, there was this massive campaign to find out who the father was. Once it came to light that uncle Ajax not only slept above his station but fathered a bastard with the duchess, it was big news in the capital for a year. The whole thing set back aunt Verity’s political aspirations, and she had Ajax flogged for it.”

  “How much power does your aunt have over her brothers to flog them?” I asked.

  It wasn’t that I thought the punishment too harsh, I’d been flogged. It was just that back home, corporal punishment was restricted to failure to uphold your duties as a member of the military. Physical punishment outside of those grounds was strictly forbidden.

  “Aunt Verity? She could have killed him and I don’t think anyone in the empire would have batted an eye. She founded House Smallbard, what she says goes.”

  “I didn’t realize your house was so young. I was under the assumption that being raised to the peerage was incredibly hard. How’d she do it?”

  “Oh, it is. We’re the first house to be raised in the last three hundred years.” Ellen said, a hint of subtle pride in her voice. “Aunt Verity secured an alliance with the Kingdom of Yerage when it was all but an open secret the Dominion was going to invade. Apparently, the threat of Yerage was enough to deter the Dominion. They raised aunt Verity to the peerage and granted her the province of Woodsedge as a reward for brokering the alliance.”

  We kept talking as we walked, mainly about the early years of Ellen’s house. As the sun set and we got closer to Dustreach, the aquamarine of its walls won out over the sun and painted the sky in a blue emerald color.

  It took another two miles for the very tops of Dustreach’s walls to come into view across the horizon. The glow now had a source, and it lit up the night like a torch in the overgrowth. Never allowing for true dark.

  The stone of the walls was just barely visible through the glow of the runes; the cool red-orange color, like a time faded rust, contrasted well against the oxidized copper of the runes. Looking at it, I would have bet a gold piece that the red and green of their walls were their city’s official colors.

  “We should stop here for the night.” Maggie said.

  “How come?” Nora asked. “We’re so close, I can see the city already.”

  “The mesa is deceptive. We’re still half a day away from the city, and I really don’t feel like walking through the night. How about y’all?”

  I’d forgotten that Dustreach was atop a mesa. I’d been under the same assumption as Nora that we were closer than we appeared. When we finally had our camp set up and I had bedded down in my tent, I had to put my pillow over my eyes as the fabric of my tent did nothing to stop a faint green light from leaking through to the interior.