Chapter 103: Territory Dispute
RAVHEN
A few years were nothing to an elf, be they Calen, Sylen, or Aravel. Over time, people changed and the world moved on. Ravhen knew that as well as anyone. He couldn’t help feeling that things were changing faster than before, though.
He wasn’t old yet. At a mere forty-seven years of age, he still had eights of years ahead of him where he’d be delving into the forests, crossing deserts, or otherwise exploring. For him, the discovery of the dungeon should have been the event of a lifetime, and that would be something to look at fondly from then on.
Rumors of a new people – a strange, stout people that lived beneath the ground – had thrown him another thing to consider and fold into his experiences. He’d never met a dwarf, and maybe never would, but the mere existence of something aside from elves and dragons had been a shock to his people.
Then came the rooken. Not just a new discovery, but one found at the same time as a dungeon. The first dungeon, no less! Ravhen was famous now, thanks to this, but other explorers had quickly confirmed at least two more dungeons dawnward from the Homelands, and he’d already heard rumors that the Velosians were exploring an area they thought likely to hold another. But Ravhen had found the first, and with it yet another strange people.
He’d thought the rooken primitive, and he was still right in that respect, but looking out over the village now… things had changed so much in the few short years since he’d met Plume.
Originally a cluster of crude shelters, he now stood on a swaying bridge between two rounded huts capped with conical roofs. The construction was still simple, but so much beyond the barely-functional dwellings he’d seen when returning Plume to his home village. The bridge he stood upon held him with wooden planks laid between secure woven rope, a trick that the rooken had picked up within weeks of seeing the ropes his team carried with them.
Where once he’d seen clumsily-prepared hide for clothing and containers, now they had cured and boiled leather. Slates or tablets held scratches of writing, where the concept had been alien before. Their organization had become cleaner, their hunting more successful, and their trade much more shrewd.
Not everything had been copied from the elves, though. He saw some parts lagging behind. Weaponry was still simple, though slingshots were common now. The rooken body was ill-suited for a spear, so they had been forced to innovate their own armaments. Magic, too, was still in the early and simple stages even with the help of advanced classes. Copying the elves did little to help them in that endeavor.
“Hmn…” Ravhen stared downward as he waited for Plume to call him. He’d been told something needed to be shown to him, but not yet what. Now he was left looking down to the ground where some of the rooken children were playing an odd game.
He only understood small pieces of what they were saying. While Ravhen and the others had managed to learn some of the rooken language, most of the bird-people had swiftly learned elvish, and spoke to them in their own language instead of rooken. The elf throat was poorly-made to replicate the complicated noises of rooken speech, but the beaked creatures had little problem adapting to the stressed-sound intricacies of elf speech.
From what he could tell, the children were playing a game about the nearby dungeon. One of them played the part of the dungeon, laying out dangers and pretending to be monsters, while the others acted out the fights. At some point, the kids had developed better rules to settle arguments, and had scratched out crude dice to determine the winner of challenges.
It made for a curious sight to watch, though Ravhen wasn’t sure he’d have enjoyed it as a child. It looked too complicated for him.
“Ravhen,” a familiar chirp called out. Plume had landed at one end of the bridge, politely neglecting to land on the bridge itself. The well-made stretch of rope and wood could easily handle two, but Ravhen disliked how landing directly on the bridge made it sway. “Come, this way.”
With one last glance toward the strange game, Ravhen swished his tail and started toward his friend. “What’s so important that you called me all the way out here?”
Not that he minded. It wasn’t even much of an imposition for the rooken. Their flight was usually quite short, aside from trained expert flyers like Plume. They walked often, especially when carrying things, so the entire village had a complex of stairs, ramps, and bridges so that elves could easily find their way around. The short bluff that the village was built upon made for a great vertical settlement, giving them a compactness that only the greatest of elven cities could hope to compare to.
Ravhen quickly realized that they were headed to the top of the bluff, however. That was odd, as very few rooken lived up that high. The heavy winds that swept over the top made it inconvenient even for the bird-people, though he’d understood that they sometimes used it to launch themselves for long flights.
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He shook his head. The danger of being a [Lore Finder] were showing themselves. He couldn’t help but assess everything new each time he visited, and every time he did see the rooken, their progress in building up their village was more impressive.
“This way,” Plume repeated, doing a short flying hop up the last level to the top of the bluff. He waited for Ravhen to climb up the ladder at his own pace, finally topping the bluff to immediately see something unusual.
The top of the bluff was weathered and rocky all about, which made it poor farmland – another reason the rooken, who were trying to learn how to farm, did not use it much. Two more of the bird people stood near a large wall of stacked stones with a smear of dried paste over them, the attempt at mortaring obviously done in haste. That alone was strange for the meticulous mimics, who normally took great care in replicating structures.
A rickety platform with stairs leading up to it stood in front of the wall, and Plume hopped up the stairs to turn around with an expectant tilt of his head, awaiting Ravhen as the elf followed. Like the wall, the platform looked to be assembled swiftly, more attention paid to speed than correctness, which just added to the mystery.
As soon as Ravhen reached the top, a quiet thump announced the arrival of another rooken. This one had been nicknamed Stripe, thanks to the streak of white on his beak. Ravhen guessed it was an old injury, since this rooken was one of the more esteemed members of the tribe, but he’d never asked.
He almost asked the older bird what was going on… but then he looked over the wall.
It wasn’t just one wall, he realized. It was four, arranged in a roughly square pattern to make an open-air pen of rock walls, with a rocky floor. The pen was barren except for a large grey lump, a segmented carapace of a disturbingly large insect that nestled in against the far corner.
“What’s this?” Ravhen asked, unslinging his spear from his back. It wasn’t long enough to poke at the creature, but if he walked along the wall…
Instead of answering verbally, Stripe plucked a pommle fruit from the sack sitting next to the wall. The old bird flung the ripe, bright red fruit into the pen, the hard rind keeping it intact as it thud to the ground and rolled. Ravhen winced just a little… he liked pommle, but bruised pommle was kind of nasty.
The giant bug lifted itself up… higher and higher, standing on four legs with two up off the ground. Scuttling forward it plucked the fruit up and chewed down with broad mandibles, holding the fruit in what were unmistakably fingers on the end of the legs.
Arms, Ravhen realized. The thing had functional hands and glared at him with undisguised fixation. The alien face couldn’t be read by the elf, but the direction of the stare was obvious. It was either angry or curious about him, he guessed, but that wasn’t the part that bothered him.
“Can it speak?” The question was obvious. Before running into the rooken, he wouldn’t have asked that, but Ravhen had now seen that the presence of fingers usually lead to crafting items. The rooken had been clumsy about doing this at first, but they had undeniably created things even before encountering elves.
Stripe let out a low whistle. “It will not speak much to us, so we have not yet learned the language. When we encounter them in groups, they make distinct clicking and whistling noises at one another, and adjust how they approach. It can definitely speak, just not to us.”
Ravhen felt an uneasy turn in his stomach, watching the thing devour the fruit. “You’ve encountered them before, then?”
This time, Plume chirped and answered. “For a few tendays. This is the first time we could catch one.” His wing gestured at the hard-shelled creature, the body looking delicate and slim in front, but the back fully covered with the segmented plates of thick, pale grey and brown mottling. “Their shells are hard enough that they are difficult to kill when they curl up, and they pair up to use one another as cover this way. They use simple spears, like yours but with the tips gnawed to points.”
“We suspect there is a large nest somewhere nearby,” Stripe murmured, interjecting his own thoughts. “At first we only saw their tracks and shallow burrows, but when our crops began to vanish we started to look harder.” His wings lifted in an agitated flex. “They grew bolder, and the last few days they have organized and attacked our fields. We have difficulty driving them off with our weapons, and their numbers are increasing.”
Ravhen tapped the butt of his spear on the platform, rapping lightly as he watched the creature. It looked like the insects they knew, but much larger and ravenous. If these things ever swarmed, they could wipe out the rooken’s fields easily. And if they continued expanding duskward…
“I see why you wanted to show me, but I can’t make many decisions about it,” he finally said. “You want our help, right? But sending warriors up here would be… I’m not sure we could get enough to make a difference, long term. This calls for a large group, larger than the ones that challenge the dungeon.”
Stripe tucked his wings together. “We will fight our battles, but we need better tools and weapons. Our rocks can stun them from above, but our axes bounce off. We would like magic weapons or weapons that can pierce the shell.” He tilted his head and added, “Or to learn magic from your kind.”
With a heavy sigh, Ravhen lowered his ears, his free hand rubbing the back of his head. “I’d like to help with that, but convincing people to come and do that for you would be… pretty hard. I’ll see what I can do, but it might take a while to convince anyone that this is a threat to them as well. I don’t have any authority with my kind.”
The elder rooken lifted a wing to wave it. “We can offer something in trade. Many of our youths are very curious about your kind. They have offered to live among your people and carry messages for them, or other things that flight may help with. In exchange you may take some of our people and teach us magic, and let our messengers take back weapons.”
That idea had more merit, and Ravhen tilted his ears up as he considered it. With his status as a famous explorer he might be able to convince a few. And with the rooken’s ability to mimic one another, perhaps it would work out.
He sighed again.
“I’ll talk to them about it.”
The Gates of Wisdom
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