Author's note

Got a surprisingly large amount of subscribers since last week's Friday chapter. Welcome mareus, Lord Fufundra, and P:rehistoricDuck.

Also, sorry for being a little late. (It says something that I can call being late being off by just about an hour and 1/2. Shows how punctual my standard has become. XD.) Anyway, was a bit distracted by family stuff.

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??? POV

 

At first, after the dryad had left, everyone felt a sense of relief. However, they all knew the dryad was not truly gone. As a tree spirit, they could be anywhere, watching the people of the crowd at this very moment.

 

After what these people had just experienced, nobody knew what to do. They were just in a daze. Several people had to pick themselves up off the ground, standing embarrassed about the mess they had made of themselves. They were able to recover a little bit of their shame upon realizing they were not alone in this, but it could not even come close to completely erasing the embarrassment.

 

The sound of a child crying could be heard at the edges of the crowd. Several eyes were drawn to the noise the kid was making as his mother seemed to be trying to sooth him.

 

“It’s Ok, it’s over now.” She said, cradling the child’s head into her shoulder.

 

“No!” A man nearby said in response before turning to the rest of the crowd. “This isn’t it! The dryad said something before they left, right!?” His voice quaked and broke as he brought up the subject that was surely haunting everyone’s memory. “We’re supposed to punish the people who spread the rumors ourselves!”

 

“Wait! I thought the dryad just said to figure out who was guilty!” Someone else in the crowd spoke up to counter the man.

 

A murmur spread throughout the crowd as the implications between this exchange began to sink in. At the same time, another thing the dryad had said creeped into several people’s minds. There were may eyes cast to the outskirts of the village. With the number of trees dotting the area, it was hard to see all the way out to the edge of the lakira grove from this location in the center. However, in those places where you could see the edge, a wall of ivy vines woven together was plainly visible.

 

This wall of vines had been painstakingly woven for the past two weeks by the mages of this village, and more recently they were even joined by the mages from the next village over. This was a project they had undertook in order to protect the village from the tainted devils under the order of the fey dragon who had come to the village.

 

The dryad had said no one was going to be allowed to leave. It was a brutal irony that the wall that had been put in place to defend their lives by keeping the enemies out had now become a symbol of oppression to them all as it was now a wall that kept them in.

 

There had been a great deal of scoffing at the flimsy wall the mages were being made to construct. It was only a thin wall of vines. There was no way that simple wall could protect them for long. It had only been just over 2 years since the scouts who went out to check out the area after the Heaven’s Fall had run across a village in which several of the lakira trees had been burned to the ground. This was the work of those same devils.

 

There was magic to protect plants against fire, but the mighty lakira trees were constantly bathed in the magic of their tree spirits. That very magic should render them the least vulnerable to fire, but they had still been burned down. It was clear the devils had some kind of powerful fire magic. That wall of vines would do nothing to protect the village.

 

That wall would not even do much to keep the devils out of the village. Even after the wall had been put up, the hunters had routinely felt it easier to simply climb a near by tree and jump over the wall rather than use the gates that had been put up. It did very little to stop people from entering and leaving as they pleased. The wall was entirely useless for it’s intended purpose.

 

There was only one way this wall could ever keep people from crossing it. That was, to have the tree spirits actively lash out at anyone trying to climb their tree. A normal tree spirit would not have the power to do this on their own. A dryad, on the other hand, could do this easily.

 

“Alright, calm down.” A woman’s voice cut through the din of worried voices. This woman stepped toward the center of the crowd with an air of leadership. Half the people in the crowd recognized this woman and knew her well. This was Sainel, the master magus of Rima village which had sent their best in order to help them.

 

“Alright,” Sainel began once all eyes were on her. “If you will remember, the changeling, Mr. Sagel, just made an effort to intercede with the spirit of this village in order to advocate for all of us. I feel we should follow a similar example. Let us not allow ourselves to be ruled by our fears. We should keep this orderly and try to hold a trial for those who have sparked the great spirit’s ire.”

 

There was an uneasy tension in the crowd at her announcement.

 

“Well then,” she continued. “As I am from outside this village, I feel I might be in the best position to impartially judge any case brought before me. Let’s hear what you have to say.”

 

“Hold on! Why should we be listening to her!? It was the outsiders who started all of this anyway!”

 

“Yeah!” Several voices were raised in agreement with the man who had shouted out.

 

“Yeah, it was one of the outsiders who told that dragon about the babies! It’s their fault!”

 

“Alright! If you won’t listen to her, you can listen to me then!” An old man walked out to join the magus Sainel. The man who just stepped forward was Calanor, the elder of the village. “I understand there’s a lot of tension here, but we need to keep cool heads. A trial makes sense. We don’t want to end up with a situation where we are randomly casting about blame.”

 

“Shut up old man! It’s not your head that’s on the line here!” A man from the crowd shouted.

 

“Hey, weren’t you one of the people talking about the girls being grey elves?” Someone accused the man who just spoke up.

 

“No! Well, I talked about how it was possible, but I never seriously advocated for anything!”

 

“I think we all might have had thoughts like that. I think the question is whether or not someone got in on the gossip. Most of us knew better and we all held our tongues!”

 

“Yeah! See! We’re all guilty then!”

 

“That’s not what I said.”

 

“You just said you suspected it, that’s like an admission of guilt!”

 

“I think if someone is guilty here, it’s gotta be you!”

 

“Shut up!” Before anyone could intervene, the man who was being accused ran forward and punched the one he was arguing with in the face. In the next moment, the entire crowd was on him, pulling him to the ground. “Stop stop stop!” The man desperately tried to defend himself as feet began stomping on him.

 

“ENOUGH!” The elder’s voice shouted above the chaos, but it did not stop.

 

“Elder, no!” He tried to approach the mob, but was quickly blocked by one of the strong young hunters. The man put his hand on the elder’s chest and sadly shook his head. Calanor knew this young man was right. All he could do was look on sadly as the mob beat a man to death.

 

The man who was punched spat out blood and looked on with hatred in his eyes as the mob began to disperse, seeing that the man was no longer moving. “You see!?” He shouts. “We can’t have a trial, you think that anyone is just going to sit and submit themselves to be judged like that!?”

 

“No, calm down!” Calanor shouted desperately. “This will only lead to unneeded bloodshed! We need to be calm!”

 

“We can’t be calm in a situation like this old man!”

 

“AHHHH!!!” A child’s scream erupts and catches everyone’s attention.

 

“Teril!” Everyone looks as the mother reaches for her child who is being dragged backward by a vine that had managed to wrap around his waist. He is pulled toward a tree that immediately opens up. The small boy is immediately pulled inside, and then the wooden exterior of the house closes on him.

 

“EEEK!” A little girl is heard screaming from the other side of the crowd, heads turn to see a very similar situation going on with her.

 

Realization dawns on them. The dryad is protecting the children. This brings a momentary sigh of relief.

 

“You see!? This must be what the dryad wants!” The man who was the instigator so far yells. “They’re saying the children are innocent! We don’t have to worry then.”

 

“AHHH! Let go of me!” Another scream rings out, this time from an adult woman. When people turn to look, they see the mother who was just with her son who got dragged away. Another woman has come up behind her and is holding her by the hair.

 

“This woman was spreading the rumors as well!” She says triumphantly.

 

“No!” The mother screams, trying to resist as she is dragged by her hair by the triumphant looking woman toward the angry mob.

 

“Calanor!” The voice of Sainel raises as the elder holds his hands forward in a state of focus.

 

“Elder, stop!” The young man who stopped him before grabs the elder roughly by the shoulders and shakes him, throwing off his concentration for the spell he seemed to be about to cast. In the meantime, Sainel runs up behind and grabs him by the shoulder.

 

“This is getting too far out of hand, if you do something like that it will only make them angrier and then they might even go after you!”

 

“I can’t just let them do this! They’re going to rip her to shreds!”

 

“Did she say anything about the girls?” Sainel asks.

 

“Well, she did, but…” 

 

“Then there really is nothing you can do! Especially if that’s the case. If you interfere with them, they will only see you as an obstacle with the state they’re in now.”

 

“But what’s after this!? They’re not just going to stop with her!”

 

The magus Sainel looks over at the woman being made to kneel in front of the crowd. She begs the mob, but all she gets in return is a slap across the face before someone else kicks her in the stomach. From here, the crowd quickly surrounds her and it’s easy to assume how the rest of this will progress.

 

“Yes, it is unfortunate, but all we can do is find a few people to protect and get them somewhere safe at this point.” At these words, she looks over toward the other apprentice mages of the village. Calanor follows her gaze and realizes something that makes his face drop in horror.

 

“Laeril!?” He could see the little girl clinging in fear to Ceren’s hip. Why wasn’t she taken to safety by the vines already!? This was very bad! If they saw that little girl still out in the open when all the other kids had been taken to safety, someone would definitely assume the worst thing possible.

 

“Let’s get them to a corner of the village, we can protect ourselves there.” Sainel gives out a command that Calanor can’t help but nod his head in agreement with. A few more hunters have joined them by this point to form a guard around the elder and the magus as they move toward the spellsinger and apprentices.

 

Calanor takes off his cloak as he approaches and throws it over Ceren’s shoulders, allowing it to also cover the upper body of the little girl clinging to her. “Hide Laeril!” He says to her in a high whisper. “We’ve got to go!”

 

As a group, they manage to get away from the mob as the village continues to descend into chaos.

 

-

 

Eirlathion’s POV

 

“Actually master, it would be better that you not go outside right now.”

 

Eirlathion looked up at Dryad, there was something he did not really like about the way they had said that, and it was not just because being contradicted by the spirit of his house was a new experience for him. It was an expected thing for dryads to have a much stronger will than a nymph. However, there seemed to be some kind of implication under those words that just gave him an uneasy feeling. Perhaps he had just become hyper sensitive to these uneasy feelings after what had happened a short while ago, but there was something about this that told him he was not wrong to have an uneasy feeling about Dryad’s refusal to let him outside.

 

“Why?” He asks with a challenging tone. “What’s going on out there?”

 

“Well, before I left with Sagel, I told everyone out there that they should handle the rest in regards to little matters like those who spread rumors. It seems like they have taken a rather extreme interpretation of my words.”

 

“What!? Dryad, what’s happening!?”

 

“I’m sorry, all I can do right now is protect a few of the children. The elder is getting a few other people to safety. You will be in danger if you go outside right now master, so I’m afraid I cannot let you out.”

 

“Are you saying you’re out of mana!?” Sagel’s voice broke into their conversation. Meanwhile, Eirlathion rested his hand against the inner wall. He could not hear a single sound that would reveal what was going on outside right now. This wall had grown very thick during Dryad’s transformation, thick enough that it could completely block out the turmoil that must be going on outside at this moment.

 

A sick feeling twisted through Eirlathion’s gut as he considered this situation. Dryad had not answered Sagel’s question, but Eirlathion knew the answer already without having to press for one. He did not know whether or not Dryad was actually short on mana, but even if they were not they would not be willing to help stop what was going on outside right now. If it really was a question of not enough mana, Dryad could have easily asked him to supply some. He had exhausted himself earlier working on the wall, but he had plenty of supplies in the cabinets that could go a long way toward augmenting Dryad’s mana supply far beyond what he could pour in himself.

 

If it really was just a matter of being short on mana, Dryad would have asked for some of Eirlathion’s resources in order to have the power to help. The mere fact that they were not askin, the fact that their tone seemed to not even indicate the slightest bit of tension or concern for what they just said was happening out there, it was enough to tell him all he needed to know.

 

Eirlathion knew what was going on, but he did not press Dryad and he did not offer mana or magical supplies to them. He knew he would be rejected, and that rejection would force Dryad to drop the thin mask of benevolence they were wearing in front of him. Eirlathion was beginning to get more and more of a clear picture of what was beneath that mask now, and he was growing afraid to see directly what was underneath.

 

“Dryad.” Eirlathion said in a heavy and cold voice, hinting at the turbulent emotions just barely being held below the surface. “I would like to go down and check on Túeth and the children. Can you give me some stairs?”

 

The wall opened up in front of him, revealing small outcropping with stairs leading down. This was not the normal place where he had the stairs, but since the walls had grown so much thicker now the stairs could easily go anywhere without the need for an already existing dedicated area for the purpose.

 

Eirlathion silently descended the stairs without a word. He wanted to get out of that room before Sagel in his loose-tongued state blurted something out that ripped Dryad’s mask clean off and forced him to see the dreaded truth head on.

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Author's note.

Also, I've decided to start a new little fun thing. Sharing the SubscribeStar subscriber comment last chapter was something kinda fun, so I think I'm going to make it a regular thing.

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Subscriber comment of the chapter.

"dat village got some nice kindly elders and shameless adults....20 mob death i bet maybe more. also Dryad don't give a F%^k, "mess with my baby's kill each other for me plz"

                                                   -Roy

Yeah, it was Roy again this chapter. He tends to have a bit of a thing for such comments.