>>5886712“We’ll discuss it more tonight.”
You watch Clanirae stretch languorously, turn on heel, and saunter back down to her resting-place. You consider pursuing her, to demand and explanation, but that feels faintly sacrilegious, and at the very least very rude. You instead just stare down at your remaining food before, filled with sudden appetite, you wolf it down as surely as you wager that Oncyth fellow would have.
That evening, the elves of Dappulyet—and Laskar Endingray, and Ruldofo van Houtzmann, who have after all earned their place here—gather around the centre of Dappulyet’s scared clearing. The sun is low in the sky when the feasting begins. It isn’t like a human feast (full of carbs and meat and fat) nor like a goblin sendoff (mostly alcohol, as you recall). Elves party differently. The festivities are marked by a sort of vegetarian buffet, with each elf gathering portions of every foodstuff and finding those who helped to make it; then, they thank them, and pass secret whispers or small scraps of rough paper covered in elven glyphs describing the recipe—a passing of secrets, however humble, in honour of the Goddess of Secrets Shared, and Goodness Cloaked in Shadow, Princess Miannie of the New Moon.
Central of it all is a decidedly NON-vegetarian main course, though: one of the great beats of the woods: a white-furred, golden-antlered deer, thrice the size of any man of elf and with antlers wider than the span of your father’s arms. It is led into the clearing, head bowed and eyes closed, as if drugged or domesticated, its muzzle only loosely tied with a leash of enchanted and woven willow-bark. You watch with growing unease as it approaches the central altar, where Clanirae stands, solemnly, with an incredibly thin crescent-sickle of silvered steel in her hand.
The stag does not resist, but in its eyes are tears. So, too, the hunters. Yet all know what must be done. To summon forth the goddess, to renew the power of the moons-tone, a rich and noble life must be offered, in good faith and after an honourable hunt, without cruelty or malice.
You were told all this, of course. Being told is one thing, though, and seeing it is another. This is no Unseelie Fey, no goblin raider out for blood and happy to enslave the innocent. This is a herbivore, and no dumb one either—it is a creature of the Sylvan Realm, its sad eyes full of intelligence and wisdom, its natural lifespan measured in decades if not CENTURIES.
