Around the base of the bird mountain, the elevation prevented the forest from climbing higher.
The ring of heartened prairie was where the experienced druids found a rabid beast.
The young streams navigating their gravel troughs rushed past the morbid scene.

Aspen knew what kind of call he was answering when he arrived at the scene with his sickle drawn.
“There you are…” he said in a quiet and exasperated way that seemed devoid of any malice.

The elf bear stood over three metres tall.
It had a powerful bipedal body armoured in dense fur and equipped with claws capable of drilling rocks.

By the time Aspen saw it, it had already been staring at him for a while, motionless.
Its bulging bird-like eyes were locked onto the druid with thinly veiled aggression.
An elf bear’s bare, wrinkled, bone-white face was perpetually smug as it roared deeply, exposing its rounded teeth suited for crushing food apart.

The monster’s black fur was stained with copious amounts of blood.
Its long, articulated ears drew back as it took its first oafish steps towards the druid on its thick, clawed talons.

Behind it, Aspen saw a jigsaw of fresh body parts haphazardly scattered in a fit of rabid rage.
The rags looked like cuts of casual outdoorsy clothing.

“You shouldn’t be this far from the shimmering,” he said around the creature.

“But you’re still young,” he noted the incomplete colouration of its coat – the very feature that allowed all the blood to be seen.

As abruptly as it began to move, the creature dropped to all fours and charged at the elf.

Aspen’s eyebrow rose gracefully.
“You have fallen out of harmony,” he observed with only a flicker of ephemeral surprise.
“No, you’ve been pushed out of harmony, outside the kingdom of nature…”

Communicating with the beast proved as effective as it was for the people scattered in the bushes.

In a perfectly carried out manoeuvre, Aspen swung his glowing sickle as a twined rope of knitted roots grabbed the elf bear’s leg and sent it falling face-first into the druid’s blade.

As the tool slipped through the beast, it immediately sapped it of all its heat.
It collapsed to the ground with a thud dampened by the underlying foliage.
As it lay there, it mechanically wheezed its final breath out under its own mass.

Aspen sighed quietly and regarded the creature with a note of apology as he left it for the forest to reclaim.

He had a look at the bodies and identified three people: a fishman, a human, and a young elf under a thousand.

Fortunately – but not unsuspectedly – they were all strangers to Aspen.
That wouldn’t make delivering word of their deaths to the nearby towns any more pleasant.

He thought himself lucky for having sent the novices away. He didn’t think this would help with their training.

Half a day’s walk away from the elf’s grim duty, Clover and Basil were inside a tavern – only for work.

The ‘wet scalemail’ was an establishment with so much history that some was amassing as calcium carbonate sediment around all sources of water; the stone floor was cobbled together entirely from such limestone tap rocks.

Shelves sprouted perpendicularly from the walls, lined with belts of assorted beverages or lime-rimmed drinking glasses.
The “L”-shaped space was populated by clusters of gravitating tables surrounded by suitably mismatched furniture.

There were around a dozen patrons actively inside the tavern when the druids entered.

She and Basil huddled around the leaf bearing their instructions.
“We’re looking for a hunter…” Clover murmured under her breath.

When they looked up, Basil quickly pointed to a table of three, a man and two women.
Two crossbows, a bow, and three quivers were left leaning against the whitewashed daub next to them.
“It could be one of them,” he whispered inconspicuously.

Clover nodded. “I think you’re right.”
She deeply inhaled the stale air that reeked of smoke and evaporated courage.
“Let’s go up and ask.”

The two sheepishly wandered up to the hunters’ table.
When the ginger fishman with a goblinesque nose looked at them, his expression immediately hardened into a spiteful squint.
“Well…” he drawled, “Druids.”

When the frogman and dwarf looked over, their faces went through the same souring that wrinkled their colleague’s marine mug.

“Hello, we’re looking for a hunter called Pearlin,” Clover replied, trying to remain unfazed by their frigid disposition.

The trio went quiet before the fishman eventually spoke again.
“That’s me,” he said with an almost accusing tone.

Clover nodded and swallowed dryly.
“You hunt with a bow?”

The fishman groaned. “Yeah, what do you want?” he demanded gruffly.

Where Basil began to quietly panic already, Clover wrestled her face-clawing reflex.
“You haven’t been sharpening your arrowheads,” she stated calmly.

The fishman’s squint twisted into an impotent sneer.
“I… I’ve been busy…” He gritted his teeth.

The other hunters regarded their colleague with sympathy and Clover with thinly veiled disdain.

To the druids’ annoyance, instead of any form of surrender – however grudging – the hunter breathed a flustered sigh.
“Does it really matter if they’re still dead in minutes?”

That comment irked Clover.
Before she could articulate why, a man piped up from the neighbouring table.

“You must be really new to your job…” Daniel – the warlock – slurred in tipsy mockery.
“Are you genuinely picking a fight with a druid…?”

“We didn’t ask you for your opinion, magician!” The frogman replied curtly, to which Daniel donned a pleased smile.

“Actually,” he said, dragging each vowel into a saccharine drone.
“I’m not a wizard.”

He didn’t look up.
He couldn’t look up.
He really wanted to look up.
But scary, intimidating warlocks didn’t check to see if their lines worked.

“Alchemist then,” the frogman shrugged awkwardly.

Danial shot to his feet, knocking his drink and the stack of boxes seated beside over in the process.
“WHEN THE HELL HAVE YOU EVER SEEN AN ALCHEMIST IN PURPLE?!” the warlock demanded in sudden outrage.

“That’s true,” Clover confirmed levelly. “They wear red.”
Even Basil nodded.

The hunter blinked quietly and looked over to his colleagues, who both nodded in grudging agreement.
“Am I colourblind…?” he asked under his breath.

Daniel breathed a staggered sigh and slumped back into his seat.
While he lazily attempted to collect all his topped supplies without getting out of his chair again, Clover remembered her mission.

“In any case, you have to sharpen your arrowheads,” Clover insisted firmly.

“Fine! I’ll get new arrowheads!” He exploded before gulping down his drink and slamming it on the table hard.
“Happy?!”

Clover hesitated.
“Satisfied…” she sighed with a bitter edge before turning around to Basil and nodding in the exit’s direction.

As they stepped out into the cool night air, Clover felt strangely exhausted – not by the journey, which she hardly felt at all – but by the people.

She read over the leaf under the streetlight.
“Looks like that’s everything,” she said with a wry smile.

Basil nodded.
“I think you did really well,” he offered alongside a reassuring pat on her shoulder.

She mustered up a small smile and shrugged.
“Yeah, we both did,” she agreed with a short-lived lurch of optimism.

“Are you okay?”

She nodded.
“Yeah,” she smiled, stuffing the maelstrom of confusing emotions down for later.
“I’m still just hung up on what jerks the alchemists turned out to be,” she fibbed.