[sunseekers]

This story has been written in accordance with PG-13 guidelines. However, please be aware that it still contains strong adult themes, ideas and perils.


Part One :


        For it is written that a great time of bloody madness shalt
   descend upon the land,  and there shall be a period of
   great slaughter and blood-letting the like of which has ne’er
   been known before.
   During the Time of this Madness there will be killing without
   end,  without rhyme or reason,  each killing begetting yet
   more killing until the original reasons and motives behind
   the first killing are long forgotten,  or understood.
   And also during the Time of Madness it shalt come to pass
   that the innocent will be chastised,  and have punishments
   without number heaped upon them so that they will cry out
   with loud voices,  and grind their bones and nash their teeth;
   whilst the guilty shalt be rewarded and set free.

 

          Tales of Cul-Tinka atrocities never filtered down South,  across the Brogan Passage and The Sea of Fallen Stars to the land of Grmm’wab.  They didn’t have to,  for the two human-dominated Kingdoms that inhabited that region,  the Throne of Grmm and the House of Wab,  were too busy fighting one another with disturbing ferocity and savagery.   The reasons for this conflict were long-lost in the mists of time,  for the current protagonists certainly had no clear reason or rhyme as to its’ origins,  but it may have had something to do with a strip of disputed lands and territories that lay between both kingdoms.  Others such as cynics and commentators on the endless dispute muttered and sniggered into their cups that it was over the appellation of the Domain,  and nothing more.
         Whatever the real reason,  the conflict had been waged for many decades with savage fury,  and many a ne’er-do-well,  ‘adventurer’ and would-be mercenary out for quick coin were drawn to the lands,  spurred on by tales of good wages and plunder that could be earned fighting for either side,  for both kingdoms were blessed with natural riches and mines bursting with gold and silver.  In fact,  as the cynical commentators noted,  these days both rival armies had been so swelled with the influx of foreign mercenaries and ‘volunteers’ that this new fresh blood,  eager to gather in the spoils of war,  vastly outnumbered the original inhabitants,  who had now more or less gone back to their more mundane and everyday lives of eking out a precious living tilling the land for food,  or else burrowing ever deeper into the mines and roots of mountains in search of precious metal,  which could be turned into hard coin to pay their ever bulging,  ever restless,  mercenary armies.   Some observers even went so far to note that fighting one another and prolonging the endless conflict was now just about the only useful thing the otherwise easily-bored and potentially troublesome warriors could do,  all spoiling for a fight and eager to reap rewards and plunder for the survivors.
        The origins of the conflict,  and the vast numbers of greed and lust-driven mercenaries swelling the ranks meant nothing to the High Elven community who lived down by Whitewater Lake, bordering it and maintaining a peaceful co-existence with nature and the vast timber and fir forest of Goeth’with,  which banded the huge oval spread of water mainly to the north and west.  For centuries they had maintained their own traditions and way of life, marveling at the beauty of the natural world,  paying great homage to the beauty and tranquility of their lives,  singing beautiful haunting songs under the starlit skies and in the woodland groves and glens,  and above all staying aloof from the affairs and politics of Humans.  For the Elders of the Community ruled with great wisdom and sagacity that to be drawn into the conflict would mean nothing but woe and disaster to their own Lands,  which anyway were to the south of the main area of strife,  and had little agricultural interest or strategic importance in the affairs of Men.  So the Elves stayed aloof from the struggle, watching with amazement and disgust at the bloody atrocities that were committed over the decades by either side,  and how the fortunes of each Kingdom waxed and waned as often and as regularly as the passing seasons.  Most Humans at any rate believed the Goeth’with Forest which bordered their southern lands with equal measure to be haunted with woodland spirits,  or else protected with dire Elvish spells,  for most had never seen an Elf and knew of them only by reputation,  and in stories handed down by mothers to young children.  A few Humans skilled in woodcraft and forestry,  such as Rangers and other ‘scavengers’ that lived and meandered about the Goeth foothills,  met with and knew the Elves and their customs;  and as they treated the Elves and their Forest and Lake with respect and reverence,  likewise receiving the same from their Elvish friends and called one another ‘a’Waeerynlle’,  meaning ‘True Friends’ in the Elvish Tongue of Halar.
         Only one Elf,  C’ryll the Crazy,  had dared to be different.  He had approached the ruling High Council of Elder’s on many an occasion,  imploring it to remain aloof from the conflict no longer.  For,  he had warned the Council,  “If you do not chose a side,  then it will chose you.”   But the learned High Council met,  and conferred,  and shook their heads,  and every time they rejected C’ryll’s counsel,  for they did not fully understand nor believe his words.  “You can not maintain your policy of Isolation any longer!”  C’ryll had cried out in a great voice before one annual Meet or Gathering.  “You’re all doomed,  do you hear me,  you ‘stupid wise fools’!  Do you hear me,  doomed!”  Some Elves did not understand his words,  and shook their heads;  but others were alarmed,  and took great fear and disquiet from them.
          Then the High Council of Elder’s met again in secret, and this time they did not debate C’ryll’s words and warnings,  but rather C’ryll himself and what they should do with him. And so it came to pass that a few Elder members approached their great Oracle J’cwwbbr,  who sat aloof and immobile at the ruins of the Fountain of the Sun,  an hours walk due south of Isembard Rock,  and beseeched him in all his infinite wisdom,  what should they do about C’ryll and his omens.  But the Oracle J’cwwbbr took great fury at them that they had not already dealt with C’ryll,  and warned the Elders that even now he might be plotting a secret alliance with either one Human Kingdom or the other,  and in so doing to plunge the Elvish Peoples into a conflict which they could not hope to understand, and which would in all probability consume them,  and from which they had survived so long purely because they had remained outside of it,  not favouring one side over the other.
          Thus the High Council had C’ryll arrested,  and brought before them.  He cried out in a terrible voice,  asking them why they had done this,  for he had committed no crime,  done nothing wrong other than to speak his mind.  And the High Council countered him in their great wisdom by telling him that sometimes,  for the good of the many,  it was necessary to punish the one,  even if he were innocent of any charge.
          So on the Eve of Midsummer’s’ Day,  at the time the Elves call ‘Ll’y’ll’  which roughly translates as a time of love and peace,  the High Council bound up C’ryll and took him to the dreaded Ruins of Aramini,  where they handed him over to the demons that abided there,  machinations of hate,  creatures of pure evil that were the secret of the images beheld in the mirrors.  And these creatures,  as in accordance with the custom,  took C’ryll and marched him along the woodland trail called ‘Myggyniyym’,  meaning the Trail of Grey Tears for a full night and a full day,  until they came to the clearing in the woodland known as ‘Klyddabor’, ‘The Glen of Skulls’;  and there they exterminated him.   

   C’ryll’s counsel had fallen on deaf ears,  and some muttered to themselves if it might have been better had his words never been uttered,  or heard,  but in the fullness of time events played themselves out to prove with horrific bluntness the veracity of his admonitions.

[sunseekers]

Part Two :

It began innocently enough,  the time which the Elves grew to call ‘E’non Ecllyr’drynni Cmm’,  meaning ‘Descent into Madness’,  when the Elf-maiden Duryath,  wife of F’crccrc,  was out walking and singing in the woodlands near the Goeth foothills,  singing and dancing in the golden dappled sunlight that filtered down through the leafy boughs.  Suddenly,  to her great dismay,  she came across a trail of blood that had dripped like a vivid strip of scarlet across the grassy sward that lay before her,  and, her curiosity overcoming her horror,  she turned from the path and followed the ichor that lead her on into a nearby thicket.  There she beheld two human soldiers,  both bloody and battered from a skirmish and bearing the mark of Grmm upon their armour.  And Duryath was moved to great pity,  and tarried there to bind their wounds and injuries,  offering them potions of ‘Ecyllyr’,  an Elvish healing draught. The two soldiers thanked her,  and explained that they were the sole survivors of a Grmm patrol that had been ambushed earlier that day by the Wab,  and that they had fled into the Goeth woodlands whilst the Wabians butchered their fellows.  The two humans were speaking in the Common Tongue,  but Duryath could understand them as she had had dealings with the Human Rangers and Woodsmen that occasionally bearing peaceful tidings into their woodlands.

   Duryath,  when she had bound their wounds as best she could,  called for her horse and put the two Grmm soldiers upon it,  and gently bore them back along the trail into her village.  There,  she put them to rest in her house with fresh linens and bandages,  and sent for her husband and also the village Elders so that she might tell them what she had done. She also sent for their local runner,  Allby,  and bade him to journey east over the Jun’kyt river to the Elvish kingdom,  to inform their Elders of what had come to pass.   But Duryath,  although filled with pity for the two human soldiers, despite that they were of a different race,  was naïve and innocent to the nature of warfare and conflict.  For although she had bound their wounds as best she could initially whilst in the thicket,  they were not fully closed and thus as she bore them along the trail back to the village,  they left a faint trail of blood which the company of Wabians,  still flushed with their battle frenzy and lust for carnage and whom were already on the spoor of the two survivors of their carefully prepared ambush,  could not fail to spy.

   And thus,  even before the sun had set that very same day,  and Duryath,  F’crccrc and the Elders Sp’mwmm and Elbie were all locked in heated discussion over her actions and whether she had shown the greatest wisdom in bringing two wounded human soldiers to their village,  the hundred or so Wabians fell upon the unsuspecting and unprepared Elves and tore into them from out of the woodland with a wild horrific derangement and lust that was truly terrible to behold.
   Many Elves died in the initial rush,  clubbed or shot down with arrows or skewered upon steel-hardened spear-points as they stood,  open-mouthed and bewildered as to the reasons for the unwarranted attack.  They were the lucky ones,  in what the Wabians ever-after referred to as ‘The Battle of the White Water’ which was a misnomer for two reasons; the first being that it was not a battle,  more a charnel-house of unbridled,  senseless savagery and brutality,  the like of which not even Grmm’wab,  with it’s long human-inspired history of massacres and protracted pointless warfare had ever seen.  The second reason was that Whitewater Lake truly turned colour to a bright coppery scarlet,  the taint and hue of the deluge of Elvish blood that was shed and spattered its’ banks that evening,  and into which the broken,  mutilated bodies of the Elves,  along with their belongings and possessions that the Humans did not claim for plunder,  were thrust without pause at the end of the killing spree,  as the Wabians,  drunk on their great victory,  made a clumsy attempt to wipe all trace of the Elvish settlement from the face of Grmm’wab,  as punishment for their despicable crime of choosing to help the evil forces of Grmm.  Some said that,  despite the washing of many rains,  Whitewater never truly regained its pure snow-coloured vivid tone ever again,  and was thereafter forever known locally as ‘We’a’dylloc’,  which means ‘The Scarlet Lake’.

   A group of Elvish children were discovered hiding in the reeds down by the lake by Grylla Huesan,  one among a band of wenches who tagged along in the wake of the Wabian company and in many respects little more than a child herself as still being in her teenage years,  although many of the ‘personal services’ she was known to provide for the soldiers were scarcely the province of a child.  Beguiled by her beautiful countenance, sympathetic smile and promises of sanctuary and protection,  the Elvish children flocked to her,  and trusted in her fair and gentle-sounding words.  But behind her reassurances of aid lurked the worms of deceit and betrayal and,  aided by another human wench, she bound the children,  tied huge stones to their necks,  and threw them into the lake one by one,  where they all drowned.   

   A few spirited Elves attempted to resist,  but they were not skilled in the arts of warfare and,  although of magical trait,  had prepared neither offensive or defensive spells and thus were quickly hacked or shot down;  most,  on the other hand,  attempted to flee once the shock of the initial attack had worn off,  but did not get very far as they were surrounded and butchered by the blood-mad Wabians.

   The house of F’crccrc and Duryath was quickly singled out by the Wabian commander,  Sûller Lemoc,  for some special attention. First the Wabians burst in,  and dragged out the two wounded Grmm soldiers who could mount only an ineffectual struggle,  and bound them to teams of agitated,  excited horses,  who were then whipped and lashed until the frantic beasts literally tore the pair apart.  Then they found Duryath and brought her forth before Sûller,  and she fell to her knees before the human leader and begged him to punish her,  and not her friends and fellow Elves,  for it was her who had found the wounded humans,  her decision to care for them and bring them back here to the Elvish village – it was therefore her responsibility,  and hers alone.  And again she begged the humans to leave her friends and fellow Elves alone,  and just inflict whatever punishment they adjudged upon her.
   “Oh don’t worry about that,  we intend to,” Sûller Lemoc had almost smiled back.
   And thus Duryath was forced to watch,  through genuinely horrified eyes,  as many living Elves as whom could still be found were brought before her into her house,  and there put to death before her.  She tried to twist her head away,  to shut her eyes so that she might no longer see,  if still hear the cries and pleas of those being killed.  But a particularly vicious common Wabian soldier who held her,  twisted her head back and grinning,  told her that if she did not watch then they would cut off her eyelids.

    Sûller was called off elsewhere,  to supervise the firing of looted Elven properties,  but a quartet of Wabian soldiers and mercenaries that fought under their banner and whose lust for blood and destruction was greater than their lust for plunder,  had still not finished with her.  Next,  they dragged out her husband,  F’crccrc,  strung him up by his thumbs to a roof beam in their cottage,  pulled down his breeches and hacked off his penis,  leaving him to bleed to death hanging there whilst the helpless Duryath twisted and screamed in their cruel grips.
   However the human soldiers were far from satisfied.  Next in their madness they bore out  her beautiful younger sister Gl’yy’th,  and after ripping her clothes from her they took turns at raping her whilst the helpless,  sobbing Duryath looked on.  Eventually it all proved too much for the beautiful young elf,  whose only crime had ever been one of compassion,  and she fainted clean away at the feet of the grinning,  drunken soldiers.  However,  they more or less ignored her,  having spent their immediate lusts on her younger sister.  Besides,  one of their number had discovered a beautiful collection of jewels in an adjoining house,  called the ‘Bygyn’ or Starlit Ones,  because centuries before Elven hands had lovingly created and shaped them in the image of the glittering stars that sparkled high above in the empty,  comet-haunted abyss,  and it was said that some of the true essence of star-stuff was imbued in their creation which was why they shimmered and coruscated with their own hidden,  inner lights,  and needed no pale imitations of lumination to shine in the darkness.
   Whilst the human soldiers had left the wreckage of her home to squabble over the Bygyn, Duryath somehow found enough strength to crawl over to the beam beneath which her husband’s body now hung motionless,  scarlet still trickling down but slowly now and adding to the ever-widening pool of ichor that puddled beneath his feet.  Somehow,  in their mad drunken frenzy,  the Wabians had missed her Wychnth,  or ceremonial knife,  which had been kicked under a table and had a keen fresh blade some five inches in length.  Begging her now still husband for his forgiveness,  Duryath took the knife and plunged the blade into her breast,  where it pierced her heart and she gasped and collapsed dying under him,  her own blood mingling with his own.

   Soon after her younger sister,  Gl’yy’th,  roused herself from her shocked and violated stupour and slowly crawled over to their bodies,  tears rolling down her cheeks in an unchecked torrent and her dark red tresses falling forward like bark-fibre curtains to obscure the expression that was written deep into her lovely pale features. “Oh Duryath… please… wait for me…” she sobbed,  checking back the tears as she stroked her beloved elder sister’s flawless cheek.  Duryath’s eyes seemed to flicker in recognition,  and her rosy red lips moved slightly,  but no sound issued forth.
   “Hello then,  what’s this I see before me…?” grinned a drunken Wabian archer with grimy features and lank,  greasy hair which tufted out from beneath his helm as he lurched and reeled into the remains of their house,  clutching a burning brand in his hairy,  filthy fist with which he had just fired the curtains and furnishings that adorned their doorway.  “A little woodland creature that deserves a good prod from my trusty rod…”
   Gl’yy’th’s lovely violet eyes were a mix of fear and bewilderment as she beheld the drunken belching human who tottered before her,  shrugging off his bow and quiver and tossing his torch aside,  before reaching down to unbuckle the crude leather belt that held his soiled,  rank-smelling breeches up.  Behind him,  the greedy orange flames were starting to gather strength and take hold of the cottages’ timbers,  providing his ugly,  repulsive form with an almost satanic halo or backdrop of vivid flickering colour.
   Something snapped inside Gl’yy’th’s brain, in the dark recesses of insanity that lurk way beyond rhyme or reason.  Without warning she tore out the Wychnth from the breast of her sister,  and,  spinning round and reaching up,  buried the blade up to the hilt into the boiled leather hauberk of the befuddled Wabian. 
        “You… bi..t…”  he gasped,  so full of genuine astonishment that his intended victim was daring to fight back,  that he stood stupefied and gaped for several long heartbeats at her,  giving her perfect opportunity to yank out the knife,  now wet with his own blood,  and puncture it deep once more into his chest.
         Slowly,  as though under the impression of some weird dwoemer,  he toppled backwards and hit the floor with a sickening thud.  Instantly,  Gl’yy’th was upon him,  eyes flashing and snarling obscenities in her bloody madness,  slashing and hacking with blind frenzy at his face,  his form,  dowsing her front with the bright red,  warm,  sticky stuff as she sliced his features to bloody red ribbons,  and the light finally faded from his eyes and went out altogether.
Only then did she recover something of normality,  and wiping the gore from her eyes and parting back her sodden tresses with the back of her hand,  crawled back to her beloved sister.  The light had finally gone out from her eyes as well,  and they were staring pointedly at the ceiling.  But something of the raw horror had gone from her features,  although her fuschia-bud-like mouth was partly open,  as though in the beginning of an ‘O’ of surprise.  “Oh Duryath,”  sobbed Gl’yy’th dryly,  “you could have waited for me… I won’t be long,  I promise… but there is something more I must do,  first…”

         Then,  ignoring the roaring conflagration that was about and above her,  and dimly perceiving the flaring fragments of roof that were starting to patter down into the room like a distant fine mist,  she slowly straightened her slim,  young and supple body,  stumbled to the nearby basin and washed her face relatively clean of gore and ichor.  Checking her reflection in the mirror above it,  but barely recognizing it, she absently waved away a burning fragment of bark-fibre that was wafting and fluttering about her tresses.  Only then did she make her way back to the body of the Wabian,  and,  gathering up his bow and quiver which she methodically slung over her shoulder,  purposely made her way towards the merrily blazing front portal.  His bow was fairly short and of unusual beech-wood construction,  but Gl’yy’th knew what she was doing when it came to handling bows;  for many moons she had practiced long and hard with many different types and designs,  until she could seek a feathered shaft into a palm-sized target from ninety paces nine times out of ten.
           She stopped just outside the front door,  almost casually reaching back to draw an arrow from the quiver and checking its’ flight feathers for any signs of damage and impairment.  A Wabian soldier was riding past on a looted Elven pony,  its’ saddle bags bulging with loot and bounty,  some of which was falling out of rents and spilling like seeds onto the trail in its’ wake.  Gl’yy’th let him get about ten or twelve paces beyond her,  then swiftly and smoothly she notched her arrow,  drawing back the string and letting fly with the shaft,  burying it perfectly between his shoulder-blades in a sublime,  flowing movement.  Both the Wabian’s hands flew up in an instinctive reflex action,  then he partly toppled out of the saddle,  only for an ankle to twist and get caught in the stirrup,  and the pony dragged off his lifeless body in it’s frantic gallop to be rid of the bouncing,  dragging dead weight.
          There were plenty more Wabians around,  none of which apparently had noticed her,  so engrossed were they in their insane killing,  raping and looting spree.  Gl’yy’th was just in the process of systematically inspecting and notching another arrow,  when a large heavy and blazing log tumbled off the roof and smote her hard on the back of the head,  so much so that she tumbled forward senseless and knew no more.

[sunseekers]

Part Three :


          Three Moons on,  and the post-mortem into the events that occurred at Whitewater Lake were proceeding in their own unique,  peculiar form.  The Wabian High Command had kept on referring to it as a ‘battle’,  and only after increasingly stern remonstrations from the Elder representative had they begrudgingly changed their histories to read ‘massacre’.  A meeting had been called,  to which the three main interested parties had attended.  Heading the Wabian deputation was a stern,  uncompromising odd little individual called Em Brook,  a human with a well-deserved repute for his steadfast manner,  but at least adjudged as relatively fair and impartial by the High Elves.  The representative from the High Council of the Elves at nearby J’c’lluth,  the Lands that lay beyond the Jun’kyt River,  was Elder Hll Muucyuucc,  and his reputation for seeking compromise and solutions that appeased parties in any dispute proceeded him;  indeed,  one of his most famous and aptly-used phrases when making any official announcement was ‘Peace in out time’,  sometimes translated into the Halesh language as ‘Peace with honour’.   The third and final representative attending the meeting,  Gl’yy’th herself,  might not have agreed with him.
         To be fair,  up until now Em Brook’s renown had been more or less born out.   His preliminary investigation and findings into the whole bloody affair,  after listening to the howls of protest from the High Elves of J’c’lluth,  had been reported with more or less total dedication to the truth,  no matter how… uncomfortable… many Wabians had found it.  And yes,  he had agree with the Elders in that the rampant destruction and looting of property,  coupled with the wholesale slaughter of many of the inhabitants,  was both unwarranted and unjustified,  despite the agreed evidence of two wounded Grmm soldiers having been given sanctuary within the encampment.

          Now, however, Em Brook was uncertain how to proceed.  The battle had been precipitated by a Wabian company, true, but the Elves had provoked matters by taking in the two wounded Grmm soldiers,  and in doing so involving themselves in a conflict that was not of their making.   Elder Hll Muucyuucc nodded in solemn agreement at this pronouncement,  for ‘twas certain that getting involved in the Shem, or Hu-Man conflict,  was a fatal mistake by the community of Whitewater Lake.
          Em Brook would have liked to have done more, he truly would, but what, in all honesty, could he do?  The Wabian company was composed largely of hired mercenaries who had dispersed soon after the battle,  taking the loot they had procured from the Elvish peoples with them.  Their commander,   Sûller Lemoc, had been acting far outside the orders or standards set by the Wabian leadership,  but it was impossible to punish him as he had died in the very next skirmish with the Grmm forces.  Em Brook was sorry, truly he was, but what more could he say, or do?

          Gl’yy’th, her greeny-blue eyes burning with fierce rancor, had an awful lot she wished to say, but Elder Hll Muucyuucc motioned her to be silent, as she was not yet of sufficient age to earn that right at an official investigation, and certainly not before a learned Elder such as he, and so respectfully she kept her own council.
           Actually,  Hll Muucyuucc had a lot more he wished to say,  about Gl’yy’th and her actions at the Battle of Whitewater Lake,  none of which fell easily upon the young girl’s pointed ears.  He respectfully pointed out that her actions that day in fighting off the rampaging,  drunken, blood-mad company of Shem far went beyond what anyone could describe or appreciate as ‘self defense’.  Why,  even by her own admission, she had shot down one fleeing Shem in the back with an arrow,  and not in fair fight or conflict.  Such actions can and must be punished,  for you have broken our own solemn rubrics and tenets.”
          Beside him Em Brook turned and looked at the learned and wise Elf,  his eyes bulging and incredulous.  He had not wished to pursue this point,  for bad things always happened in war, and ‘fair fights’ rarely occurred.
          There was even worse to come for Gl’yy’th. 
          With great care,  Elder Hll Muucyuucc took and unrolled a vellum parchment scroll,  which listed a report compiled by his scouts the previous day.  “There is this… ‘development’… as well,”  he rumbled, genuinely unsure as to how to proceed,  "which I feel I must bring to the table of our meeting.  It concerns the sounds and screams that were heard coming from Ash Tree Glade not two nights ago…”
          Gl’yy’th’s face coloured slightly under her beautiful auburn-red tresses, but she did her best to keep her expression as blank as possible,  giving nothing away.
          “Initially the sounds were thought to be the screams of the Vixen’s mating call,”  continued Hll Muucyuucc carefully,  “but they grew so intense that eventually a pair of our most skillful scouts went to investigate.  They could not believe what they found….”   The Elder had to pause, and take a sip of water before he found strength to continue with the investigation report, his clear speedwell-blue eyes fixed upon Gl’yy’ths ingenuous face.  “Just as we can scarce believe it ourselves.  Four Shem… Wabians,  who appear to have been members of the mercenary band that attacked your settlement,  child… four Shem,  who appear to have been captured,  tied up and staked out within the glade.  Then, in what appears to be some kind of… bizarre… quasi-religious or cult ceremony… they had been deliberately gelded and then left to either bleed to death, or for the wolves to come and take…”
           Beside him Em Brook paled noticeably.
           “Have you nothing you wish to say to us,  child,  to confess to?”  continued Hll Muucyuucc, as Gl’yy’th continued to look him fair and square in the eye, her expression become rapidly and nakedly hostile. “What happened at your village was bad,  terrible, for certain,  but there is nothing, I repeat nothing, I nor any of the Elders can do, and no action we canst take against the perpetrators of these… disturbing deeds.  However, your actions,  by your own admission at Whitewater Lake,  are contrary to our rulings and imperatives,  for which you will be punished accordingly.  But this…this…”  he tapped the runic glyphs of the report with one perfect, long fingernail,  “this goes far, far beyond anything… anything a child of our race should e’er countenance, or be capable of performing…”
           Gl’yy’th continued to say nothing,  but her demeanor was becoming more and more sullen with each passing heartbeat.
           “Child… if you continue to walk this path, not only will you plunge our Peoples into a conflict with the Shem, the Hu-mans, that will lead to death and misery and destruction on both sides beyond all imagination,  but your very own soul will burn and shrivel away rapidly until there is but nothing left…   Is there nothing, nothing you wish to say…?”
           The dam finally broke.  Gl’yy’th stood and thumped her fist down hard on the oak table,  making the other two jump, her beautiful young face a rictus mask of loathing and frustration.  “If you are just going to sit there and do nothing,”  she snarled,  “THEN WHAT IS THE FUCKING POINT OF YOU!!!?”
 
           And with that, she spun on her heels and strode swiftly out of the Counsel-tent without a single backward glance.