Erlking Noir Rabe had taken the only available seat, just a boulder I'd cut in two to form a rough seat, and he'd located the water jug and a carved stone goblet to drink from it with. He was eyeing the subtle designs on the cup when I came up.
It was QL 32, worthy of being used by a king, so yeah, it had caught his eye.
He was polite enough to stand as I arrived back, I waved him back down, and pulled a leather apron made from Jotun skin off a hook to cover my NTSH's and tied it on.
"Like I said, I have no food. I fish out of the upstream when I'm hungry, and that's about it. I don't eat anything out of the swamp, of course."
"Of course." He seemed slightly amused, and a bit startled, when I pushed the floating mithral disk, and a fire lit up on it. Then I grabbed a hammer off a stone rack under the lean-to I'd made, and then an ingot made from smelting down every single piece of scrap iron I could find in this place. Every single piece of metal I could scavenge had been given the same treatment.
The precious metals and gems were long gone, of course. I had used them all up some time ago.
"So, talk, Erlking Noir Rabe." He watched me drop the ingot into the burning disk, and it began to change hue incredibly quickly as it heated up. "What else do you want to know?"
"My Lady seeks to claim this valley, Sama Rantha," he told me gruffly.
"Ah. So you seek to take this valley by conquest?" I asked archly.
"Indeed." He leaned forwards warily.
"Well, that's awesome." He blinked again. "I'll pack things up and be out of here tomorrow. Anything else?"
He seemed a bit off-put, tilting his head to the side sharply. "You do not wish to claim it for your own?"
"Why would I want to do that? The main reason I'm sticking around is hoping my Hagmother comes back so I can feed her to the Land. If you want to stay here and get in a tussle with a legendary Hag, I'm outta here. I'll see if I can track her down in the outside first, and you can deal with this place of shit they made, and the Hags who will inevitably come wandering in hoping to take it back."
"I… see." He waved his hand. "What of this… rock-clearing, you were doing?"
"That's all on you now. I was going to make at least an effort to restore this place to its original natural condition." I waved my hand at it. "All yours now. Enjoy."
The erlking had the distinct impression he had suddenly lost out a great deal on this conquest. "You are more then welcome to stay," he hedged promptly.
"No, thank you. Being responsible was what was keeping me here, but you took over that, so it's time to be moving on. I need to get to a trade center with the goods and materials I need to do proper work." I reached into the flames, plucked out the cherry-red piece of steel, stepped over to the anvil, and held it down with my fingers as I began to pound.
The erlking prepared himself for the crushing sound of impact at close range… and instead flinched when he heard nothing at all, despite the force with which my Hammer came down. He was sure the impact should have been deafening, but instead he heard… nothing at all.
And it shocked him more when I continued talking, it wasn't a field of magical silence. "What direction should I be heading to arrive at a proper center of trade, erlking? The bigger, the better, as it were."
"Human lands are south and east of here. What arrangements they have made for their squalid hives I do not know nor care." His voice was flat with menace. Ah, yes, erlkings, preservers of the wild, the great defenders of the free spaces.
"Then I'll be out of your feathers in that direction soon enough." Hammering out a new Weapon wasn't costing me any attention, and he was watching in fascination as the steel deformed with incredible speed under my blows. I didn't have any problems handling the red-hot metal, or keeping it in place without tongs.
"You are a skilled smith," he observed, with a ghost of a smile.
"And you obviously are not, or you would have known that with a look at my tools. Not that it matters to someone whose highest aspiration is woodcarving."
"These matters that you were addressing here… what were they?" He looked a little nettled at me heaping truth upon his craftsmanship, but few Fey enjoyed working any kind of metal, let alone iron.
"The Hags filled in much of the former river with rocks, raising the level of the water and disrupting its flow to near stagnation. The rocks I was bringing out I did so to lower the water level.
"There are several stelae buried among the rocks which reinforce this effect, and they have to be dug out and shattered. This will slowly break the corrupting effect on the waters, and they can be vivisized without regenerating as each stelae is busted.
"Once the stelae are gone and the river is running clear, you can start working on disassembling the Henge. That's going to be difficult, as you have to kill all the elementals, neutralize the magic on the stones, and then pound the damn things apart with adamantine hammers before the elementals get brought back in an hour. The formation will just restore itself, so just knocking things down is worthless.
"As you destroy each stone, the elemental bound to it will be finally released and won't return, which makes clearing the later stones easier. Once all the stones are destroyed, you can tear up the earth, melt it to slag, purify it, and the Hags' hold on the Valley will be broken.
"Congratulations! I'm sure you're just the guy to get it all done. Being able to Summon Elementals and all should speed things up immensely."
He frowned despite himself. "This… does not sound like a thing easily done."
"Well, I don't know how long they took setting all this up, but I was planning on at least three to five years taking it apart, maybe more. That's a lot of stone to be moving and all, you know? But, like I said, you've got Elementals you can bring in, and they can get a lot of work done pretty fast.
"Of course, you're a warlord, and I know you like to raze and burn rather then work and cleanse, but I did all the razing, so the clean-up is all that is left… and a bitch of a job it's going to be. Thanks for taking it over for me."
For some reason, he didn't seem all that enthusiastic about his great conquest.
"What is your relationship to the spawn that killed the nymph and sylph not far from here?" Given the carnal reputation of erlkings and fey in general, I was sure he knew them quite well.
"See this remnant on the side of my face? That's what left of the Curse of the Hag. That's what killed them. It's hanging around, feeding on ambient sin in the air, and naturally in a place like this it's not going to die away.
"I never met the ladies in question. I strangled the Curse and drove it out of my body, and this topical skin condition is the only thing that's left. I'm not a Hag, I'll never be a Hag, but I'm not rid of the Curse quite yet."
He grunted. "There are some who would call you guilty, regardless."
"Well, if they want to press their arguments, we'll have a discussion over sharp steel, I'll make my point, and then they'll feed the Land. I can deal with it."
His eyes glittered. "You seem confident of yourself, Sama Rantha."
"Mmm. It's a question of knowing your enemies. How many Sama Rantha's have you fought, erlking Noir Rabe?"
His face shifted sharply, like a watching bird. "You are the first, I must admit." He sounded wryly amused.
"So, you have no idea what I'm actually capable of. You've only seen me toss stuff around using this Girdle I'm wearing, and I can carve stone, smith steel, and wade into and out of that black filth that could reduce you to slime. And maybe, somehow, I managed to wipe out a whole valley worth of Hags and their minions, despite all their curses and spells, yes?"
He nodded slowly. "It is difficult to believe that you did it all alone," he informed me kindly.
"Well, I never said I did it all at once. On the flip side, I know a great deal about erlkings. I know what kind of magical powers you have. I know how you like to fight. I know what kind of gear you like to carry, what kind of troops you command and lead.
"While I was in Nightmare, I killed over a dozen erlkings." He paused despite himself, and was about to say something when I continued. "Of course, they were Olympian versions. Twice as tall as you, like Giant Erlkings, or something; stronger, tougher, meaner, and of course, all they wanted to do was kill me. Exulting in the slaughter of cities and reaping of the people who dwell in them, and all that.
"So, if we cross swords, I'm confident of killing you, because I've killed stronger, tougher, meaner versions of you in Nightmare, as well as the armies they led, which were also Olympian versions of satyrs, centaurs, and other Fey.
"You might be able to surprise me with some individual idiosyncrasies, but I'm confident in killing you because I've killed things like you before, killed them repeatedly, and kept right on going. Nightmare has no mercy, so neither did I."
He stared at me for long moments, balancing his expectations against my words, and not liking where they were going. My hammer had never stopped moving, as metal was folded, beat down, and folded again, beat down again, before finally going back into the fire.
"Impressive. If that is a boast, I can find no fault in it."
"There's a song that goes with it. You'll probably recognize it."
"Oh?" He smiled thinly. "How so?"
"Because powerful fey dying in Dream broadcast their deaths to their fellows. You'll probably recognize it, because I sang it as I killed those erlkings and their armies and their Ladies."
I saw his finger twitch. Dream was not a concept realm to the Fey. It could be said they were born in Dream and came to the mortal realm from it. Death in Dream was not just words.
"What song is this?" he asked softly, dark eyes narrowed in his pale face.
Tremble began to beat. Tha-thump, thump thump! Tha-thump, thump-thump!
"Came the crows, black on wing,
Heralds of doom lead the erlking.
Stack the carrion, pluck the eyes,
Burn the homes, weep the skies.
Nature's fury, forest's wrath,
Chaos reaver on a bloody path.
Crush the winds, break his wings!
Rend his armor, cold iron sings!
Curse his wounds, break his pride,
Snap his sword and gut his ride!
His bloody horde falls to ruin
Victim of a mortal's doing.
Look in his eyes and scream your Name,
Feed the Land with fey feathered flame!
Tremble, She comes!"
He shot to his feet so hard he would have hurt himself on the stone furniture, were he not an erlking with DR 15/magic cold iron. His face looked even more bloodless then normal, eyes even blacker, and one hand was still on the stone goblet, the other clutching the hilt of the wooden sword at his waist.
I didn't look up at him as I finished, and Tremble went quiet again.
"Did you hear them screaming?" I asked conversationally, finally looking up at him. "They couldn't believe I was killing them, either. I didn't even come up to their waist. But they died, and they burned as I fed them to Dream. I'm not even sure if they came back as erlkings. They might have had to start all over as pixies or something after True Death got through with them. It really messes up the incarnate cycle of Fey."
He was silent. His face was pale enough that I couldn't tell if it went bloodless, but I didn't much care, either.
"Tremble, She comes…" he trailed off, his voice wary, but taking care not to seem tense. "I will remember those words, Sama Rantha. It is not often one hears songs of butchering erlkings."
"And their armies."
"And their armies," he agreed, sitting back down carefully.
I plucked out the reheated bar, and got back to hammering. "There's stanzas for hamadryads, dryads, satyrs, centaurs, redcaps, grimm, bogeymen, spriggans, pixies, nixies, nuckalevee, rusalky, minotaurs, manotaurs, feyhounds, bandersnatches, jub-jub birds, goblins, hobgoblins, trolls, werefolk of many kinds, feyhounds, yeth hounds, dreamsnatchers, and elementals of all kinds, among others. There's a lot of different nightmares to kill in Dream, after all."
"You fought against two of the Tarn? In Dream?" He was even warier.
"Some of the hamadryads brought help along. Didn't save them. It was them or me, and I chose me."
"That you were capable of such things in Dream… does not mean you are capable of such things here," he observed with sudden insight and an attempt to reclaim the superior position.
"That is true." My total calm shot down the glimmer of light in his eyes. "Of course, there is the small fact that in Dream, it is very hard to Craft, loot, salvage, scavenge, and repurpose. Out here in the real world… not so much."
His eyes fell on the steel I was hammering, and he definitely flushed a bit this time.
How long had I been here? I had definitely had time to work on a great many surprises. In Dream there were no steel mines and steel forges, no cold iron to shape and bend into killing forms with fire and hammer.
"Truly a Hagchild, words as deadly as your mother's."
"You know Tusk Annie?" I was mildly surprised.
"We have met in certain places," he acknowledged.
"No doubt places of slaughter," I said neutrally. "I doubt you'd seek her out for wisdom, and I imagine you aren't too willing to fill her bed, even as cute as you are."
A muscle in his cheek ticced at the word 'cute' juxtaposed with a Hag… but hey, Fey were comfortable with the fair and the fowl… er, foul, what did I know of his sexual proclivities?