Making Peace

“We have great idea,” Soo-say announced. “You were friends with puppy-men, they maybe listen to you.”

I had doubts. Vekjik was the one who had named me traitor in the first place.

“We want you to go give offering to Shaman Vekjik. He southwest where river turns into waterfall. Tell puppy-man we no want fight. Tell him we play nice.” He put the offering down in front of me. “You good night elf. We trust you do this right.”

The trust was touching. Misplaced, but touching.

Vekjik was on the cliff above River’s Heart, standing exactly where he had stood when he denounced me.

“Disgusting big-tongue friend, you no belong here. Go from Frenzyheart land or I call magic stuffs to kill you!”

I held up the offering. “Shaman Vekjik, I have spoken with the big-tongues and they desire peace. I have brought this offering on their behalf.”

“Frenzyheart never be friends of big-tongues. You dumb to come back here traitor thing!”

And then I did something I have not done in a long time, which was try to explain myself.

“No, no. I had no intentions of betraying your people. I was only defending myself. It was all a misunderstanding.”

It was even mostly true. A crocolisk had come out of the water at something that could not run, and my arms had answered before I had. I stood on that cliff with a gorloc’s offering in my hands and made my case to the shaman, and I meant it.

“Frenzyheart kill you if you come back. You no welcome here no more!”

Frenzyheart’s Fury, they call it. It went into my chest like a shield rush from something four times his size, and the cliff edge went past me, and then there was a good deal of air.

I had time on the way down to consider that I have walked out of the Black Temple and the Plaguelands both, and was about to be beaten by a three-foot shaman with a grudge and a spell.

River’s Heart came up to meet me.

Soo-say heard my dripping report all the way through without a word.

“So mean! We only be nice and they only be mean.” He turned it over a while. “They keep messing with great stones… maybe they not know great stones are sacred.”

I wrung out my cloak. Maybe they didn’t.

Vikstone hauled himself out of the lake with nothing to show for the offering, and Soo-say’s parting thought about the great stones being sacred was still hanging there, unexplained, while Lafoo had already found something worth digging up, because Gods like Shiny Things.