Chapter 30: The Patient Hunter
Roric returned as the smaller red sun bled into the horizon, his movements silent as a shadow. He found Alistair and Thora waiting by the central fire, the tension in the air thicker than the smoke.
"He has a camp," Roric reported, his voice a low murmur. "Deep in a canyon on the eastern edge of their lands. A place of sharp rocks and bitter springs. Maybe thirty warriors. They are not hiding. They are... drilling."
"Drilling?" Thora asked, her brow furrowed.
Roric nodded. "They practice fighting. But not against straw dummies. They fight each other. Varg watches. He praises the most brutal, the most reckless. He calls it 'scouring the weakness'."
Alistair absorbed this. Varg wasn't just building an army; he was building a cult of personality around a philosophy of pure, unadulterated strength. He was creating a new Graxian identity, one defined by its rejection of the alliance and its embrace of violence for its own sake.
"He poisons their minds," Thora spat.
"He offers them a simple answer," Alistair corrected grimly. "In a world that's becoming more complex, with alliances and sicknesses of the spirit, he tells them the old ways are the only ways. That purity lies in the edge of an axe."
The following days became a tense game of observation and counter-messaging. Alistair did not confront Varg. He did not demand Grok take action. Instead, he doubled down on the work of the Council.
When a Graxian hunting party arrived, looking sullen and distrustful, they found Alistair and his wood-shapers not in the settlement, but at the edge of the shared hunting ground, working alongside Borak and a few of Grok's loyalists. They were building a small, sturdy watchpost, a joint project meant to give early warning of corrupted beasts.
The sullen Graxians watched as Kael shaped the wood with his innate magic, while a Graxian craftsman set the stone foundation with brute strength. They saw Borak, his arm still in a sling, laughing at a joke from one of the Blue-Skin hunters. They saw Alistair, the Earth-Shaker, not commanding from on high, but hauling stones and offering a waterskin to a sweating Graxian.
It was a living, breathing rebuttal to Varg's ideology. It was proof that strength could come from cooperation, that different kinds of power could build something together.
Alistair also made a point to be seen with Grok. They walked the border of the shared lands together, two leaders in quiet conversation. It was a public display of unity, a visual anchor of stability against Varg's chaotic rhetoric.
The counter-strategy was subtle, but Alistair began to see its effects. The hunting parties grew less sullen. A few of the younger Graxians, who had once looked at him with suspicion, now watched the construction of the watchpost with open curiosity. The story of the healed trees and the flower blooming from the rock of hate had spread, a quiet legend that undermined Varg's narrative of a destructive foreign magic.
Varg, for his part, seemed to grow more frantic. His drills in the canyon became more violent. Roric reported seeing two of his own warriors carried away with serious injuries after a particularly brutal sparring session. The cult of strength was beginning to consume its own.
The breaking point came not from a battle, but from a desertion.
A young Graxian warrior, barely more than a boy, stumbled into Vance Haven one evening, his body bruised and his eyes wide with terror. He was one of Varg's. He collapsed at the gate, clutching a broken spear.
"They... they were going to make me fight my brother," the boy gasped, as Thora helped him to the fire and offered him water. "To prove my loyalty. To 'cut the softness' from our blood. I could not. I ran."
He looked at Alistair, his fear palpable. "He says you are the great lie. But... you healed the trees. You work with Borak. Varg only breaks things. He breaks people."
The boy's defection was a crack in Varg's foundation. It was one thing to preach strength; it was another to demand a brother spill a brother's blood.
Alistair looked at the terrified young Graxian, then at Thora. The patient, quiet work of demonstrating a better way was bearing fruit. Varg's camp, built on a foundation of fear and hate, was starting to crumble from within.
The war wasn't over. Varg was still out there, a cornered and dangerous animal. But the tide was turning. Alistair had chosen to fight with patience and proof instead of a hammer. And for the first time, he saw the first, fragile signs that his patience might actually win the war.