His stomach still remained uneasy by the time Jakon got back to his familiar anvil of a kitchen at home. The sleek stone walls sheened with the usual diamonds. The gemstones all glowed high in the ceiling. Hmmm. Wait. That elf guy hadn’t commented at all on the gemstones. Strange. Humans usually did. Eyed them wide and greedy, more often than not. Why so many other races treated gemstones like currency rather than the practical materials they were … Wait. Ah! The smell of lunch hit his nose like a troll’s club to the nose, but in the best way...

Ramsel quietly cursed his luck, but he had accomplished most of what he needed to do at the blademaster academy. The scentless poison coating his steel sabers should start weakening the dwarf students soon enough. All except that Jakon. Maybe. But as a beast elf, even in wood elf form, the poison wouldn’t affect him in the slightest. Not without s solid scratch from the blades. A scratch none of those dwarfs would be strong enough to inflict on him. Not ever again. Soon the countless gemstones throughout the ceiling would soon belong to his kind. Wealth that would buy...

Jakon thought his heart stopped for a moment. No. More than a moment. Several moments. Well beyond … well … The card in his hand was gone. Before him was a puff of bright red smoke, as large, no, a bit larger than he was. Taller and wider, like a bubbly boulder of smoke. And the smell, it was … cherry musk? Yeah. It was so much like what he read elf girls should smell like, well, if they don’t wash enough, they smelled fruity and that muskiness, like a feminine version of what that elf boy Ramsel smelled like....

Sky Brewrose savored the sudden, strange rosy fragrance coming off Dirlop Mountain. It was so much like the rose hedges back at home. The hedges she loved wondering in. Getting lost in. They were ever changing. Unlike this mountain of countless never-changing boulders. Boulders that were so tall and wide she could barely see where she was going. Only she was headed upward. In a very winding, zigzaggy way. And a glance in the wrong direction … just how insanely far up she already was. At least a thousand feet. From how that thick canopy below looked more like moss...

Frostine crouched as small as she could behind the huge jagged boulder. It was shaped like a lopsided chicken egg from some huge chicken, it was half as tall as she was, and lying on its side, yet it was so pale gray it was almost as white as she was. Almost. Just the chicken egg appearance … nonono, her tummy better not growl hungry again. As the orc deck wielder, she needed to spread half of the orc platoon horde cards close enough to the battlements above. There were nearly a hundred orc soldiers to a platoon card but...