"Is that…edible?" asked Mercer as he and his brother instinctively sat back, their hands reaching for their weapons.

Frost Spiders were, after all, rather fiercesome foes for the average human here. They were nearly level thirty and their flesh-melting toxin was renowned for how quickly it could turn a fully grown human into a mushy goop.

But compared to Old Thane and the beastwomen, it was nothing.

"Think of them like crabs, lads," said Old Thane encouragingly. He put a spider leg in his broad hand and waved it around in positively repulsive display that made it quite clear that him being blind could be a blessing sometimes. "See?"

"I don't think that's helping, old man," said Li, though he personally did not care much. Many of the hindering emotions of revulsion had long since left him, especially when it came to death or the unpleasant. "How about we cook it and see how it is first?"

"Food, yay!" shouted Tia, obviously having no reservations of what her food was or looked like.

Prepping the food did not take too long, for Old Thane was very much used to dealing with Frost Spiders. As monsters, the creatures either inhabited cursed forests or the glacial ice forests of the north where trees grew made not of bark, but of glowing ice and white moss.

There, the spiders were larger and stronger than the frost spiders here, covered in white fur and having gleaming red eyes, but in the end, they cooked the same in a pot. It was rather simple. The old man carved out flesh from the spider's abdomen and put it in a pot over the fire and used that along with some water and herbs Li grew with his divine powers as a soup base where he boiled the legs.

The rest of the spider, he tossed out, for it was not edible, packed as it was with poison that could not easily be neutralized.

The end result was something that did resemble crab, and it smelled like it too, if a little bit more savory. At the least, it was far more appealing than before, and the two brothers were a little more confident in sitting around the circle that now formed around the bubbling pot, eager to eat.

Li took a spider leg and cracked it, pulling out soft, steamed white meat and handing it to Tia.

"Thanks, papa," she said as she quickly devoured it, carapace included, her sharp teeth emitting somewhat disturbing crunching sounds as she chewed her way through it all.

"Here," said Li as he held out another leg to the brothers. "Don't eat the carapace like her, though, because your teeth will shatter like glass."

"Thank you, seer," said Mason as he took the leg and shared it with his brother.

"It's actually quite good, though I would say it tastes more like chicken, oddly," said Li as he sampled a bit of the flesh. He did not eat much for he did not need to, and it was the same for Zagan who simply chose to sleep at a corner. "You two should savor the taste. With the curse on the Winterwoods lifted, it will not be long before the Frost Spiders move out to environments that better suit them."

"Good riddance," said Mercer as he chewed on a chunk of fleshy white. "Damned creatures make my spine shiver."

"They did not belong here, yes," said Li. "But they still have right to be and to live. Remember that if you two decide to become adventurers of merit. Monsters are as part of this world as you are. Take care to not let your emotions cloud your judgement of their necessity, no matter how horrid or ugly they seem."

"An agreeable sentiment," said the Serpi as she laid back sprawled in the coils of her lengthy white tail, scribbling away at a clay tablet. "Monster, man, fiend, angel, god, demon – all holdeth their roots in thine world. All are part of its balance."

"Is that a tenet of your god?" said Mason.

"Goddess," corrected the Serpi.

"And what be it that tablet?" asked Mercer.

The Serpi raised a thin black brow. She paused for a second, looking at the two brothers, and finding genuine curiosity on their faces instead of bias, she relented, showing them the tablet. Atop the surface of clay was a remarkably realistic sketch of the current scene in front of her. "I record. It is my duty, after all."

"That is an exceptional rendering!" remarked Mercer. "Not even the finest artists I've known can match it."

"Agreed, brother," said Mason as they scooched closer to inspect the tablet. "Though I suppose we've not seen much but the street artists hawking their daily wares."

"All my sisters are capable of this much, for it cannot be that a scholar of the sands lacks talent in the art of the stylus," said the Serpi.

"Sisters?" asked Mason. "Related by blood? Or a term for your people?"

"People. We are all blessed to be the chosen of Zahaka, the All-Seeing, and fashioned in her image, we hold no men among our ranks."

"Then how do you, you know…," trailed off Mercer.

"And you intend to court the golden maiden of Riviera with this lack of tact?" said Mason with a sigh.

"A select few males from other kin, we take," said the Serpi with all the cold explanation of a biology professor explaining mating behaviors. "Then, when they have performed their duties, we release them."

"Well," said Mercer as he looked at the Serpi. "Does not sound so bad a fate to me-,"

Mason cut him off with a jab of his elbow.

"Do snakes fight?" asked the Lupi from a distance, her voice a little muffled from chewing down on a spider leg with the same intensity as Tia.

"Combat is not our way, nay," said the Serpi.

"Hm." The Lupi returned to eating, rather disinterested at the fact that the Serpi were not war faring.

"Considering how the conversation is going, perhaps it is a good time for us to get to know the other a little better," said Li. "And it has been long since I have sat down with individuals under me and talked with them."

=============

Throughout that night and over steamed spider and in the presence of a warm fire, everyone talked. At a certain point, Old Thane decided to bring out one of many jugs of ale he had bought and stored. Just like the old man to value ale so much, and when the first jug came out with pale liquid pouring out liberally into bowls, Li understood why his and the old man's packs were so heavy despite the fact that they knew Li could produce food on the go.

Well, it was not like Li could blame the old man. He liked when the old man was happy, and this was that. The only issue was explaining to Tia that she could not drink the mystery liquid, but when he explained that it would taste very, very bad, she relented, though not easily.

Though, Li supposed, she would easily neutralize alcohol in the same way he could, but oddly, he felt it a little against his principles to let her drink.

With the alcohol, conversation flowed a little freer as both the Lupi and the Feli quite liked the taste of it, never having drank it in large quantities in their homelands. The only experience they had of alcohol was when they very rarely traded for it or found it naturally occurring in pools of fermenting berries, but the latter method had become much rarer ever since the elves destroyed many of the trees that produced the berries.

Through the night, Li learned much of what the beastwomen wished to do, for though they were officially deemed champions for his cause, they had their own goals and histories as well.

Vilga, the Lupi, had been torn from her tribe from a young age. Among the beastwomen, she was one of few that had been in chains since a young age, taken and placed in arenas where she was raised as a gladiator to fight. There, she became incredibly strong and grew sturdy as well, eating special foods that promoted bodily strength.

All she had known was fighting, and there, she derived the entirety of her life's worth until finally, she had been sold down south to a Soleilian nobleman who had a taste for girls built like her. Thankfully, Li had freed her kind before she could go further down that life, but now she faced a sense of isolation from the rest of her tribe for she had never truly learned their ways.

And thus, she wished to explore the world and find who she really was in joining Li.

Sheela, the Feli, rather loudly declared that she did not believe the lifestyle of hunting and farming as suited to her as it was for her little sister. She did, however, learn much about human culture in the past two months, and came to realize that the job of adventuring seemed to interest her, and in particular, she wanted to hunt down Azhar to teach her the profession's ways and also to make him one of her mates, for among her kind, the stronger females took many.

The Serpi Asala's purpose was known rather well, for she was there to record Li's adventures for the sake of future knowledge. She also wished to see how the Midpath was doing for it was a construct created by her goddess, after all. If ever there was damage to it, she would mend it, not to mention that she could make sure that Li could follow the Midpath properly.

All in all, a rather diverse group with varied interests, but all individuals whom Li was invested in seeing succeed for the help they had brought to his community.