The Woodsman held the Broken Butcher gingerly in his hands, as if it could shatter at any moment like so much glass. He put it down, left, returned with some incense and fresh herbs, and burned the former while crushing up the latter, rubbing the resultant poultice under his eyes. The pupils of his eyes somehow twisted into a spiral shape that consumed his irises altogether as he examined the blade, rubbing his pale grey goatee while making weird mumbling sounds

“The blade’s soul has surpassed its physical form… It is in an unstable state,” he murmured, looking up at Zelsys. “The mass-production grade of cold-iron that Captain’s Cleavers were made from, no matter how rugged, simply cannot stand up to such growth - the cleaver must be reforged with material worthy of being its vessel, lest the soul be placed at risk of withering and fading away.”

“How much time is there?” Zel asked.

He put the blade down just as gingerly as he’d picked it up, continuing: “Well… Putting it in Fog Storage is completely out of the question and you can’t exactly transport it via Fog Transit either, you’d just turn it into a Fulguric bomb that detonates when it re-enters the material plane. With a stabilizing treatment and the appropriate seals, I’d say a couple months before you run the risk of permanent deterioration, maybe a year if we build a stabilization array for longer-term storage while we work to procure repair materials. It’s not exactly an eleventh-hour issue, but I wouldn’t put it off, being that, to my knowledge, this is your primary melee weapon and casting catalyst.”

With that, the Woodsman just up and left, citing that he had other duties to get back to.

The rest of the trek back to Willowdale went altogether quite well, including a celebratory feast upon the victors’ return wherein Zelsys consumed so much mundane alcohol she actually managed to get drunk, for once, short-lived though the intoxication was. For her, the feast wasn’t the main event, however, as Zefaris reminded her when they finally had a moment to themselves, and continued to remind her of it for the next several hours.

Some week or so into her recovery, Zel finally worked out a deal with the governor regarding compensation for services rendered: Thirty-thousand gelt, and ongoing payments to the sect’s account until a total of fifty-thousand was reached, and that only covered Zel’s and Zef’s payout put together, with smaller payouts assigned to the sect members who had participated based on how they had performed and what dangers they had faced in the Blue Moon War - the typewriter lie detector was used to ascertain the veracity of their claims for this purpose. Problem was, of course, that the city did not have that much liquid cash available to just shell out, especially considering that most of it would likely end up in a Fog Vault, which the governor mentioned outright. This simple, straightforward truth was one of the reasons why Zelsys agreed to just have an account opened with the city-state, with the Estoras family’s frankly eye-watering holdings acting as assurance against Willowdale herself defaulting for any reason. In short, Estoras was willing to pay for the sect’s service out of his own pocket.

The Slayer’s Guild was resurrected in the beginning of winter as well, just in time to contend with the rising number of beast sightings caused by Ubul’s awakening and the associated disturbances in the natural environment. As Prime Slayer, Zelsys participated in the guild’s quite numerous hunts over the winter’s course, taking these as lighter, more relaxed assignments that she could handle even while injured and without the use of her cleaver.

When it came to the Butcher, it was stabilized and sealed-up just as the woodsman had suggested, left floating atop its own little altar that had been built in the most arcanely stable place of the sect, the very top of its highest tower.

Of all people, it was Jorfr who offered a solution to restoring the cleaver. He offered to venture north, to his home, and bring with him either the starmetal to repair the blade, or failing that, at least knowledge of how to obtain said starmetal and find a smith best able to work it.

“If I do not return by spring, you will know I am likely dead,” he said before he departed.

When questioned as to why he was doing this, he flatly stated: “I thought of a course of action that seemed good both to my sober and drunk selves, and so chose to take it. It would be a terrible shame to see such a magnificent blade reduced to scraps.”

And so, off to the north the norseman went, riding atop his own Faux-Sturmgandr, modified to more closely match the original model’s performance.

Time passed.

Zelsys Newman, Founder of the Newman Sect, would spend the next seven months of her life recovering from her injuries and reinforcing her sect’s foundations, so that it would remain firm in her impending absence. Of these seven months, she spent two indisposed, recovering from the injuries she had suffered and developing her control over the tremendous Fulguric power imparted by her possession of seven Wrathful Thundergods in the stead of one. While it didn’t linearly multiply her raw power sevenfold, even the roughly threefold increase was enough to force her into restructuring how she treated her own Fulgur.

The corresponding trait, of course, changed altogether.

STORM REACTOR Type: Essentia Synthesis and Manipulation Trigger: At-Will (Consumes Fog or Metabolized Essentia (Fulgur)) Effects: Electrokinesis A+ (S in Beast Style), Kinesthesia Enhancement A- (A in Slayer Style), Body Control Enhancement A+ (S- in Slayer Style), Manifestation Spec.(Beast Style), Self-Resuscitation Advancement: ???Diversify Thundergod Roster???

She found it endlessly amusing that the tablet’s logic automaton had obviously tried to guess an advancement criterion, though it wasn’t that far off from what she had considered as possibilities. That, however, was still well into the future. Alongside the altered trait, a new one had emerged.

METABOLIC FULGUR