“It’s only natural to have border checkpoints, even for allied or friendly powers, if you ask me. After all, while you might be allied or friendly to each other, rules still have differences from place to place. Weirdest contrast I’ve seen was between two neighboring jarldoms, where one side considered a local type of meat harvested from some sort of large rodents a delicacy, while the other strictly forbid it on the pain of lashing.” - Aideen deVreys, the Silver Maiden, circa 631 FP.

“What do you think of them?” asked Aideen as she and Celia walked out from the western end of the forest. They had stayed with the elves for a few days, on top of the time they spent walking through the forest itself, which was also a period of time Aideen had already considered in their itinerary. After all, what good was traveling around without staying a bit to enjoy the local specialties?

“The elves? They remind me more of… the people in Alfheim, in the plains, honestly,” replied Celia after some thought. “Like, friendly enough folks, though you can tell that they were still trying to rein in some old habits every now and then. I guess I feel a bit like they were relatable to me? It was like when I was trying to adjust to living with the orcs up north back then, but on a much longer timescale in their case.”

“That’s part of it, yeah. Elves tend to be slow to change, especially the ones more entrenched in the older ways. They’ve lived their lives for centuries that way. Would be harder to change that, compared to a lifestyle you only lived for a couple decades, no?” replied Aideen with a nod, noting Celia’s relatively short life before she became an unliving, something Aideen herself also experienced by herself, considering how she turned unliving at twenty.

She had already lived more than ten times longer as an unliving as she had as a human now, while Celia was nearing four times now.

“We’ll be entering the Elmaiyan Empire soon. You’ve met quite a few therians by now, haven’t you? Gotten more used to them yet?” Aideen then asked towards Celia. The way some therian breeds resembled vicious predatory animals had caused the girl to be particularly timid around them when she first ran into some in Boroes back in the north, hence the question.

“They’re definitely far more common in the south, yeah… I think I’m more used to them now. Why?” replied Celia with some curiosity at the question.

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“The Elmaiya Empire is basically the homeland of most therians. They likely have the most variety and number of therians out of any country in this world, so just asking to make sure you can handle meeting a lot of them,” replied Aideen with a slight smile. “Honestly though, the way you shy around the big therians was rather cute. Artair would have laughed his ass off had you done that around him, heh.”

“Artair is…”

“My late husband. He’s from one of the larger breeds of therians, easily a couple heads taller than me and broad to match,” Aideen said with some obvious melancholy to her voice. “If you recall the saber-toothed lions we ran into in the plains around Alfheim, he looked a bit like if someone made one of those stand up on two feet, just even bigger.”

“Damn, he’s a big one then,” said Celia as she whistled in appreciation. “Then again, you aren’t exactly small yourself, Miss Aideen,” she added. Indeed, Aideen was by no means small either as a human or a woman at one hundred eighty tall and with shoulders broad enough she could be mistaken as a pretty man at times. “Are the ones in Elmaiya also like that?”

“They tend to have more of the bigger breeds than in Boroes, yeah,” noted Aideen. Back in Boroes she had not seen many of the larger breeds of therians, which were commonly seen in Elmaiya. “Oh, you can see the fort at a distance there already. Why don’t you take a look with a spyglass? Maybe you might see something interesting.”

“Sure,” said Celia as she pulled out a spyglass from her storage and peered through it.

Through the device, Celia could see the distant Fort Bharat. Just around that moment, a caravan of wagons passed through the eastern gate of the fort, headed towards the lichdom. The wagons were noticeably larger than what she had ever seen, easily twice as broad, made with large beams of wood that looked very solid and sturdy.

The reason for the construction was obvious when she noticed the three elephant therians – likely a family, since there were two larger ones and a smaller one – climbing aboard the wagon after they thanked the guard on duty. By comparing the therians to the guard next to them, Celia got a sense of their size, and was it something.

At that time, the guard they were thanking was an elf, who looked like a full-blooded one, judging from the length of their ears. Celia knew that most elves reached around two to two and a half meters tall in adulthood, though some were shorter as well. The elf she saw stood tall and proud, easily a good two heads taller than the human skeletons that stood as sentries next to him, so he was likely on the taller end.

The therians dwarfed him regardless.

Given the size difference, Celia guessed that the taller of the therians must be around three and a half meters tall or so, with a thickness to match. The slightly shorter one probably “only” three meters tall, while the one she pegged as a juvenile was still easily taller than her or Aideen, likely around two meters or so already despite their youth.

It was definitely quite an eye-opener and an introduction to the larger kinds of therians, all right. They were headed to the place that those therians called their home for the foreseeable future, to boot.