Chapter 694: Different Veynar

Led through the gates by a detachment of stone-faced Veynar veterans, the delegation entered the settlement.... and immediately, an eerie, suffocating unease settled over every single foreign envoy.

The Veynar was not the Veynar they remembered.

In the past, when rare trade delegations or peace emissaries had visited this settlement, the atmosphere had always carried a tense, prickly wariness.

Back then, even though the Veynar were fiercely proud, their people had lived under the constant, exhausting shadow of encroaching enemies.

Common hunters would eye strangers with tight jaws and twitching fingers near their weapon; women would hurry children inside the huts watching warily from the shadows of their huts with sharp, defensive glares, and the guards maintained a tight, paranoid perimeter.

Now, the air itself felt completely rewritten and the entire settlement seemed to breathe with an alien, effortless grandeur.

As the envoys were led down the wide central thoroughfare, the sheer density of life nearly suffocated them.

The air was heavy and thick with the greasy, mouth-watering steam of roasting meat, the harsh scraping sound of tanners stretching raw hides, and the overlapping voices of people shouting instructions across the crowded, bustling square."

Everywhere they looked, the settlement pulsed with an unnerving, vibrant rhythm. The people moved with calm, confident strides, their shoulders squared and their eyes sharp, carrying an unspeakable aura.

In fact, they had braced themselves for the heavy, suffocating stench of war. They expected the usual post-war aftermath of a tribal clash: a depressed, howling atmosphere choked with the black smoke of funeral pyres and the scent of rotting blood.

They anticipated the sight of widows kneeling in the dirt, ritually shearing their hair, their faces smeared with ash as they mourned the fallen.

Instead, beyond their imagination, the streets rang with the rhythmic ringing of hammers against anvils and the boisterous shouts of laborers repairing the palisades. There was not a single sign of grief anywhere.

The wounded veterans sitting propped against the sun-baked timber walls of the lodges weren’t huddled in the shivering misery of heat and signs of certain death.

Instead, they were passing around massive clay jugs of fermented root-brew, the dark, frothy liquid spilling into their beards as they threw their heads back in chest-deep, booming laughter.

They slapped each other on the shoulders, trading war stories, comparing weapon marks and missing fingers as if they were prestigious medals won in a game.

Most staggering of all was the treatment of their wounds. The bloody linen of their bandages was packed thick with fresh, glowing green poultices. The pungent, menthol-sharp aroma of crushed spirit-herbs drifted through the air, completely masking the metallic tang of blood.

To them it was a casual display of terrifying, arrogant wealth.

Smaller clans like them would have hoarded a single leaf of that glowing flora in an absolute secret place, treating it as a core tribal treasure to be brought out only to save a dying chieftain.

Here, it was being slathered onto the grazed ribs and fractured arms of what seemed like ordinary warriors like common mud, a testament of power and resources far exceeding anything they had imagined.

Their shock didn’t stop here, as they slowly moved forward, what stunned them even more however, were the common folk.

As the foreign envoys passed by the granaries and cookpits, the Veynar women tending the stew cauldrons didn’t flinch nor did they scurry away. Heck, unlike before they didn’t even lower their gazes.

They looked right into the eyes of the foreign delegators with calm, casual indifference.

An old tanner scraping a stag hide looked up as the delegation passed. He didn’t drop his eyes. He didn’t reach for a knife. He merely stared straight through the foreign elders, his weathered face completely flat, his chin resting high with an unshakeable confidence.

When a young mother carrying a wooden tub of water crossed their path, she didn’t step into the ditch to yield the way as was customary for commoners before foreign dignitaries.

She kept her stride smooth and steady, forcing them to part their own lines to let her pass, her dark eyes looking right into theirs without a flicker of fear, hesitation, or wariness.

Let alone adults, even the children playing near the timber piles barely spared the heavily armed delegates a glance, laughing as they tossed wooden hoops back and forth.

There was zero fear. Zero wariness.

The entire clan exuded a profound, suffocating certainty that their walls were utterly unbreachable, that the sky above their heads was anchored by something so grand, so completely absolute, that the entire world outside their valley was merely an afterthought.

"By the river spirits..." the female envoy from the horned folk breathed, her fingers tightening around the horn tokens at her waist. She leaned toward Sarn, her voice trembling in a hushed whisper.

"Look at the storehouses, Sarn. Look at all those meat jerkies. There must be tens of thousands of them. And the weapons too... look at the weapon racks."

"I see them," Sarn, who was the representative of them all, hissed back, his throat dry as hot desert sand.

"Keep your eyes forward and your mouth shut. Don’t touch your weapons or even look sideways at the guards."

"Elder Sarn," a representative of Wind-Runners, whose slender body was draped in a feathered cloak also whispered, his voice trembling so hard that his teeth seemed to click together. "Look at those haulers."

The lead elder of the Stone-River tribe, a withered man whose neck was weighed down by strings of green river glass, did not answer.

In fact it was not that he didn’t want to answer, it was just that his throat was too dry to speak and he had to swallow a mouthful of saliva to moisturize it.

He had spotted the work crews on the road ahead.

Fifty burly, marauders were hauling massive trunks of ironwood with heavy hemp ropes, their backs glistening with sweat under the noon glare.

Sarn recognized the tattoos running along their shoulder blades... the three slashes of the Marauder vanguard, the crazy men who had spent their lives raiding tribes and burning outlying settlements.

Now, those same brutal guys were moving in silent, orderly ranks, not even daring to raise their voices. And standing over them wasn’t an army of heavily armored warriors, but a single young woman in a hunting braid, a bone dagger resting against her hips, lazily tapping her foot as she checked off a wooden tablet.

The Marauder elite... reduced to laborers, Sarn thought, his ancient heart hammering violently against his ribs. And they don’t even need guards with drawn bows to keep them in line.

"By the river spirits..." muttered another elder from the Stone-River clan, his knuckles turning white around his carved bone staff as his eyes swept over a passing work crew.

"This... this cannot be the aftermath of a desperate war," another envoy, a female herbalist from a human settlement, muttered beneath her breath, her fingers clutching her pine branch so tightly the bark cracked. "Where are their dead? Where is their exhaustion? They look like they are preparing for a feast of fifty moons."

The horror of that realization rippled through the entire delegation.