The Amber Sword

November, Frost Moon.

On the grasslands where the cold winds roar, the paraquats wither, and the goose fur snows fall. This winter was particularly difficult for the Lions of Tokenin, the failure of the expedition, the endless internal struggle, the pushing and contention of clan leaders, the sun rumours in some parts of the South and West plunged into perpetual nights, large numbers of cattle and sheep livestock died as a result of the snowfall, and refugees came from all directions, making the situation worse.

The thick cowhide tent is warm as spring.

Bright flames burn on the matches, making stripping noises, and Mars occasionally rises and climbs up along the bottom of a black painted pot. A lamb rib was boiled in the pan, a thick layer of oil swept over the bubbles, and the air was filled with a meaty mixture of plant stems.

Neil's gaze was a little faint.

The Lions calculate their age in a slightly different way than other civilizations, because of the lack of a culture of farming among peoples, they divide the two most important periods of the year with the withering of the grass - the grass on the prairie that withers and flourishes, and the year passes.

It seemed like a long time ago, during the busiest season of the year, the people were tempered, and it had just gone through the bar mitzvah, turning a white beam of bristles into a whip and wanting to be the greatest warrior of the Lions. Like his predecessors, he regained the long-lost honor of Tokui.

At that time, everything seemed to be moving in the best direction.

But in the blink of an eye, they lose everything, they lose their childhood friends, they lose their fathers, they lose a lot of intimate people. Toquinine's lions, on the other hand, had their spinal bones broken, and they were asthmatic and could no longer stand.

This harsh winter will bring the clan to its extinction.

The Lion Juvenile is filled with confusion, and Toquinin has lost his glory. When will they take it back?

“Neil, Neil.” The neighbors whispered to remind Nair that this was a return to his mind. The tent was bustling with heads of seven or eight clans surrounding those three humans, and the eyes of green oil were full of disgrace.

The atmosphere in the tent was sword-drawn, the human knights pressed on the handle, cautious, the wizard's hands beneath his sleeve, clutching something. Only that self-proclaimed apostle, half his face under the hood, was as divine as ever.

Neil's pale green eyes looked at these people.

“After my father died, I had no extra thoughts, I just wanted to lead my people through this difficult winter," the Lion teenager said, standing up, clashing the brass bundles on his chest and clashing at each other: “The Toquinins lost their beloved king for a moment, but that doesn't mean we fell down, and we won't be allied with humanity. ”

“It's cold this winter," said the human girl standing in the middle, showing a nice half face under her hood, smiling slightly: “Tomorrow's winter will be colder. ”

“Can I take it you're provoking us?” Neil frowned: “But I'm not going to compare to a woman, you guys go. ”

The young lady raised her head and everyone in the room felt her head pounding. People saw her eyes shining like stars, wise and deep enough to see through the hearts and minds: “I am the daughter of the Duke of Tikes. Would you bet with me, Your Highness? ”

“What bet?” Neil was clearly reluctant to be looked down on by a woman.

“I'll convince you that the bet is the future of Toquinin's lion. ”

“And you lost? ”

“I'll marry you. ”

Lion teenagers' hearts are beating, and lion women's skins are thin, and their aesthetics are actually not very different from those of humans. But in any case, it cannot deny the beauty of the young girl in front of it, the holes in her heartfelt eyes, for which she was deeply silenced at the first sight.

But he shook his head: “I can't accept it. ”

The young girl did not care and took a look at her companion, the wizard took an old parchment paper out of her sleeve. In public, the wizard carefully spread the parchment in front of the chiefs of the Lions.

When I saw this parchment, the lions changed their faces.

Neil clenched his fist and felt hot blood pouring over his head, his eyes blasting with anger and looking at the girl. Earlier feelings of innocence, beauty, and heartbreaking faces became vicious and distorted in its eyes.

It's just a wrinkled parchment, and it doesn't seem complete.

Yellow-haired, scorched, cracked paper with dense numbness written all over it, but with a slightly blackened claw print on the blank corner. This claw print was torn from the middle, like a sign of humiliation that distorted the history and honor of the Lion clan.

Under the pressure of the Dragon of Darkness, when the Temple of the Earth first withdrew from the sacred covenant.

Gilt, the fiery King of Fire, tore the oath in front of the King of Lions, representing the promise of the Toquinins, and left it in front of the man he had made friends with, while the lion's hero, the lion king of the Toquinins of that era, was ashamed to face his friends and took away his half of the covenant.

So this eternal shame stayed with Cruz for almost a thousand years.

It was also the hatred of the Toquinin lions, whose forefathers had been forced by the orders of the Temple of the Earth, and whose greatest hero in the history of the lions died of depression shortly after he withdrew from the Covenant.

And Neil's family is the heir to that great name.

“Today, a thousand years later, we all know the truth," the young girl replied quietly, "the Lion King put an end to his guilt in his own way, but we were also unable to choose history, and the Toquinins have indeed endured the hardships they should not have endured for a thousand years. ”

“My father, just let me give it back to you--”

Neil stunned.

Lion clan leaders were also stunned.

And that's when Tokenin lost his long-standing glory, and he put it there so quietly that he subconsciously wanted to reach out and grab it, but it was hard as if it were just a matter of time away. A thousand years of regret, because of failure and the inferiority of the traitors, the lions had to dwell on this barren meadow.

The desire of countless people, * * * * night, made every lion king wish to return to that moment, even to die instantly, to change the fate of Tokenin.

But people have no choice in history.

Confusion, inferiority, self-doubt, this is the attitude of many Toquinins, tragedy seems to have been cast from the beginning, a history without heroes, for a people without light as if it were an eternal night.

Because they are descendants of traitors.

But the lion teenager finally squeezed his fist.

“What exactly do you want?” It asked lightly that the self-esteem and honour of a people did not come from charity, and that people had to make up for what they had done wrong first.

The young girl looked up at the monarch of such a lion, who was only a teenager, but had the temperament of a king.

“It's cold this winter, a lot of people will die on the grasslands,” she looks at the snow outside the tent, "next winter may be colder, food on the grasslands will not feed so many people, only to abandon the elderly, kill weak babies, maybe only one out of ten newborns can grow up hungry, and how many young adults has Toquinine lost this year and how long will it take to recover? ”

She turned around and smiled with a warm smile: "Your Highness, we have only one request: to escort us out of this meadow. ”

After that, she bowed down to salute the crowd and turned around to prepare to leave.

There's a little quiet in the tent--

Only grunting water and flowers flicker.

“Your Highness…” the chiefs of the Lion clan whispered.

They exchanged their eyes, and green eyes filled with anxiety and anxiety, but there was something else.

“Wait.”

Nair finally mustered the courage to call each other.

“Are you going to Anzeluta? ”

“Are you allied with the Hazers? ”

The girl stopped and nodded her head behind her back.

The lion teenager seemed determined and turned back to his men and said, "Take those things out. ”

The tent was silent.

Next, people took a box, carefully placed what was in the box on a few short pieces, and connected it to that broken parchment —— that was the torn covenant that the lions had retrieved piecemeal over the centuries.

These fragments seem to symbolize the obsession of the Toquinins, who carefully collect them as if one day they can recover their long-lost glory from them.

But at this point, it all seems a little worthless.

A wrinkly shredded parchment paper quickly appeared on the short few, about a quarter to a fifth of what it would have looked like, that shattered dark red paw print, distorted and twisted over these pieces.

Neil glanced at the girl.

He walked forward and opened a mouth on his palm with his paws, then let his blood drip over that dark, dry paw mark. The blood of rose red drips down, and in the bright light, old and new blood seems to blend together at this moment.

“The Lion of Tokenin, renew his promise. ”

“We did not do it a thousand years ago, and today we will make it up to a thousand times! ”

“We're with you--”

“to finish the war. ”

As described above the poem of the heavens.

……

“What is that place? ”

“Ariel. ”

Brayson looked at the flames lit by the stars, and the black columns of smoke on the plain came from the sky, and even as the stars were hidden, the sky was getting closer to night and still clearly visible.

Ariel is the second largest town in Kolkova, after Wangdu, where the starlit fire proves that fighting is still taking place in Kolkova and that the White Lion Corps has not completely collapsed.

The three of them stood on the mountain path, reflecting a little glow in their eyes and watching the scene silently.

The accompanying knights were silent, and although everyone was wounded, the sight in front of them had long forgotten the pain.

The kingdom is in flames, and that is their shame.

Everyone secretly bites their teeth.

“Is that your city?” A somewhat ambiguous voice asked.

It was an old dwarf who sat tall on the back of a heavily armored sheep with a hammer in his hand and a pair of tiny eyes pointing in that direction.

Bresson turned around and looked at each other a little strangely - he hadn't seen dwarves moving on the surface in years. Although it is true that across the Misty Mountains to the north, there is a rarely known trail that leads underground.

This ancient road runs between the hills of Chongshan, through the deep valley and the ancient forests, through the giant statues of turbulent stones and weather, and eventually reaches the entrance of an ancient passage. Many years ago, the alpine dwarves controlled the entrance to the underground tunnel, guarding the door to the underground world.

They built halls deep in the mountains, intricately connected to each other, constituting dwarf cities, and even once they built a vast empire when the dwarf kingdom flourished most.

But with the fall of the Silver Clan, after the Dwarf Ruwen disappeared with the Silver Plains, the Dwarf's scenery ceased, and the Empire collapsed, leaving only countless ruins deep underground in darkness.

In the Battle of the Saints, the dwarves of the Chongshan clan betrayed mankind and the Elf coalition, and since then few people have seen their presence in the ground world. There are few dwarf adventurers in human society, but none of them are residents of the dwarf kingdom, but the minority that human society grew up in.

But these dwarves are clearly different.

The dwarf sat on the saddle pad of his goat, his saddle back shrugged like a hill, and Elouin didn't have the saddleware in this shape.

Not to mention the gorgeous dress, the gold and silver, the necklace on the chest is filled with onions and ruby sapphires, and the heavy dwarf armor is carefully carved like a work of art. Though Bresson doesn't know much about precious metals, he also sees that the armor is in no way simple.

Manrique also looked at the tongue, and he turned back to look at the countess behind him, Dilfrey, with a pale face holding a long box and a mouthful telling them: "Secret silver -”

This dwarf, obviously, was never easy to come by.

Bryson nodded silently at each other's questions.

The dwarf touched the beard on his chest and the large brown red beard was woven with brass bundles, like a couple of split flames. There is also a staggered pattern engraved on the bundle, a family crest characteristic of the Dwarf aristocracy. Each Dwarf clan is different and their compatriots living on the ground have long forgotten these traditions.

His huge nose showed obvious disdain: “Not much. ”

Manrik endured no exit rebuttal, partly because the dwarves saved their lives and partly because of the well-equipped and forty dwarf cavalry surrounding the old dwarf.

In fact, since the dramatic change in Swallow Castle that day, they have chosen to abandon the floating fleet that had stayed in Swallow Castle and leave the countess with the sword at zero - mainly to avoid the rebel blockade in the direction of Janilassou and Bouré, after all, the floating ship was unable to return to the south without going through King's Harbor.

The secondary reason, however, was that the target of the floater was too large to attract the attention of the Sassards.

But even so, they continued to run into walls within the swallowburger - obviously, Baron Dahler did not intend to abandon the holy sword Misor easily. After successive breakthroughs of the rebel blockade, the crowd eventually had to head north and cross Mount Mist to Corcova at the suggestion of a white lion knight of Koros origin.

While the entire northern part of Eruin is now unstable, it is easy to join the White Lion Corps in Balta as long as it leaves Corcova. Both Manrique and Bresson believed that the White Lion Regiment, reconstituted through Her Royal Highness after the Battle of Ambethel, would never change again.

But it was with this in mind that the breakthrough of suffering began, and the rebels who intercepted them became fewer, but this time their enemies became more terrible monsters - first those crystalline monsters that they had seen in the Earl of Swallow, and the terrible presence of what the rebels called the Nuns, each time they lost a great deal.

After entering the Misty Mountains, dozens of White Lion Knights were sacrificed on their way here. Had it not been for these strange dwarves, I'm afraid all of them would be here today.

And Manrik didn't forget that those horrible monsters were under the hammers of these dwarves, one hammer at a time, as simple as smashing watermelons.

“Why are those clusters chasing you?” The dwarf asked again.

Manrik was stunned.

Dilfrey glanced at Bryson and asked softly, "Are you talking about the monsters? ”

“Yes, Cluster,” the old dwarf glanced at the Countess: "Little girl, you don't understand their horrors. I've seen the world crystallized by them with my own eyes, and there's no life there. ”

Dilfrey never thought those monsters were so horrible, and she remembered the sight of the Earl of Swallow Castle with some white fingers.

Bryson didn't look so good that he stood up and recounted the whole thing.

“This is Eruin?” The old dwarf suddenly asked.

Bryson nodded.

“Good luck.” The old dwarf nodded and looked closely at Delphiry, saying: "He says you are the daughter of the Earl of Swallow Castle, your name is Delphiry? Is your ancestor the son of Sola the Horseman of Fire? You are the swordkeeper family, right? ”

He looked at the box the Count was holding tight: "This is the holy sword, Mithole, don't worry, we'll take it where it belongs. ”

Delphirie suddenly stopped, and she subconsciously opened her eyes and looked at the old dwarf and forgot to breathe.

And while the table pong was ringing, the human knights pulled out their swords with seven hands and watched the dwarves with vigilance. Brayson and Manrik also blocked Val Ferris in the first place, Brayson pulled out the sword and Manrik pulled out a hand from his pocket.

“What do you want?” The young captain asked nervously.

But the old dwarf didn't look at him either, and he turned around and said to a dwarf knight behind him, "Blow the trumpet, see that place?” He pointed in the direction of Corcova, and the flames were shining on the plain, “We went there, it was called Ariel, I asked earlier ——”

The dwarf cavalry nodded and immediately removed the trumpet from his waist.

But before he could lift the trumpet with his hands, Dilfiry's voice finally came along: "You… who are you? ”

The old dwarf put on his helmet, turned around and answered her in a loud voice: "You can call me California, or the lion vulture king... in the name of the Irene Anvil, for the Silver Plains...”

Dwarf cavalry shouted in unison.

Whoo--

The horn rang.

……