Vaelor Thane was Warden of the Thornwake, the fighting wardens of the Sylvan Sanctuary, through the years the Gilded Coven spent cutting roads and mines into the western forest. He spent almost all of them being told no by the one person he would not overrule.
One side of his face remained elven. The other had become bark and knotted wood. Silver insects lived in a hollow in his shoulder and came out when he was angry, so that anyone who dealt with him learned to read his temper off his forearm before he spoke. He was blunt, proud and quick to fury, and never pretended to be otherwise.
His quarrel with the envoy Eryndra was the quarrel of the whole Sanctuary. He was certain the expansion would never stop on its own, and that the Sylvan, with their beasts and the old guardians sleeping under the ridges, could end it in a day. Eryndra was certain that this was exactly what the Coven wanted, so that it could name the Sylvan the aggressors before the throne. He thought her restraint was letting the forest die by pieces. He obeyed her anyway.
He held until Thalenor Root, the place where the Sylvan went to listen for their dead, where he had once heard his mother’s voice and had never told anyone. When the Coven’s drills began severing the Root he stopped calculating and led the Thornwake against the machines. People died on both sides, and the Coven got the account of Sylvan violence that Eryndra had spent two years denying it. The Supreme Ruler ended the expansion all the same.
He never regretted fighting, and in later years said only that he might have fought sooner. To his own surprise he did not hate Jarek Voss, the mercenary captain who had guarded the machines; there were other people he hated enough.
When the decree reached him he read it beneath Thalenor Root with one hand on the wood, and said a single word: good. Then he sent the Thornwake to walk beside the withdrawing columns — not to attack them, but to make certain they kept walking.