Vaelor Thane commanded the Thornwake through the years of the Gilded Expansion, and spent almost all of them being told no by someone he could 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 right about the thing that mattered least and wrong about the thing that mattered most, and he knew it long before he could admit it. He was right that the expansion would never stop on its own. He was wrong that the Sanctuary could end it without becoming, in the official account, the party that started a war.
His argument was never subtle and never needed to be. Eleven thousand unarmed men were sleeping in tents in his forest. There were colossi under three ridges and things in the western dark that had never been counted. He could have finished the Gilded Expansion in a day and lost nothing but his standing in a court eight hundred miles away that had never asked what was on the ground.
He obeyed Eryndra anyway, until Thalenor Root.
Thalenor was where the Sylvan went to listen for their dead. He had heard his mother’s voice there once, and had never told anyone. When the drill entered the fourth root he stopped calculating, raised both hands, and told the Sanctuary to kill the machines. Twenty-three people died in under five minutes, and the Gilded couriers rode east before sunset with exactly the report Eryndra had spent two years preventing.
He did not regret fighting. He said so plainly. What he regretted was that they had made fighting cost that much.
Afterwards he went back to the Root and put his hands on the wood and asked for his mother. Nothing answered. He stayed there anyway, long after Sarai found him, in a place that had remembered everything and now remembered losing itself.