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It wasn’t quite as impressive as he remembered. From this high up, he could see most of the forest’s edges in the distance.

But perhaps he was being unfair. After having spent considerable time in the great Imara Forest of Lorent, this place felt downright quaint. Hence why House Carthrace wanted to preserve it, he supposed, rather than letting it dwindle away into nothing. Lorent clearly didn’t have such problems.

The Gate itself was quite easy to find, too. Not only was the Reserve smaller than he expected, but the battle that had taken place here had left a giant hole behind.

Which made him feel a little bit bad. He’d talked with a few different Carthraces now, not the least of which being Amelia, but the subject of their nature reserve and his involvement in its partial destruction had never come up.

He landed with a thick thud, not quite as graceful as he’d intended, feeling bolts of pain shoot up both legs as he barely managed to stay on his feet. Thankfully, he regained his composure quickly enough, which told him that he’d probably avoided injuring himself, at least.

The sundered battleground did seem to be recovering, he noticed. That was good. It looked like all the felled trees had been cleared away, too, leaving room for new sprouts to pop up all over the place. Or had those been planted by hand? Yeah, some of them must have been, if not all. A few were nearly as tall as he was already, and while he was no botanist, he was fairly sure that trees didn’t grow that quickly.

Some pristine red flowers were blooming amid the tall grass, as well, making for quite a painterly view as he laid eyes on and finally approached Rathmore’s Gate.

So this had the power of teleportation. In part, at least. Hector highly doubted that he and Garovel would be able to get it to work here and now. He wasn’t even sure what they would do with it if they could.

But it did make him wonder if it might be capable of anything else. “So Rathmore named all these things after himself,” said Hector, recalling what Garovel told him before, “but they actually existed long before he did, right?”

‘Yep. Kind of a wily prick, that Rathmore.’

“And you knew him personally, you said.”

‘That’s right.’

“Doesn’t seem like you have many fond memories of the guy...”

‘Actually, I do. It’s just that I have some particularly horrible ones, as well. Horrible enough to ruin everything else.’

“Ah...”