"The Spirit of the Forest blesses her children. Praise nature! Through the cycle of death and rebirth, our woodlands will flourish forever!"
As the mountain folk elder in a stag-skull mask cried out the final verse in the ancient cadence, the clanspeople gathered around the sacred pool in the Ancestral Woodland erupted in a resounding cheer.
Crowding around their current lord, little Sharon, and the Governor of Transia, who had gone out of his way to wear traditional mountain folk attire, they watched as the handsome, valiant, and widely respected vampire governor personally dipped two babies into the faintly shimmering sacred pool.
When Murphy lifted the two wailing mountain folk infants in the classic "Hakuna Matata" pose, the ceremony reached its climax.
The clan most renowned for song and dance began dancing beside the sacred pool. Sir Valand, the children's father, was grinning so broadly he looked like a grinning idiot. His wife, unable to bear the sight, punched him in the back, and he quickly sobered up again.
While the adults valued the many reflections and meanings expressed through the ceremony, the children's desires were much more straightforward.
The mountain folk children at the ceremony, holding fresh beech branches as decorations, stayed by their parents' sides but kept glancing back. In the woodland behind them, the barbecue stalls had already been set up, and the chefs from Scarlet Castle were busily preparing the feast that would follow the ceremony.
The scent of spices and roasting meat, along with the delicious pastries being prepared, made the children swallow hard as they eagerly awaited the feast after the ceremony.
Though they were still the most insular people in all of Transia, as Scarlet Castle's low-ranking civil servants gradually established their authority among the mountain folk clans, every order from the Scarlet