Bang—!
A wooden mug and a ceramic bowl knocked together in midair. Cloudy foam spilled over the rim and dripped onto a tabletop long soaked through with grease and leftover liquor.
Broken Antler Tavern.
The sharp bite of alcohol and the sour stench of sweat mingled with restless excitement, fermenting amid the clamor of the crowded hall.
It was a rough, blunt sort of scent—like the faint tang of thawing earth, and like some hidden signal urging all things to breed. The hormones and heat in the air seemed to evaporate twofold.
This primal heat wave unique to early spring heralded the arrival of a special day—the Green Grass Festival.
As spring's most important festival, even in remote, frigid Frost, those nobles who cared about appearances would spare no expense to buy armfuls of flowers shipped from the south or grown in greenhouses, placing them atop the knee-deep snow outside their homes to celebrate the important occasion.
Commoners, of course, had no such spare coin.
They simply followed in the flower merchants' wake, picking up discarded twigs and leaves to hang on their weathered wooden doors.
Whether scattering fresh flowers across the snow or hanging green leaves from the lintel, people did these things for much the same reason: they hoped to gain the gaze and blessings of the gods who governed nature and agriculture, praying that crops planted in spring would escape the bite of late frost and that barren land would bear plump ears of wheat in autumn.
Naturally, most adventurers felt little connection to this festival so full of life and hope.
After all, for people accustomed to wearing their heads on their belts and roaming about making trouble, whether wheat could grow from the soil was hardly their concern.
Demonic Beasts were their crops.
If they