Excerpt: Crystal Clarity

With a smooth smile Eton replied, "Good morning to you too Lidia, I'm fine for now, how was your weekend? You said you had plans to go hunting with your Aunt Trudy, right?"
Lidia grimaced with a sour look on her face, "Exactly right, and it was horrible! She always has to show off her aim and this time she wanted to go armored boar hunting, do you have any idea how dangerous those are?", the look on her face implied she didn't want an answer, "She got a flitter to take us down to the edge of the Vertigas and somehow managed to track one down, she made me take the first shot and you know how I am with guns!"
With an attentive expression Eton continued to listen to her story, his mind automatically filtering it for talking points and storing them for later as he thought about the elven woman he'd seen less than an hour ago. She'd looked so peaceful, almost at rest. An elven princess from myth sprawled in a field of grass a dozen paces from the walking path. The nearby tree twisted its way up into the sky with bright green leaves spread toward the early morning sky, dew sparkling off them. The chill of the night before had just begun to fade and there she lay, looking asleep with one arm tossed across her brow and her mouth still slightly pursed. The illusion was shattered only by the setting rigor mortis. The Guardian keeping watch for him said that she'd been found in exactly that position, no sign of a cause of death. Struck down at barely fifty she was practically a child.
"So she shot it right between the eyes and it slid to a stop barely fifty yards from us, nearly gave my mom a heart attack." Lidia finished in a rush.
Sorting the story in his mind Eton replied without a break, "I can't believe you actually got three shots off, the first time I fired one of those things I scared myself silly! How much did it weigh in at, and how in the world did you manage to get it back here?" and then he returned to the body, the fifth nat dead in as many weeks for no apparent reason. He needed to get to his office and put together a report, the Auditor would need to know that it was hitting Elves too, not just Dwarves and Ogres as they'd seen before. Drifting back to the conversation he chuckled and said, "Not a chance that I'd put something like that up in my house, it'd scare the guests. Now that I think about it though, I could use some tea, would you mind grabbing me some? I've got to get started on some reports in my office or they'll never get done."