Lunari’s face twisted ever so slightly and she hesitated to answer.  But Sirana spoke,<strong> “Diggers are a particularly wicked tribe of kobolds.  They aren’t content to simply live in caves, but they are constantly excavating and they’ve been known to launch ambush attacks by spewing from the very ground covered in dirt and screeching like injured dogs.”</strong><br/><br/>Lunari spit on the ground, and her eyes darted downwards.  Mara asked,<strong>“Kobolds, they aren’t really a problem are they?  Cowardly and weak, they can’t cause a real problem for anyone can they?”</strong><br/><br/>Lunari shook her head,<strong>“We thought so at first as well.  But they are especially vicious and somewhat uncharacteristically brave as well.  I participated in a raid they sprung on us where they fought to the death, every last one of them.”</strong><br/><br/>Mara’s hand flexed on her bow handle,<strong>“That is unusual.  But this culling?”</strong><br/><br/>Lunari’s lips went tight,<strong>“I wouldn’t normally talk about it with a human, but you’re my friend Mara and I suppose you should know.  You heard that we’ve lost contact with the druids from the northern continent.  My people came to these southern lands several hundred years ago with human allies.  It caused a rift in our peoples at the time.  Most thought it was foolish to trust the humans and work along side them.  They told us not to return and turned their backs on us.  At some point shortly after we settled on these shores, we found that there were already people living here, humans and elves, as well as other races.  The local humans were xenophobic however and did not trust us ‘pointy ears’.  It led to another rift in our people.  Now between the elves, the humans who allied with them, and the humans who wished to ally with the natives.  Then after our third year on these shores, every elf became sick, very sick.  Many of our people wasted away and did not recover.  But those that did found the cure lay in human herbalism and alchemy.  But the sickness had a side effect….”</strong><br/><br/>Her face turned a deep purple, one that Nirael had come to recognize as shame or embarassment.  Only at his prodding did she continue.<strong> “My people were a free spriited and lusty people to begin with, but fertile only two weeks out of  a year instead of a dozen like humans.  But the cure for the wasting disease that we began to call the culling made us more fertile, our men were able to plant their seed in our women four, five, and even rarely six times a year.  This caused my ancestors to take a serious look at the situation.  On one hand, we were replenishing our fallen quickly, but they didn’t know how it would affect our society.  More than that, our people had an increase in their sex drive that matched the fertility.  While our people were always very free sexually, our culture became for a while dominated by our carnal lusts.”</strong><br/><br/>She sighed and shifted her inky black loin cloth, a subtle suggestion that maybe such things hadn’t faded over the last few hundred years,<strong>“But it was only after a year or two that we realized the third and most unusual aspect of the cure.  Only one in five births was male.  It completely changed our society.  Over the next few decades our rule switched from an elected protector to a ruling matriarch, voted by the elders of the clan.  Marriage became a thing of the past as women learned they needed to share men or give up hopes of having a child.”<br/><br/>But through it all, one question remained unanswered, why had this happened?  Was it the native humans?  Had our ancestor’s elven kin done it somehow?  Had our human allies betrayed us?  Was it something natural?  It was even suggested that it may have been an elf who started the disease or the twisted cure.  We don’t know, but the conflict caused the final schism between my ancestors and the human allies they’d had.  The humans split off and joined the natives.  That was over five hundred years ago, and since then the relations between our people has never improved.”</strong><br/><br/>The group walked on in silence before Sirana added,<strong>“Oh, and Raihna Nameer is their current matriarch, you’ll have to get her approval of course or you’ll be cast out of the villiage and I’ll probably have to take you south to the human lands.  At least to the southern border of my territory.”</strong><br/><br/>Lunari stopped and dropped to one knee, inspecting what appeared to be a simple cluster of rocks, then looking up said,<strong>“This is the furthest edge of our patrols.  We will run into my people within the hour if we continue on, and will make the village after night fall.  But I have to ask you Nirael, do you wish to press on, or set camp for the night?  I haven’t been home in a year and I don’t know that we will have a chance to be together once I return.”</strong><br/>