by Greg Curtis
Fylarne looked at the boy, wondering what he meant. The sun was shining as brightly as ever and the day was warm. But then he didn't understand humans – and especially not ones with pet dragons. Perhaps that was a failing of his. One of many.
“Hush, Boy,” Dah replied. “Go and find your friend some food. There would seem to be plenty of mice about.”
And there were a few mice and other small vermin. There were also birds in the trees and the little dragon seemed to be partial to them. So he wasn't surprised when he saw the winged black lizard suddenly take off and head for them, while its master followed. Trey was still grumbling of course. The boy did a lot of that. But at least without him things were quiet for a time.
“So. Not what you'd hoped?” Allide asked after a bit.
“No.” Fylarne agreed sadly. “But what I should have expected.”
“Not by Taran!” Gris retorted. “What you should have expected – what we all should have expected – was that the winged rats would be decent creatures! Not mangy jackals!” Gris was a wood elf, a master of woodland life and of the hunt, but not a master of tact. And of course he always carried his longbow on his back and was ready to use it.
But he was right, Fylarne knew. They all knew that. The man was on the small side, his skin surprisingly dark which allowed him to vanish into shadows in a way no one would expect, and he always spoke too loudly as if to make up for his small stature and the way he faded away, but he was right. The sprites were monsters. Unfortunately that didn't change anything. And sticking a bunch of arrows into the sprites as he no doubt wanted to, wouldn't help either.
“So what will you do now?” Allide asked.
“Wait, I suppose.” Fylarne shrugged. “What else is there to do?” And really it had already been a long time. Too long. So what was a little more time. Another month or two. A year. Maybe a lifetime.
“You may be waiting a long time. Gris has the right of it. Even if the people the sprites have held are now free, they cannot get home. They have no gift for the most part from what we now know. And without one, they cannot use the portals. They are still trapped.”
And that had come as a surprise to him. Everywhere they went, when they heard about sprites having been seen, they had also heard that the sprites were nearly helpless. That they seemed to have no magic to their name. By all the gods that confused him. The only sprites he knew were the ones that had come to the Temple. But they had all been powerful casters. And their people were known across all the worlds for their magic. So what had changed that they now wandered the worlds as helpless little creatures? Lost and frightened? He didn't understand that at all.
“And the portals aren't working perfectly either,” Dah added, though she didn't need to.
That was the one thing they were all painfully aware of. The portals were in tatters. Half their destinations no longer existed. It was ironic, in a way. The portals actually still worked perfectly. But the places they led to had gone. Which meant in a strange way that the recent sending they'd received from the human, Chy, were pointless. Even if masters of dimension turned up and started building this great web of portals he'd talked about, it wouldn't last. As more and more bits of the worlds moved around, they too would become useless. Portals leading to nowhere.
“There is still little else to do.” He shrugged again. “Nowhere else to go.”
“There is this Stonely,” Gris replied loudly. “At least it is a place where there is some attempt to fight what is happening. To survive it. Rather than simply waiting to die like the prey.”
Maybe it had a good thing when they had come across the wood elf, Fylarne thought. For all that Gris was loud and annoying and short on tact, he was a fighter. He had a clear view on what had to be done. He knew where to place his arrow. And what had to be done was to survive. Were all the people of Valsenara the same? All the Nari? He didn't know. Not many of the Nari had come to the Temple over the years and he hadn't spoken to many of them. They were too concerned with the endless hunt. And the magic they valued was only that associated with it. Magic that they learned by themselves.
“You would give up on your dream of returning to Mora mori?”
“No! Never! But every hunter knows as the Huntsman teaches, sometimes the path is difficult. Sometimes the hunter must step off the trail as he follows the prey.”
“Step off the trail?” Dah looked quizzically at him.
“The woods themselves are being twisted around. The trails vanish underfoot. But the hunt does not end. We must simply find a new trail. And these humans of Stonely, are attempting to do just that. So they will find me a new trail and I will follow it.” He paused for a moment to take a breath. “But as Taran himself would tell you, I wonder about these humans. They seem so … childish!”
“Trey is a child,” Fylarne pointed out, realising who he meant. And his guess was that Trey was but sixteen at best. Not even fully grown. Too young to really be called a man. Though he often acted as if he was far younger. A petulant child.
And the lad made decisions that Fylarne didn't understand. They had made it to Althern. Twice. Once to a realm called Farcross. And once to an island known as Port Varian. Both were admittedly a long way from his own realm. Farcross was a good thousand leagues from Carnas and Port Varian slightly closer but the journey entailed an ocean voyage. However he could have gone home from either of them. It would have just taken some time and some coin. But he'd refused. It seemed that he wasn't going to be satisfied until he arrived right on his doorstep.
The problem for the others was trickier. They hadn't made it to Si at all, so the sylph hadn't had any chance to return to her home. And they had once arrived in Gornal, but there were no maps available. The dryad world had no roads, no countries or realms and not even a compass. Allide had no way of returning to Pushana unless they arrived somewhere close enough to his home town that the locals actually knew where it was.
And yet they had had some success. Harvia, a frost giant had travelled with them for some time before he had finally found a portal that had brought him close enough to his home that he could walk the rest of the way. And he had now found Hellas even if it was still empty. So maybe there was hope for the others.
“You know that if your family are still in N'Diel as they surely are, that the only way you will find them is to go there?” Gris returned to his point.
“I know,” Fylarne agreed, while not taking his eyes off his family home. Off the building where he had grown up with his brother and sister. Where his mother had worked tailoring and repairing clothes for the townsfolk. The garden where he had first met his wife, Tia. And the house across the road where they had raised their daughter. Tia's family home.
It was a fine home. A large one, more than capable of holding many generations of his family in comfort. And a place he should never have left. But logic reminded him that if he hadn't left, if he hadn't become a guardian all those years ago, he too would have been abducted by the sprites and then no one would have been left to fight them. Then again if he hadn't been a guardian they wouldn't have started mutilating his family. But he also wouldn't have helped them destroy the worlds.
Fylarne shook his head in sorrow. No matter how he looked at it he had brought trouble to everyone. He had brought ruin.
Hellas was such a pretty place. Too pretty to have suffered this fate. This was more than a town to him. More even than a home. It was his world. Maybe it was a world he had had no right to be a part of as a guardian. He should have renounced his ties to his family when he had become a guardian. But things hadn't worked out that way. And now they were all gone. The Temple was gone too. And all he had left was a faint hope that some day someone would return.
He couldn't go to N'Diel either. Because even if he did how did you search an entire world for a few people? A world you knew nothing about? A world full of enemies? It was simply impossible. The only thing that was possible was waiting here, hoping that somehow, by the grace of the gods, the
y too would be able to make their way back here.
Of course if and when that happened, his pain would only grow worse. He would have to tell them what he'd done. He could not stand that. And if he ever ran across Elodie again, surely his heart would explode in his chest of shame. But maybe the world would end before that happened. That might be for the best.
“If you go to Stonely, there you may find some hope of finding them. You may return to the trail.”
The wood elf was right of course. Fylarne knew that. But he also knew that Elodie was there, somewhere. And he did not know if he could face her. Or for that matter the rest of the world when they learned that he was responsible, at least in part, for whatever had happened to the worlds. Whatever disaster the sprites had unleashed upon them all, they had done it because of his deception.
But maybe it was what he had to do. First though, he realised, he had something else he had to do. He could feel the small, linen wrapped bundle in his pocket, pressing against his side. As it had for all the days since he had been given it. It was time to finally say farewell to it. And to his daughter's fingers.
“There is something I must do,” he told the others, before he got up and headed to the house to carry out the burial.
Did they know what he was doing, he wondered? Did they guess what he had done? Fylarne wasn't sure. He hadn't told them. But they weren't stupid. And Allide surely knew at least some of the pain in his heart. The weight he carried. The man after all, was a dryad. Sensitive to such things.
But as he walked he suddenly found that he didn't care. The pain was too raw. It overwhelmed him – again. This was his daughter. Sylie. His most precious little creation. He loved her in a way he couldn't even put into words. He had held her on the day she had been born and known such wonder and joy that it was beyond understanding. And they had mutilated her! She was just a little girl and they had hurt her in a way that was truly monstrous. They had done something so terrible to a little girl that it could not even be understood.
He hated the sprites and he wept for her. And it only grew more painful as he found an old spade and began work in the yard. Digging a hole immediately beside the one he had dug for his mother's hand years before. He didn't care that tears rolled down his cheeks as he worked. He didn't care that the others watched him. That perhaps they even understood what he was doing. He just continued with his digging. And then as he placed the remains in the ground and spoke the prayers, he wept some more.
Maybe in the end he would do as they suggested. Maybe it was the best thing to do. But not now.
Chapter Twenty Four
A dragon! Who would have imagined?! Certainly not Chy. Which was why he couldn't stop staring at the creature.
When the rider had come racing in to his place well before the sun had risen with this crazy story, he'd been tempted to tell him he was crazy. Someone was telling tales out of turn. But still he'd come – it was expected apparently – and now here he was, face to face with a dragon.
It looked exactly like all the stories. Reptilian, covered in scales – dirty black scales – with wings attached and breathing fire. There was only one difference between it and the drunken stories passed around the alehouses – this one was four feet long. Maybe six when he included the whip like tale. But it still blew out little rivers of fire at him when it thought he was intruding on its territory. Small rivers thankfully, but they still singed him every time he got too close.
“So do something, wizard!” a guard grunted at him. He sounded upset. But that probably had something to do with the fact that his uniform was covered in scorch marks, and some of his hair was missing too.
“I am,” Chy replied. “I'm thinking.” But what he was thinking mostly came down to a single question – where was mummy?! Because he didn't want to meet her. Ever.
“Less thinking, more doing!” the man replied unhappily.
“So you're sure you haven't seen a much bigger one of these roaming the countryside, burning things down and eating people?” He asked once more.
“No! I told you, no!”
“Well, you soon may.” Truthfully he didn't know a lot about dragons. They came from the worlds of the giants. And most of what they'd told him about them amounted to a simple instruction – stay well clear. But he knew that dragons laid clutches of eggs, and then when they hatched, the mother stayed with them for a time. But there was one other thing he knew – they never just laid one egg. So the chances were, given that this baby dragon looked so little, that there were more around. Maybe it had wandered away from the nest and been grabbed by whatever was happening to the worlds, but he wouldn't bet on it.
“So where was the first place this beast was seen?” Chy thought he'd better find out before all the dragon's little demons broke loose of wherever their hatchery was and invaded the town.
But before he could get an answer the air was split by the sound of thunder right by his ear, and the baby dragon vanished in a cloud of smoke. The other guard had tried shooting it – again. But of course he'd missed. The baby dragon was fast and it had wings. It was also learning that the long pointy sticks made loud noises and it didn't like them.
“Please don't do that any more.” He turned to the guard when his hearing had recovered. But he couldn't help but notice that the man was reloading his rifle.
“It was standing still,” the guard replied as he worked.
“And now it's not,” Chy pointed out as calmly as he could manage. But really he wanted to hit the man. “You missed and now we're going to have to track it down again.” And that wasn't going to be easy. You wouldn't think of dragons as being good at hiding, but it turned out that this little one was. It was fast and sleek and agile, and worse still, black. If there was a shadow out there or a nice dark crevice it would seek it out.
“Can't you just cast a spell?”
“Did I do that the first time?” Chy pointed out as he rubbed at his face. “Those are just the tales of the bards.” He was tired of telling people that he wasn't a witch or a wizard, and that he didn't cast spells or wave a wand. But there was no point in getting upset about it anymore. He had been through it too many times.
“So where was it first spotted?” He returned to his original question.
“Mag's house.”
“Then lets go there.”
Soon, after another round of pointless questions and people telling him what he should be doing, they were off, heading for Mag's place. Whoever Mag was. And it was a bit of a walk as Mag it turned out, didn't live in the town of Broken Gully. She had a property among the farms surrounding it. But then since she apparently made her living repairing leather goods, that was understandable he supposed. There were a lot of saddles and sets of reins out there that no doubt wore out.
Before they reached it though he could feel the touch of magic on his senses. Strange magic. Maybe dragon magic – he wasn't sure. But he felt uneasy – almost as though something slimy was on his skin. Touching him.
Chy stopped when the feeling became too strong, and held up his hand to stop the others. He didn't tell them why, but when they saw the look on his face, they decided not to ask.
“Who's there?” He called out, knowing that the magic he felt had a will behind it. He could feel it. But it didn't feel like what he felt whenever he was with another caster. That magic was somehow clean and fresh. This was something else. Something not quite of disease or death, but something akin to them. Chaos?
“You see me, Boy?” A voice called back. But no one appeared.
“I feel you,” he replied doing his best not to show any fear. “Do you hide for a reason?”
“Perhaps because you bring soldiers with smoke sticks,” he or she replied.
It was probably a woman's voice he thought. It was just that it was too deep and gravelly to be certain. But the accent bothered him more. He'd never heard one like it, which surely meant that the speaker wasn't a local.
“You three, head back fifty or sixty paces,”
Chy immediately instructed the guards, and then watched them leave. After that he turned back to where the voice had come from. “And no shooting!” he added.
“That better?” he turned to where the voice had come from.
“I suppose,” the voice answered him. And then the speaker appeared in front of him.
Chy had to hold back a gasp when he laid eyes on her. The guards, weren't so restrained and he could hear their shocked gasps even as far back as they were. But at least he knew what she was. He'd seen a couple of her people in the old days when he'd walked the road to the temple. She – and she was a she if her ponderous breasts were anything to go by – was an ogre.
Big, green, with hands that could surely crush rock and massive teeth – though thankfully not fangs – he knew she could be nothing else. But she was a very long way from home. And no doubt anyone who saw her would run screaming. Giants would frighten people but she would terrify them. She looked like every monster in every story the bards told. And her clothes didn't help. Strips of leather and what looked like mouldy green cloth somehow woven together into an outfit that looked like it had never seen either soap or water. Worse though, it barely covered her vast, round body. But what would really scare them was the staff in her hands. Though really it looked more like a small tree with a gnarled end. He had no doubt that if she swung it as she surely could, it would shatter a skull. Possibly his skull.