“And now, I will fulfill mine,” I tell him, as I take a diamond out of my gold pouch, and throw it to him.
The orc catches the diamond in his hand, he studies it from a few angles, to make sure that it’s not fake, and then he puts it in the sash that he’s wearing around his waist.
“I must leave you now, human,” the orc says. “Before any other of Tyrath’s troops come to this location, and find out that I am still alive. Perhaps we will meet again.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I’ll make sure to say hi, if we ever visit Fyron’s camp.”
The orc nods, and then he utters a command to his wyvern, which makes it go up, and then as far away from this place as possible.
“Is it over?” Kate asks. “Are they all dead? Or is there some third wave of enemies still waiting to ambush us?”
“Nah,” Arraka says. “There’s no one else. I even checked above, this time around. If they’re going to bring new reinforcements, I doubt that it’s going to be any time soon, after the beating they’ve taken in this fight.”
“We should at least be prepared, in case it happens,” Daren says. “Let’s start with some healing. Come over here, and I’ll tend to each of your wounds, in turn.”
For the next few minutes, Daren spends his time magically healing all of our bruises, including Hadrik’s black eye. When he is just about done, I see a tent getting opened in the distance, as Melindra slowly comes out of it. Just as she exits the tent, I can feel the air currents around me fading away, until they disappear completely.
“Look who finally decided to show up…” Kate says.
“Hey, Melindra!” Flower shouts, as Melindra is already advancing towards us. “Over here! You missed the fight! Also, Daren’s old enchanting master came to visit. He’s standing right here, next to me. His name is Nolderan.”
“Is this another member of your team, or?…” Nolderan asks us.
Melindra overhears Nolderan’s question, while she’s still making our way towards us, and she answers it before any of us get a chance to say anything.
“I am only a travelling maiden, looking to go back home to her sickly father,” Melindra says, in a loud voice, while smiling politely, and walking slowly in our direction. “Sadly, I wasn’t inside the city premises when the tournament protection spell was cast, so I’ve been hiding in a cave all this time, scared for my own life. Luckily for me, however, these brave warriors have offered to escort me to my hometown, and I’ve been travelling with them ever since.”
When she reaches our position, she extends her hand, towards Daren’s old master, inviting him to kiss it.
“Pleased to meet you!” she says, still smiling.
“Likewise, milady,” Nolderan says, as he grabs her hand, kissing it softly, and then releases it. “May I ask which way you are headed?”
“Oh, it’s just a small town,” Melindra says. “You probably haven’t heard of it.”
“We are taking her to a city called Ollendor,” Daren says.
Melindra frowns at him, when she sees how easily he’s given away our destination, but it doesn’t look like Daren noticed.
“Ollendor?” Nolderan says, surprised. “We’ve actually passed that city on our way here! And it just so happens that I have a mage in my team that can cast teleportation magic. If you would come with me to my camp, I’m sure that I could convince him to teleport you to your destination, and you could save a few days from your journey. What do you say, Daren, would you like to meet my teammates?”
“I… suppose so…” Daren says. “But I’m not sure what the others have to say about this. Would everyone else also be okay with asking one of Nolderan’s friends to teleport us to Ollendor?”
“Hey, if it gets us there faster, then why not?” Hadrik says.
“I don’t have a problem with that,” Leila writes.
“I don’t have a problem, either,” Kate says. “I also want to apologize for being so suspicious of you earlier, Nolderan. You helped us a great deal in that fight against the orcs and the mammoth, and you’ve most definitely earned my trust.”
“Think nothing of it,” Nolderan says. “Well, if nobody else has any objections, I would personally suggest that we get ready to leave, soon. I wouldn’t really want to spend too much time in this place, when new monsters could teleport and attack us at a moment’s notice.”
“Alright,” Daren says. “We should go pack our tents, then. We’ll meet back here when we’re all done.”
“Oh, Barry, darling!” Melindra says, with a forced smile. “May I speak to you in private for a moment? There’s something very important that I need to talk to you about!”
“What is it, Melindra?…” I say, as I get closer to her, while all the others are walking out of our hearing range.
“Barry…” Melindra says. “Would you mind explaining to me why everyone here just agreed to walk into a potential ambush without a second thought?”
“What do you mean?” I say. “Are you saying that Nolderan might want to kill us?”
“Yes!” Melindra says. “Isn’t he a tournament participant? Why would he not want to kill you?”
“Well, he’s an old friend of Daren’s, for starters,” I say. “And if he really wanted us dead, I see no reason why he would not have just left us to get killed by the monsters, instead of helping us. We even told him that he should flee, while he had the chance, but he still chose to stay and fight by our side. What would he have had to gain by doing that?”
“I don’t know what his plan is,” Melindra says. “I can’t read minds. All I know is that my instincts are telling me not to trust him. Listen, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t go with him at all. Believe me, there’s nothing that I’d love better than for us to get teleported right at Ollendor’s doorstep, without any effort on our part. But I still think we should be cautious. We shouldn’t just take everything this guy says for granted. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Hmm…” I say. “I suppose we could ask Arraka to regularly check for traps, on our way to Nolderan’s camp, just to be on the safe side.”
“And I’ll make sure to use my magical sense to see if there aren’t any mages, trying to jump us,” Melindra says. “I still don’t get why everyone is so willing to trust this guy that they’ve only just met. They’re all still treating me like I’m some outsider, but then this new mage comes along, and suddenly it’s like he’s already part of the team. What makes him so special?”
“Well,” I say, “maybe if you told the others about the trouble you have with controlling your wind powers, they would trust you more. If people can’t even rely on you to fight together with us, you can’t just expect them to treat you as a member of the team. Seriously, why are you trying so hard to keep this a secret from everyone? What do you think they’ll do when they find out? Do you think they’re going to try to kill you?”
“As a matter of fact, I do!” Melindra says.
“You do?…” I ask her, confused. “But, why?”
“Because it’s already happened once!” Melindra says. “There used to be this small group of people that I travelled with, for a while, a long time ago, and at a certain point they found out about my problem. They wanted to fix this issue by casting a white mage spell on me, which was supposed to help me by limiting the amount of energy I could use to power up each one of my spells. In theory, it could have worked, but I did not want to risk it, because a stillwater’s aura is just too different from that of a normal mage, and you can’t know what will happen. It could potentially be deadly for someone like me. I tried to explain this to them, but they wouldn’t take me seriously. The bastards even tried to cast this spell on me while I was sleeping, without my permission. They may well have killed me, if I hadn’t woken up to stop them!”
“I really don’t think that Daren would try to cast that spell on you while you’re sleeping,” I say. “Especially if you explain to him why you think it might be risky for you…”
“Rea
lly?” Melindra says. “You guys practically forced me to take a deadly enchanter’s oath, just so you’d agree to come along with me, and now you’re expecting me to believe that you would suddenly be willing to prioritize my safety over your own, just because I’m asking you nicely?”
“Well, I’ve known about your problem and the risk it poses to us for quite a while, haven’t I?” I say. “And yet, I never told Daren or anyone else about any of this.”
“I suppose not…” Melindra says, as she takes a small break to contemplate on my words. “But I’d still rather keep the others from knowing, at least until we reach Ollendor. It’s not like I could help much in a battle, even if I wanted to, so I don’t really see any need for them to know. And if this means that they’ll keep hating me, then so be it.”
“As you wish…” I say. “Either way, I think we’re done, here, so I’ll go pack up my tent. See you in a few minutes.”
Once we’re all done with our tents, we grab our backpacks, and we start following Nolderan towards his camp. According to his words, it shouldn’t take us more than thirty minutes to reach it. Luckily, the battle with the mammoth has mostly sobered me up, so if anyone attacks us again on the way there, I won’t have that problem to deal with, anymore.
Before we left, Melindra and I had a private conversation with Arraka, and we asked her to notify us if there were any magical traps on our way to Nolderan’s camp. As we walk through the forest, we come upon a few more mages that are filling their backpacks with pinecones. However, these ones are all looking rather terrified when they see us, as if they were afraid that we’d attack them.
“Why do you suppose those mages were so scared to see us?” Daren says, as we walk past the pinecone collectors.
“Well, we’re a pretty big group, so we must be looking quite intimidating to them,” Hadrik says. “Maybe they think that we’ll try to steal their pinecones.”
“Hey, Barry,” Kate says. “There’s something that I forgot to ask. How did you manage to cast that flight spell on yourself, earlier? Was it with the help of your stat device?”
As Kate finishes her question, I see Melindra right behind her, staring at me with a menacing look in her eyes.
“Uh…” I say. “Yeah, that’s right. It was the stat device.”
“So you’ve finally managed to unlock your magic stats?” Kate says.
“No, it was only temporary, just like the last two times,” I say. “The monster mages probably made a mistake when they cast the ritual, and they leaked a little too much energy my way.”
“Oh, I see…” Kate says, looking somewhat disappointed.
“So, how did you come to know these allies of yours, master Nolderan?” Daren says.
“Oh, they’re mostly people that I’ve met while doing mercenary work,” Nolderan says. “Our group is rather diverse. We even have a banshee in the team. I’m sure that your own banshee will get along with her just fine.”
“Yes, I always get along with other banshees,” Illuna says, in a dry tone, while she looks towards Arraka’s amulet.
“A banshee?” Hadrik asks. “How did you meet that one?”
“It’s a long story,” Nolderan says. “If you want, I’ll tell it to you when we get there.”
“Psst, Barry!” Melindra whispers to me, as she is now trailing about a dozen feet behind our group, along with Flower. “Over here!”
“What is it?” I say, in a low voice, as I join the two of them. “Did Arraka find any traps?”
“No, but we can sense how many mages there are waiting for us inside the camp,” Melindra says. “There are five of them, including the banshee that the old man was talking about earlier.”
“Hmm…” I say. “Five mages doesn’t sound that bad.”
“How powerful are these five mages, exactly?” Illuna asks.
“It’s hard to tell,” Arraka says. “since they all seem to be suppressing their auras, to avoid detection, but most of them appear to be on Nolderan’s level of magic power.”
“It’s hard to tell because you are unable to do it, or because you don’t want to do it?” Illuna asks her.
“You would accuse me of lying to you?” Arraka says, in a mocking tone. “Me? Your oldest friend and beloved mentor? I am shocked. Utterly shocked…”
Illuna frowns at the amulet, but she doesn’t say anything.
“I think she might be telling the truth,” Melindra says. “Their levels of power look the same to me as she’s described them.”
“I still think that she’s hiding something,” Illuna says. “But I suppose that we won’t find out what exactly that is until we reach our destination and see for ourselves. Let’s catch up with the others. We’re starting to look a little suspicious.”
As we get closer to our destination, I notice that there are no sounds whatsoever coming from the camp, even though with the level I have in my hearing stat, I would have expected to hear people talking by now. I can only suspect that they must have cast a silencing spell around their base of operations, similar to the spell that Melindra cast when she came into my tent the other night.
When we finally get close enough to the camp, we see that the whole area around it is surrounded by four large, twenty foot tall walls, made of rock. By the looks of it, the walls were probably created by an earth elementalist.
“There’s the entrance, over there,” Nolderan says, as he points towards a door, which also seems to be made out of stone.
“Quite the impressive camp fortifications you have here, Nolderan,” Hadrik says.
“Yes, we have a very talented earth elementalist in our team,” Nolderan says. “Step right in.”
He then opens the door for us, and we all step inside, one by one. As soon as we enter the camp, we all finally get to see the faces of the five mages from Nolderan’s team. One of them is a dwarf, who is sitting on a stone chair, behind a stone table, some two hundred feet away from us, while drinking a bottle of dwarven ale. The other four are all standing behind him, watching over him, as bodyguards.
As we get a closer look at the dwarf, we recognize him almost immediately. It would be impossible to not know who he is, since his face has been shown in every newspaper, for the past twelve years. The mage that we were looking at right now was none other than Talmak, the Sage of the North.
“Ahahahahahaha!” Arraka starts to laugh loudly, all of a sudden.
“Talmak?…” Daren says, looking very shocked.
“The Sage of the North?” Illuna asks, surprised, looking first at Daren, and then at the dwarf in front of us, with a very unimpressed look on her face. “This is the almighty sage you’ve been talking about?…”
“Ahahahaha!” Arraka keeps laughing in the background.
“You knew about this, didn’t you?” Illuna says, as she grabs Arraka’s amulet by the chain and looks at it directly. “You knew that one of the mages was a sage from the very beginning!”
“Of course I knew!” Arraka says, still barely containing her laughter. “But I wanted to see the looks on your faces when you saw him for yourselves! Ahahahahaha!”
“Master Nolderan…” Daren says, still in a state of shock. “Why didn’t you tell us about the sage being in your team?”
“If I had told you this, would you have followed me here, boy?” Nolderan says.
“You should not blame him for this, healer in armor,” Talmak says in a loud voice, as he puts his bottle of ale on the table in front of him. “Your old master works for me, now. He does what I tell him. But do not worry, I did not call you here to fight. I called you here because I wanted to talk. Now, come closer. All of you. I don’t like it when I need to shout to make myself heard.”
We all exchange a few looks, and then we get ready to traverse the large, empty area between ourselves and the sage’s table, together with Nolderan. Just as we were beginning to walk, Melindra pulls both Flower and me by the arm, in order to stop us. When we look at her, we see that she has an unusually serious expre
ssion on her face.
“After I snap my fingers, I’m going to need you two to pull me out,” Melindra tells us, in a low voice. “Do you understand?”
“Pull you out of what?…” I say.
“You’ll understand when the time comes,” Melindra says, and then I can feel her casting the same air currents on me as she did earlier this morning.
She then walks away, without another word, as she goes to join the rest of the team. Flower and I look at each other for a second, in confusion, and then we decide to head towards the sage as well. The air currents seem to be calming down as I am walking forward. They’re probably waiting for me to give them the signal, whenever I want to start flying.
As I approach the stone table, I get a better look at the sage and his henchmen. Talmak is of around the same height as Hadrik in his dwarf form, and he has a long, brown beard that covers most of his face. He looks like a typical dwarf. There’s nothing special about him, or anything that makes him look particularly intimidating. I can sort of understand why Illuna was so underwhelmed when she first saw him.
The sage is wearing the same type of heavily enchanted leather armor that Nolderan is wearing, and so is the rest of their team, but neither of them seem to be holding any weapons. I’m guessing that Nolderan is the one who enchanted all of their equipment.
Aside from Daren’s old master, Talmak’s team consists of a banshee, an elf, and two dwarves. Funnily enough, both of the dwarves look more intimidating than the sage. One of them has two big scars on his face, and the other one is wearing an eye patch. The elf has long blond hair, and he has a slim, tall figure. He appears to be rather old, even by elven standards. I’m not really sure how slowly elves age, but I think you’d need to be over one hundred years old to have any noticeable wrinkles on your face. And this elf has got plenty of them.
The woman that the banshee possessed is somewhere in her early thirties. Her eyes are constantly shining with a green light, similarly to how Flower’s eyes always shine blue, when Illuna takes over the body. She also has an outwordly aura about her, so it’s clear that she is not an artificial mage.
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