The shadows between the thin birch trees seemed to stretch, twisting like grasping fingers under the cold brilliance of the moon. Reis held his breath, his boots anchored into the loam. Beside him, he could hear the rapid, shallow breaths of the half-elf girl. The orb of her wooden staff flickered with a faint, nervous violet light, casting long, erratic shadows across the clearing.
Every sound around them seems to deaden, but the silence grew deafening.
Snap.
The sound was directly ahead now, no more than twenty paces out. Reis focused to the origin of the sound, and steeled his nerves, and the Light started to glow within him.
A dark silhouette broke through the dense brush, moving at a frantic, uneven speed. Sierra heard it too, and let out a low whimper.
Reis did not hesitate.
Step, plant, pivot - the heavy steel of his broadsword cut a sweeping arc through the midnight air, the blade hissing as it prepared to meet flesh or shield. At the same breath, Reis willed the latent spark of the Light within him to ignite, intending to blind his assailant with a sudden burst of kinetic brilliance.
“By the Great Cog, wait! Lower the steel, you giant overbearing lout!” a high-pitched, thoroughly exasperated voice shrieked from the dark.
Reis shifted his stride to arrest the momentum and froze his strike a mere inch from a massive, canvas-wrapped pack. The ambient glow of his blade illuminated a remarkably short, stout figure panting heavily, clutching a gnarled walking stick in one hand and a crumpled leather journal in the other.
“Dash!” Shierra gasped with delight. The defensive violet aura of her staff instantly evaporating into tendrils of harmless smoke. She rushed past Reis, her elven agility carrying her across the dirt to kneel beside the gnome.
Dashiel collapsed onto a rotting log, his stubby legs shaking from what had clearly been a miles-long jog up the Traveller’s Road. His face was smudged with soot from the ruins of Fieri, and his coat smelled faintly of burnt parchment and dried dewberries.
“I am..entirely too old..for academic field research,” Dashiel wheezed, tapping his chest with his graphite stick to catch his breath. He glared up at Reis, who was slowly lowering his broadsword, though his posture remained defensively rigid.
“Do you always greet fellow travelers by attempting to decapitate them, Knight of the White City? Frederick told me you were cooperative, not a meat-grinder on horseback!”
“You were tracking us,” Reis stated, his deep voice cutting through the chilly night air. He slid his broadsword back into its scabbard with a heavy metallic click, though his hand remained rested on the dark steel pommel.
“A dangerous game on a road plagued by mercenaries.” he added.
“I was tracking her,” Dashiel corrected, gesturing his graphite stick toward Shierra, who was fussing over the loose straps of the gnome's massive pack. He unrolled a crumpled piece of parchment from his coat pocket. It was the index notes of his dreams.
“And by extension, the fates have seen fit to tangle my thread with yours, Reis. I know what happened at the stables. I know what you carry in your larder bag.”
Reis’s jaw tightened. His fingers instinctively drifted toward his hip, where Rianna’s silk scarf was tucked safely inside a leather pouch on his sword belt, guarding the shimmering Maiden’s Kiss. The ambient warmth he had channeled to heal Shierra earlier flared slightly in his chest, a low, protective rumble of faith.
“If you know of the brutes in dragonhide, then you know we cannot tarry,” Reis said darkly, looking back toward the road.
“They slaughtered Fieri for a ghost. If they realize she escaped the hatch, they will hunt the road to Nadaran next.”
“Oh, they are already hunting,” a cold, detached voice drifted down from the canopy above them.
Reis whirled around, his hand flying back to his hilt. The Light flared anew inside.
High up on a thick oak branch, bathed in the silver moonlight, sat Morohtar. The dark elf’s silver hair fell loose around his shoulders, his purplish skin rendering him nearly invisible against the night sky. Resting across his knees was the Crimson Sabre, its blood-red grip pulsing with a macabre, hungry aura that made the air feel suddenly thin, starved of mana.
The rogue looked down at the three of them with a faint, humorless smile.
“And they brought friends.”
