Legends of the Dragonrealm Volume 2

CHILDREN OF THE DRAKE
I

What do you think?” Rayke asked, prodding at the feathered corpse at their feet. The body, nearly petrified, was that of one of the Sheekas, the lords of the land. It was manlike in form, had walked upright and had the usual limbs. It was winged as well and covered from head to clawed foot with feathers. The face was very avian, even down to the eye structure that forced a Sheeka to cock the head to the side so as to focus on a target, and the beak was designed for rending the toughest of flesh. Besides these natural weapons, the Sheekas had cunning minds, too, a formidable combination that had allowed them to rule for several thousand years.

Rayke seemed disappointed, as if someone had deprived him of some dark pleasure.

Seen together, the two elves who stood over the sprawled form might have appeared to be brothers. They were of a similar height and both were clad in the same forest-green outfit that consisted of a shirt, pants, shin-length boots, and hooded cloak. Both had light-brown hair that only barely covered their curved ears, and eyes that were the color of spring.

Physical appearance was where the similarity ended. Faunon, younger than Rayke by a hundred years though each looked as if he had seen no more than thirty summers, often thought that his companion was, by far, more blood-thirsty than even the old ones who clung so tightly to the ways of pomp and circumstance that they were always challenging one another to duels. It was fortunate, then, that he and not Rayke had been put in charge of this expedition into the lands of the avians… or what had once been their lands. So far, they had only found those hapless victims like this one, Sheekas who had fallen prey to some spell they had unleashed in an attempt to rid themselves of their rivals, the more ancient, armadillolike Quel.

Unfortunately, it seemed that the spell had proven more detrimental to the spellcasters than to the intended targets. The Quel lived in the southwestern portion of the continent, so there was no telling for the time being what damage they had actually suffered. A party of elves was headed that way and, if they returned, their information would be pooled with that of this band.

“I think,” Faunon finally replied, recalling Rayke’s question at last. “I think that they must have made a terrible mess of trying to reverse their spell, whatever it was. This can’t be the result they wanted,” he concluded, stating the obvious because one had to do that sometimes with Rayke.

Faunon turned around and gazed at the massive peaks to the north. Somewhere in there was an aerie, that much they knew. It was still occupied… the elves had seen one or two Sheekas fluttering among the mountains… but by only a token flock, not the massive horde that had lived there only a decade before. The inhabitants there had suffered not one calamity but two in the past ten or so years. There was evidence of a third group that had come and gone like the wind… yet who had seemed to clean up after themselves so as to leave little trace for the elves. All that he had discovered was that this other race had fought the Sheekas, held their own against the large flock here, and then abandoned the place for somewhere else.

But where?

“Let’s go back to the others,” Rayke muttered. He looped his bow around his head and his left arm. The question of the third group meant nothing to him. The council had ordered them to discover the extent of the damage to the empire of the Sheekas, not an easy task since the birds did not have an empire as elves understood it but rather vast communities that controlled great regions of the continent. As far as Rayke and most of the others were concerned, their duties ended there.

That was one problem with his people, Faunon thought as he stepped back from the rock-hard corpse. They either had no inclination toward curiosity whatsoever or they were obsessed with finding out about everything under the sun. No moderation save in a few individuals such as himself.

“Just a minute more, Rayke,” he returned, putting just enough emphasis in his voice to remind the other elf who was in charge here.

His companion said nothing, but the flat line of his mouth spoke volumes enough. Rayke had angular features that reminded Faunon of a starving man, and the look on his face only added to that effect. Angular features were not uncommon among the elves, but Rayke’s were more severe than most. Faunon’s own visage was a bit rounder, more pleasant, so some of the females of his tribe were apt to tell him time and time again until their lilting voices got too much on his nerves and he had to excuse himself from their company somehow. There was another problem with his people: when they saw something they wanted-or someone-they became very, very persistent. He sometimes wondered if he was really one of them.

“Well?”

Faunon started, realizing he had lost track of things. Doing so in front of Rayke made it doubly annoying. He pretended instead that his daydreaming was actually a collecting of his thoughts. “Notice anything wrong with this?”

“With what?”

“The bodies and the land.”

“Only that there are a lot of the former scattered around the latter.” Rayke smiled, pleased with his clever response.

Faunon kept his own face neutral, trying to hold back his anger. “And the land seems relatively untouched, doesn’t it?”

The two of them scanned the area, though each had done so several times already. There were inclines where it was obvious that there had been none before, for trees and bushes jutted at angles no self-respecting plant would have chosen, almost as if something had dug up the ground and then only halfheartedly tried to repair the devastation. A few trees appeared to have withered and petrified much the way the avian dead had, but most of the wooded region seemed fairly healthy overall. Still, Faunon found it astonishing that he was the only one who had paid any note to the peculiarity of the landscape.

The other elf lost hold of his smile. “It does. We’ve come across some areas where the land was overturned, but, even there, the plants and smaller animals were thriving.”

“As if they had been bypassed, protected… or perhaps healed,” he added, suddenly feeling that the last was closer to the truth.

“Protected by what? Certainly not the Sheekas. They would have protected themselves first, I think.”

“Perhaps by whoever fought the bird people and then vanished,” Faunon suggested. Likely, they would never know. This land, which his own people could not claim as their birthplace, having fled to here, as legend put it, from the horrors of another world countless millennia ago, had an air of mystery about it that defied the efforts of the elves. Faunon himself knew that the Sheekas and the Quel had not been the first masters here; that, in fact, several other races had preceded them. This was an old world despite its vitality.

Rayke sighed. “Are you going to begin that again, Faunon?”

“If need be! It isn’t enough to know that the Sheekas have suffered a calamity that may speak the end of their reign; we have to know if their disaster has the potential to reoccur! If we-”

Something huge went crashing through the trees, sounding as if it had fallen from the sky at a remarkable speed. Faunon, whirling, caught sight of a huge black shape moving in and out of the trees that finally registered in his mind as a horse… but what a horse! A stallion, to be sure. He stood taller than any that the elf had ever seen and ran with a swiftness that the wind would have been unable to match. If the steed was responsible for the din they had heard, he had changed his ways in swift fashion, for now the animal ran as silent as the shadows he so resembled.

“What is that?” Rayke whispered. He had turned pale. Faunon knew that his own visage matched in shading.

“Let’s follow it!”

“Follow it? Do you see how fast it runs? We will never catch it!” The other elf sounded almost relieved at the last.

“I don’t intend to catch it! I just want to see what it is! Follow me!” Faunon raced after the black beast, darting around and over obstacles as only one of his kind could. He did not hear Rayke, but he knew his companion had too much pride to stay behind. Not that it would have mattered to Faunon if he had. Catching a glimpse of this swift phantom was paramount in his mind, and he knew that it would require his best efforts to do that. Against many another creature, an elf’s speed would have proven a match; not so, this animal. He had known that from the start. What he also knew, however, was that the mighty steed raced toward an open field. There, his quarry would be quite visible, though distant. Faunon was not too concerned with the distance. Elves had excellent vision. Besides, like Rayke, he did not want to get too close to anything as massive and powerful as the black horse. He only wanted to ascertain its existence and the path it was taking. By no means had he ever thought of trying to do anything more.

The horse, however, had apparently had other ideas.

He almost ran into it and wondered how he could have ever missed seeing so terrifying a figure. It loomed over him, having somehow managed to turn back and come upon them without making a sound. Faunon did a very unelf-like thing and slipped, collapsing to the earth less than an arm’s length from the demonic stallion.

“I have come back, but this is not the place!” the fearsome figure bellowed down at him. It had long, narrow eyes of the coldest blue, eyes without pupils.

Faunon wished he had an answer that would please the ebony monster, but only air escaped his mouth. He could not even utter so much as a single sound.

“This is the place but it is not the place!” One hoof gouged a track in the ground. The elf was all too aware of what that hoof could do to his head if the steed decided to remove him.

The unnerving animal stared at him for a short time. Faunon held his breath throughout the study, wondering what the beast found so interesting. Then he felt the probe. It was surprisingly tentative for so powerful a creature, almost as if the ebony stallion were shamed by his own actions.

Mere moments later, the head of the beast snapped back. He scanned his surroundings in renewed fascination. “So that is it! Astonishing! So many things to learn!”

With an abruptness that left the elf’s mouth hanging, the darksome steed backed up, turned, and raced back in the direction it had been heading earlier. Faunon’s acute senses noted that there was no trail of any sort on the physical plane, though he did smell power of an unidentifiable sort. It was as if a ghost had come and gone, though that made no sense considering that he and Rayke had, in their initial encounter with the demon, heard the animal before they saw him.

“Are you all right?” Rayke asked from somewhere behind him.

“I’m… fine.” He was actually surprised that he was. The shadowy steed had owned his life for the duration of their brief meeting. Faunon could think of a dozen different ways he could have been killed. He had been thinking of them throughout his trial despite his best efforts not to. Had the demonic stallion noted those fears at all during his probe?

The other elf’s hands were around his torso as Rayke helped him to his feet. A quiver still ran through the former’s voice. “What is that thing? No horse! Not even one of ours! Was it a shapeshifter?”

“Yes, no, and maybe. I was too at a loss to think much about it while he was here. I doubt that was one of us, though. The sorcery needed for that sort of change would kill most of us! No, there was something wrong with that horror, as if he came from some place other than this world. Somewhere very different.”

The two stood staring at the spot the ghostly horse had abandoned. Finally, Rayke asked, “What did he want, Faunon? The way he spoke, he was looking for something. Do you know what?”

Rayke knew of the probe, perhaps had even been probed himself. Faunon shook his head. “I don’t know, but he found something in my mind that satisfied him… he was gentle about it, Rayke! He could have plundered my mind; I could feel he had the will to do so, but he didn’t!”

That part seemed not to concern his partner. Rayke continued to stare after their departed intruder. “Where do you suppose he went?”

“East. Straight east.”

Rayke grimaced. “There’s nothing that way.”

“Maybe he plans to go on straight to the sea… or beyond it.”

“Maybe.” The other elf’s eyes widened. “Do you suppose he had something to do with the death of these Sheekas?”

It was a thought that had not occurred to Faunon, and he had to credit Rayke for the concept. “I don’t know. We may never know.”

“I’d be happy with that. Let’s get back to the others, Faunon. Let’s get away from here before it decides to come back!”

There was no argument over that. They had discovered all that there was to discover-unless something else ran past them-and it would be dark before long. Faunon generally had no fear of the dark, but, after this encounter, he had a growing desire to be back among his fellows where there was the comfort of numbers.

As they hurried through the woods, moving nearly as silently as the shadow steed had, a nagging feeling grew in Faunon’s head. He was not one for signs and omens, being one of the newer generation of more practical elves, but he could not shake the sensation that the creature he had faced was yet one more hint of something vast to come, a change in the land as he and his people knew it. If the Sheekas were truly nearing the end of their reign, as the Quel had before them, then someone would come to displace them. The land had seen such change time and again, though the elves had never been part of that cycle, merely onlookers.

Ducking under a low branch, Faunon grew more troubled as his thoughts progressed. The Sheekas and even the Quel had been predictable creatures; the elves knew where they stood with those two races. Who was to say that the same would hold with their successors? Who would their successors be? There were no other races that could claim dominance.

There was little to justify his fears, but he believed in them nonetheless. As they neared the spot where the others were to meet them, Faunon discovered that he was, for the first time, hoping for the continued survival of the arrogant avians. The elves knew how to coexist with them, if no more than that. The next masters might feel that there was no need for his race to continue on.

They had escaped such a fate once before, when, legend had it, they had discovered the path that freed them of the horrors of the twisted world of Nimth and its lords, the sorcerous race called the Vraad. At least that was one threat that the elves no longer had to fear, Faunon decided, drawing what little comfort he could from that.

Nothing the future held could ever match the cruelty of the Vraad.