Undead

It started with the wind. It came in and down the old path- first a gentle breeze, and then the voices whispered within, indistinct and mumbling at first. They soon howled clear and hateful, filled with spite and murder. They spoke of death, blood and all the dark things of nightmares. With the arrival of the voices a fog rose up, covering the ground in a blanket of white. Everything up to the knee was damp-white mist, making it impossible to see the ground. It seemed to have a mind of its own, a malevolence that dragged ragged, making hands of fog pulling at everyone’s clothing, a white suffocating softness that shrilled murder. The forest drained of life, the pale darkness between the trees becoming more intense.

Complete silence enveloped the clearing where they stood.

That’s when the screaming started. It was bloodcurdling, followed with the clash of steal. It came from three sides of the little party and lasted for a small moment before abruptly the silence returned. The only thing that could be heard now was the voices of blood on the wind. Han knew without looking that his brother was at his back. He pulled his weapons out of their sheaths preparing for anything. Around him the familiar sound of preparedness echoed as others did the same. Han noticed Quinten and Heljah taking the same back to back position. The dwarfs gripped her heavy hammer in hand, a determined look on her face. Valasar had taken a position slightly in front of everyone his cloak cast to the ground, his weird bone spear at the ready. In position, they all looked into the darkness of the forest, prepared for its unknown horrors.

Dappled light shifted in the darkness of the forest, taking shifting shapes of milk-white horror, creaking closer. The shapes revealed themselves, skeletons, moving slowly toward them. They almost blended into the fog that they lurched through. Han glanced quickly left and right; they were surrounded. The silent dead moved toward them, a dead-silent mob that was slowly closing on them. A skeleton in front of the others opened its mouth and hissed, fog dripping from its maw and chilling them to the bone. The undead horde took that as the signal to rush in. The skeleton in the front raised a rusted sword and swung it at Valasar. Valasar moved so fast it was hard to see him. The lead skeletons' head flew over its comrades and smashed into a tree; its body fell into the mist and vanished from view. After that it was hard to tell what happened to anyone else. All Han could do was concentrate on living.

If the skeletons had all worked together Han knew that they would have all been dead in a moment. Instead, they acted like a mob. Even so, Han couldn’t use his weapon effectively; the chain was wrapped uselessly around his shoulders and the Kama and kukri were gripped in his fists. Han felt Kol move slightly and he reached back and cut the head off the skeleton that his brother had let by. They had fought so long together by now that it felt like one person fighting, not two. The clearing boiled with action as dispatched skeletons fell in heaps around them.

Han noticed some more skeletons coming their way and mentally prepared himself for their attack. There was a loud bang and a flash of light. The small group of skeletons was now piled on the ground, unmoving. There was the beat of wings and Han looked up to see Soren lighting another one of his busters and throwing it into an additional group of skeletons. The fog that had momentarily been displaced by Soren’s buster moved in quickly to cover up the charred bones.

The battle seamed to last forever. The mindless undead ambled on toward them, unaffected by their numbers being hewn down. Han sidestepped a skeleton, bent on making him a shish-kabob, and hit it in the back with his elbow as he did so; thus sending it up to his brother to be decapitated. Han turned around, ready for a new threat, and found the space in front of him gratefully empty. It was over and Han could only put his hands on his knees and gulp down fresh air.

The fog was retreating, revealing bones scattered all over the clearing some in large piles where the fighting had been the hottest. Han looked over in Valasars direction. He had taken on the brunt of the attack and it showed; an extremely large pile of bones surrounded him. The great lizard’s battered chest heaved in and out as he sucked in air, but Han was impressed that he was still standing. It also seemed like the lizard recovered faster as well, picking up his spear and trotting off into the woods. Quinten and Heljah came over to them; both looked tired and dirty. Quinten had a wet spot on the side of his head and a small trickle of blood ran down the side of his face. Heljah had a limp, but no blood to indicate a deep wound.

“Are you to all right?” Quinten asked upon reaching them.

“Oh us, we’re just dandy, nothing like a battle with undead to get the blood pumping, right Han?” Kol threw a hand over Hans shoulder.

“Oh aye, a man can go to sleep soundly after a party like that.” Han said smiling at the looks on Quinten and Heljah's faces. Winking at his brother, he continued. “But what about you two, did you enjoy your dance?”

Heljah looked at him red in the face and fury in her eyes, but before she could say anything Quinten replied. “Not at all. My dance partner wasn’t really up to the task though.” He said patting the rapier at his side. “And because of that I got a little token of the evening.” He reached up and touched the wound on the side of his head winching as he did so.

“What about our champion dancer over there?” Han said, pointing in the direction Valasar had disappeared in.

“He’s fine, except for a bruise on his arm. Honestly, I’m glad Cassandra told me to bring him along. That was hard enough as it was.” Quinten said.

“Well Gen... ah, Captain Cassandra knows what she's doing.” Kol said.

“Well I suppose she does. That’s why she has a Company now, I suppose.” Quinten replied dryly.

“Hey Quinten, bend your head over hear and look at this.” Heljah demanded looking down at a pile of bones. Han joined Quinten alongside his brother as they all stared down at the heap. Slowly, as if watching ice melt on a hot day, the bones were breaking apart. It was like chalk dissolving into powder, getting smaller and smaller until totally disappearing along with the last tendrils of fog, leaving nothing behind to say that they had ever been there.

They all stood up and looked at each other. “Well, that was interesting.” Kol finally said, breaking the silence.

“The sound of the first screams came from three men that were stalking us.” Everyone jumped and turned to look at Valasar as he walked up to them. “They had us surrounded on three sides, one to a side. They are all dead. I looked for anything to say what tribe they are from and this is all that they carried.”

Valasar tossed a small leather bag to Quintian. Before Quinten could open it there was a screech, and Tera swung down above them. Soren hopped down from her back and ran quickly over to Quinten.

Wings

Soren loved the feel of the wind in his face, the powerful beat of Tera's muscles beneath him. The great beast powered them through the air, only slightly slowed down by the weight of the halfling on her back.

Far below them the countryside opened up, the spires of conifers reaching up to grab them from the sky, the crags of the cliff faces breaking up before them. Tera glided past monolithic precipices with a great rush and thunder of wings, banking sharply to rise across the sky, the throat of the wind singing them out into open space.

The leather harness creaked as Soren leaned farther forward, gazing over Tera's shoulders, searching the ground for anything unusual. So far they had avoided a motley band of robbers, the smoke from their campfire giving early warning. Other pursuers shadowed them with greater acuity, but the Captain seemed to expect them with a resigned sigh, and not for the first time did Soren wonder what the Captain was hiding.

He spotted a pack of wolves, a few deer, and once, in a secluded glade, a pair of Dryads dancing green to gold through leaves and trees. Nothing to worry them.

Soren to one last look around, rubbing the downy fur on Tera's neck, and strained in the biting wind for one last look, before circling back. He pulled the fur coat closer to him, and they swooped back, gliding for a second through a cloud bank. Despite the recent excursion, the land-bound party had not made much progress, and they were soon approaching.

Tera shrieked in warning, a piercing sound that split the chill air. Soren glanced back down, to where the party should have been, and heard faint shouts and the clanking of metal. Their was trouble.

A small Path

Heljah looked back at the walls of Sternguard slowly getting smaller behind them. Their journey had been uneventful so far, except for the funny mix-up with cows on the first day that had the caravan master shouting and swearing. Acting, in Heljah’s opinion, no better than the beasts he was trying to move. They had finally arrived at the infamous Sternguard the following day. Solidly constructed of heavy granite and iron, the city declared: I am meant to last.

They hadn’t spent any time in the fortress city at all- instead, Quinten had led them in one side and out the other.

Heljah was a little upset at Quentin for this. It wasn’t because she was tired and could use some rest. That was ridiculous. It was because that, even if Sternguard was built by humans, it still had impressive stonework that she would have liked to see. And if anyone said differently they would get a face full of dwarven fist. Well, maybe just a well placed kick in the shin.

Honestly, Heljah thought as she quickened her pace to keep up, the builders of this road needed to be taught a lesson- severely. They had paid no heed to how many times it was going up- or down- or that the slope was unusually steep. She thought about telling this to one of the twins, but of course they would completely misinterpret it for something else and totally lose the point of the matter. The point was of course that the engineer needed to be fired and the post given to a respectable dwarf.

Heljah looked up at the mountains. Famous, the Rathbain Mountains, good solid granite those, with peaks that tried to scrape the sky and cut clouds in half. She looked over at the twins, they were of course joking around- either telling jokes or being the joke themselves. As she looked at them she told herself that in no way was she envious of their much lighter leather armor. Her much bulkier metal half plate gave her pride. She had helped to forge it herself. She was quit proud of the etching she had done on the front that told of her clans' proud history. She looked down, the beads and metal in her braids pinging against her armor, and ran her hand over the only bare spot, around the belly and up one side. That spot she had left open to write her own future deeds.

They had to stop one more time for the night before reaching a little town at the foot of the mountains. The town was small, but a high stone wall surrounded it, a remnants from the Last War. The feeling here was different also, than farther south. Where Sternguard felt immovable with its thick stone walls and battlements, the small town of lomelle was like something from a fable. The little white-washed buildings of oak and maple-wood, with bark-shingle roofs, they were so different from the larger stone dwellings she was used to, or even the dirty little streets and towering buildings of Sharn. The only foreboding aspect was the haphazard stone wall that surrounded it, ugly and brooding and scarred, shored up and reconstructed in so many places it made Heljah's eyes twitch. No sense of craftsmanship whatsoever.

When they entered the village, Quentin started to ask around for directions. Despite his legendary charm, the villagers would clam up, no matter how friendly they seemed at first. Eventually wary mutterings and thinly veiled threats began to follow them. Finally, they found an old man that told them of a small path at the east end of the village that would take them to where they wanted to go. They had to go outside the village walls before they found it. The old man was right, it was small and rutted, and looked like no one had used it in ages. A wooden structure, marking the start of the path, looked so old and rotten that it could fall at any moment. The path was a series of steps that lead up the mountain cutting a path through the thick foliage and undergrowth of a dense leather leaf forest.the old man bade them a gruff farewell, quarreling for a moment with Quentin about not bringing trouble back to Iomelle on their return, and then huffily made his way back to the village.

Quentin whistled for Soren, and soon the halfling and Valasar (who had not accompanied them into the town) rejoined the rest of the travelers. They began the arduous journey up the steep mountain path, which if dwarves had constructed it would be much more pleasant, and into the wilds of Thrane.

Bloodmane (Concept)

Sundry Measures

"It was you, wasn't it, that was talking to the caravan boss?" Soren fixed him with a hard stare.

Quinten felt profoundly uncomfortable under that gaze, but he kept his cool. The rest of the Company didn't have to know about his troubles with the Aurum. "Yes it was. We were stopped in the city by some former- acquaintances of mine. I wanted to make sure the caravan master didn't know anything about them." The caravan master was actually an Aurum agent himself, but like all such low-level agents, promise of a little extra payment allowed Quinten to moderate exactly what he told his superiors. It wasn't much but it was better than nothing.

"Guild politics." Soren turned that piercing gaze away, and Quinten felt a little more easy.

Soren had been with the Company almost longer than Han and Kol, had known Cassandra Silverhand back during the war even, and was her good friend. Quinten couldn't afford the halfling to doubt his loyalty to the Company. He was still to new, and the little band of mercenaries was tight-knit. The twins had accepted him as a fellow trouble-maker, and the rest of the company were close behind, but any problems this early on, and they would turn away. He needed them, more than they knew, more than he could admit to himself.

It was good to have friends, after growing up in a place where everyone was a rival and everything a ploy for power.

"Just so you don't get the Company involved, Quinten. I know don't you associate with your family anymore, but we can't afford to offend anyone who might give us a job right now." Soren seemed almost to catch Quinten in his thoughts. Then with a quick laugh Soren punched him. Since Quinten was a good couple of feet taller than the halfling, the punch landed on his hip, but it was still more powerful than he expected. Halflings might be the size of children, but they were adults, with adult strength. "Don't worry too much Captain, I'm just joking with you. If your Guildhouse family posed a threat to the Company, Cassandra would never have let you join. She's the sharpest woman I've met in my life."

The little man gave a piercing whistle and leapt nimbly to the top of a covered wagon. He leaped of the side a second after his riding beast soared down and under him, landing with a light bounce in the saddle and guiding the creature back into the sky.

"Our people used such creatures as scouts as well, though they were too small for us to ride." Valasar had approached him as the halfling left, his great cloak billowing slightly in the cool breeze coming down from the Rathbain mountains. His hood was pulled over his scaly head, so only his snout and some of his pointy teeth her visible.

"How does that work?" Quinten asked. "If you have no riders, how can the birds give any information?"

"Our shamans perform a ritual that allows them to Borrow the eyes of the creatures, so that whatever the flyers see, the shaman sees also. And now a question for you, Captain." The lizard-man cocked his head to one side, not unlike a bird.

"Shoot."

"Shoot what?" Valasar crouched suddenly, pulling a short javelin from his pack and looking around. Quinten stifled a chuckle.

"No, I mean, ask your question."

"Oh." Valasar returned the javelin to its place and resumed walking at the Captain's side. He gestured to the countryside. "Look here, your dwarf-friend tried to explain this to me." The lizard man gestured to the caravan. "How we move so quickly past the countryside, when the caravan moves so slowly."

Quinten took stock of the road himself. The caravan was moving slowly, slow enough that many were walking alongside the carts at an easy pace, but just off the road the countryside blurred past. He was used to the phenomenon, but it was slightly disconcerting if you thought about it.

"Well", he said slowly, "I'm not a wizard myself, but I'll see if I can explain it a little more clearly for you. Your people believe that the land has spirits correct?"

"Yes, the gods are in all the world." Valasar nodded his head, a quick little jerk, a kept listening.

"So the way someone explained it to me is that the Roadways Guild convinces the ground on the roads that it should act like a river, carrying people faster in whichever direction, like the current of a river carries a boat."

"But the road does not move."

"Yes, but we do, and all the river-ness stored in the ground comes out when we travel on the road. I'm a little fuzzy on the details, but basically it works out so that we can cover thirty miles or so in an hour at this pace. That means that even though Sternguard is a good four hundred miles from Sharn, we should get their in no more than two days of travel or so, maybe a little more if the roads are bad. It's once we get off the Wayroads that travel slows down."

"That is very powerful magic." Valasar rumbled in appreciation.

"Yes it is, and it costs a fortune to keep up. The spells used on the roads need constant upkeep, and their are roads like these all throughout the Five Kingdoms. The other guildhouses and the Kingdoms pay it because it's so useful."

Heljah came up, huffing and puffing, next to the other two. While most could keep up fairly easily, the short-legged dwarf was having a bit harder time of it. Dwarves are stubborn, and she wasn't about to complain about the speed of the caravan. She was going to complain though.

"My explanation was much more precise and including quite a bit of interesting history. I don't know what's so hard to understand about it." she hugged.

Valasar looked alarmed. "My apologies, I did not mean to cause offense." He tried to make himself shorter, lowering his head until it was almost down to the dwarve's level. Quinten laughed.

"Don't worry about it Valasar. Heljah, I'm sure your explanation was wonderful, but you do tend to forget not everyone has been around as long as you. Even the Captain is only my age."

"Among the dwarves, eighty is no great number. I'm practically a youngster, yet." But the dwarf glowed with pleasure. Among the dwarves, age gained you veneration and respect.

"But among us you are venerable and a sage." Quinten also bowed low, and the dwarf maiden stopped for a second, blushing furiously. After a moment she ran to catch up with the lizard-man and the half-elf.

"Don't you try to butter me up, Quinten, or I'll tan your hide, I will!"

The Caravan

As the halfling left the group the fading voice of Han followed him. "The Caravan Master didn't like Valasar at all- I wonder what he would have done if he saw Bloodmane?"

Soren wove himself through the caravan, using his extreme agility and reflexes to move between the big animals and their human attendants. Most people didn’t realize how much of these skills you actually needed to ride one of the Soarial. Those who didn’t know thought that you just had to be small, not realizing you had to ride the currents just as much as your mount. Soren looked up at his animal companion still circling the caravan, feeling pride in her movements. Tera's brilliant colors caught the light, showing off the brilliant white and yellow patterns streaking her dark green body. Her brilliant orange crest, near transparent as her wings, seemed to glow with inner fire. Intelligent and fierce, the dinosaur circled, waiting for the chance to snatch Soren back into the skies.

As Soren neared the front of the column he saw the wagon master talking to a figure covered in a cloak. Soren stayed in the shadow of a wagon, not wanting to intrude on what looked like a heated conversation. The man in the dark cloak suddenly stiffened and started to look around. He quickly turned back to the wagon master and with some more hurried conversation passed him a small leather bag, which the wagon master promptly pocketed. The man in the cloak looked around one last time, and then disappeared among the humans that were traveling in the caravan. Soren trotted out of the shadows and tugged on the wagon master's sleeve. The wagon master gave a start and looked around. And then looked around again, this time a little lower and saw Soren and almost gave a bigger start than when Soren first tugged on his sleeve. Soren wasn’t very happy about that. Just because halflings were short didn’t mean that others had to look down on them.

“What do you want?” The caravan master said, having regained some of his composure. Coren could still see his face was to red, little beads of perspiration dotting his forehead. “I don’t have time for you to waste. What is it?”

Soren told him what he had told Quentin. The caravan master looked up the road, stringing along a very long list of swear words as he did so. He yelled at some of his men and told them to go on ahead and clear off the cattle. Soren left the red-faced caravan master their, and made his way back to Quentin and the company. As he came close he could hear Heljah explaining to Valasar about the roads and how they worked.

“…that’s when the Roadways Guildhouse was started.” Heljah finished to what was most likely a confused audience. “Look at the ruins up on the path ahead of us see how we approach them. In an hour we will likely be past them. That is likely twenty miles ahead of us so we are traveling as fast as a running horse.”

Soren went past them he had to tell Quentin what he had seen. He wasn’t there.

(Finally) On the Road

"And bless my soul, you two look exactly alike," Han said mockingly, "Oh my word, I've never seen twins before. I didn't know that you humans had children in litters? Oh my, I'll have to tell my children this one, but I'll embellish it a little, for the kiddies, you know."

"Dark brown hair, hazel eyes, but it says nothing about all those little nicks on your hands, maybe if that was documented we'd be able to tell the difference." Kol finished in chorus with his brother. They looked at their hands solemnly, shaking their heads in unison, and Kol continued mocking the little dwarf who had taken so much of their time at the gate. "Oh my, I still can't tell, you'll have to tell me, and you are both sure you're human? It's just that most people don't hang around great scaly beasties."

"Surely a dwarf wouldn't be that stupid?" Heljah asked in amazement. She grinned up at the two humans. "Are you sure it wasn't a very short, very fat human? Or a gnome?" She tossed her head, heavy Clan-braids clinking off her heavy plate-mail armor. Heljah was a dwarf herself, took great pride in the 'stodginess', as the twins called it, of her people.

"We'll be passing through that gate again, when we return to Sharn, so you can check him over for yourself." Kol warned.

The four had met up with Soren and Heljah just in time, the caravan master huffing and puffing. The caravan was a balding, red-faced man who shouted and waved at the other caravan workers and the merchants traveling with them equally. He counted out the coins they gave him with a scowl, muttering about taking monsters to fight monsters, and started barking orders, but the caravan was already moving. The great oxen yolked to the carts were uneasy around the lizardman, so the company travelled back and a little to one side of the main caravan. Now they were well on their way, the City of Towers rising up behind them like a fat tent pole holding up the sky.

Valasar hunched his shoulders and tucked in his tail a bit more. The people of the continent were constantly referring to him as a beast or monster, and while his own people were savage, he had seen the same savagery exhibited by humans. Now some of the merchants were staring in his direction. His great cloak hid little in the bright light on noon day. Kol noticed the defensive posture. Putting it down to what they had said about the gate-beridden dwarf, he patted a scaily shoulder and said, "Honestly, if it had been anyone else, he would have had the sense to keep his mouth shut."

"Don't worry, we won't hold your flesh-rending tendencies against you, Val," Hand said easily "you're really a good person at heart."

Quentin shook his head, a grim smile on his face at the twin's antics. "That was without a doubt the silliest dwarf I have met in my entire life, and I have met no small amount of dwarves." He nodded to Heljah.

"He probably got the post because he comes from a wealthy family that wants to keep him out of the way." Heljah herself was from a smaller Clan. She gestured at Quinten with a gloved hand. "Similar to what your family has done."

"But I'm not silly, just an incorrigible rascal," Quentin said easily.

"Oh but here, lets be him talking about Quentin," said Han with glee. He took on the accent of the little dwarf again and said, "Oh, a half-elf? Mendanesti, you say? I've never seen anyone with black hair and blonde eyebrows who doesn't die their hair. Are you sure you didn't die your hair? And with your dark skin, maybe you died your eyebrows and eyelashes? Green eyes run in my family too, you know, on my mothers' side."

"You'd think he would be used to Mendanesti by now, it's not like we're exactly rare," Quentin said irritably, "Dol Aran, we own some of the biggest Guildhouses in Kovar."

"Can you imagine what he would have been like with Soren and that great reptile he rides? 'Oh, a halfling, I didn't know there were people shorter than dwarves, and what is that little dragon-thing you are riding? Don't dragons breath flame? Is it poisonous? I've got to have stories to tell the kiddies.'" Kol started playing with his ring knives, flipping them in great flourishes to punctuate his words. "Maybe if Soren had been there, we could get Tera to eat the little bugger and have done with it."

"Who do you want Tera to eat?" Just then the halfling swooped down on his Soarial, leaping lightly from the creature's back to land in a crouch. "By the way, Captain, their are three other caravans and a company of horsemen using the road along with us, though I don't believe any of them are interested in following us at this time. Some cattle are blocking the road a couple miles down and might slow us a bit, but on the whole we should make good time to Sterngard."

"Okay, report the cattle to the caravan leader." Quentin didn't relax. That blackguard Ireselan probably had a man placed in the caravan itself, ore maybe waiting in the city up ahead. He had someone watching them, anyway.

"Cheer up, Captain." Han whacked the shorter man on the shoulder. Quentin shot him a wry smile. "In another day, we'll be in Sterngard, and then the real adventure begins. We might even get to bash a few heads."

Soren whistled his mount to circle overhead and went to track down the caravan master.