No, much more, added the entity. You will still be a part of the future; you are too essential to be denied that. The others are not yet ready to be left to their own devices. In some ways, I will envy you. You have an ending, a destiny. You and yours will change and grow where we no longer can.
The sorcerer turned to his wife. Dru knew what his decision would have been if he had never met her. This was a partnership, however. “One last journey?”
She smiled at him, as ready as he to take on this challenge providing they were together. “One last journey, wicked Vraad.”
The featureless figures stepped aside for them. Dru looked into the sky at the last moment, as if by doing so he would see the guardian. “What about Darkhorse? He’s the one thing I still feel bad about. You had no right to send him back to that place, even if it was somewhere out there he came from.”
If the dweller from the Void, as you have called that place, returns, we will not exile him again… and I think the one you call Darkhorse will most definitely return. It might even be that from where you go you will be able to aid him in his efforts.
“One more thing, then. Do you think our race will succeed? Do you truly hold any hope for us?”
I do now. The guardian’s voice was fading. Its task was done. More important, so do they.
Dru gave the departing entity a grateful smile. When he could no longer sense its presence, the sorcerer turned to his wife, who indicated her readiness by squeezing his hand.
They walked through the portal and stepped into the room of worlds.
The chamber was filled with more of the faceless, cowled figures. To Dru’s surprise, they bowed to the newcomers. One of them, possibly the closest they had for a leader, walked up to Dru and extended a partially formed hand in an unmistakable gesture.
Dru clasped it and nodded, for some reason at last truly feeling at home.
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.”