Cuno sniffed the night air. There were many scents that caught his keen snout.
The long-legs were gathering up ahead of them. More than he had ever smelled before in his short life. Cuno grasped the shaft of his wooden spear and licked his lips. Perhaps tonight he would claim his first trophy. Domne was only a few steps beside him, his breathing heavy for a Wrent. The rest of their pack was close at hand.
This was what they longed for.
The pack stood hunched down, as their race typically did, ready to attack. Cuno was tall for his kind, standing nearly four feet. All Wrents had the heads of foxes, with their ears standing up and their mouths ending in long snouts. Each shared common yellow eyes. For clothes they wore simple belts with leather pouches and cloths.
Every Wrent in the pack carried a wooden stone tipped spear with their front two paws and stood on their hind legs, preparing for their kill. If they needed speed, however, their spears would be shoved into their belts and then they ran on all fours.
In the north, where their dwellings were, the Wrents lived in dens dug out of soft ground. Leather stretched over a wooden frame would often be enough for a door. Smaller holes dug into the ceiling of their den allowed for daylight to come in and smoke from their fires to go out.
No hole had ornate furnishing, just rough-hewn rocks for tables and mats of grass for beds. Wrents weren't keen on decorating. Hunting was their first and greatest skill.
Cuno wasn't sure of the origins of his race. To his knowledge, they had always lived in the north and hunted southwards. A tale or two told in between their boasting of the number of elvish heads they had claimed would sometimes speak of a long ago past. A past where the Wrents lived in the south and had free reign over the land.
But that was before the elves.
The Wrents may have come from a different land altogether, or emerged from the forest one day, ready to kill. His kind never cared much for stories of passing on traditions and origins.
What was most important to a Wrent was how many of the long-legs one of their pack could kill.
The fox race had always been at odds with the elves. From the south where the Wrents had long ago called home, the elves had learned how to build their walls tall enough and kill his kind from a distance. They were no longer able to fight the city dwellers. After hundreds of years battling and fighting the elves who hid behind their walls, the Wrents moved north to claim land for their own.
Hundreds of thousands of them had once occupied the southern continent of Irradan. Before the great wars that drove them north, they were a proud and strong race. After generations of hiding and rebuilding their kind, only ten or so thousand were left. The city elves had driven them nearly to extinction.
So his kind traveled south again, feeling stronger and ready to hunt. They wanted to find new lands and new prey. And find them they did.
A new kind of elf lived among the trees. Ones the Wrents did not know of before. These didn't hide behind thick, tall walls. The elves that walked among the trees were exposed and did not hide behind shield or plate armor. They did not possess the ornate weaponry of the city elves, nor did they charge out on horseback and trample their enemies.
These elves were much easier for his pack to dispose of.
Cuno had been told his entire life that the elves were to blame for their troubles. It was because of the elves that they lacked the food their tribe needed. It was because of the elves that his kind was no longer the strong race they had once been. It was because of the elves that they were treated so harshly.
They were treated like filthy animals. Worse than livestock. The only remedy they had ever known was to fight. To kill the elf kind. To hope that one day, their efforts would mean the end of the elves and the beginning of a new age of Wrents.
Cuno grasped his spear tightly in anticipation of a kill.
This was his first raid on the long-legs and he desperately want to claim his first trophy. They had been sent from their tribe, the Arras. It was their mission to kill as many elves and return with their heads. By this, they would bring honor to their tribe and increase their tribe's reputation among the other Wrents.
Cuno, personally, also wanted to impress his pack leader: Domne.
Domne was an abnormal Wrent in that his coat wasn't gray or brown. He was albino: his entire coat was white as snow. He was broader and more muscular than most of the others in his tribe. His size was matched in his ferocity in battle.
Under his leadership, the Wrent pack had seen their first few elves killed in revenge for past atrocities. A small hunting party of elves had been their first victims. A few of the deaths of their pack had been paid for.
There were many more they planned to avenge.
For hours they had been stalking through the woods, following the scent of elf. Their pack was quiet and quick, able to traverse many miles without becoming weary or hungry. The Wrents were a resilient race. After a time, new smells began to mix with the woods of the spring.
"There something different in the air," Cuno said, taking deep breaths with his long snout.
Heavy on the night breeze, the smell of elves penetrated his being. Cuno began to twist the spear shaft in his hand, hoping to find his first kill with it tonight.
"Many elves are gathered together from all over," Domne said in his deep, growling voice.
The collective breathing of those in their pack quickened as the possibility of killing an elf grew. By the smell of it, Cuno guessed, thousands of elves were meeting together in the trees ahead of them. None of the Wood Walker gatherings that they had encountered so far had held more than a few hundred. The long legs were gathering together for some reason, and Cuno wanted to know why.
Only fifty of the fox creatures stalked through the woods that night. It was beyond their dreams to come upon such a large gathering of elves and beyond their capacity to take them on full force. So they would do what they had also done. Strike. Retreat. Strike again until they had found their trophies.
Any death of a long legs was worth the death of an entire pack to Cuno's people.
Domne shook his head. His massive paws gripped his long spear tightly.
"Something not elf is in the air," he said as he took another long sniff. "It smells of...human."
Those words had barely left his snout when an arrow pierced his heart. Domne let out a grunt of pain, then fell dead. The other foxes around him begin to howl in anger as arrows pierced through the air. Cuno hoisted his spear and ran in the direction he thought the arrow that had hit Domne had come from. His people had very little sense of remorse, but revenge was a common and celebrated trait among them. Long-legs dressed in leaves and furs shooting arrows with stone heads were bursting out of the woods all around them. Cuno began to run to the closest one to him and, snarling wildly he thrusts spear in the direction of the long legged elf.
Instead of finding its mark as he had intended, the spear tip of his weapon was deflected by a shimmering silver blade.
This new warrior was the human that he had smelled.
Another female, dressed like a warrior and not like one of the wood dwellers burst out from underneath the foliage and began her assault on three different Wrents that assailed her. The one closest to Cuno glared down at him.
Her hair was dark and short, but the look on her face was ferocious.
He tried to thrust his clawed fist into this new threat, only to be smacked away again by the sword she held in her other hand. This enraged him. As his attention was focused solely on the dark-haired warrior, he hadn't realized that his original target had strung another arrow, his bow was aimed and the elf was about to release it from only a foot away from him. Cuno saw that the tip was pointing directly at his skull.
The dark-haired woman shouted something that Cuno never heard and made a sudden movement, taking the elf by surprise and causing him to aim up. The arrow pierced Cuno's left ear and he shouted out in pain.
He began to run as quickly as he could on all fours back in the direction they had came with a dozen or so of his pack at his heels. They were all that was left of those who had attacked. As he looked back over his shoulder, he saw that the Wood Walkers were now drawing new arrows and pointing them at the two female warriors.
He only grimly wished that the pair would meet a painful and horrible death as he etched the face of the dark-haired woman into his mind.
Revenge ran deeply in his tribe.
Cuno would have his.