Keolah insisted on staying in Scalyr for a little while longer to do more reading at the library, and made a note that while the library wasn’t all that useful to her current situation, she would need to come back at some later point in order to peruse the place more thoroughly. There was a wealth of knowledge at her fingertips in that one building alone. But finally, she acquiesced to getting on their way.
The party, now numbering five bipeds, one horse, and one bird, set forth from Scalyr along the western road. It would be a bit of a journey on foot, but there was no way that Narcella was going to be capable of carrying all of them on her back. They crossed through a minor range of mountains and into the valley of Tanivalis.
“Let’s stop by my farm so long as we’re in Tanivalis,” Silver said. “Let my son know that I’ll be away for the foreseeable future. I’m sure he’ll be thrilled, really. He’s too polite to ever say so, but I don’t think he likes me hanging around like a drunken bum.”
The farm was a small patch of earth, thick crops growing around a decent-sized elf-style farmhouse grown three stories into the air, with what looked to be one area grown off the lower floor making up a barn. Silver led them up to the leaf door and touched one of the crystals at the side.
An orange aura approached the door, and blue-skinned man with long, black hair opened it. “So you are here, Father. You know you don’t need to ring the bell. Come on in.”
“I’ve brought guests,” Silver said, stepping aside and gesturing to the others.
“Arvell Renneck,” the black-haired elf introduced himself. “Come inside. Any friends of my father are friends of mine.”
If Arvell was as disdainful of his father as Silver claimed, he did not show it in the slightest. He led them in up the living wood stairs to the parlor.
“Khanis!” Arvell called out. “We have guests. Put on some tea!”
An elf man with vivid scarlet skin, contrasted by a minty green aura, looked up from the couch and nodded to them without smiling. Keolah started in surprise. She’d never seen a blue elf before she went to Scalyr, never mind a red one.
“My husband, Khaniro,” Arvell said. “And that would be our daughter, Khanis, in the kitchen.”
After a round of introductions, the group settled into the parlor. A young elf woman, also with red skin, presented them with a platter of teacups and a pot of hot artu-root tea.
“Will you be staying for dinner?” Khanis asked. “I haven’t had a chance to cook for a group this size in quite a while.”
Silver chuckled. “By all means.”
Khanis disappeared into the kitchen again.
“Is she your biological daughter, Khaniro?” Keolah asked quietly.
Khaniro nodded. “Her mother died when she was very young. Flylish bandits. They still manage to slip over the mountains somehow from time to time. At least we’re not still at war like when Natalie—”
“Khaniro,” Silver said sharply. “Let’s not talk about that.”
Khaniro sighed. “Silver, if I can speak about my wife’s death, you can speak of yours.”
“Not today,” Silver said.
“She asked,” Khaniro said. “I see no reason to lie.”
“She asked if Khanis was your daughter,” Silver retorted. “She didn’t ask to hear about Flylish raids.”
“I didn’t mean to touch a sore spot.” Keolah quickly changed the subject. “I must say, though, I’ve never seen a red elf before.”
Khaniro chuckled. “I’m not surprised. You won’t see many of us outside of Noraley.”
“What brought you to Kalor?” Keolah asked.
Khaniro shrugged. “Politics. I chose exile rather than allow my wife and baby daughter to get caught up in a tribal power struggle.”
“Are red elves that vicious?” Keolah wondered.
“You don’t know the half of it,” Khaniro said. “It would have probably ended in Khanis being pressed into an arranged marriage to secure an alliance with another tribe.”
“As a baby?” Hawthorne wondered.
Khaniro nodded. “They would, of course, wait until she came of age to consummate it, but yes. As a baby.”
Hawthorne made a face. “And I thought my own family was messed up.”
Delven set aside his tea. “Silver, I hate to ask this, but, how old are you? You don’t really look old enough to have an adult son.”
Silver chuckled. “Do you really want to know?”
“I’m curious, now,” Keolah said.
“Older than I look,” Silver said with a cheeky smirk. “The Windriders left Zarhanna before the fall of the League of Wizards, as I mentioned. The elves didn’t lose their immortality before the League of Wizards fell. The Windriders never lost it at all.”
Hawthorne almost choked on her tea.
“Arvell is actually older than me,” Khaniro said.
“Not that it really matters all that much,” Silver said. “When you don’t get old, you don’t take relative age to be much of a consideration.”
Sedder held his tea untouched in both hands, and looked away to stare out the window.
Although Silver’s family put on a polite and friendly face in front of their guests, once she’d settled into one of the guest rooms, Keolah overheard raised voices downstairs.
“It’s bad enough that you keep running off to go drinking,” Khaniro’s voice declared. “But now you’re planning on going on a trip for who knows how long? We need you here at the farm! Your son needs you. We can’t do this all by ourselves.”
Silver gave a muffled reply that Keolah couldn’t make out. As she drifted off to sleep, she had to wonder if anyone who joined their group was going to have a normal, happy family.
Sedder couldn’t sleep. He considered pulling out the thought crystal and making a report, but what would be the point? Sardill surely must know about Silver’s family and personal life already, shouldn’t he? They were involved for a while, after all.
Sounds of arguments drifted up the stairs. Sedder sighed and rolled over, and almost fell out of the stupid elf leaf hammock. Delven, across the room from him, was already sound asleep. He wasn’t sure just how Delven could sleep like this. Why couldn’t these elves just use actual beds like normal people? How did they even have sex in hammocks?
His thoughts drifted back to Silver. Due to his assignment, he could never have seriously considered a relationship with him, after all. Sardill would have skinned him alive if he’d even thought about trying. And yet, for all the time he’d spent watching Silver, there were still many things about him that he hadn’t known. He didn’t know Silver had a son, or that he’d been married to a woman. And that Silver’s late wife had been killed by Flylanders… ouch. How could he justify hooking up with Sardill after Sardill’s own people killed his beloved wife?
And then there was the fact that Sedder had had no idea how old Silver was. He’d never really thought about it before. That was bound to get awkward. Even if Silver said Windriders tended not to think about age much, he couldn’t stop from thinking about it. Silver must be at least old enough to be his grandfather!
From the sounds of things, the group planned to head through Flyland next. Sedder wasn’t sure where they’d said Dalizar was, but it seemed to be on the other side of Flyland somewhere. Which was absurd. All that was over that way was sheer cliffs. And… no coast, that Sedder knew of. Which was also ridiculous. The land had to end somewhere, and there was definitely water over there. Had Dalizar really been right next to Sardill’s territory all along, and he just never knew it?
Thinking about heading through Flyland put a twinge of repressed emotion in Sedder’s mind. It was too bad that going to see his family there was out of the question. It had been ten years, and part of the arrangement with Sardill required him to fake his own death. Tennar Deller was dead. Only Sedder remained. His two younger half-brothers probably barely even remembered him any longer. It was probably just as well, though. He’d never gotten along with his father or stepmother anyway. ‘Dying’ had not been any great sacrifice.
Across the room, Delven started snoring. Grumbling softly, Sedder put up a sound ward and closed his eyes. It was just as well to block out the continuing arguments downstairs, anyway. Sometimes it was nice being an Illusionist. If he were feeling more generous at the moment, he’d ward the girls’ room, too. He wasn’t.
Come morning, Silver hardly waited for them to finish eating breakfast before ushering them out the door, not even stopping to say goodbye to his family. He brought a pack that he must have thrown together in a haste last night, although he looked like he hadn’t even slept at all.
“Silver, you okay?” Keolah asked, looking to him in concern.
“Of course,” Silver replied. “Arvell’s glad to see me on my way. I’d hate to get in his way any longer.”
Keolah bit her lip. What she’d heard last night said otherwise, but she wasn’t about to confront him with that. His family issues were his own business.
“I’m curious,” Delven said. “I’ve noticed a disproportionately high number of elves who are… I don’t know the word in elvish. We say gay in common. Men who like other men. Women who like other women.”
“You have a word for that?” Hawthorne said. “Humans sure are weird.”
“I think most elves are at least somewhat interested in their own sex,” Silver said. “Many of them are not interested in the opposite sex at all. But, it’s really not something we generally think about all that much, never mind have a word for it.”
“How do you manage to not go extinct if most of you aren’t breeding?” Delven wondered.
Silver gave him an odd look. “Who said we weren’t breeding?”
“Well, if you’re not attracted to the opposite sex…”
“I don’t see what physical attraction has to do with creating offspring,” Silver said. “We are sentient beings. We know how babies are made, and regardless of our romantic interests, we do still want and have children.”
“Huh,” Delven said. “I guess that’s a point. I’ll just have to write off the fact that most of you are interested in the same sex as a weird elf thing, then.”
Silver shrugs. “I know humans tend to have an emotional attachment between the people who they create children with. Elves don’t have the same expectation. Love and breeding aren’t necessarily synonymous.”
The party stopped in for a few days at the city of Port Fins. While at first glance, the construction was similar, it had a completely different atmosphere than Scalyr. It seemed like everyone there wore gloves, and immediately pinned them as outsiders to be distrusted by just taking one look at their bare hands. Although Keolah had intended to stay for a few days and see if they had some sort of decent library, they decided to cut short their way due to the chilly reception.
The road to the pass ended in a small fortress at the border crossing. The gates were open, however, and the guards let them through without complaint. Each guard wore a uniform bearing a symbol of three mountains, and was armed with a long, hollow metal rod attached to a curved handle.
“Why all the security?” Keolah wondered.
“We’re at peace at the moment, but that hasn’t always been true,” a guard said. “If a regiment of soldiers comes marching down that pass, we need to be ready to go into lockdown here at a moment’s notice.”
“Is that likely?” Keolah asked.
“It’s been a hundred years since the last war with them,” the guard said. “And that time, they brought muskets against us and would have devastated us if we hadn’t gotten magical backup. We’re overdue for another war, and needless to say, that’s gotten us nervous. We have firearms too by now.” He patted his weapon. “But we’re still afraid they might have better ones.”
“Are we in any serious danger if we go in there?” Keolah asked.
The guard shrugged. “I’d advise you to watch your backs, but I doubt they’d cause you any real trouble. You’re just travelers, and mostly elves at that. They don’t generally care much about what elves do.”
The pass through the Thorndelle mountains was much rougher, and Keolah could see why they were nicknamed ‘The Impassible mountains’. The stubborn, uncaring mountains seemed to want to throw in extra cliffs right up to the water and beyond. The island of Unar, visible off the coast past a strait, was probably an offshoot of the mountains that just happened to be separated by a bit of water. It was like the mountains just didn’t know where to stop.
At the far end of the pass stood another fort, this one bearing pink-and-black banners depicting a bird with outstretched wings. The guards at this fort were less friendly, but still gruffly let them through, warning them to keep out of trouble.
The next major city they arrived at was Starton, and just as Port Fins felt different from Scalyr, so Starton felt different again, not least because most people there spoke a different language. While enough people here spoke the common tongue to get by, it was hardly as welcoming a place as Hannaderres had been. Keolah didn’t like being in Flyland and was nervous the entire time they were there. She even passed by the city prison just on the off chance of being able to spot Kithere’s near-white aura through the walls. No such luck.
“Zaravin’s feathery butt, all that time spent learning common, and I still can’t understand a word anyone’s saying,” Hawthorne muttered. “What in the Abyss are they saying?”
“They’re speaking Flylish,” Delven said. “To be fair, they’ll be more likely to understand common than elvish, at any rate.”
“Why does everyone have to speak different languages, anyway?” Hawthorne grumbled. “Isn’t there some spell or something that will translate everything for you, for that matter?”
“I don’t know.” Delven shrugged. “Maybe there is. I’m not the expert on magic here.”
Hawthorne looked to Keolah. “Keolah, is there a spell that will translate languages?”
“I don’t know.” Keolah smirked. “I’m not an expert on magic, either.”
Hawthorne turned to Silver. “Silver! Is there a spell that will translate languages?”
Silver sighed. “Yes, Hawthorne. There is a spell that will translate languages for you.”
“Do you—”
“No, I don’t know how to cast it,” Silver cut her off.
“Oh.” Hawthorne deflated. “Well. Delven! Can you at least teach me how to cuss in Flylish?”
Delven sighed. “I suppose.”
Keolah spotted a shimmer in the air that indicated the use of Illusion Magic well before Silver pointed it out. The Windriders, it seemed, did not simply rely on covering the route into their realm with bushes and hoping it would be enough. They masked the entire path up the otherwise sheer cliff. And while the path revealed itself to the others once Silver told them about it, Keolah had to spend the entire climb immersed in the middle of a very distracting web of lavender mana.
Once past the illusion barrier and having difficulty navigating the steep path, Zendellor transformed into human form, grumbling something about being a horse, not a goat.
Silver looked over to him in surprise. “A rahi?”
“Try not to horribly murder me for being a shapeshifter, please,” Zendellor said.
“Don’t worry,” Silver said. “I wouldn’t. That’s a human prejudice, not elven. You’ll be safe with us.”
The path ended, not at the top of the cliff, but at a cave entrance leading into the rock. When Silver told her that the Windriders mainly lived in caves, she had been unable to imagine that elves would want to live underground. Now that she saw the place, she understood why. These were no ordinary caves. Shining crystals lined the walls, giving off a light of their own. Soon, they emerged into a vast cavern with a vaulting dome of a ceiling, filled primarily with glowing red crystals of all shapes and sizes.
“City of Ruby,” Silver announced, then added, “They’re not real rubies.”
These caverns seemed to be more of a small fortress than a real city, consisting of gates, wards, and guards. Despite the illusions covering the path up, they were still clearly paranoid about anyone attacking them. This struck Keolah as a very unwise place to try to assault.
Most of the elves here were varying shades of blue. It quickly became apparent how few outsiders were here. They attracted quite a few looks from passersby, although of a less hostile and distrustful sort as they’d received in Port Fins, perhaps because they saw the group was with Silver. It also became quickly apparent that while many people spoke the sort of elvish Keolah was familiar with, the primary language spoken here was one which she was completely unfamiliar with. And it was indeed clearly a completely different language, and not simply a dialect with some strange pronunciations and vocabulary choices.
“What’s that language everyone’s speaking?” Keolah asked Silver quietly.
“Tevric,” Silver replied. “Snow elvish.”
“Your people are descended from snow elves?” Keolah asked.
Silver nodded. “Distant offshoot, yes. A bit of song elf blood in there too, but mostly snow elves. We don’t really call ourselves snow elves anymore, though. We’re Windriders. Maybe ‘sky elves’ would be a more appropriate term. We’ve lived far from the snow for a very long time.”
“Huh,” Keolah said.
“Here, let me introduce you to some people who might be able to help with our little project.”
“Our project, now?” Keolah said with a grin.
Silver chuckled. “I agreed to help, didn’t I?”
“Well enough,” Keolah said.
“We’ll want to go to City of Adamant for more resources, but there’s some in Pearl that might be of interest to us,” Silver said. “Ruby is more of a border town and a first line of defense should Flyland start getting grabby and actually find the path.” He punctuated this statement with a fiercer scowl than Keolah would have expected of him.
They didn’t even stop in Ruby for long, and immediately set off down the tunnels. Even if someone got past the security at Ruby, Keolah could only imagine that any invader would quickly become lost down here. Silver clearly knew where he was going, but Keolah would have lost her way almost immediately. The low background mana didn’t help matters any, either. Or the odd, incessant sound echoing through the caverns reminiscent of singing.
After some traveling, they came to another cavern, this one larger and its crystals milky white.
“Welcome to City of Pearl,” Silver said, a small grin playing across his face. “My home, once. I was born here. We can stay here for the night, or the next few days, if you’d like. There’s a library here that might interest you. I’ll show you where it is. Provided they haven’t moved it or shut it down since I was last here. It’s been a while.”
While Hawthorne and Delven went off to find whatever the local equivalent of a tavern was, Sedder stuck with them. The Windriders did not use doors, which was somewhat disconcerting, but Keolah supposed if that was the sort of culture they were used to, they must find the construction of outsiders quite restrictive.
A silver-haired woman with a blue-gray aura greeted them in song elvish when they arrived in the library. “So you are here. I am Lumenth, of the House of Renneck.”
“Relative of yours?” Keolah asked quietly.
“She’s my aunt,” Silver said. “Also the wife of my late wife’s mother.”
Keolah blinked. The Windrider family tree seemed even more convoluted than what the Rascalanse elves got up to.
Lumenth tilted her head toward Silver and gave him a look of condolences, but moved on quickly. “New friends?”
Silver nodded. “This is Keolah Kedaire, and the fellow slinking around is Sedder.”
“Welcome,” Lumenth said. “Is there something I can help you with?”
“Ah, yes, perhaps,” Keolah said. “We’re working on a little project and trying to identify an old language based on some inscriptions I discovered in an ancient ruin.”
“Hmm, we have books on all the major languages spoken in the world, as well as several more obscure ones,” Lumenth said.
“I’d imagine that if it were a major language, I would have come across it by now,” Keolah said. “I checked up in the library in Scalyr and came up empty. Do you have a room with a table or something where I can lay out my notes?”
“Right this way.” Lumenth led them into a side room that, while it still didn’t have a door, was at least partially enclosed and had a table and chairs.
Considering Silver already knew about the pocket-world and Lumenth was apparently his aunt and mother-in-law, Keolah figured she might as well tell her something, if not precisely where she found it. She didn’t think the Windriders had any sinister intent, but she wouldn’t discount one of them being a Seeker and capable of finding the place. If she was being perfectly honest with herself, she really wanted to stake a claim to the place herself. Keolah laid out her notes, the diagrams and copies of the runes in the pocket-world.
Lumenth pored over them thoughtfully, and frowned. “I don’t recognize these markings offhand. They might have been used in an obscure or dead language, or one of the secret codes used by the League of Wizards.”
After scanning a shelf, Lumenth pulled out a book labeled Dialects of Domgad-Festig and passed it over to Keolah. The book denoted many dwarven dialects and writing variants, but all of them were based around squares and right angles. The pocket-world’s runes were triangular. Keolah shook her head and passed it pick.
“Hmm, not dwarven,” Lumenth said. “Let’s look at gnomish. Some of the gnomish dialects are quite odd.”
The next book Keolah looked through was named A Careful Investigation into Gnomish Communication. In addition to a spoken language, gnomes apparently had a detailed and complex hand language that had been adopted in a slightly different form amongst deaf elves and dwarves. The book speculated that gnomish handtalk had been developed as a means of communication in loud environments and between gnomes who suffered hearing loss due to working in loud environments, and it apparently even had its own written form with symbols denoting each sign. While interesting in their own way, they didn’t match either.
“What about the structure?” Keolah wondered. “The eight-spoked wheel, the circle of obelisks?”
Lumenth shook her head. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like that before. I assume if you’ve been to Scalyr that you already discounted a human origin, unless it’s one more obscure than would have been recorded there.”
“Human?” Keolah asked.
“Elves usually venerate odd numbers,” Lumenth said. “Threes, fives, sevens, nines. Eight would be a very peculiar number to see come up in an elven structure.”
“Hmm, good point,” Keolah said. “Being in Kalor, I hadn’t assumed it was an elven structure in the first place, though. Then again, I hadn’t realized the Windriders had been in Kalor so long, either.”
Lumenth chuckled. “Truly? The southern lands were known to the League of Wizards long before we came here.”
“Really? Hmm,” Keolah said. “I’d considered the possibility that this was Albrynnian in origin, but I’ve seen Albrynnian ruins. And this definitely isn’t Albrynnian writing. Modern languages in Kalor use a derivative of Albrynnian alphabet. They’re not Islandic pictographs, either.”
“I can see why you were curious about this,” Lumenth said.
Keolah nodded. “I seem to be learning more about what it’s not than what it is. If anything, that’s just making me all the more curious.”
“Stay and look through the books we have here if you like,” Lumenth said. “I don’t know if you’ll find anything. You might be able to find more League of Wizards-era magical information in City of Adamant, though. You might want to check there next.”
“I’ll do that, thanks.”
Sedder shadowed Silver, as much out of habit as anything else. He put up illusions over himself as always, even though he wasn’t sure if it was really necessary any longer, especially given that Silver had apparently not been fooled by them some of the time. Sedder was still a bit miffed about that.
An elf woman with lavender hair confronted Silver outside a clothing shop, pinning him with a glare and shaking a finger at him.
“I can’t believe you,” the woman said. “Were you planning on just passing through Dalizar without stopping for one brief moment to see your dear sister?”
Never had Sedder been so glad to be able to understand snow elvish. And here he’d thought it was a waste of time when Sardill had first insisted that he learn it. Now he knew why. Silver always spoke song elvish or common when in Scalyr, but this was Windrider territory.
“Vinna…” Silver said.
“Don’t Vinna me,” Vinna snorted. “Bad enough that you’ve run off to Tanivalis for however long it’s been, without saying goodbye or even mentioning where you were going. I had to hear it from Arvell, for gods’ sake.”
“Crossing Flyland is always risky,” Silver said.
“And yet that didn’t stop you from deciding to take up residence in a place on the other side of it?” Vinna said. “Besides, we’re Windriders! It’s not like we can’t fly. And don’t even give me a word about how they might notice us flying overhead.”
Silver sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. “I don’t know what to tell you, Vinna. Anything I say, you’d just take as another excuse, so why should I even bother?”
Vinna huffed. “So what brought you back to Dalizar this time? And yes, I’m not even going to believe that it was just feeling homesick or wanting to see your family again, seeing as you weren’t even going to stop by my place and give me a ‘so you are here’.”
“How do you know I wasn’t?” Silver asked. “You’re making a lot of assumptions yourself.”
“Because I know you,” Vinna said. “You always avoid your problems instead of face them.”
“Give me the benefit of the doubt here, Vinna,” Silver said with a sigh.
“Whatever,” Vinna mumbled. “You haven’t answered me, though.”
“I’m helping some friends with a project,” Silver said. “I brought them here to do research.”
“Windriders?” Vinna asked.
Silver shook his head. “A couple of song elves, a half-elf, a human, and a rahi.”
Vinna raised an eyebrow. “You brought outsiders into Dalizar? And here you were talking about crossing Flyland to be risky.”
“I trust them,” Silver said. “I have faith in their good intentions. I don’t think any of them are working for Flyland or going to tell them where we are.”
Sedder took a step back and shrunk further into the shadows.
“And did you carefully fly each of them here, or did you just walk across Flyland and leave a trail leading right to our gates?” Vinna asked.
“I made sure no one was looking,” Silver said.
“No one was looking,” Vinna repeated. “And where did they think you might be going, leaving Starton or wherever you left going in a direction they know there’s nothing in but empty cliffs?”
“It’s fine, Vinna,” Silver said. “We had an Illusionist with us. No one even saw us leave town.”
“So you just vanished without a trace, then?” Vinna said. “Oh, that won’t be suspicious at all. Brother, we haven’t survived this long by being careless. It’s not just a matter of whether or not Dalizar might be invaded — I’m sure we can handle whatever Flyland throws at us. But we may wind up falling under the curse that hit the other elves. We could lose our immortality. You are not the only one who suffers when you’re careless!”
Silver winced. “I know, I know.”
“You know it’s your fault Rinalie was killed—”
“Natalie,” Silver interrupted. “She called herself Natalie.”
Vinna scowled. “You moved into human lands and took human names. What did you think would happen but that you’d die like humans?”
“Vinna,” Silver snapped. “Enough!”
Sedder slipped away silently, leaving them to continue arguing all the more heatedly. He still had a report to make. Sardill would kill him if he didn’t report in. He’d have to make sure he was in a safe spot where he wouldn’t be disturbed. Damned Windriders and their lack of doors. Nothing a well-placed illusion couldn’t fix. He already had one of himself up in the room he’d been given, sleeping away in a hammock.
He found a side passage that led to a small dead-end that seemed to be being used as a closet, and tucked himself inside. Pulling out his crystal, he sent a thread of Mind Magic into it to activate it.
<Sedder, report,> tepped the hooded figure in his mind.
<I’m in Dalizar,> Sedder replied. <It’s located west of Flyland.>
<Where?> Sardill asked. <Hidden somewhere amongst the barren highlands?>
<Underground,> Sedder tepped.
Sardill was silent for a moment. <Underground. Of course. Here I’d always expected, with their giant birds, that they’d be located somewhere high in the mountains, or even on some sort of floating island. But they’re underground?>
<From what I’ve seen, they access the sky through caverns in the cliffs,> Sedder tepped. <There’s ones leading out over the ocean where they can fly out with their birds, but more importantly, there’s a path hidden by illusions leading up a cliff in western Flyland.> He mentally sent over a map, and an image of the path’s location and what it looked like.
<Excellent…> Sardill replied. <Most excellent indeed.>
<My lord,> Sedder asked hesitantly. <Forgive me for the presumption, but may I ask what you intend to do to Dalizar?>
<Right now? Nothing,> Sardill replied. <You need not be concerned about me launching an initiative into the area while you are still in it. You are a spy, not a front line soldier.>
<Of course, my lord,> Sedder tepped.
<Keep me apprised of any further developments.> Sardill cut the connection.
Hawthorne downed another glass of piss-weak elf wine. This whole trip so far had just been bar-hopping through the caves of Dalizar, while Keolah hit up every library, scholar, and sage in the whole country. Not that she was about to complain, but she’d really been hoping for a bit more adventure than this. Not… Books. She was bored out of her mind. It was high time to find some trouble, she figured.
“All that trouble to learn common, and nobody here speaks it either,” Hawthorne grumbled. “Zendellor! Let’s go explore.”
“You’re drunk, Hawthorne,” Zendellor observed.
“Only a little!” Hawthorne retorted. “It took a lot of shitty elf wine to get even slightly tipsy. Come on, are you with me or not?”
“What about Keolah?” Zendellor asked.
“She’s busy reading,” Hawthorne said. “I want to see what’s around here! These caves are pretty cool and shiny.”
“Right behind you,” Zendellor said.
“I’d best come along to keep you out of trouble,” Delven said.
“Unlikely,” Zendellor commented lightly.
The three of them headed out of the cave that passed for a tavern, and went down through the tunnels. They got more than a few odd looks from passersby, who clearly didn’t expect to see humans in Dalizar.
One guard even stopped them. “Hey!” she spoke in common. “Humans aren’t supposed to be here.”
“Silver of the House of Renneck invited us,” Delven replied. “We’re just doing some research. We probably won’t be here long.”
The guard scowled. “I’ll have to have a word with Silver, then. Carry on.”
“My thanks,” Delven told her in snow elvish as they continued on.
They turned a corner and found themselves in a large cavern overlooking the ocean, sunlight streaming down onto a ledge where several floka sat sunning themselves and preening their feathers. Some of them turned unpleasant attention toward them, as Hawthorne realized they’d moved uncomfortably close to a nest full of large eggs.
“Sorry!” Hawthorne called out. “I don’t want to hurt your babies!”
A wave of disorientation rushed through Hawthorne’s mind. Feelings of distrust, annoyance, and protectiveness pressed down on her. Hawthorne stumbled under the telepathic assault, and tried to get to the exit again. But she got turned around and wandered over to the ledge, and before she could stop herself, found herself falling.
Hawthorne screamed. Reasonably, she knew she’d probably be fine. With her Wind Magic, the fall wouldn’t actually hurt her. But it might land her somewhere annoying to climb back out of. And falling a long way was still disconcerting as hell.
Feathers struck her face, and something stopped her fall. Hawthorne grunted at the impact, and her mind cleared enough to realize she was on top of a floka.
<Try moving your leg behind my wing, please,> spoke a female voice in her mind.
“What?” Hawthorne said aloud. “Oh.” She shifted position, clinging to the giant bird’s neck. “Narcella?”
<Yes,> Narcella tepped. <Let’s get you back up to solid ground.>
“The other floka attacked me,” Hawthorne said. “With their minds. I think. I’m still not sure just what happened.”
<Most floka have innate Mind Magic, yes,> Narcella tepped. <I’ve told them to lay off. Your friends are unharmed.>
“That’s good,” Hawthorne said. “Thanks.”
Narcella landed up on the ledge where she’d originally fallen from. Hawthorne carefully slid down off her back and went back over to Delven and Zendellor, who were rubbing their heads.
“Let’s make an important note not to mess with floka,” Delven said.
“I’m sure they’re perfectly fine people who were just startled by us suddenly showing up near their eggs,” Hawthorne said.
“You have a very broad definition of ‘people’,” Delven commented.
“Anyway, let’s continue the tour.” Hawthorne gave a wave to Narcella and headed back out of the floka cavern.
Most people would have been discouraged from wandering off after falling from a ledge high over the ocean. Hawthorne was not most people.