The elf and the goblin walk
East into the desert, back from where they have come. The Sun is retreating across the Western sky,
racing for the sea past the badlands.
Hackard considers the soldier’s plan:
if they are heading to the Northern Wastes (as the Northern Tundra has
been called since flying Sagacia was dragged down across it), then the quickest
route would be to travel through the forest past the desert, cut through the
ape farmlands, skirt around the shore of Lake Mountainsroot, and then pass
along the foothills between the mountains and the great plains. It is a journey of perhaps two weeks on foot,
but her new “bodyguard” does not stop for food, water, or rest – that should
cut the travel time at least in half.
Somewhere along the way, she may find a way to bend the glyphed knight
to her own will (if the legends were true, then this soldier was some manner of
undead, created to be a servant and now without a master); and wouldn’t
that be something to bring back to the
Southern Jungle! She would be the toast
of all Santuji, and this ancient war machine might be able to put an end to the
foolish border skirmishes between the apes and the goblins for good.
That
was all very far down the road, though.
In the meantime, she had to traverse deep into ape territory with a
glyphed knight. Hackard herself was
small, and one goblin could easily slip unnoticed through large and
sparsely-populated areas; the glyphed knight, for her part, would probably pass
for one of the Blackened Guard. Indeed, her
order was the very inspiration for the elite soldiers’ uniforms. While the apes didn’t get it quite right, the resemblance was
probably good enough to fool any country bumpkins they’d be likely to meet.
The
soldier pauses: she senses something,
and draws up her hood to cover her elfin ears.
A few tufts of hair poke out over her forehead, mostly black, except for
one bit of white over her right eye where a long scar crosses her face from jaw
to scalp. Even this, though, is normal
for a soldier – she looks like any ape, albeit an unusually tall and slender
one. Hackard stares out over the horizon
for some seconds, and then sees it:
something coming out of the sky from the East.
