Knight to the Silver Throne

Chapter 3: Enjoy with Caution

At one point, Aru and Iri seemed to disappear behind some trees, but Feamir was now entranced by the strange but beautiful music, a cheerful tune that never repeated itself. It kept her going forward. Like being drunk on the music, she stumbled upon the clearing, unprepared for the sudden change of the environment.

Entering the clearing was like entering a whole different world. While the forest had always felt somehow... strange, the glade seemed to exaggerate everything.
First there were the trees that seemingly bend out of the way to form a nearly perfectly circular opening in the dense forest. Then were the flowers. They appeared to be glowing with luminescent light. Some were so exotic looking that Feamir would have never thought to find them in the Silver Forest.

While looking for Aru and Iri she noticed the many other people. Whereas "people" did not exactly mean humanoids. Some of the most human looking persons donned goat like horns and feet. Others looked like plants grown to be somehow people-like. There were flower people, fungus people and some trees that had arms and legs.
In the air were other fairies so that hushed around. It was nearly impossible to identify Aru and Iri in this bustle. Have they really just let her here alone?

Somehow that thought cleared her mind a bit. Why was she here again? Why had she followed? That was not very typically of her.

"Mortal.", a deep voice came from her someone close by. Startled turned Feamir around. The voice belonged to an enormous person that was definitely over two meter high. After a second of surprised staring the young woman realized that this person had a full-grown horse's body from the waist down which resulted in his huge figure. He was a centaur, if Feamir's memory served her correctly. The four-legged build of the muscular horse combined with the human body waist up where the horse's head should be, was somehow strange look at the man, as if someone twisted the reality.
However, Feamir had no problem only looking at his human features. He looked like a middle aged, weathered man, or to be more precise than a warrior. She had no problem imaging him waring armor and storming onto the battlefield with drawn weapon. His unkempt black hair

However, this scaringly huge and strange figure did not seem very pleased with her being here.
"How did you get here?", he seemed really annoyed by the situation, but at least he was not outright killing her... Feamir had the feeling like he was a person that liked to deal with things in a very...straight forward manner.

Because of this she thought honesty would be the best: "Umm... I... I was invited by Aru and Iri... but I am not sure where they are now..."

Another person tumbled over, it was one of the people with the goat horns and legs. He was considerably smaller than the Centaur, without the horn probably only as high as Feamir herself, but he carried an aura that showed that he had considerable amount of authority normally. At the moment however, he seemed completely drunk.

"Don't be a party poopa, Hal!!", he was slurring, presumably because he had been drinking alcohol. Since he was too small to wrap his hands around the centaur's shoulders, so he clumsily laid his hands over his horse back. He seemed very familiar with this Hal, even though the centaur himself only rolled with his eyes and looked even more annoyed than before.

"Then you are going to take care of it?", the centaur tried to get the other one's hand of him.

"If yah feel betta than.", the stranger with goat horns and beard glanced at Feamir curiously, but he finally let Hal out of his grasp and that seemed all that the huge non-human cared about. Still clad in an aura that let others feel his annoyance, he strode away. After that the goat person turned all of his attention to Feamir.

"Hello, sweet lil' mortal.", he very theatrically bowed while greeting, "What a wonderful accident ta meet at such a festive n' happy night! Dat has ta be fate, my dear!"