The Halfling

Chapter 11

Sunlight slivered. Dew burst in speckles of gray. They left the cavern.

They were a fleet cahooting the seas, fuzz like shimmering-white diamonds within the lazuli-kissed water. The river, snakelike, twisted and turned, and finally, straightened, until they ceased by a structure.

Stones lay on white grains of sand, resembling a hand, the ruin's fingers extending outward as if opening itself up to the heavens like a spring flower. Or perhaps a wound slicing through the structure, now abandoned and broken.

The boy stood on the stones. His companions had gone before him and were now fording the water, rocks serving as their stepping stones.

"Thank you again," he said. "For saving us and providing us quarters."

"It is of no importance," the King said. A few moments after, he shook his head. "I take that back. It is of much importance, but what we have done is very little, is what I wanted to say. We snake-men deliver travelers from one side of the continent to the other. We did the same with your Company."

"You'll be going, then," the boy said, smiling sordidly.

"Have faith in yourself, boy," said the King. "There is more in you than you have so far seen. And strength is discovered only in the most perilous of dangers. Farewell!"

There was the sound of splashing in the water and the whipping of tails. Soon, the men disappeared upstream, water whisked this way and that by the nimble muscles that glided through them.

The boy watched the rippling river for a moment, his stomach sinking. "I wish it were that easy," he said.

Fording the river, the boy clambered atop the bank to join his companions. A wide plain spread before them, dew-licked grass swaying and dancing. If one listened carefully, she might have heard the flutter of a butterfly's wings or the droning of a bumblebee, flying hither and thither. An earthy scent filled their noses.

They walked through the plain, metallic grass hushing under their feet. Soon, they reached an assortment of small tree-flecked hills, whose shoulders they passed through. When night came, they rested at the base of a small knoll, one which they had climbed to scout their distance from Lorven Height.

"I can see it from here," Amos said. "But we won't get there until tomorrow evening. I hope we arrive just in time for the storm."

His two companions raised their brows at this but the wizard did not explain.

When morning came, they took up their staffs and the equipment provided them by the snake-men of Sierpe, leaning here and there as the ground wove into rocky nips and descended into small hollows. The blistering midday pelted their backs with brooks of sweat, their baggage oppressing them with heat and heaviness.

Their stomachs knotted in hunger but the wizard insisted on reaching the tower first, before they ceased to eat.

"We must," was his only explanation.

The only sound was the groaning leaves beneath them, and, now and then, the attempts at conversation that were ceased by the dulling monotony of the journey. Just before evening, tenebrous clouds flickered upon the horizon, beyond the jutting structure of Lorven Height—an impending storm.

There was the pattering of the rain when they arrived at the monolith. It was smoothly carven, the stonework, by the Ancient Elves. But it was smeared with layers of dust now, cobwebs thick and large as brambles within ancient forests. Each step they took, they coughed or sneezed, what with all the mote, disturbed, flying and creating screens of smoke.

It smelled like an unused cellar, a scent which made the throat raw and the eyes water. The moaning of the stones reminded them of the earthquake back in the chimera's cavern.