Elven Legacy

Chapter 1

The heat of the rising desert sun closed in hard on Noah's heel as he marched behind his commander, Seyar Zaoka. They followed a westward course into the Scorched Plains – which were about as uninviting as they sounded.

Sand dunes spread out to their right, and before them and to the left, nothing but a mix of rock and sand with the occasional gnarled sapling. This unforgiving land was home to the Eonak Tribes. Nimisians didn't come here unless they absolutely had to.

Walking beside Noah at the fast pace their commander had set was Fenek Zaoka, Seyar's seventeen-year-old son. Noah and Fenek were both still Wraiths-in-training, though Fen actually counted many more years of training under his belt despite Noah being four years his elder.

Slinking closer to Noah, Fenek used hand signs to tell him, "I can't stop thinking about what they might be doing to her." Fen was deaf from birth, and Seyar had created this alternative language when his son was still an infant. Noah had picked it up over the past year.

"We'll find them," he signed his reply. But he was worried too, unease snaking about inside him at the thought of the two missing teenage girls.

This morning, Noah had woken up early – way too early, arguably – to find his neighborhood in panic. Seyar's second-in-command had realized his daughter Hannia was missing. A few kids were questioned and said they'd seen Hannia and her friend sneaking outside the city walls last night. Probably to hang out by the Drisia River, to get high, drunk, or both.

All well and good – kids will be kids and all that – except the girls never made it back home. Which meant the Eonak must've taken them. It wouldn't be the first time.

Noah knew Hannia from their local tavern, where she often played the mandolin. And of course he also knew her because Fenek had a thing for her, though he was too shy to ever act on it.

As they marched, his young friend's anxiety was almost a palpable thing. Keen dark brown eyes darted from side to side in the hopes of spotting the telltale triangular shapes of a tribe's yurts in the distance. His black hair was done in tight, slim braids, and today Fenek wore it tied neatly back with a cord. He wore the Wraith uniform – thick-soled leather sandals, dark brown pants, tooled leather belt, short sword sheathed at the hip, and a short-sleeved tunic in mottled beige tones, slashed in sunset red at the hems and lapels. Added to that were leather arm bracers and studded shoulder pads.

Noah wore the same uniform, and so did the ten other men moving with them. The only difference was their weapon of choice. Everyone else wielded a spear, Seyar included. Each spear pommel ended in a design of two bronze wings; the Nimisian emblem.

Fenek, however, preferred his short recurve bow and steel-tipped arrows. And Noah, after training with the spear for a while, had decided it wasn't really for him either. When he'd visited Seyar's house for the first time, Noah's attention had been captured by their collection of weapons, hung across one wall.

One in particular caught his eye, a flat steel ring with a sharpened outer edge and a swirling design of copper and silver all around. A chakram. The designs looked like flames, but with sharper edges. Fenek's own creation, at the town's smithy. Fen had seen how Noah looked at it, and had given it to him soon after. It had pretty much been a romance story between Noah and his new favorite weapon ever since. The chakram was hitched to his belt right now. That, plus a couple throwing knives, and the short sword. Utility belt at full capacity.

Fenek's unease was matched by Altad's, Hannia's father. The tall, broad-shouldered man stomped at the front beside Seyar, whose billowing sunset red cloak clearly marked him as commander.