Tauren Tale

Chapter 4: The Long Road Ahead

Time slowed and they continued to slide helplessly down the icy passage for what seemed like hours. Each bump along the way found a knee, or an elbow, or a forehead. They screamed in unison until their voices grew hoarse.

Then they erupted from the tunnel into bright daylight, and skidded to a stop down a hillside of small, grey stones.

“Ow,” Jorga moaned.

Ow, indeed. “Are you okay, kiddo?” Sanja whispered.

“I feel like I was trampled by herd of kodos,” he groaned.

She felt much the same. She closed her eyes and rested her head for a while before trying to stand up. They had been so wet, so soaked to the bone, that the summer sun was a blessed relief.

“Where are we?” her brother said.

Sanja sat slowly up and got her bearings. Something didn't smell right, but her nose was still bleeding from rough trip down. She figured that had thrown off her sense of smell.

The tunnel had been some sort of water channel from the stream at the top of the plateau down through the mountain and out towards the valley floor. In fact, they had fallen so far that they were almost at the bottom now.

But where there should have been lush, green fields; there were none. The land was grey and barren for as far as the eye could see. Scraggly scrub were the only signs of life.

The valley was rocky and desolate. This was no prairie. They had emerged into the desert somehow.

“No!” she gasped. “We can't be in Desolace.”

Sanja climbed to her knees and looked back up the mountain; back at the knife-edge peaks of the Thunderhorn mountain range. The tunnel had led them through the mountain, not just down it.

They were on the wrong side! The wrong side of a mountain range that had sheltered Mulgore for aeons. Mountains which were just as impenetrable as they were breathtaking.

She scrabbled a few yards up the gravel slope in disbelief. “No.” She looked to the left and to the right for any sign of a path or a pass, but there were none. “How are we...?”

# # #

Behind her, Sanja heard an unfamiliar moan. She snapped her head around to see Theodore climb to his feet. He looked pretty rough. He must have been in the descending tunnel when the trio came barreling down behind him.

He saw her and looked away. As if nothing had happened, he started walking casually down the slope toward the valley floor.

Although a wiser Tauren would have let him go, the flames in Sanja's head would not allow it. She had never been as angry as she was now. She charged at his back and shoved him down the slope with both hands. “Néchi!” she yelled at him.

Theodore tumbled down the slope and rolled easily to his feet, facing the girl.

Shoving him had felt good, but it had done little to put out the fire. She had never raised her knife in anger before, but she definitely wanted to now. She glanced down at her hip. The sheath was still there, strapped to her belt, but the handle had been broken away from the blade at some point in their fall.

Seeing that she was no threat, the rogue turned and walked away; but she chased after him. “You lied to us! You said you were going to help get us out, and then you left us to die!”

The man glanced over his shoulder. “I don't owe you anything.”

Sanja felt like her head would burst. “You don't owe us? I saved your life!” she shouted. “I could have left you there on that cliff to be eaten by bugs and carrion birds. Why would you say such a thing? Why wouldn't you help us?”