Forged

Chapter Five: A vampire and a man versus an army

It was not a good day to be called Rendal or Eltharan. As the plains stretched out before them, the massive castle rising before them, dread filled his soul. The power from Elizabeth had brought him to awareness that there were creatures and people out there who commanded power far beyond the scope of everything he’d ever seen. He watched at the castle’s raised walls, then at the army that milled before it, hearing the snorts of the horses, the orders that were being shouted.

Eltharan had already drawn her weapons, her face showing distaste, as she began to ready herself for the fight that lay ahead. “They’re not really going to assault us all at once, are they?” She asked, looking at Rendal, who shook his head. “No, they’re going to come at us one on one…” He spoke, sarcastically. Above the army, the keep hung, a sign of the power that ruled these lands, held aloft by the gale forces that had been bent to work the magic. “We’ve got to get in there!” He said, hearing the war shouts as the first line of defenders of the land charged.

He remembered what had come before this battlefield. It just wasn’t fair.

They had made good time from the shores of the sea, going down on a long road that curved around several settlements, hearing the stories of a huge army gathering within the lands of the nomads. The accents of the people were hardly able to be understood, as they had such a different grip on the language that both Eltharan and Rendal were hard pressed to find a common language, mainly relying on pointing and well… sign language.

The farmer had not come to pick them up, something which Rendal noted, silently glad that there was no divine intervention within his life, for the seed of thought that such a powerful woman could only have been one of the gods, who she might have been, he did not know, yet the farmer still rose his hairs. It might just be the way with which the man regarded the world, or the ways that he seemingly found to come with them into the other lands, having a market there, or some place to visit.

He gazed at Eltharan, who seemed to have some annoyance, swatting around at some flies that buzzed around her. “Cursed flies. They’ve been following me ever since we departed from the sea.”  Rendal shrugged, eyes glancing up and down the delicate form of the elf and watched flies crawl out of the armor, giving a soft chuckle. “That’s probably because you’re dead.”

She hissed deeply. “I am not dead. Just slightly living-impaired. My skin is flawless! It’s just that some parts of my body just started to… well, be slightly worn.”  She raised her hand defensively, her eyes glaring at him from between the slants that allowed vision for her. The blacksmith felt a little uneasy, perhaps it might just have been the heat, a nook and some fly eggs being laid? He didn’t wish to think about it too much, watching Eltharan out of a corner of his eye. They were on foot, not even having the money to buy a horse to carry them along, a bit of difficulty that had come from not getting any monetary compensation over the course of their quest. Rendal knew that to get money, he would have to make some work be done, but smiths usually had tenure, and did not allow others to ply the trade within their city.

It wasn’t that they’d starve immediately, but much money they did not have. Eltharan was luckily restrained to a liquid diet, one which Rendal allowed himself to be used as, otherwise she would drain some unlucky fellow. The vampire had given a long speech about gratefulness, his blood still dripping from her lips and the wound that she had made.

Vampires sucked, in his opinion. They did it too much, and whenever she went for the second portion of the day, she’d have to be fought off. Not that the effort was hard to do, but it made him feel slightly bad about pushing such a woman off him, who just needed food. His stomach was fed with the spoils of a tavern here and there, bread bought cheaply to last him for a while.