The Prophecy of Five

I: 8 :I

Rayla

Oh great. Now what?

They had encountered so many roadblocks in their journey so far, why was Rayla surprised by this one. She strained to look at why the party of sunfire elves had stopped. As far as she could see, there had been a small rockslide or something at the end of the tunnel. They could still climb over it pretty easily, but something else was obviously wrong.

Where are the other guards?

Rayla remembered the warchief stationing guards at the tunnel when she came to 'help' her and Callum, so she must have done the same for this end. But there weren't any.

Rayla watched as the warchief and her guards drew their weapons, obviously aware of something that Rayla wasn't. She walked Callum over to the side of the tunnel and laid him down. He was still sickly pale and his leg didn't look like it was getting better.

"Hey. I'm gonna go see what's going on. We need to get you to a healer."

Callum nodded, obviously not feeling good. She turned and began walking to join the rest of the elven party. She had just reached them and was about to try climbing the fallen rocks, when she noticed the light in the tunnel starting to diminish. She looked up to see a figure standing on the rocks, blocking the light produced by the flowing lava.

That must be one of the guards. She thought naively.

Rayla felt a hand on her shoulder and turned to see the warchief right behind her, pulling her backwards away from the rocks. Something wasn't right.

The figure was standing in such a way that Rayla couldn't see who it was, obviously on purpose.

Warchief Janai stepped out in front of Rayla, silently holding her glowing blade. As she approached the mysterious figure, Rayla began noticing things about them.

They wore very little plate armor, only a pair of pauldrons, vambraces, grieves, a hood over their face, a shield on their left arm, and a belt with a lot of pockets. Like, a LOT of pockets. Rayla also noticed a crest on one of the pauldrons, it looked like a wolf's head over a shield. She didn't recognize it as Xadia so assumed it was a human mark. They also had an odd looking sword and what looked like a broken crossbow over their back. As the warchief got closer, the human reached for their sword, unsheathing it and holding it in a defensive stance. The sword weirdly reminded Rayla of her own two blades, curved in an arch and sharpened to a point, though this one looked more solid and substantially more heavy.

"I'm here by order of the king." the human said calmly. "He has asked that I help Prince Callum in his journey."

Rayla watched as the warchief turned to look at her sick friend.

"So, it is not every day a prince wanders into Xadia. How I have longed to end that terrible reign of kings." Janai said, sickly, walking over to where Callum lay.

Uh oh.

Rayla felt a nudge from her side a friend to see Kalli next to her, Zym still in her arms.

"He's a prince?"she whispered. "You didn't tell me that."

"Well, I was afraid of what your mom would do to him. She's not exactly 'human friendly'."

"Yeah. You've got that right."

The warchief had made it over to Callum and was trying to get him up. Rayla could only stand and watch, as she had been cut off by all of the elven guards in her way.

"So," said Janai, "this is what passes for a prince these days? Pathetic."

She dropped him on the ground right on his bad leg. Rayla heard him yell in pain as he rolled on the ground.