The Dragon's Speech

Chapter 5: The Man Adorned with Dragon Scales

I walked further into the dense forest in search of some sign of a path.

I'm losing precious daylight, I thought to myself, or at least I thought I was, it was hard to tell with all the shade of the dense trees.

Father's going to murder me if I'm late to the gathering tonight, I sighed to myself.

Rulf's words rang in my head. "He lives in a small clearing past the entrance to the western woods. It's about a twenty minute ride followed by a 15 minute walk." I had been trudging around this forest for about 25 minutes with no clearing in site. The only boot tracks I managed to find, I lost just as swiftly about twenty paces deep into the woods. While I was certainly not the most skilled tracker, my skill was better than this and I knew it.

"Well shit." I muttered under my breath. If I was going to be late, I was determined to make it worth it. Pushing past a wall of vines, I thought I saw a cloaked figure receding into the trees.

"Hello?" I called, following in that direction. Movement caught my eye, turning I saw the tail end of the same brown hood.

"Wait, I'm looking for the home of Aeon Velecos!" I called out, my voice ringing in my otherwise quiet surroundings.

Following where I had last seen movement I continued on, determined to find that blasted clearing.

Him:

Today began as normally as any other, that was before my quiet world came crashing down. I woke early, journeyed to the closest stream to gather water and got to tending my modest field. This season, I was growing a few squash varieties. I had perfected the art of drying out gourds to store grains and beans several seasons ago, so I was enjoying the last harvest of my vegetables before I would have to dedicate all my land to preparing for the winter.

Life was hard living outside of the comforts of society without the luxury of a communal storehouse, but while this isolation was not initially my choice, I had grown accustomed to the silence. A silence that was broken when I heard a very noisy intruder in my quiet part of the wood. Pulling on my canvas hood, I set out to investigate this intrusive presence.

I hope it's not more of those foreigners, I thought to myself.

Several weeks back a group of three men had approached his wood, he had heard stories of mysterious invaders that preyed upon towns on the outskirts of this land, but this was the closest they had ever come to his home. He had managed to draw them away from finding his clearing, leading them deeper into the woods itself. There, they would discover why the woods were avoided by the locals. The stories surrounding this place were practically legend, but his home was close enough to the edge so that he did not encroach on the territory of the larger creatures who resided deeper in the forest. Creatures, even he didn't dare to meet on purpose.

Drawing closer to the source of the noise, the first thing he noticed was flaming red hair tied somewhat messily into a ponytail high upon her head. It was braided in an attempt to tame it's wild nature, but it seemed to rebel against this restriction and curled around her face in thick strands. It was one lone woman, and a foreign one at that. He was pretty confident that while she was not native to this region, that was for sure, neither was she one of the foreign invaders that he had seen previously.

Distracted for a moment, she turned his direction, her emerald green eyes narrowing in an attempt to discern a path in the dense forest surrounding her. Involuntarily he took a breath in, her features were striking. She had fair skin and sparking eyes. While she had a smaller build, he could tell by the slight pull of her clothes that she had lean but defined muscles in her upper arms and legs. She was built for speed rather than for brawn.