Finally, when many months had gone by with nothing found, her mother had accepted the bleak and awful truth: they had all perished. Alienated from her own people for reasons that she did not disclose, broken from the loss of her mate, she mourned deeply for many, many months. Valdys, Auri, and the serving staff were the only ones she allowed to see her during those stark months. And then, not too many months later, she was killed, snuffed forever out of Auri’s life.
Auri continued to sit for a few more minutes, trying to hold on to her mother’s presence. But, like every time before, it floated away, and all she had left were memories and a vague feeling of warmth in her chest.
All of the questions that she had could only be answered by moving forward. It was finally time to see her home.
She stood, brushing the dirt off of her pants, and headed back toward the camp. She needed no visual markers to find her way back. The path that she walked back was instinctual, burned into her brain and senses with very little effort on her part. It had always been thus with her. As she didn’t need to pay attention to her surroundings, she watched her boots crunch the pine needles beneath her feet, deep in thought.
When she entered the clearing, she noticed an unnatural stillness shimmering in the air. Her muscles tensed as she quickly looked up. There, sitting serenely and calmly, was a huge white wolf. It sat in the very center of the clearing, looking directly at her, watching her . . . seemingly waiting for something.
She didn’t want to wait around and discover what it was waiting for. Perhaps it was hungry and elf was a delicious dish.
She thought quickly and then inched her way slowly toward the knife in her other pack. The wolf whined and she stopped, all senses painfully alert. She watched it warily. It sat on its haunches in the exact same position, watching her with soft, sad, blue eyes.
This she had not expected. She didn’t know what she had expected, but it certainly wasn’t this. Its eyes were so soft and the expression along its muzzle suggested hurt. As if her stretching for her knife was something that was impolite and potential grounds for a break in their friendship.
She deliberated for a long, tense moment and then shakily sunk to her knees. She was pretty good at reading human emotions. She hoped for her sake that she was just as good with wolves.
With a voice barely above a whisper, she called out to it. “I won’t hurt you.” She kept her hands at her sides, fisted against her fear. She wanted to laugh. The idea of her hurting the wolf was ludicrous. She didn’t even know how to shoot an arrow for crying out loud!
She waited for the wolf to charge her, despite the sad look in its blue eyes. When nothing happened, her mind again began to churn. It was more than likely hungry. Weren’t wolves always hungry? The thought made her somewhat nervous. She slowly reached for her pack again and rummaged around for some dried meat. She brought the meat out and tried to hold it very still in her palm, face up. Her hands shook.
The wolf limped slowly forward and she frowned, nearly forgetting her fear in her concern. It was injured. Maybe Liran could help it. Her hand was a little steadier, and she was able to hold it out now without too much shaking. It limped slowly closer to her, its blue eyes holding a disarming mix of warmth and intelligence.
The wolf finally reached her, and gently, carefully, took the meat from her hand. It sat back on its haunches again and chewed, staring at her all the while. She breathed a sigh of relief as she reached carefully into her pack for more. A full wolf belly could only be a good thing. She smiled for the first time at her daring, feeling like she had aged a month in the last few minutes alone. Weren’t elves supposed to be better at this sort of thing? One with nature and all that? She snorted. Perhaps it was another flaw in her human upbringing.
An amused voice sounded behind her. “I wondered where you’d gotten too. Now I see that you prefer the company of this brute.” Liran walked cautiously over to the wolf, and held out his hand. The wolf snuffled it for a moment then turned away and came limping back to Auri’s side. “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” Liran said dryly.
He glanced over at her. “It looks like you found a friend.”
“More like he found me.” She grimaced. “He sat here, waiting calmly for me to return from the stream. I thought he was going to attack me.”
Liran nodded, suddenly avoiding her eyes. He piled the wood from his arms into the pit with stones, and went over to his pack. She followed his movements with suspicion. He was keeping something from her. . .
“Liran?”
“Yes?” His voice was overly casual.
“Why was there a white wolf waiting here for me?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“You couldn’t say or you won’t say?”
He sighed. “Won’t say. It’s only a suspicion anyway.” He finally met her eyes again. The expression in them was even more cautious than before.
She glared at him. His lips twitched, fighting a smile. “Sorry.”
“You don’t look sorry,” she muttered under her breath. Her glance went back to the wolf still chewing the second handful of meat that she had given him. He looked like he was hurt in more places than just his paw. “He’s hurt. Can you heal him?”
Liran quickly got the fire started then knelt gracefully by the wolf and slowly ran gentle fingers over his chest and torso. A bit of blood smeared onto his palm. “He’s got a few deep gouges here.” He pointed at the raw marks on the wolf’s chest. “Nothing that I can’t take care of.”
He gave the same soft-touched examination to the rest of the wolf, finishing up with its right paw. “There’s some blood here as well, but I believe it’s mostly just been twisted wrong. I’ll have to treat the cuts and gouge marks and then wrap this.” He drew his pack close to him and started searching through it.
Taking a calming breath, she reached forward and stroked the wolf’s white fur. She was surprised. It felt unlike any animal fur that she had ever felt before. It was silky, warm and plush. She trailed her fingers through its thick length, amazed by how long it was. About half a hand’s length. Perhaps that was the reason for its silky texture. There was simply so much of it.
The wolf put its nose into her palm and snuffled it. She smiled; his nose tickled. He bounded forward then, nearly knocking her over, and licked her face and neck until he had her laughing hysterically. He rolled around in the dirt with her, licking every spare inch of skin that he could find. “All right, enough!” she finally gasped. “It wasn’t so long ago that I thought you were going to eat me.” The wolf whined, looking very affronted, and she laughed again.
Liran came over to them, shaking his head and smiling bemusedly. “Could you get me some water? His cuts need to be washed first before I can put the ointment on and bind his paw.” She nodded, laughing again as the wolf kept swiping his tongue over her face.
“I need to get something. I’ll be right back,” she told him as she gently pushed him away from her and rummaged in her pack for her silver drinking cup.
She only got a few paces down the path before a frantic canine yelp, a rough shout, and a loud crash sounded behind her. She spun around on her heels, took in the scene before her, and started to laugh.
Liran was flattened in the dirt. He had a half bewildered, half startled look on his face. The wolf was hurriedly limping after her. She chuckled again, hardly unable to stop herself, before she turned around and headed back toward the stream, this time with the wolf right on her heels. “Sorry, Liran. I think he prefers my company to yours. . .”
Chapter Eight- The Gates of Bremgar
Nachal woke instantly. One moment he was sleeping, the next wide awake. His body jerked in pain even before his brain remembered why. Then it hit him, and he did remember: ashes and soot, pain and loss. The pain of his body he could handle, but the pain in his heart. . . It clogged his throat. Tears ran down the sides of his face, dripping to the dirt.
He sighed and scrubbed at his face. It was one thing to train for a war th
at you knew was coming and another entirely to be out in it, seeing the effects, seeing the loss for yourself. There was no mercy in Obsidian’s war against the Dragons of Light. No leniency. No honor. And that was something that he was just going to have to deal with because it wasn’t going to change.
He rose slowly, giving his body time to adjust to his new position. His body ached. Pain throbbed down it, flaring intensely whenever he moved. He wasn’t surprised—he had put it through a fifty foot drop, illness, and burns that covered what came close to a quarter of his skin, and all of that with precious little sleep. He was only surprised that he could still sit up at all. He panted as the pain slowly ebbed to a manageable level, and then he rose shakily.
His knees and legs stayed strong beneath him as he stood, adjusting his position again. He sighed, gasped as he reached for all of his things, and then groaned aloud as he straightened. When he had everything loaded and his water skins refilled, he walked away. Bremgar was many days west and then south; he needed to keep moving.
Days passed. He hunted when he ran low on food and foraged when he couldn’t take the time to hunt. In summertime, there was always fruit and other edible plants that he could pick from and manage to stay fed. It wasn’t a feast, but it worked. He found himself foraging more and hunting less. Time. It stalked him like he was the prey, and he didn’t want to waste it on things that he could easily do without.
His body was slowly healing. The burns and scrapes were scabbed over with new, shiny, pink skin. His ankle was better as well. It still wasn’t completely sound, but it was definitely better. His heart, however, still burned with pain. It refused to heal.
His mind flashed between images of Auri in the dream and images of the town going up in flames and, somehow, inside of him, they felt like they were one and the same. He knew it wasn’t true, but with every breath that exited and entered his chest, every second that ticked by, every day that passed, every night that he spent alone staring up at the stars, he felt her. She had burrowed into his heart and mind, into his whole life, and all without even trying.
Indeed, without even knowing.
Almost a fortnight passed. His ankle and body were now completely sound, so he had started running. When he stopped to rest at night, his mind churned, spewing things that he didn’t want to think about anymore. They pummeled him again and again. Relentless. Persistent. Finally, he closed his eyes and dreamed. Of course he dreamed of her. . .
His eyes snapped open to darkness. His heart raced. He buried his hands in his hair, groaning as realization dawned. Just a dream. . . It was just a dream. . .
What was wrong with him? Why couldn’t she just leave him alone? He wiped the wet from his face onto his shirt and started packing his things. He didn’t care if it wasn’t light yet. He couldn’t just sit there in the dark and mourn a person he’d never met before. He refused.
Several days passed in monotony. The scenery had started to change a few days past. The forest had, for the most part, given way to grassy slopes and hills, dotted sparsely with rough-barked trees. He only had a few days more—by his estimations and by what he remembered of Dhurmic’s long ago instructions—before he reached the entrance to Bremgar.
He half walked, half ran for another two endless days before he entered the pass through the Gimrothlen Peaks. Massive mountains stood like sentinels on either side of him, the tops of which he couldn’t see. The mountains narrowed inward, squeezing the pass into just one solitary strip of land that sloped slowly and steadily downward.
He stopped as he suddenly saw it in the distance: Atgar Lake. And just past the lake were the Towers of Bremgar. He smiled tightly and jogged for the next few hours until he reached the water.
Atgar Lake was massive. It went on for miles and miles in either direction, as far as his eyes could see. The bridge to cross it was huge as well. Wide—probably thirty feet wide—it arched slightly up and then out of his range of sight.
He shook his head at the construct; only the dwarves could have made this. Only they had such skill with stone-crafting. He watched as his feet left the dirt path and trod down onto the first step of the bridge. He watched the step because he was expecting it. He wasn’t disappointed. It felt like leaving the familiar, the relatively new, and stepping into the deepest annals of history. The pages that were never written because they were only told in story. In legend.
He felt the timelessness in the air all around him and from the water below him. It whispered to him, piercing the hollow emptiness that he had felt since he had left Tristan in ashes, awakening something precious inside of him: complete wonder.
He looked to his right and left and found massive statues, at least twenty feet high. One was of a Brulna Bear. It was made from a precious stone, brown in color, with striations of golden-yellow running through it. It towered over him as he stepped closer. It was menacing, mouth open wide, teeth bared, claws extended. He reached out to touch the base of it and found that it was smooth and cool to the touch. It looked so warm standing there, so vibrantly real and dangerous. He had almost expected it to feel warm too. But it didn’t; it was just stone after all.
He left the bear and crossed to the other statue at the entrance, and an entirely different feeling pierced him. This one was quieter, less menacing than the bear, but . . . more devastating. It was a white wolf, shivering on a plinth of snow.
His vision was pulled, sucked, to the wolf’s eyes. They were a crystalline ice-blue. It was easy to see the pain in them, easy to see the loss. But what stood out to him the most in those ice-blue eyes was determination. Determination despite pain. Determination despite loss. Determination such as he himself had never experienced before. It made him feel paltry in comparison. Like a lesser being amongst immortals.
Something twisted inside of him. It felt like a door slamming shut. He shivered violently, unable to shake the feeling that it was exactly that: a door being shut inside of him, refusing him entrance because he was undeserving. As he walked away, he kept looking back. He passed many more statues—the whole length of the several miles of bridge had them—but none of them held his mind in thrall like the eyes of the white wolf. None of them even came close.
He couldn’t guess what any of it meant. He only knew that he felt more here, aside from toward Auri, than he had in his entire life. There were so many things that he was feeling that it was hard to label just one. His feet traveled another mile in silence before he could bring his thoughts and feelings in line with one another.
One part of him, the soldier part, couldn’t help but appreciate how utterly implacable their defenses were. They had impassable mountains on two sides, an ocean at their backs, and a deep lake at their front, a lake that covered the entire area with the only access by bridge. A bridge that they controlled.
Another part of him felt the wonder of being this close to Bremgar. Bremgar was a closed kingdom, much like El`ness Nahrral. There were no stories of any human ever entering its gates. No stories of anyone even coming close. So there was wonder inside of him as he looked around. This feeling of being able to see something, to look upon something, that no human ever had before.
Finally, there were the animals that lined the bridge: one animal really. He glanced back even though he knew he couldn’t see it anymore. But if he closed his eyes it was still there, hounding him with its determination and focus, looking at him as though in disdain. As though it was asking a question that he didn’t have the answer to; a question that he would never have the answer to. It was a cold feeling, the not knowing. As cold as the snow that the wolf had stood on.
The cold feeling continued as he made his way down the several miles of stone bridge. The bridge ended suddenly, spilling onto a stone courtyard. Above him, two huge, stone doors rose vertically up to the sky, intimidating him with their sheer size. Above the gates, on each end, was a stone tower. And in each tower was a dwarf.
It was hard to see them from this far away. They stood like the statues on th
e bridge, still and silent. For a moment, he thought they were like the statues on the bridge, only stone, but then one moved—a slight angling of his neck downward—and he felt fiery eyes pierce him where he stood.
“What business have ye with the dwarves? His voice was deep, like a bass drum, hard to understand because of his thick brogue, and very curt.
“I am seeking one from within your gates,” Nachal called up to him. “His name is Dhurmic of the Clan Brulna. The matter is urgent.”
The dwarf from the other tower spoke. “And how know we that ye will not attempt to slay him should ye meet with him?”
He was stumped. How did you prove that you had no harmful intentions to a race that was hostile to any but their own kind and expected hostility in return? You didn’t. He began to pray silently. He needed Dhurmic with him. For some reason, he felt like he couldn’t pull this off without him. He wouldn’t be able to get to Auri to save her.
“You don’t,” he said quietly. He looked up, trying to think. And then he did the only thing he could . . . he told them the story of how he and Dhurmic met. He told them about the pranks that they had pulled on each other, and the brawls that they always seemed to get into with each other. He told them about their life at The Hall for the two years and that they had practically been brothers. Mostly, he told them about Dhurmic’s harrowing escapes. Dhurmic had always seemed to manage to offend someone at least once a day. The result usually involved a hunt for his blood, and him narrowly escaping with his life. He was good at that sort of thing. That’s why Nachal needed him.
He talked for probably an hour, and by the end, his voice was only a croak. A desperate croak, blathering everything and anything that might get him inside those gates. Maybe they would send for Dhurmic just to shut him up. . . Maybe they would come down and cleave his head open just to shut him up.
Dragon Dreams (The Chronicles of Shadow and Light) Book 1 Page 7
