He crouched back low in the grass and watched the scene unfolding before him. He wouldn’t likely see the approach of the cunning elves, of course, but he would know of their arrival by the screams of Clan Yellowtusk’s sacrificed forward warriors.
A moment later, and not so far to the north, one such cry of orc agony rent the air.
Dnark glanced down at Clan Karuck, who continued their methodical encirclement.
Innovindil could only shake her head in dismay to see the dark lines of smoke rising from the northern end of the Moonwood yet again. The orcs were nothing if not stubborn.
Her bow across her saddle before her, the elf brought Sunset up above the treetops, but kept the pegasus low. The forward scouts would engage the orcs before her arrival, no doubt, but she still hoped to get some shots in from above with the element of surprise working for her.
She banked the pegasus left, toward the river, thinking to come around the back of the orc mob so that she could better direct the battle to her companions on the ground. She went even lower as she broke clear of the thick tree line and eased Sunset’s reins, letting the pegasus fly full out. The wind whipped through the elf’s blond locks, her hair and cape flapping out behind her, her eyes tearing from the refreshingly chilly breeze. Her rhythm held perfect, posting smoothly with the rise and fall of her steed’s powerful shoulders, her balance so centered and complete that she seemed an extension of the pegasus rather than a separate being. She let the fingers of one hand feel the fine design of her bow, while her other hand slipped down to brush the feathered fletching of the arrows set in a quiver on the side of her saddle. She rolled an arrow with her fingers, anticipating when she could let it fly for the face of an orc marauder.
Keeping the river on her left and the trees on her right, Innovindil cruised along. She came up on one hillock and had nearly flown over it by the time she noticed carefully camouflaged forms creeping along.
Orcs. South of the fires and the noise. South of the forward scouts.
The veteran elf warrior recognized an ambush when she saw one. A second group of orcs were set to swing against the rear flank of the Moonwood elves, which meant that the noisemakers and fire-starters in the north were nothing more than a diversion.
Innovindil did a quick scan of the forest beyond and the movement before her, and understood the danger. She took up the reins and banked Sunset hard to the right, flying over a copse of trees that left only a short open expanse to the forest proper. She focused on the greater forest ahead, trying to gauge the fight, the location of the orcs and of her people.
Still, the perceptive elf caught the movements around the trees below her, for she could hardly have missed the brutish behemoths scrambling in the leafless copse. They stood twice her height, with shoulders more than thrice her girth.
She saw them, and they saw her, and they rushed around below her, lifting heavy javelins on notched atlatls.
“Fly on, Sunset!” Innovindil cried, recognizing the danger even before one of the missiles soared her way. She pulled back the reins hard, angling her mount higher, and Sunset, understanding the danger, beat his wings with all his strength and speed.
A javelin cracked the air as it flew past, narrowly missing her, and Innovindil couldn’t believe the power behind that throw.
She banked the pegasus left and right, not wanting to present an easy target or a predictable path. She and Sunset had to be at their best in the next few moments, and Innovindil steeled her gaze, ready to meet that challenge.
She couldn’t know that she had been expected, and she was too busy dodging huge javelins to take note of the small flying serpent soaring along the treetops parallel to her.
Chieftain Grguch watched the darting and swerving pegasus with amusement and grudging respect. It quickly became clear to him that the ogres would not take the flying pair down, as his closest advisor had predicted. He turned to the prescient Hakuun then, his smile wide.
“This is why I keep you beside me,” he said, though he doubted that the shaman, deep in the throes of casting a spell he had prepared precisely for that eventuality, even heard him.
The sight of a ridden pegasus over the previous battle with the elves had greatly angered Grguch, for he had thought on that occasion that his ambush had the raiding group fooled. The flyer had precipitated the elves’ escape, Grguch believed, and so he had feared it would happen again—and worse, feared that an elf on high might discover the vulnerable Clan Karuck as well.
Hakuun had given him his answer, and that answer played out in full as the shaman lifted his arms skyward and shouted the last few words of his spell. The air before Hakuun’s lips shuddered, a wave of shocking energy blaring forth, distorting images like a rolling ball of water or extreme heat rising from hot stone.
Hakuun’s spell exploded around the dodging elf and pegasus, the air itself trembling and quaking in shock waves that buffeted and battered both rider and mount.
Hakuun turned a superior expression his beloved chieftain’s way, as if to report simply, “Problem solved.”
Innovindil didn’t know what hit her, and perhaps more importantly, hit Sunset. They held motionless for a heartbeat, sudden, crackling gusts battering them from all sides. Then they were falling, dazed, but only for a short span before Sunset spread his wings and caught the updrafts.
But they were lower again, too near the ground, and with all momentum stolen. No skill, in rider or in mount, could counter that sudden reversal. Luck alone would get them through.
Sunset whinnied in pain and Innovindil felt a jolt behind her leg. She looked down to see a javelin buried deep in the pegasus’s flank, bright blood dripping out on the great steed’s white coat.
“Fly on!” Innovindil implored, for what choice did they have?
Another spear flew past, and another sent Sunset into a sudden turn as it shot up in front of them.
Innovindil hung on for all her life, knuckles whitening, legs clamping the flying horse’s flanks. She wanted to reach back and pull out the javelin, which clearly dragged at the pegasus, but she couldn’t risk it in that moment of frantic twisting and dodging.
The Moonwood rose up before her, dark and inviting, the place she had known as her home for centuries. If she could just get there, the clerics would tend to Sunset.
She got hit hard on the side and nearly thrown from her perch, unexpectedly buffeted by Sunset’s right wing. It hit her again, and the horse dropped suddenly. A javelin had driven through the poor pegasus’s wing, right at the joint.
Innovindil leaned forward, imploring the horse for his own sake and for hers, to fight through the pain.
She got hit again, harder.
Sunset managed to stop thrashing and extend his wings enough to catch the updraft and keep them moving along.
As they left the copse behind, Innovindil believed that they could make it, that her magnificent pegasus had enough determination and fortitude to get them through. She turned again to see to the javelin in Sunset’s flank—or tried to.
For as Innovindil pivoted in her saddle, a fiery pain shot through her side, nearly taking her from consciousness. The elf somehow settled and turned just her head, and realized then that the last buffet she had taken hadn’t been from Sunset’s wing, for a dart of some unknown origin hung from her hip, and she could feel it pulsing with magical energy, beating like a heart and flushing painful acid into her side. The closer line of blood pouring down Sunset’s flank was her own and not the pegasus’s.
Her right leg had gone completely numb, and patches of blackness flitted about her field of vision.
“Fly on,” she murmured to the pegasus, though she knew that every stroke of wings brought agony to her beloved equine friend. But they had to get over the forward elf line. Nothing else mattered.
Valiant Sunset rose up over the nearest trees of the Moonwood, and brave Innovindil called down to her people, who she knew to be moving through the trees. “Flee to the south and west,” she begged in a vo
ice growing weaker by the syllable. “Ambush! Trap!”
Sunset beat his wings again then whinnied in pain and jerked to the left. They couldn’t hold. Somewhere in the back of her mind, in a place caught between consciousness and blackness, Innovindil knew the pegasus could not go on.
She thought that the way before them was clear, but suddenly a large tree loomed where before there had been only empty space. It made no sense to her. She didn’t even begin to think that a wizard might be nearby, casting illusions to deceive her. She was only dimly aware as she and Sunset plowed into the tangle of the large tree, and she felt no real pain as she and the horse crashed in headlong, tumbling and twisting in a bone-crunching descent through the branches and to the ground. At one point she caught a curious sight indeed, though it hardly registered: a little, aged gnome with only slight tufts of white hair above his considerable ears and dressed in beautiful shimmering robes of purple and red sat on a branch, legs crossed at the ankles and rocking childlike back and forth, staring at her with an amused expression.
Delirium, the presage to death, she briefly thought. It had to be.
Sunset hit the ground first, in a twisted and broken heap, and Innovindil fell atop him, her face close to his.
She heard his last breath.
She died atop him.
Back on the hillside, the three orcs lost sight of the elf and her flying horse long before the crash, but they had witnessed the javelin strikes, and had cheered each.
“Clan Karuck!” Dnark said, punching his fist into the air, and daring to believe in that moment of elation and victory that the arrival of the half-ogres and their behemoth kin would indeed deliver all the promises of optimistic Toogwik Tuk. The elves and their flying horses had been a bane to the orcs since they had come south, but would any more dare glide over the fields of the Kingdom of Many-Arrows?
“Karuck,” Toogwik Tuk agreed, clapping the chieftain on the shoulder, and pointing below.
There, Grguch stood tall, arms upraised. “Take them!” the half-ogre cried to his people. “To the forest!”
With a howl and hoot that brought goosebumps to the chieftain and shamans, the warriors of Clan Karuck leaped up from their concealment and ran howling toward the forest. From the small copse to the south came the lumbering ogres, each with a throw-stick resting on one shoulder, a javelin set in its Y, angled forward and up, ready to launch.
The ground shook beneath their charge, and the wind itself retreated before the force of their vicious howls.
“Clan Karuck!” Ung-thol agreed with his two companions. “And may all the world tremble.”
Innovindil’s warning cry had been heard, and her people trusted her judgment enough not to question the command. As word filtered through the trees, the Moonwood elves let fly one last arrow and turned to the southwest, sprinting along from cover to cover. Whatever their anger, whatever the temptation of turning back to strike at the orcs in the north, they would not ignore Innovindil.
And true to their beliefs, within a matter of moments, they heard the roars from the east, and realized the trap that their companion had spied. With expert coordination, they tightened their ranks and moved toward the most defensible ground they could find.
Those farthest to the east, a group of a dozen forest folk, were the first to see the charge of Clan Karuck. The enormous half-breeds ran through the trees with wild abandon and frightening speed.
“Hold them,” the leader of that patrol told her fellow elves.
Several others looked at her incredulously, but from the majority came nothing but determination. The charge was too ferocious. The other elves moving tree to tree would be overrun.
The group settled behind an ancient, broken, weatherworn wall of piled stones. Exchanging grim nods, they set their arrows and crouched low.
The first huge orcs came into sight, but the elves held their shots. More and more appeared behind the lead runners, but the elves did not break, and did not let fly. The battle wasn’t about them, they understood, but about their kin fleeing behind them.
The nearest Clan Karuck warriors were barely five strides from the rock wall when the elves popped up as one, lowered their bows in unison and launched a volley of death.
Orcs shrieked and fell, and the snow before the wall was splattered with red. More arrows went out, but more and more orcs came on. And leaping out before those orcs came a small flaming sphere, and the elves knew what it portended. As one, they crouched and covered against the fireball—one that, in truth, did more damage to the front rank of the charging orcs than to the covering elves, except that it interrupted the stream of the elves’ defense.
Clan Karuck fed on the cries of its dying members. Fear was not known among the warriors, who wanted only to die in the service of Gruumsh and Grguch. In a frenzy they defied the rain of arrows and the burning branches falling from the continuing conflagration on high. Some even grabbed their skewered companions and tugged them along as shields.
Behind the wall, the elves abandoned their bows and drew out long, slender swords. In shining mail and with windblown cloaks, most still trailing wisps of smoke and a couple still burning, they met the charge with splendor, strength, and courage.
But Grguch and his minions overran them and slaughtered them, and their weapons gleamed red, not silver, and their cloaks, weighted with blood, would not flap in the breeze.
Grguch led the warriors through the forest a short distance farther, but he knew that he was traveling on elven ground, where defensive lines of archers would sting his warriors from the tops of hills and the boughs of trees, and where powerful spells would explode without warning. He pulled up and raised his open hand, a signal to halt the charge, then he motioned to the south, sending a trio of ogres forward.
“Take their heads,” he ordered to his orcs, and nodded back to the stone wall. “We’ll pike them along the western bank of the river to remind the faerie folk of their mistake.”
Up ahead, some distance already, an ogre cried out in pain. Grguch nodded his understanding, knowing that the elves would regroup quickly—that they probably already had. He looked around at his charges and grinned.
“To the river,” he ordered, confident that his point had been made, to Clan Karuck and to the three emissaries who had brought them forth from their tunnels under the Spine of the World.
He didn’t know about the fourth non-Karuck onlooker, of course, who had played a role in it all. Jack was back in his Jaculi form, wrapped around the limb of a tree, watching it all unfold around him with mounting curiosity. He would have to have a long talk with Hakuun, and soon, he realized, and he felt a bit of joy then that he had followed Clan Karuck out of the Underdark.
He had long forgotten about the wide world and the fun of mischief.
Besides, he’d never liked elves.
Toogwik Tuk, Ung-thol, and Dnark beamed with toothy grins as they made their way back to orc-held lands.
“We have brought forth the fury of Gruumsh,” Dnark said when the trio stood on the western bank of the Surbrin, looking back east at the Moonwood. The sun was low behind them, dusk falling, and the forest took on a singular appearance, as if its tree line was the defensive wall of an immense castle.
“It will remind King Obould of our true purpose,” Ung-thol posited.
“Or he will be replaced,” said Toogwik Tuk.
The other two didn’t even wince at those words, spoken openly. Not after seeing the cunning, the ferocity, and the power of Grguch and Clan Karuck. Barely twenty feet north of their position, an elf head staked upon a tall pike swayed in the wind.
Albondiel’s heart sank when he spotted the flash of white against the forest ground. At first he thought it just another patch of snow, but as he came around one thick tree and gained a better vantage point, he realized the truth.
Snow didn’t have feathers.
“Hralien,” he called in a voice breaking on every syllable. Time seemed to freeze for the shocked elf, as if half the
day slid by, but in only a few moments, Hralien was at Albondiel’s side.
“Sunset,” Hralien whispered and moved forward.
Albondiel summoned his courage and followed. He knew what they would find.
Innovindil still lay atop the pegasus, her arms wrapped around Sunset’s neck, her face pressed close to his. From Albondiel’s first vantage point when he came around the tree that had abruptly ended Innovindil and Sunset’s flight, the scene was peaceful and serene, almost as if his friend had fallen asleep atop her beloved equine friend. Scanning farther down, though, revealed the truth, revealed the blood and the gigantic javelins, the shattered wings and the magical wound of dissolved flesh behind Innovindil’s hip.
Hralien bent over the dead elf and gently stroked her thick hair, and ran his other hand over the soft and muscled neck of Sunset.
“They were ready for us,” he said.
“Ready?” said Albondiel, shaking his head and wiping the tears from his cheeks. “More than that. They lured us. They anticipated our counterstrike.”
“They are orcs!” Hralien protested, rising fast and turning away.
He brought his arms straight out before him, then slowly moved them out wide to either side then behind him, arching his back and lifting his face to the sky as he went. It was a ritual movement, often used in times of great stress and anguish, and Hralien ended by issuing a high-pitched keen toward the sky, a protest to the gods for the pain visited upon his people that dark day.
He collected himself quickly, his grief thrown out for the moment, and spun back at Albondiel, who still kneeled, stroking Innovindil’s head.
“Orcs,” Hralien said again. “Have they become so sophisticated in their methods?”
“They have always been cunning,” Albondiel replied.
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