Messah was perched on a branch overhead. He reached out to Bumbo, who still seemed content, and in the same direction and distance as last night. Grundel must still be waiting on Frau and the rest of the dwarves. He was happy everyone was still okay, he was excited about everything he was learning, and he was exhausted. He linked with the earth, the chairs shrank back down into the ground, and he lay down and went to sleep.
The next morning Rundo woke up to a fox nudging him. He immediately sensed that the aura of the fox was actually that of Evelyn. “Do you never sleep?” he asked, climbing to his feet. Evelyn shifted back into herself. There she was again, standing in front of him naked.
She saw him look away. “When you shift your clothes will almost always fall off or tear. It is best to be naked. If you ever go to a druid community you will need to get used to nudity. In a community of druids many don’t wear clothes at all.”
“I will try to remember that,” he said, but she was already walking over behind a tree and slipping back into her clothes. His head was turned but he couldn’t stop his eyes from trying to see. He hadn’t really gotten to know Evelyn that well. He knew she was a good person and her aura was genuine, but he hadn’t talked to her much about her. The fact that he didn’t know her didn’t take away from the fact he found her attractive and had seen her naked. He thought that at his age he would be past adolescent feelings like this, but apparently he wasn’t.
Evelyn walked back over to him. “Are you ready to get started?”
“As ready as I am going to be,” he answered.
“Okay, I’ll start by explaining what shifting is. Shifting is like linking with the earth and making an earth golem, except you are tapping into your own aura and manipulating it. The more you shift the easier it becomes, but it takes time and practice to learn something new. I can shift into something I am not really familiar with, but there will be things I don’t manipulate properly. Since the thing I think you are most familiar with would be Messah, I suggest you attempt to shift using her. Don’t try to turn into her. For right now, just work on the hand. Study her talons. When you are ready look into yourself, find your own aura, isolate your hand, and attempt to change it.”
Rundo called to Messah through the link. She came and landed on his shoulder. He was pretty familiar with her. He could picture everything about her in his mind without seeing her, but he looked at her talons anyway. When he was confortable he focused on himself. He was able to find his own aura easily enough, but isolating his hand was harder. He spent hours trying to isolate just his hand from the rest of his aura, but it was all merged. Evelyn gave him tips and encouragement from the side. When he finally did it he looked at Evelyn. By the smile she gave him, the look on his face must have given away that he had finally done it.
He started trying to shift his hand, but his mind wouldn’t let him. He knew what his hand felt like. It was like he was trying to trick his own mind. That gave him an idea. He reached into his link with Messah. He could see and feel her body the way she did. His hand began to shift. He looked at his other hand. Then he had an idea. He almost went for it, but Evelyn’s warning rang out in his mind. He shifted his hands back to normal. Evelyn began to congratulate him, but he held up a finger. She was staring at him, obviously intrigued, when he began stripping off his clothes right there, his excitement and pure stubbornness overruling his discomfort. He was standing there naked next to his clothes with Evelyn watching him, but he wasn’t thinking about that. He found his own aura again and then reached through the link again. He watched as his arms became wings. He looked down and his toes were changing into talons. His whole body shifted. The shift was almost complete, but he knew what was missing. He closed his eyes and when he opened them he saw through the eyes of a hawk. He had looked through Messah’s eyes quite a bit over the last couple of months so it wasn’t awkward any longer. He felt Messah through their bond. She was excited. She wanted to fly. He was huge. There wasn’t a bird around that was going to mess with him. He had been linked with Messah enough to understand how she flew, but he had never actually flown—he had never actually controlled her body.
He watched Messah take off and imitated her. He flapped his wings hard, lifting himself off the ground. He followed her into the air. It was difficult at first to control the wings, but after a few minutes he got used to it. The takeoff was the hard part. Once he was in the air he just used his wings to change his elevation. He didn’t have to work nearly as hard to keep flying as he did to start. A couple of flaps would lift him up, and then he could just stretch his wings and glide. Messah felt his excitement through the bond, and he felt hers. This was a bonding experience for them, something they could share in. He sensed her and looked down through his bird eyes. He could see a mile with these eyes. Evelyn was a hawk, too. She was flying toward them. He turned his body, lowering his right wing, and banked hard. He began flapping his wings and rising higher into the sky. He looked back again to see her trying to catch him. Messah had no trouble. Even with his much longer wings she had much more experience. Evelyn was gaining on him, but slowly. He tucked his wings back some and dove forward away from her. For at least an hour the three of them flew. They chased each other for a while and then eventually they just soared, gliding back toward where they had taken off from. Rundo wasn’t quite sure where exactly that was. Evelyn got in front and got them close, but she, too, wasn’t exactly sure. Messah felt his confusion through the bond. She had no trouble finding her way back, so the two huge hawks followed the smaller one. Rundo thought that taking off had been the hardest part, but landing proved to be much harder. He flapped his wings hard, trying not to land too abruptly, but he would just lift back away from the ground. Finally on his third try he managed to land. He kicked up all kinds of dirt in the process, though.
Rundo manipulated his aura again, and then he was standing there, naked and laughing. Evelyn was laughing as well.
“That was the most fun I have had in a long time,” she told him.
“Me, too. It has been too long since I had fun. Messah enjoyed it, too,” he told her.
“She helped you somehow, didn’t she? When you were shifting. After you figured out the talons you figured the rest out too quickly on your own.”
Rundo nodded. “Yes, I was having trouble trying to figure out what it would feel like. I felt like I was trying to trick myself, then I linked with her to see how she felt, and I could feel it all.”
“That was good. You won’t always be able to do that, but it was a clever way of figuring it out. Now that you have shifted it will be easier to convince yourself you can do it. Let’s take a break for now. You can work on it more tomorrow.”
The spent the rest of the day talking, getting to know each other better. She talked to him more about her experiences as a druid. She had grown up in a druid community. Her parents had both been druids. Her father hadn’t been very skilled, but he was dedicated. Her mother was more skilled but cared more about her father then being a druid. It had all balanced out.
That night when he reached out to Bumbo he realized that he was farther away, quite a bit farther. The dwarves must have started towards Shinestone this morning. He had been so caught up in everything today that he hadn’t even been paying attention to his link with Bumbo.
He and Evelyn were lying on the ground, staring up into the trees. “Tomorrow will be my last day. The dwarves started toward Shinestone this morning. I can stay tomorrow, but the next morning I will have to go, so I can catch up with them before they reach Shinestone.”
“Wait, isn’t Shinestone that mountain where the dwarves used to live?” she asked as she sat up and looked over at him.
“It is. The dwarves are going back to retake it,” Rundo told her.
“You can’t go there. Orcs have constantly been moving through this area toward there. That is why we are here. There are druids from my community spread out among these woods in case the orcs start cutting them down or trying to stick around. W
e’re here to protect these woods.”
The fact that she knew about the orcs and Shinestone was surprising. The fact that he hadn’t figured out that she wasn’t just living here made him feel a little foolish.
“I have to go—they are my friends. The orcs that have moved into the mountain are just what is left of the orcs we already beat. They are the ones who escaped after they attacked the other dwarf homeland. Those are the orcs I was telling you about when I told you I summoned the earth golem for the first time.”
Evelyn’s shoulders slouched and she looked down. She was defeated and she knew it. “Your loyalty to your friends is honorable. They are lucky to have you. I hope that you will all make it through this safely.”
“We will be fine; don’t worry. We have dealt with a lot worse than orcs in the last few months. Once everything settles down I would like to continue learning, though. How long will you be here?” he asked.
“I cannot say. Whenever they say the threat has passed we will return to the community. Druids often live alone in the wild, but a druid community is fascinating. I enjoy solitude sometimes, but I could imagine what it would like not being able to return there. If you ever want to continue you should go there.”
“Where is the community? What is it called?”
She looked at him. “Our community is in the great oak forest. It is a couple of days’ walk to the south and east of the city of Ambar. If you find the forest you will find the community. The life of the forest will guide you there.”
Rundo looked at her. He could see that just talking about the place made her happy. He really would like to see it, but now just wasn’t the time. “One day,” he said as he lay back down.
“One day,” he heard her say.
The next day was spent practicing shifting. It was substantially harder without the intimacy of his bond. It took him the entire day, but he finally was able to shift into the whole form of her fox. The only thing he wasn’t able to get was the eyes. He had been able to get Messah’s eyes, because he had seen through them. He had taken the form of a fox, and he had even managed to shrink himself down to normal fox size, but he was never able to get the eyes. Finally they called it a day. She told him how well he had done, but her encouragements seemed stale. The whole day had dragged on, since they both knew Rundo would gave to leave to fight orcs in the morning. That night they didn’t talk much.
Rundo woke up in the morning to find Evelyn spinning some kind of large bird over the fire on a spit. “I didn’t want you to leave without a full belly,” she said.
Rundo recognized what she was doing. She wanted to end things between them on a happy note. He agreed that it was the best way. “We wouldn’t want that. I might just have to trust my ability with plants and hope the ones I chose weren’t poisonous.”
Rundo ate the bird and some wild onions that she had gathered. Then he collected his things. “Thank you, Evelyn. I had a great time. You are an amazing teacher.”
“Be safe,” she said, and then she grabbed his face with both hands and kissed him. “You know where to find me.” Before he could respond, she was running into the woods with her fox at her side.
“Well how about that?” he asked Messah. She didn’t respond, so he started walking in the direction of Bumbo.
Chapter Eleven
Under Dungin Mountain
Fredin woke with his wounds mostly healed. The cuts were still there, but they were already scabbing over. The wound in his side was completely healed, though it was still sore. The hole in his arm was mostly healed as well.
Hure explained to him that Vingaza had used some kind of magic spell on him. She had watched as the minor wounds healed completely and the major one shrank before her eyes. It wasn’t until she had finished explaining everything to him that he realized that she was injured. There was a puncture wound that went straight through her arm. He knew without asking what had happened but he asked anyway.
“One of the javelins punched through your shield?”
Hure shrugged at him as if it wasn’t important. In reality it wasn’t, but he had decided to acknowledge it. “Why didn’t he heal you?”
“He said healing isn’t his kind of magic. He used the only spell he had on you. He said that he didn’t know it well enough to use it more than once at a time,” Hure explained to him.
He wasn’t sure if he believed the wizard, but he didn’t really know anything about magic, so he couldn’t really argue. The wizard had helped him. Fredin didn’t have a choice but to be seen now, and if he had appeared weak and wounded, he would have had to fight off a number of challenges. If his son were still alive he wouldn’t have to worry about it, but since he wasn’t, this was the way it was. Hure would help him with that problem. His grandson was already on his way as well. For now he was mostly healed, and there wasn’t an orc alive who could defeat him.
Now Gescheit was telling him about an orc tribe marching toward Dungin Mountain. Fredin would go and meet them at the entrance. It was a good thing that he was healed. A new clan would likely mean a new challenge. He actually intended to somehow force a challenge. It was his goal to have all the orcs in the mountain united under him.
Gescheit and Vingaza followed. It wasn’t lost on him that the human had been staying closer since he had come back from the fight with the kobolds. Fredin had led the attack to push them back, and once the orcs had them on the run with a constant flow of reinforcements, it had been easy enough to defeat them. Fredin had lost somewhere between five hundred and a thousand orcs in the attack. It was much more then they should have, but the kobolds were fast and could get those javelins in the air before you even saw them. They had killed or forced all the kobolds into lower levels, and the wizards had collapsed the tunnels. Fredin had constant patrols on that level now. If anything tried to tunnel up from under the mountain they would not be caught off guard again. But he didn’t need to worry about that now. Now he stood outside the entrance of his mountain while the four ranks of an orc clan came toward him.
Fredin stood and watched while the orcs slowly moved toward him. He had Hure, Gescheit, Vingaza, and a thousand orcs behind him. The orc clan stopped about a hundred paces away from him.
“Fredin Dungin, I challenge,” said an average-sized orc as he walked out in front of the rest of the clan. Fredin just smiled and waited. In one hand the orc had a simple wooden club. In his other hand was a banded wooden shield. When he was about thirty paces away the orc began sprinting toward him. At fifteen paces the orc brought his club back behind him and raised his shield in front of him. At ten paces Fredin reached back over his shoulder and wrapped his hands around his greatsword. He could feel the tightness in his damaged muscles, but it was a pain that felt good. When the orc was almost upon him, Fredin pulled the sword free of his back, and in the same motion he came down with it, throwing his weight behind the blow. He was on one knee in less then a second. His sword had dug into the shield, forcing it down as the end of the blade continued down into the orc’s shoulder. With the amount of force he had put behind that blow the blade hadn’t stopped there. The other orc was on his knees in front of him in a very unnatural position. Both of his knees were out to the right side of his body in a weird angle. He should be on the ground, but Fredin’s sword caught in the mess of bones in his chest. He stood up and turned his sword, rolling the body onto its back. The orc was dead; his mind just hadn’t figured it out yet. Fredin looked down into the orc’s eyes. He put one foot on one side of the dead orc’s chest and pulled his sword free. Without paying the body any more attention he turned back to the clan that the orc had come from.
“Uncle!” Fredin shouted.
Fredin watched as an orc behind the first rank stood up to his full height. The head lifted up over that of the orc in front of him. The orc in front of him didn’t even come up to his shoulders. He pushed the orc in front of him to the side. Fredin walked forward to greet the only orc in the world that was likely to come close to his own size. They
walked up to each other, and at the last second his uncle’s hands shot out and grabbed the sides of Fredin’s head. Fredin reached up and wrapped his hand around the back of his uncle’s head. Together they slammed their foreheads together, and neither orc wavered. Fredin looked into the eyes of his uncle, which were nearly level with his own.
“Is that all the son of my brother can do?” his uncle taunted him.
Fredin brought his head forward with all of the force he could muster, pulling his uncle’s head toward his own. The force of the blow dazed him, and his uncle stumbled back a step, letting go of him. “Better,” his uncle said with a smile.
“What are you doing here, Uncle?” Fredin asked.
“Some scrawny little orc was running around telling every orc in my area that they should come join the orcs of Dungin Mountain. When I found out that there was a dwarf mountain with my name on it, I had to see it. How did you know it was my clan?”
Fredin smiled at his uncle. “Only Dungin orcs walk in columns. You are the only living Dungin besides me old enough to lead a clan.”
“Your son fell taking the mountain?”
“My son was killed in combat with the king of Evermount. He killed the king in the process. We nearly took the mountain, but a wizard showed up and called lighting and fire down on us.”
The Half Dwarf Prince Trilogy Page 11
