Dedication: Here’s a tip for those of you who like to write with symbols and themes; don’t worry too much about them. Just open your mind and write; the symbols will reveal themselves.

I’d like to dedicate this tale to Dr. Louise Malory-Stienspring, Professor of Theater at Texas Tech University, for giving me exactly that advise when I was busy angsting over what kind of act could possibly follow “An Invisible Knife.”

The Healer

Dahlia did not see the swamp-dragon till it had already struck. One heartbeat her hand was rising to show her companion the patch of tiny white-hearted purple flowers that were sovereign cure for allergies and other mistakes of the bodies curative systems, the next her magical shield was bursting from her heart, hurling the young man whose arm she held into the flower bed, before ichorish black-green bile splattered over the field of magic. Then the dragon blotted out the sun and the healer-mage froze like a rabbit espying a viper. It vanished as quickly as it came, leaving only an image of a reptilian body the size of a draft horse with a snakelike neck just as long, and a tail twice as long again; a moment's image of dagger-long, dirty black talons dripping slime and algae, of bat-like wings that could enfold a human family's house, of black-green crocodile hide resembling nothing so much as human bile. The beast disappeared beyond the next hill in the space of a heartbeat, before the startled birds could rise from their trees, but the disjointed images would remain in the healer's mind with crystalline clarity till her dying day.

The next thing to enter Dahlia's mind froze her blood with a horror to make the last fright seem nothing but a passing spider. Jingo, her friend and suitor since before her earliest memory, lay convulsing amid the wilting flowers. The halfling youth's body was covered in strands of slimy, bile-green ichor. The dragon had spat his poison across the entire glade; even now steam rose from streamers of slime coating springs first pristine growth, plants withered and birds dropped from the sky.

Dahlia's shield reflexively vibrated, splattering the sickly bile from its pristine translucent browns and greens. Her numb mind hated the shield for not protecting Jingo, hated herself for not mastering the skills to make it do so, though few her age could even come close. Hated herself for the protection it afforded her while Jingo lay dying.

While Jingo lies dying. The thought struck the healer like a bucket of icy water and she leapt atop her friend, cursed as the shield forced her away, then grappled instinctively to force the shield in tight around her body, like armor, not a bubble. She wrapped her arms around the halfling and flooded him with all the raw life she could channel, then threw her shoulder back to send them both tumbling down the hill. A tiny corner of the taller maiden's mind still hated the shield for cushioning her tumble so that the hill seemed a feather mattress the stones and roots pillows, for making the tree they crushed into and twisted around to continue tumbling little more than a child's fist while her spirit sight could clearly see her friends bones cracking, blood-vessels rupturing.

The stream closed over them, icy cold and murky from spring runoff, and for an instant reality was stolen as the blackness closed over her. There was only the spirit of the boy above her, whites of purity, yellows of mischief, golds of budding masculinity, all more felt than seen. She could feel his pain and fear as if her own, feel the poison's black's and reds invading his lungs, his skin, rotting tissue like gangrene, reaching out for his hart, his mind, rotting through body into spirit, grasping like razors to sever the connections to his soul.

Yet talk of colors made it all seem so dry and impersonal. This was Jingo above her, communicating to her in a way almost as intimate as lovemaking. She was giving him herself, as his dwindling spirit gave the same to her. Her gratitude that as children he treated her like a brother despite her human parent, that in their blossoming he treated her like a maiden and a friend; to him she was neither littler than the big folk or bigger than the little folk, she was only Dahlia. The way she loved him for it. He alone among all the village youths, even the few other halflingkin, had turned aside from the spring equinox revels to help her gather the herbs of power on this, the day of fertility, when life was strongest.

Dahlia reached deep into the earth, drawing the rich energy of this day, more and more till her body screamed at the power coursing through it, fanning the flames of Jingo's fading spirit, awakening his immune system beyond the levels where it would normally rebel and destroy, all of it futile. She had no power to destroy the poison, barley even a whisper of the ability required to shield his vital centers from it, but shield him she did.

Then, as Dahlia gasped at the effort, her mouth filled with water. The stream had filtered through her contracted shield completely. As the maiden choked she forced her halfling irises to dilate farther open than any human's could, but could see no hint of whether or not her friend was clean. His body was now dying as quickly from the lack of air as from the poison. The halflingkin begged her body for the strength she needed, flooding her blood with adrenaline, to heave herself upright, hoist her friend above the water, and struggle to shore.

Jingo was soaked and blue from cold, but his clothes and body were clear of bile. The halflingkin maiden flexed her will and his lungs contracted, spewing out water. She fed his body power and it filled with heat, fed his lungs and they gasped all the good things from the air.

She didn't hear them, but latter Dahlia would remember the sounds of the dragon roaring, of the whistle of slings and the thrum of bows and crossbows. Then the thunder-like roar of her grandmother’s magic, charging a stone with power till it exploded, perforating the beast with shards of rock. Again and again the roar would ring out, and then the hills would shake as the wyrm crashed to the ground.

But she did not hear it; there was only Jingo and the malevolent corruption of the venom infusing his system. More vile than any disease, it existed only to destroy, motivated not even by procreation. It had suffused the halflings system. It struck against the boy’s heart, and she sent the heart all the power she could to beat it back, it attacked the kidneys and she did the same. Constantly the war raged, silver and green and brown attacking black and red and bileish yellow. The venom writhed within her friend and nothing she could do would more than hold it at bay.

As the minutes stretched by Dahlia's body began to burn, to shiver. Her heart pounded like a marathon runner, bruises began to purple her light brown skin, her breath came faster and faster but it was never enough. I'm killing myself, a quite voice whispered; I'm going to scour the life from my body if I don't release the power.

But like the now long past battle that voice went unheard.

Something wrapped its hands around the maiden, tried to pull her away from her patient, but Dahlia's raw arms convulsed around Jingo's waist. She would not let him die!

Then a soft, calm presence slid into her being, loving and gentle but ancient and stern. I am here now, granddaughter, you do it this way. Power slid into Jingo's body through the channels of her own, vibrant with the strength of two hundred years channeling the earth’s magic, a hill to her pebble, granite to her sandstone. Streams of brown and gray found the poison, enveloped it, and petrified it into harmless dust. Then green of life suffused Jingo to each individual cell, compressed the dead ones into microscopic gravel and granted the living strength enough to replace the dead in seconds.

Then the power entered Dahlia, soothing cool blue to blunt her screaming nerves, walls of organic stone mending blood vessels, then filled by cells. Pulverizing the blood within bruises, forcing it out through sweating pours. The silver of feminine power found her tattered spirit and reminded it of the patterns it was meant to hold, filled those wounds with earth power till her nature could transmute it into her own aura.

Sleep now.

* * *

It was three days of near constant sleeping and eating before Dahlia roused enough to learn what had happened. The dragon was not a lone hunter from the swamps to the east, but the vanguard of a plague of monsters. Even as she'd been carried towards her home reptilian raiders struck. The now alert halflings had melted away without any further losses, harrying the monstrous lizard-warriors from ambush long enough for the few human shepherds and dwarven miners of the village to reach the shelter of their halfling-style underground homes with much of their livestock intact. Old Maigin Sixtoes had smacked the dragon on the nose to buy his grandchildren and their friends time to escape and been bitten in half for his heroism. Rina Flickerstep, not five years older than Dahlia and glowing from her engagement, and Kyle Witherspoon, hulking even by human standards, had succumbed to the poison before Granny Featherfoot could reach them.

And as if fate were not satisfied with blood Dahlia's beautiful sung-wood quarterstaff, a weapon powerful enough to put her on an equal footing with the weaker of the big folk, had been lost in the chaos.

Now they huddled within their underground homes, nailing shut and barricading or even collapsing the outside doors and communicating with each other through back door tunnels. The sheriff and his deputies would slip out to scout every few eight-days, always finding reptilian camps above, or swamp-dragons hunting the night. One deputy, Shilo Underhill, was almost killed by a giant snake, and whispers spoke of even viler things disgorged from the swamps corrupted heart, a legacy of horrors left by the Unseelie Elves who'd been driven away so long ago.

Messengers moved through back tunnels and old mine shafts to the neighboring villages, finding that the plague had spread across the eastern half of the Carlishar hills. Rumors said they raged across the swamp's other side as well, into the kingdom of Elithiira and across to the sacred valley where Aramina, true daughter of the eight faces of the divine, taught and worked miracles of healing beyond any mortal mages power. The surrounding provinces would not stay silent long. The elfkin king would call for war, would break these beasts with elven magic and human numbers. The Church of the Lords and Ladies would bring crusaders from far and wide. They need only wait.

Dahlia's human mother, once a traveling carnival girl, pushed her skills as minstrel, juggler, comic, and acrobat to the limit keeping the people distracted and sane, while her father and others who had gone roving wrung out their minds for stories they hadn't exhausted during the winter. Bored halflings pushed their pranks and question games to the point where human and dwarven victims who would have gleefully laughed them off a month ago were ready to do murder. Bored cooks prepared feast after feast till the sheriff imposed a ration on the food and halflings almost rioted.

Otherwise nicely adjusted dwarves grumbled at the shortage of ale and distance from their clan. The humans had the worst of it, though, what with half the tunnels and houses built so low even Dahlia had to duck. They grew near to madness in conditions halflings considered signal from the gods to take a few months off and snuggle by the fire while the elders and the rovers told tales.

Perhaps it wouldn't have been so bad had this come at midsummer, but with winter barley past Dahlia pined to see the blooming flowers, feel the grass between her fuzzy toes. She tried to sing herself a new staff from roots that roofed one tunnel, but it lacked the vibrance of green leaves and ripe fruit; its power was almost insignificant and it had a thirsty quality, always sucking hungrily at the trickle of power that maintained it; demanding more and more till she burned the thing in frustration and fed it to the mushroom bed.

Mother's songs and father’s tales grew tiresome quickly and the halflingkin found herself spending more and more time with Jingo. They fell into each other’s arms more from boredom than passion and their youthful libidos drove them to make love with a frequency newlyweds would be hard pressed to match. As the eight days passed Dahlia's magic maintained their prowess and soothed their soreness, ‘til even love-play grew dull and Granny Featherfoot muttered about premature marriages and love-blind healers forgetting to shield their womb from their lover’s seed.

Many accounted Dahlia the most sweet tempered and caring maiden in all the Carlishar Hills, but with her courses the tension grew unbearable and even Jingo felt the razor edge of her tongue. Dahlia's quick mind, sociability, and magical empathy gave her vast insight into peoples psyche, insight she usually used to offer comfort and council. Now the sadistic cruelty of the things escaping Dahlia's lips, driving her brothers to tears and Jingo to his knees, sent her fleeing into the deepest tunnels in horror of what she was becoming.

Dahlia's shields began to slip. The emotions of those around her intruded into her spirit, amplifying her tension with their own. Hoping to exhaust herself the maiden began methodically tempering and empowering sling stones, telling herself it was simply a desire to exhaust her self and dull her empathy, but knowing she lied.

When at last she found the courage to make up with Jingo it was as sweet as ever, but inside the knowledge of what she'd done to him, gleefully striking at his deepest insecurities and sorrows, ate at her like a parasitic worm.

With the next council session Dahlia added her voice to the vocal minority calling for guerrilla raids against the invaders.

"Are we Homebodies?" There was no greater insult to Lightfoot Halflings than comparison to their settled, dull as dirt cousins who never got a joke or left their hometown. The sheriff paled when he saw that Dahlia had turned her charisma and empathy against him, fearing an outright rebellion. "Is there a child among us who couldn't tie a ribbon round the tail of one of these lizards and escape unseen? Is an honest sling not weapon enough for you? Well fine, our dwarven friends have brought repeating crossbows that can shoot through a small tree at twenty paces. With a proper stock and shoulder brace I could lean against a tree and fire all seven bolts before the beasts could find me."

"Darius Proudfoot, where are the razor-wire traps you sold the Shalotan border villages? Mina Mungo; whatever happened to your grandmother's tar-pan traps? Our gardens are choking with weeds, our orchards withering for from dragon-bile, our livestock eaten raw by uncouth lizards while we cower beneath our own lands and wait for foreign armies to deliver us. The Tarsins delivered us once. You remember that, Granther Corim, don't you?" The old halfling fingered the stump where his right hand had been. "How they delivered us right into vassalage and forced conversion to the Belisarian religion? Who will deliver us this time?"

The moment the speaker’s-stick left Dahlia's hands the gathering erupted into chaos, shouting of the proud tradition of freedom in the Carlishar Hills, of their favorite trap or most trusted sling, but Granny Featherfoot silenced them all by reaching towards the speaker’s-stick. The old rowan-wood first rolled, then skipped up to flip end over end across the audience, into her hand. The ancient healer spoke in the softest, most solemn of voices, and all strained to hear. "My great-granddaughter and apprentice has spoken of guerilla tactics as practiced by any of you who've ever roved beyond these hallowed halls. All of you who practice them have, at one time, seen foreigners enslaved by orcs or Shallottan, maidens raped, children slaughtered. Think carefully on those people you aided, and remember that your own mothers and nephews and daughters were far away in the safety of these hallowed halls. Now imagine how these reptilians will respond if we make a threat of ourselves. Imagine dragons digging open our homes and spewing venom into our children's beds. Imagine reptilian’s sulking through these tunnels, eating your neighbors alive. Great snakes slipping through our nurseries, swallowing our babes. Imagine all of this and know that we only survive because we aren't worth the effort of digging out.”

* * *

Dahlia spent the better part of the next two days weeping. Everything she did was turning to bile. Once she'd been the first person any in the village turned to for comfort, now she wouldn’t council them if they asked. It seemed everything she did caused pain to those she loved, and that pain was a hundred times worse than her own. She could feel Jingo wanting to comfort her, but couldn't look at him without remembering the shattering she'd felt within him at her horrible words. She could feel his pain at his inability to help her but she couldn't face him. It was the same with her parents and the twin whirlwinds of trouble who were her little brothers.

If things stayed the way they were Dahlia would hurt the people she loved, and if she tried to change them the maiden would hurt the people she loved. There was only one thing left to do.

The second night, once she was sure her family slept, Dahlia slipped a hip pack out of her father's chest. Though he'd tried to keep it a secret she knew he meant it as a gift for her roving. Then the halflingkin maiden snuck to the back of her mother's wardrobe and removed two enchanted throwing daggers in spring-loaded wrist sheathes. Hello, Hu and Tad. Mother said uncle Jo found you in an old barrow, named you Hu and Tad, just like his fists. Said you'd be his fists to protect her as she traveled. I'm slipping out to walk in dark places now, and I'm a whole lot smaller than mom. I never knew big uncle Jo, but will you be his fists to protect me?

Back in her room Dahlia stripped down to panties, breast-cups, and rose quartz on silver chain anklet and strapped Hu and Tad to her wrists, drawing a white blouse over that. Hunter green divided skirts of fine and tightly woven wool gave her freedom enough to move and a well-fitted burgundy bodice snuggled her clothing round the huge chest and wide hips of what her father called a "fine halfling figure."

Dahlia shook her head ruefully in the mirror. In father's stories all roving girls were pretty, and a healer could hardly help but being so, but she looked more like a fertility statue than a maiden gone roving. There was little of the halflingkin's slender mother in her curvy, almost plump, nut-brown body, only the chocolate colored eyes and the dimpling smile. "Well, I'm pretty enough for Jingo, even if I do look more like the Mother than the Maiden or the Warrior, and that'll just have to satisfy anyone who decides to spin a tale about me."

With that the halflingkin donned a pouch-covered sash belt of swirled green and burgundy -sudden changes in color tended to catch the eye- and set about making the pockets bulge. Her sling and three pouch-fulls of stones, some tempered by her magic and a few empowered into weapons deadly as any crossbow bolt, tinderbox and some candle stubs. A folding knife, fish-scaler, and scissors set. A spool of fishing line and small leather case of hooks. A handkerchief, and a small purse of silver and copper coins to match the golden one secreted in the back of her blouse. Into the good leather hip-pack she placed smallclothes and breast cups, blouses and handkerchiefs, a sewing kit and new healer's case. Dried fruit, a fresh journal, a scribe’s kit, and a toy snugly-bear. Lastly twelve bracelets and anklets with rose quartz stones to be made into charms to prevent pregnancy. Those could bring coin and bread in the middle of a draught.

Or a war.

What all am I forgetting? Could I carry more if I knew? What to prepare for? How long till I find an inn, a camp, a store, an untainted garden? What if there's a late snowstorm? If I have to slug through the swamp? If the dragons have poisoned all the food...

What if I keep standing here worrying 'till someone wakes up?

Dahlia donned her thick leather jacket; brown stained with greens and umber, letting it cover the trailing length of her wavy black hair, then took up her old staff. She'd sung this weapon from a tree rather than cutting a branch but it hardly qualified as a weapon of power; magically made but not magical, and she'd grown five inches since she made the weapon, making it far to short. Then the halflingkin slipped soundlessly out into the back tunnels, to a place not far from the side of the hill, and began singing softly to the earth.

Slowly, as the minutes past, a three foot high tunnel spread into the wall, little faster than heavy digging, but safer and easier to collapse. She crawled into the tunnel as it passed five feet long in twice as many minutes, and prepared to begin collapsing it behind her.

"Don't be a fool, girl."

Dahlia turned awkwardly around and glared defiantly at her great-grandmother, who stood erect in the tunnel with her hands on her hips. "I won't do anything to call attention to the village. I'm just going to slip into Elithiira. Armies always need more healers."

The old halfling stared into Dahlia with steely eyes twice as gray as her hair. The nut-brown maiden could feel her aura read, every fear and insecurity and weakness, and her grandmother was about to use them all so deftly that she'd crawl back home weeping.

"Well, I guess there's no stopping you."

Dahlia's jaw worked soundlessly then firmed with resolve. She wouldn't be stopped, would she?

"But that," she pointed to the old staff lying in the tunnel, "will do you less good than a sturdy broom." The old woman drew her staff into the tunnel and pressed it into Dahlia's hands. At least, it looked like Granny Featherfoot's staff, living rowan wood with a few leaves and a sprig of mistletoe at the top. Yet it was longer, four and a half feet as Dahlia preferred to wield, just higher than her poofing bangs and swept back hair. The staff thrummed with earth-power, strength enough to more than compensate for the elderly halfling’s tiny frame, but the connection to its maker was gone. The ancient healer had given a portion of her spirit to the staff to make it a permanents weapon of power. "Take it with my blessing, girl. I pray you'll never need it, but I know better." The old woman's aura stretched out in benediction and embrace before she slipped away.

* * *

The crescent of the moon shone through the trees, broken by a bow covered in cherry blossoms. Her dance partner, a far smaller moon with a particularly azure cast to its crescent arc, hung between the horns of the larger, dancing in her arms. Small, white, night-blooming flowers almost seemed to glow with inner light, argent woven with yellow woven with white covered the ground like snow, matched by the blooms filling the cherry and peach trees that dominated this half-wild orchard. Night birds sang a gentle chorus, disturbed by neither the stalking fox nor the halflingkin emerging soundlessly from her burrow.

Dahlia didn't let herself see anything but the tunnel till it was again hard packed earth covered by even grass, as if sensing that once she did nothing else would matter.

It didn't. Dahlia laughed musically at the beauty around her, halfling eyes drinking in the dim light, turning midnight to evening. She wanted nothing more than sing herself a scanty shift of living leaves, strip off these artificial garments, and dance till dawn. The maiden restrained that impulse but opened her jacket and unlaced her blouse as far as the bodice would allow, baring throat and cleavage to the caress of the night wind. Then she danced, laughing and singing softly at the tickle of grass between her toes, swinging the staff like a dance partner, wishing Jingo were here to celebrate with her, wanting him to see her in the shift of leaves for the first time. Dahlia's joy stretched out, caressing the trees, coaxing new songs from the birds.

Between one spin and the next the Reptilian loomed over her. A detached corner of the healer's mind observed that it looked more like a desert lizard than anything she associated with swamps. The halflingkin's eyes were level with its fang filled maw, but only because the charging creature leaned almost as far forwards as it was tall, balanced there by its more than body length tail. The muscles in its ruffled neck rippled like a giant monitor lizard. Its scales were pebbly like a lizard's but with the raw strength of an alligator's. The creature's distinctly human arms, muscled like a woodcutters, ended in three fingered hands with almost three-inch talons, while its feet were vaguely avian with meat hook claws. One snake-like golden eye studied her while the other was swiveled all the way back to study the night behind it. The charging monster abruptly seemed to topple forwards, head tucked to the side, rolling over it's shoulder, to come to its feet in a complete stop, claws flashing down with the force of the charge still behind them.

Dahlia's scream exploded into the night with the shield, the abruptly closer target foiling the strike, but the lizard barley hesitated at all before tearing at the bubble of earth power with its talons.

The rending of the shield shot up Dahlia's spine like static discharges, giving the shocked maiden her first awareness that two more of the beasts were attacking her from behind. Terror drove the healer to her knees, grasping at grass and gravel as if for comfort while voicing a cry for help as much spiritual as sonic.

The birds answered. A veritable swarm of rival flocks and species racing to the aid of one their primal instincts named as friend. Beaks and talons sought swiveling eyes and lolling tongues, darting forms offering ever shifting targets to claws and tails as the shield collapsed.

Yet Dahlia still huddled there, paralyzed by terror, till she saw a blue jay snapped out of the air by a reptilian’s maw. The tiny echo of the birds death-cry sent flashes of agony through the healer's body and her mind responded with rage that shifted the alchemy of fear, transmuting paralyzing civilized horror to primal strength. The halflingkin's fingers closed over her staff.

The sung wood thrummed with power as Dahlia shot to her feet. As the nut-brown maiden spun into an upward strike the staff amplified her desire, speeding and hardening, striking the reptilian's knee with force enough to bend it sideways. Then Dahlia leapt over the fallen lizard and raced straight into a wild rosebush.

Again the healer cried out for help, silently this time, and with the cry she offered the energy necessary to give the help she desired. The thorn-covered branches parted, forming a tunnel just wide enough for the halflingkin to dart through, then closing to rip at the pursuing lizards. Dahlia made the call a constant flow, pouring into undergrowth ahead of her, pouring back into her subconscious with instructions for waist and feet. The smaller of the lizards foundered in a briar but the larger charged on, crushing through bushes and rolling over stones and logs. Dahlia knew she couldn't keep ahead of it for long, that the spell would quickly grow exhausting.

The nut-brown maiden pretended to stumble, collapsing to the ground and gasping with very real exhaustion. She forced her lips to form a song that served as focus for a new spell, a song extorting the ivy for aid, offering it power, filling it with strength and life.

The plant leapt from tree and boulder to enfold the reptilian, first simply grabbing at it, then binding the thrashing beast like a net, then growing around it, sending fresh creepers between joints, round neck, fresh roots between scales, 'till the beast was bound in a green cocoon.

Dahlia stared for many moments as a numb part of her mind ordered that she tighten the hip pack, walk out her exhaustion, close her jacket, recast her shield, all without ending her horrified contemplation of the beast.

The maiden could feel its fear, its horror at the belief that the ivy was eating it. (It wasn't.) Its desperate flexing of muscles, its even more desperate contemplation, why haven't you killed me yet? You want to savor my fear, don't you? I would. Yours was delicious.

Dahlia found her staff raising, felt the ivy drawing back the monster's head to bare its throat to the killing blow. The reptilian began a low-pitched whine that swelled into a quite keening. The maiden's arms froze. Her hands shook. That thing is a cancer upon this land, over hunting and eating the flesh of intelligent beings. The bones of a family were found up in Braem with theses things teeth marks.

That keen is the way his people cry.

She couldn't do it.

Dahlia drew gently on the energy the earth offered, wincing in exhaustion as a translucent blue beam snaked out of her hand to slide between the creature’s eyes. "Sleep."

The Reptilian shook, fighting against the weariness that oozed through it, but Dahlia offered it peace, forgotten pain, an end to fear, and the monster succumbed, leaning back in the web of ivy.

Behind the nut-brown maiden an owl hooted approvingly. The healer turned to face the large, snowy bird of a breed she wasn't quite familiar with. "You could have helped," she admonished gently.

The owl seemed to laugh friendlily before leaping soundlessly from the branch to be swallowed by the night.

Dahlia moved on quickly then. A blind dwarf could have followed the trail that beast had left, and the all to familiar lethargy of magical exhaustion sank into the halflingkin's bones. Channeling anything more than the gentlest empathic communications now would be mutilating herself as surely as if slashed her wrists with her mother’s daggers. The nut-brown maiden moved properly this time, gliding softly from bush to log to stone. At times she heard twigs snap, or leaves rustle, or simply the birds going quite, and froze as smoothly as if she'd never been moving, as still as if turned to stone, her breath nothing but the night breeze, her stomach's rise and fall concealed beneath the jacket. Dahlia caught site of hunting reptilians sometimes, once one passed so close she could have touched it and a hysterical giggle welled into her throat at the thought of tying a ribbon round its tail. There would be no stabbing these creatures in the back, not with their independently swiveling eyes watching backwards and forwards at once, and she might need a crossbow to make the beast feel pain through those pebbly scales.

As the moons sunk low the patrols came further and further apart, the fear churning Dahlia’s bile began to slowly ebb.

The world darkened as the moons sank beneath the tree line. Then something trembled out of the earth and up her legs, like a tunnel collapsing a few villages over; subtle vibrations only an earthmage would consciously notice, but with them came terror more primal than anything she'd ever experienced. The nut-brown maiden's blood froze as the shaking came again. Halfling instinct drew enough earthpower to freeze her bowels before soiling herself could spread her scent across a half mile of hills and valleys; locked her watering joints in place. The sharp pain behind the maiden's eyes went unfelt by her numb mind and body. It was out there. It was hunting. The trembling grew stronger, rustling leaves and rippling spring pools, ‘til they were almost audible in the crypt-like silence of the night. Footfalls. The steps of a creature larger than any giant, drawing nearer, bringing horror nearer. Empathic waves that communicated absolute mastery, absolute hunger, absolute evil.

It was hunting her!

Dahlia screamed and raced mindlessly through the woods, hurling up her shield to keep back the unseen beast which raced towards her now, pebbles were hurled into the air by the rhythmic crashing, yet there were no snapping branches or crashing trees. That impossible mass, drawing nearer by the instant, was passing through the woods as if it didn’t exist.

Up ahead a moonbeam illuminated the entrance to a badger den and Dahlia leapt into it, more than ready to welcome the grumpy creatures wrath; yet the frightened eyes at the back of the cave were almost welcoming. The halflingkin forced herself to scramble around and face the oncoming beast.

The voice was the most beautiful she’d ever heard, soft as a night breeze and musical as an organ, masculine as a dream-lover and brave as a prince. “Listen carefully and do exactly as I say, for that beast hates and hungers for people like you above all others and only I can hide you. Disperse your shield and spread it out to your left as far as you can.

Dahlia obeyed, blinking tears from her eyes. The maiden saw motes of earthpower drift to her left in a cloud before slowly beginning to cycle back into the world. She was truly defenseless now.

The oncoming monster paused.

“Good, now you have to be still and quite. Bite your jacket so you don’t scream. I’m going to mask your aura but it knows your scent. Think about the most logical, dry, boring thing you can. I used multiplication tables when I was your age.”

Dahlia did as instructed, blinking away tears every few seconds as she asked herself sevens and threes. The trembling grew closer and a head appeared above the canopy of trees, all reptilian muzzle with scimitar fangs and beady, hate filled eyes. While the head seemed a cross between a bulldog and an alligator the neck was slender and supple. The body resembled a Reptilian, a Reptilian taller than the trees, and, while its footsteps struck the earth like thunder, its body passed through the trees like wind leaving behind blackened leaves that curled up and died. Nostrils flared, drinking the wind. The monster bent low and Dahlia swallowed a scream, forced herself not to breath, forced all her trembling into her spine. The monster sniffed deeply at the earth seven feet to her left, yellow fangs curling over a muzzle that could swallow her whole, flowers wilting at its breath.

The monsters head swung slowly left, then right, snuffling like a blacksmith’s bellows. An arm thicker than Dahlia wrapped around a tree and pulled it down. The maiden’s teeth pierced a layer of her jacket to stop from whimpering as the creature listened to panicked birds racing through the air.

Then it simply faded away.

The Lioness

The only man among the crusaders sent from Shallotte to liberate Aramina’s valley who hadn't questioned the newly freed slave's sanity was a nobleman magus who'd become enamored of her white half-sister. They all knew the magus thought it, though.

It began with the word "no." Lydia, the former slave, seemed unable to say it. She stammered, stuttered, spent almost a minute looking quite the fool when asked by her former mistress to bring bacon to flavor the campfire beans. When at last the mocha-skinned woman managed to gasp out the word she convulsed in manic laughter. The two white noblewomen stared at their friend in shock, jaws working soundlessly, as Lydia barked out the word again, her laughter stretching on as tears soaked her smooth brown cheeks, till the blonde women realized they where laughing as well. Minutes latter the three friends where rolling in the dust, barley able to draw breath, as the guffaws converted into sobs, yet it was not former slave who wept this time, but former masters. Lydia stared at them, lost in wracking sobs, and wondered for the first time if her bondage had demeaned them as much as herself.

The noblewomen's names were Quinterra of house Winterstar and Lienessa of house Whitefire, though Lydia abruptly found it easier to call them Quin and Lioness. (The second was a grand joke for, while slave-born warrior and Winterstar paladin were as sleek and powerful as they were beautiful, the sorceress was distinctly petite and delicate, bearing no resemblance to her black half-sister save for a certain height and delicacy of the cheekbones and dimples.)

Then it was hair.

The next morning, just before the crusaders descended into the wooded foothills that began Elithiira proper, Lydia refused Quin's help in brushing her waist length, velvety curls. The men who saw that shook their head in puzzlement, but Quinterra recoiled in horror at the raw chaos in her former slave’s eyes. The paladin found her cheeks dampening as she watched her cursing friend jerk her ivory brush through more tangles than the silver-haired paladin faced in most weeks, realizing that what she'd thought was a friendly morning ritual had effectively enforced her fashion sense upon her best friend. What other hated habits had she forced on Lydia in innocent ignorance? Should she offer to help cut the hair or would that just be another unintended order? How could she have been so blind? How could she talk to her dearest friend when any word could come out as an imperious order; when any preference she expressed could be rejected just to spite "Massa Quinterra?" How could she maker her friend feel loved without making her feel owned?

So they did the only thing they could. Lienessa wished she could say she thought of it, but as usual Quin explained what she knew to be necessary and, deep inside, the tourmaline-eyed sorceress cursed herself for a fool for not thinking of it. They took a full third of their coin, gold and platinum enough to buy a hundred acre farm and a years labor to work it, placed the purse on Lydia's packhorse, and told her all of that was hers.

The silence grew between them; blondes afraid that anything they said would drive Lydia away. Five agonizing days later Quin made the first mistake and Lioness hated herself for tiny corner of her mind that crowed at this proof of the seemingly perfect paladin's fallibility.

There'd been a dwarven metal smith’s shop in the small Elithiiran city, and Lydia walked into their inn room with a new bastard sword slung over her back to replace the one the kobold destroyed. The mocha-skinned swordmaid gave it the same loving contemplation Lioness might have offered a new kitten as it slept. It took the petite sorceress a few moments of contemplation to realize that this was the first weapon that Lydia had ever purchased, a blade bought with her own coin, by her own right.

A few minutes later Quin entered with a dwarf forged bastard sword with a jeweled hilt under her arm and Lydia went pale with rage. The paladin realized her mistake instantly and stammered something about wanting to learn proper use of the bastard sword for heavily armored enemies, and could Lydia please help her? But the mocha skinned woman just glared, tears iridescing in the corners of blazing tawny eyes, before pulling the dagger looted from the kobold out of her sleeve with deliberate slowness, gathering her hair, and slashing it all off at the nape of the neck with a single stroke. Then she stalked out of the room and wasn't seen again till morning.

It was almost enough to make Lienessa forget her own problems at first, but latter made them all the more terrifying. The platinum blonde sorceress had been as fervent a dreamer as any of the Silver Swordmaid’s Tomboys when growing up, but on the crusade she found that, at the core, she was very much the pampered lady. Sleeping on the ground gave her backaches, and she sunburned faster than most people began to darken. The boiled leather that protected her delicate waist, breasts, and womanhood chafed terribly despite the silk shift beneath it. The armor was hotter and stuffier than a royal ball gown at midsummer beneath a fur cloak, and the sorceress swore she was developing a rash. To top that off it reminded the slightly claustrophobic young woman of the corsets larger women wore to imitate her ethereal figure, and how one such garment had almost killed her mother. Likewise the gorget around her delicate throat, though attractively silver plated to dampen the iron alloy beneath, gave Lienessa the insidious feeling that she shouldn't be able to breath while filling her with memories of farm slaves lead to market, all collared to the same rope.

Back in the mountains a group of orc raiders had tested their defenses and the so called Lioness had cowered within her shield, watching the hooting beasts, their features blurred by her poor vision, hurl spears and charge down the mountainside. Somewhere inside a voice chanted the focus for a spell to call a protective whirlwind, deflecting incoming missiles, but her lips were too numb to form the words, her throat too tight, her mind too busy gibbering that they were all about to die.

Lydia and Quin shouted witty insults and lobed crossbows quarrels at the orcs, laughing like it was all grand fun, till a javelin took Quin in the chest.

The sorceress let out a scream as her friend was knocked down, convinced her inaction had killed the paladin, but of course she sprang to her feet and loosed a final bolt at the retreating orcs, her cold iron breastplate had collected it’s first crack.

Lydia woke every morning to a nightmare of the beasts reaching her, or of standing frozen while they tore out the throat of the sister she could not bring herself to acknowledge as such. Only the thought of Quin and Lydia defending her had kept Lienessa from slipping away at the first Elithiiran town they reached. Goddess, what would she do if Lydia left them altogether?

Should she confide these fears to Lydia? Would that help them remember how to share their feelings, to be the friends they were, or would she be met with contempt, deliberately abandoned? Goddess, what a wreck their lives had become!

The weeks stretched on till they didn't speak to each other at all. Handsome Marius was the only solace Lienessa could find; yet the sorceress could see how her affection for a slave baffled him. Nor did she dare confide her terror to the older man, to the veteran battle mage who treated her like an equal, any more than she could wear her spectacles around him, let him know they were for anything but reading.

Four days from the front Lienessa realized that she would never know if Lydia was would abandon them because she was going to do it first. In the town they'd reach tomorrow she was going to resign and sit tight till she could hire a carriage in a caravan to take her home. The ethereal sorceress couldn't endure the nightmares of orcs and reptilians any longer, couldn't stand the certain knowledge that she would freeze again, helpless, and her friends would die. Couldn't bear to face the reality of her cowardice.

The next morning, well before sunup as Quin began to boil the morning porridge, Lienessa found herself moving towards where sat Lydia on her bedroll, recovering from her morning workout. The tourmaline-eyed sorceress couldn't let it end like this, for surely her friend would never return to Shallotte and she would never leave again. She had to say something to her... to her sister. If only to say the word neither of them had ever dared to say.

The seated swordmaid's chocolate eyes went fierce and tawny when the ethereal sorceress arrived. She jerked the new dagger from her chainmail-sleeve and flung herself to her feet, shoulder knocking Lienessa to the ground. The dagger spun furiously, speed amplified by the force of the rising, to lodge in the ruff of a reptilian's neck.

The monster did not fall as the alarm cries went up around the camp. Quinterra's dagger flew true close behind it, piercing the reptilian's chest shallowly before falling out. Lydia hadn't the time to extend a hand or an apology, only to look down with fierce laughter turning her brown eyes to gold. "To battle, shieldmate, I'll guard your casting." Then the mocha-skinned swordmaid raced forwards calling, "The Raven and the Owl!"

As Lioness jerked to a seated position, shield flickering out a moment before a bone-headed javelin bounced from it, her own lips formed the war cry, "Whitefire and Winterstar! The Raven and the Owl!' Raven was the silver warrior’s bird, and owl the champion she sent to aid her knights in Shallotte. The sorceress sprang to her feet as if flying, as if moving in a dream. It was a dream; a fantasy of adventure shared in the basement salon over cordials, not a waking nightmare of screams and steel with death a moment away. Lydia had returned; the trio was whole again. There could be nothing to fear, and Lydia was the Whitefire whose name she cried.

Her shieldmates hit the reptilian from opposite flanks, but it leapt as they approached and spun to lash its tail at Quinterra. The paladin reversed her short, precise fencers steps and jerked her arms high, elbows back, so that the tip of the reptilian's tail whipped noisily over the breastplate. Then the silver-haired paladin skipped in two steps to lunge at the monster's left eye.

In the same moment the reptilian struck downwards with its claws while landing. Lydia tilted her rectangular shield to catch both attacks while her front leg stepped to the lizard’s right. Taking the two blows at such an awkward angle from so powerful a beast crushed Lydia’s arm into her chest, but the mocha-skinned swordsmaid's blade was clear of the tangle; her circling back foot put the whole weight of a six foot woman behind the strike.

It was exactly as the Tomboys had practiced a thousand times. The rapier strike, which most likely would have contacted scales even her enchanted blade would be hard pressed to pierce, forced the beast to flinch away, straight into Lydia's far heavier, and almost as sharp, bastard sword. The blade cleaved a quarter way through the monster's neck, deep enough to reach its air passage, and the reptilian collapsed, blood gushing through its dirty fangs.

Other battle cries pierced the night as reptilians poured from the trees on either side of the what passed for a road in this wilderness kingdom. "The Eagle and the Wolf!" men cried; banner of Shallotte’s paladins of the Golden Warrior. "Shallotte and the Warrior!" "Silver and Gold!" the paladin across the wagons called, acknowledging both Lord and Lady in this endeavor even as he called encouragement to the Tomboys, and, this being a dream, they resolved to thank him with a kiss. Marius's armsmen bellowed, "Razorwind and the Lady!" Still others, "Firehawk and Shallotte!"

A gardener’s throat was ripped out before he could join the other craftsmen and drovers in the center of the wagons. The party’s second magus, the healer, threw a wall of wind around the non-combatants before turning to send a jolt of lightning at the reptilian striking his shield.

As the murderous reptilian moved past the gardener it had slaughtered from behind the a whirlwind abruptly engulfed the monster and gathered grit, condensed into three spiraling, razor thin streamers of air moving near to the speed of sound. These contracted to slice the creature like a ham. Marius Razorwind focused on his house spell, directing it to whip out toward multiple monsters while his two armsmen stood inside his shield, loosing bolt after bolt from their crossbows.

Lioness had her crossbow now and moved to stand in the lee of Lydia as two more reptilians found the ladies, one with a large shield of turtle shell, the other armed with a trident. The ethereal sorceress loosed at the armed monster and watched dispassionately as she missed by a half yard at seven paces. Her eyes were lovely, living tourmalines first bright green, then yellow or gold or even violate, but jewels were poor compensation for a world that resembled abstract art within a yard and beyond a limit of four. Looking back Lioness would curse herself as no true Tomboy, but now she calmly observed that her magic might turn this fight and tuned out her shieldmates enough to focus on the mighty gleam of air power floating on the night wind, reciting formula in Old Reeman. "Warrior wind, true from the east, to my hand I call thee." -The energy flowed through her, into the crossbow bolt- "Take my rage," -Her half-sight focused on the monster's throat, perfectly centered. A questing tentacle of wind power stretched out from the crossbow- "...take my blow," -The Lioness let out a short shriek as her shield shattered. The agony of cold iron, like ice so cold it burned, oozed through her temples in an instant. The emerald-eyed sorceress spun to see a reptilian with blood on its maw raising a Shalotan cold iron mace. Its nostril slits flared to relish her fear as the air-channel dove beneath its chin, - "and to my enemy go!"- and snapped straight!-

Lioness loosed and the Reptilian dropped, crossbow quarrel protruding from the top of its head.

"Earth, water, air, fire, to my soul I call thee. My shelter and sanctuary be!"

Relief escaped the tourmaline-eyed sorceress's throat in a bubbling giggle as a new shield swirled into being around her, then spun to see if her friends still stood.

When the reptilians first struck one caught Quin's rapier thrust on its turtle shell shield and forced the silver-haired paladin back while raking and snapping at Lydia.

Quin maneuvered around the reptilian towards its back, jabbing at neck and back to keep the things attention. She continued ‘round the beasts, taking tail-strikes on her breastplate or hopping over them. Lilac eyes could see Lydia forced further and further onto the defensive, blocking trident strikes with her shield, slashing at claws as they struck to force them back or yielding to the blow so that it could grind over her chainmail.

Then Quin reached the trident wielders left flank and began stabbing at the beasts shoulder over and over. The reptilian disengaged from Lydia and spun to strike at the silver haired paladin, but she circled it as fast as she could, parrying with main gauche and taking a bruising glance on her armored thigh, till the shoulder was a bare patch of muscle with no covering save for the slick sheen of blood.

The circling had stolen all but the most cursory awareness of Quin's surroundings. She was near to dizzy from the circular moving. As the monster slapped its trident perpendicular to protect the shoulder Quin jabbed over the wounded limb, locked her blade with the trident, and shoved in till she forced the monster to straighten up, then swung her main gauche into its belly with all her formidable strength.

The weapon embedded, piercing bowels, but Quin could not bring it to tear the hide and spill the monsters guts. The Reptilian's neck arched down and teeth closed over Quinterra's head as she dropped, scraping off skin and hair, soaking silver with crimson. As the screaming paladin cleared the jaws, dropping into a backwards roll, she saw Lydia's sword take the overbalanced creature in the throat even as the monster with the turtle shell struck from behind to score her shieldmate's cheek.

Rage burned into Quin, awakening the silver flame of her goddess 'till it danced in her lilac eyes. As Lydia tore into two monsters that came at the swordmaids from behind Quin glided calmly towards the reptilian, making deliberately slower than usual strikes at the monster’s eyes.

The reptilian backed away, batting at the slender blade, then abruptly found it was holding the weapon!

Quin's forwards roll brought her inside the creatures guard, jerking daggers from her boots as she went. Silver fire raced up the blades as the paladin drove them into either side of the creature's belly and ripped inwards and downwards.

The lilac-eyed swordmaid heaved the collapsing body aside. It landed atop her rapier.

A javelin in the armored back nearly knocked the silver-haired paladin over as she turned, saw Lydia trying to defend from a reptilian on either side while Lienessa let out a shriek of frustration as a spell, designed to make the monster hesitate by disrupting its biological balance, failed to bring any effect other than a belch for a second time, then chanted madly, calling the North Star to her hand.

The lilac-eyed swordmaid tried to rush to their aid but fell to her knees, muscles cramping, grappling for the air her exhausted body needed to continue. The paladin cursed and struggled for her feet, but they cramped again. So, rather than struggle vainly, Quin let her body go limp and focused on catching her breath, tears of fear that she'd take to long shining in lilac eyes.

Lienessa gathered the glimmer-bolt in her hand, a croquet-ball sized sphere of power that shimmered through hundreds of colors. She could see the sweat coating Lydia's brow, strong hands shaking, tawny eyes loosing focus. Her sister was mere seconds away from a fatal mistake.

"Take this!" The bolt streaked from the Lioness's hands to take a reptilian in the snout, impact blowing a starburst of blood and flesh through the night. The monster bellowed in pain, the eye on her promising death, but it did not slow. "Oh shit," the sorceress sobbed.

Quinterra whimpered as the javelin thrower stalked nearer. Blademaster Vinchento had always instructed her to count three deep, proper breaths, less and she would cramp and be slain, more and the exhaustion would overwhelm her. Each inhalation seemed to take an hour as Lydia's guard grew weaker. The reptilians were toying with the mocha-skinned swordsmaid now, wearing her down deliberately rather than risk a serious assault. Lioness was crying. Six fresh reptilians broke from the tree line and raced across the road to join the fray. Three monsters approached from the right, and to their left a group of men was going down under seven of the beasts. "Not in anyway good," the lilac-eyed swordmaid growled with her third exhalation and rose to her feet, knees steady.

The wall that encircled the camp seemed made of pure, shimmering light. One beast flinched a moment at the spectacle of swirling colors as its claws approached Lydia's throat, giving the mocha skinned swordmaid an instant to bring her own blade in line and gash open the monster’s arm.

Beyond the wall moonbeams solidified into curved blades, two scimitars connected at the hilt, which whirled outwards into the night, vivisecting reptilians and shredding trees.

A lizard raised his spear to impale a young, golden haired paladin when its head flew from its shoulders. The elf was there then, as if he'd been there all along and was only just now being noticed. The smoky quartz of his slender, one-edged hand-and-a-half blade and sleeve shield seemed to ripple from one jewel to another as it echoed the light of the wall. It flashed ruby every time a Reptilian fell, burning in counterpoint to the luminous emeralds that were the fey warrior's eyes. Two of the beasts fell before they could reacted to his presence. A subtle step sideways cleared a trident thrust as three other beasts leapt at the elf only to end tangled with each other, none quite sure how he'd evaded them or when his blade had disemboweled the largest. Next the elf allowed the trident to contact his fluttering cloak and be shattered by a starburst of azure and madder-violate and crimson as he beheaded the tangled reptilians with two precise, angled strikes and moved to stab the trident wielder through the eye while it was still reeling from the flash that destroyed its weapon.

The elf raced towards the Tomboys then, there and gone in an instant but leaving five reptilians dead and three young women with an image that would last 'till their dying day. He was slender as an a blade, supple as silk, graceful beyond imagining. His skin was flawless indigo; his arcing eyebrows and floating waves of hair raw gold. The elf’s arms were as slender as elm bows and rippled with tightly sculpted muscle twice as dense; bands of solid ruby flashed fire round each supple wrist. A sleeveless, white silk shirt flickering argent hinted at more of the same beneath, as did the loosely laced neck, and tight pants of black leather flowed with his lower body as supply as the silk.

The Silver Warrior’s Tomboys sagged together, in shock from twisting emotions. "Oh my Lord," Lioness and Lydia breathed in voices nearly identical despite one being alto, the other soprano.

"Ladies," Quin whispered, "I have seen the Golden Warrior." The three sagged farther together, stomachs fluttering and heads spinning, adrenaline converting to such wild lust that, had the elf still been in sight, they might have torn his clothes half off before getting hold of themselves, willing or not.

Lydia's blood leaking down to Quin's hand brought the young women to their senses. The lilac-eyed swordmaid cupped her shieldmate's cheek and silver fire caressed from one into the other, clotting and scabbing and purifying the wound, numbing pain, mending muscle, and awakening the mocha skinned swordmaid's own healing prowess. Lienessa realized she was wet in the middle of a pile of corpses and doubled over retching. Lydia held the ethereal sorceress with one hand while the other kept a crossbow ready as the paladin neglected her own wounds to move among the fallen, seeing whom her powers might save.

Two lives latter, with the energies the Silver Warrior offered nearly exhausted, Quin moved towards a man disemboweled but still rasping for breath, barley able to inflate his lungs. As she watched the man’s bleeding stopped and viscera wormed back into his body. For an instant a green skinned maiden appeared, winked a ruby-colored, cat-like eye, and was gone.

A few minutes latter the wall dropped, revealing a circle of shattered trees and reptilian body parts three hundred paces across. At least a hundred of the lizards had attacked them twenty-five miles from the front.

The elf introduced himself as Deiryan Rigel, a bard of some repute. Many of them had heard the name before, though he had not performed in Shallotte since most of their parents were young. He gave their commander a letter from King Shamnaratch, explained that the monsters were being contained as reinforcements were gathered but Aramina’s Valley and the Carlishar Hills had fallen. His healer would remain with them to see they were all in one piece once they reached the rendezvous at Lirmain's stand in two days, though sixteen of their fifty-three were dead. The indigo elf was authorized to recruit volunteers for a special mission.

Deiryan walked among them, "you," a paladin, "you," a lowly armsman with suspiciously dark skin. "You," Marius and his two retainers. Then he approached The Silver Warrior's Tomboys and again they found their hearts fluttering. His eyes were living emeralds, lightly luminous, peering through slits of textured obsidian. Lioness met his eyes and was torn between rapture and shame. Though he looked no older than herself this elf must have honed his magic for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. Deiryan would see the cowardice in her aura; see the frailty woven through whole of her being, every weakness, every petty flaw.

Then the elf smiled in what was at once the approval of an ancient arcmage and the flirtatious welcome of an admiring youth. "You. Will you join us, ladies? Come with me and in two days we will have won this war or died a hero's death."

The full, desperate force of Lienessa's fear came crashing back, horrible enough to loosen her bladder, but her friends were at either side. Could she let them face that alone? Could she stand to see disappointment in that elves eyes; no that was not what she felt. Could she stand to not live up to that which he saw in her? That which he smiled at? Lioness was the first to speak, "set me your challenge."

A half hour latter, a little cleaner and with wounds nicely on the mend, the ladies rode slowly through the woods up a hill, illuminated by a series of elf-lights dancing over their heads. The swordmaids’ eyes never left the elf ahead of them, just far enough away to be blur in Lienessa’s tourmaline eyes. Enough of this childishness. The Lioness firmly settled her tiny, gold rimmed spectacles into place and sighed as Deiryan came into focus, the way he danced across the ground, pulled back cloak swinging back and forth to cover and uncover his legs and...

"I'm in love," Quin whispered.

Lydia giggled, then replied in the husky, wicked-but-loving voice only the Tomboy's ever heard, "can we share him, shieldmate? Can you imagine what a two thousand year old man would know to do to us?"

The paladin purred, "Right now I can imagine that all to well. This is post-battle rapture, ladies, we've just faced death and now we hunger to reaffirm life. I'd never imagined it could be this intense. Goddess, I've never slept with a man in the first month in my life, but I'd throw myself at Deiryan if he crooked a finger!"

"Are you saying he's not really that beautiful? That we're seeing things?"

"Have you looked behind you in the last ten minutes, at five virile young men who've got it just as bad as us? They're watching us the same way, having the same thoughts."

Lydia blinked and Lioness understood that, like herself, the mocha-skinned swordmaid had forgotten that the men existed.

"Have you, Lioness?" the paladin continued. "Your Marius is back there." Quin purred again as the elf’s cloak was whipped completely clear of his body by a sudden gust.

"Marius is sweet and charming and he helps me to forget my fear," Lioness whispered softly, "Deiryan makes me want to face my fear. And yes, he is that beautiful."

The ethereal sorceress knew her friends couldn't possibly be feeling what she was. More than lust, attraction, or even infatuation. Maybe it wasn't the love that brings true marriage, but a hunger to move him in the way he moved her, a desperate need to see that smile again, that total approval and acceptance by a man with the face of a god. Yet her fear had returned, this time with a different, far more insidious focus. In the entire battle she'd killed one of the beasts, and that one by wasting a guidance spell to shoot a monster point blank. Her spark of Star-power had done little more than bloody a monster’s nose, and dazing magic repeatedly proved fruitless. She was useless. She would fail again at whatever task Deiryan set them, and her friends would die.

The fear swelled quickly towards unbearable so the sorceress fell into a breathing exercise, relaxing her tired body as she sought a way to release the fear, then found it. Between post-battle rapture and girl talk Lienessa hadn't felt so hot since Julius Shatterhawk taught her what the square bodice on her new dress was for. Lioness yielded to it, to the power of the horse between her legs, to the unearthly beauty of the man in front of her, let a hot haze of fantasy settle over her mind as, for the first time, the stiff leather beneath her robes seemed to cup her breasts like a bodice, or like Julius, not strangle them like a corset. Life truly was stronger than death.

The Forsaken Child

The first Dahlia saw of the beautifully voiced elf was his fine-boned indigo hand slipping down to clasp her trembling shoulder. The halflingkin felt her body growing light, taking on an inner glow like unto the one above her. Then there came the sensation of an infinite chorus, countless voices that she couldn’t quite comprehend singing symphonies she couldn’t entirely hear. Then the nut-brown maiden was lying on a grassy knoll atop a wooded hill. There were others with her, the inner glow fading from each, a redheaded human maiden throwing back a black velvet cloak to drop to the ground trembling, an elfmaid with skin like leaves and healing radiating from her aura, and an elfkin maiden, normally pale skin corpse-white, normally indigo cheeks lined with stark purple blood veins, tightly curled auburn hair gleaming with purple highlights from the elf-light she conjured.

“That took too long,” the elf’s beautiful voice was tight with concern as he slid a cased harp from his shoulders as the snowy owl lifted into the night. “I need you, Ferret. The rest of you will be safe here.”

“I can help, father,” the elfkin insisted, voice as shaky as her fingers.

“Don’t coddle us, Deiryan,” the redhead demanded, stubborn pride laced through her quavering voice, “we’ve completed your training and passed your tests.”

“I need you fresh for tomorrow, and Dahlia doesn’t need to be alone right now.” With that the elf vanished. Ferret, the verdant elf, gave them a smile before she was gone as well.

Dahlia took this all in as a buffer to her shock. The elfkin sat down next to her and offered an embrace, which Dahlia threw herself into, whole body shaking. The elfkin wore smooth leather in leggings and bodice, purple so deep it was almost black, and a shirt of white silk woven through with threads of silver. There was a lute cased across her back, but no visible weapons save for a dimly glowing armored sleeve of rose quartz rather than steel ending in a rounded blade that protruded past the left hand, a sleeve shield. The velvet cloak that fell over Dahlia’s sides like a mother birds wings was fastened round the neck with a silver falcon. “You have more courage than I could ever imagine,” the elfkin whispered.

“My god in heaven,” the human whispered, joining the hug from behind. “If that thing had turned its attention on me I think I would have gone mad.”

“What’s going on here,” the words exploded from Dahlia in a shrill whine that shot up to a scream, “where are we, who are you people, what was that thing, how do you know my name!?”

“Sh, sh,” the elfkin whispered. “Sometimes the stars tell us things, and there’s only two halflingkin healers in the Carlishar hills, you were the only one they could have been talking about. I’m Saidyara Rigel, and the girl whose hilts are digging into your kidneys is Cat.”

If that was meant to be a joke Dahlia didn’t feel it, but Cat released her and began to back away, “I’m sorry…”

“Don’t,” Dahlia gasped, still sobbing from fear. The swords were pressing just as Saidyara described, but the slight hint of pain was the only proof she had left of this night’s reality and she needed to be held.

“My father is Deiryan, he worked the teleport, and Ferret is a healer from the Elithiira Militia. We’re about seven days ride north-west from were we picked you up, near the tree city of Amdervast, and two days from the front. The creature was a forsaken child, father will sing the lore about them when he returns with the last recruits.”

The warmth of the two holding Dahlia was beginning to find its way into her. The healer found calm enough to comprehend the words without further panic, what they told and what they didn’t. “Why would the stars have something to say about me, and what does that have to do with recruits?”

“Father thinks he knows a way to destroy the Forsaken Child without waiting another half month to gather Elven Champions, which might cost us Aramina’s Valley, but he needs help with certain tasks, which is why he’s gathering us. No one will try to make you do anything, Dahlia, but we need your help, and it was mentioned that your grandmother was a powerful healer. How much longer do you think it’ll take the Forsaken Child to find her? The more he poisons the earth the less its energies mask hers.”

Dahlia began to shake again, but Saidyara leaned close to her ear to whisper emphatically, “don’t answer now, I’m sorry I brought it up. Just sing with me.” Then the elfkin began an ancient hymn about the Mother first teaching the halfling Denira to heal, saving lives with the energy of her own and nearly slaying herself, ‘til she went to Grandmother, the Earth, to bargain for aid. Grandmother set her tasks to perform in return for her earth-power to fuel the healing and work other wonders. Again and again the halfling overcame seemingly impossible odds to aid Grandmother, building within her a love as deep as any bond of family for the growing things and striving beasts and vast landscapes. At last Denira failed at her task and wept, for the energy was required to raise her own lover from the grave. To do so with her life force alone would cost her own life. Life was empty without her dearest Tolver, but equally empty would be her death without his companionship along the darkest path.

Denira reached inside herself for the power and found all the strength of the Earth awaiting her. “My dearest granddaughter, all I ever wanted in return for my power was your love.”

Dahlia did not know the song, but could join in with wordless melodies for they were at the heart of many earth-spells. Somehow her half-trained voice blended seamlessly with Saidyara’s perfection. Cat did not join. The nut-brown maiden could feel the redhead’s grip tightening, the cold metal of her sleeve-shield crushing into the healer’s shoulder, and she could feel tears running into her hair.

When the song was done Dahlia realized they were being watched. Warriors and horses surrounded them; human men in battered armor with hungry eyes, trying not to be too obvious in their appraisals and their memories of fanciful tales about the affections of swordmaids offered freely to both genders in groups. Three human women hardly noticing them, eyes locked on Deiryan with hunger just as fierce, fiercer in the case of the ethereal sorceress. Dahlia’s head spun at the images, men she might have been afraid of had she not just faced the Forsaken Child, the pleasant shock of seeing a human woman with skin darker than her own, her first awareness of just how handsome Deiryan was, her alarmed assessment of the wounds all but the magi and the elf sported, her reassurance at the sight of each one in the midst of a tied-off healing web on par with Granny Featherfoot’s work that would restore them completely, even their lost hair, in less than an hour. Her first sight of paladins, their divine aura so much more intense than that of the miracle working priest she’d known, the golden haired man almost as beautiful as Deiryan, the silver haired maiden almost drawing attention away from the three women huddled together like…

Dahlia’s cheeks heated as the intensity of the passions seeping through her mind-shields turned shared comfort into downright masculine awkwardness for physical intimacy. She accepted the hand Deiryan offered and came to her feet, head on level with the fey warrior’s belly. Dried blood stained his pristine white and silver shirt. “Well met, Dahlia Featherfoot, Journeywoman Healer With A Lioness’s Courage. I’m Deiryan Rigel, Master Bard and Youngest Elven Champion. This,” the snowy owl landed on his shoulder, “is my familiar, Moonshadow. There are more introductions to be made, but first we must ride the star-paths once more. Will you all join hands and form a circle with your horses immediately behind you?”

Dahlia’s eyes widened. It hadn’t exactly sunk in before that Deiryan had teleported five people to this spot, but now he meant to do the same with thirteen people and half again as many horses? Was that possible? The healer took the proffered hand. With what must have been an apologetic glance towards his daughter the elf took the harp she proffered and extended a hand to the ethereal green-eyed sorceress, whose face flushed even brighter. Then they all began to glow.

We’re being transmuted into pure starlight, or at least the spiritual aspect of such. That song is the universe, and we are following its course to a new physical location. Last time the fear had blunted the experience, this time Dahlia was left with a glimmer of having touched perfect beauty, like the first full moon of spring or Jingo’s hand extended to invite her to dance.

They found themselves in a wooded glade surrounded by majestic tree houses. Were their not elf-lights dancing in the windows Dahlia might have thought herself miles from civilization, but instead the light revealed masterwork’s of subtle, naturally blended architecture only a tree-singer could match.

Children, humans and elves and elfkin alike, raced down trunks and ropes to take charge of horses and luggage. They were lead up a rope ladder into a cozy inn with a broad window on the rising sun. Dahlia felt she was stepping into a legend for the Company of the Electrum* Blades was gathered round the central table. Talamer Goldblade was just as beautiful as the stories said, nearly so compelling in his divinely empowered masculinity as to rival Deiryan. Just like a tale he sat thigh to thigh with Kilminee Silverlocks, her legendary hair, knee length argent curls, spilling over his shoulder, her supple but powerful arm wrapped around his waist, as affectionate as newfound lovers after twelve years together. The tale of the impossible love these two shared was a favorite, an unfinished legend in its own time. Talamer was the son of a poor farmer in the chaotic lands to the east, Kilminee a princess form the splendors of Sarasper, far to the north. They’d dreamed of each other from a very early age, of each other and a pair of blades, one gold, one silver. Each chosen by the Warrior of their gender, the youths quested for four years to find the blades and the lover from their dreams. When at last they met there was a duel, but eventually their waking selves acquired the love they shared as dreamers and the two swords merged to form two new blades, both of electrum with four times the power the former weapons possessed. Now they travel and battle together, mortal embodiments of the love between Warriors Gold and Silver, but should they ever wish to move on in their lives, seek the comforts of home and children, the blades and their paladinhoods would vanish like dust on the wind.

There was Talamer’s mentor, the mad dwarven map-maker who would give no name but Hammer, with his bottomless bag of maps made by a walker and mithral armor and his maul that weighed exactly as much as the person he battled to any save himself.

The ranger, Hananar Sirius, with his twin living crystal scimitars and ring that unleashed exploding comets was reputed to be plain by elven standards, but surely that was just contrast to the company he kept, and to Dahlia, little touched by a lady-paladins divinely enhanced charisma, the human woman on the elf’s knee was more beautiful than Kilminee. Tymaleena Firehair’s strength as a firewalker was surpassed only by her legendary skills as a healer, the only person in living memory to have ever called upon Healer’s Rage, restoring an entire village to life and nearly slaying herself in the process.

The halfling with the huge ears and slightly upturned nose must be Mario Skipper, the rover who could sneak past a rabbit over dry leaves, but the tales painted him as a dashing hero to rival the paladin he companioned. Then the hero met her eyes and smiled invitingly and his homely face didn’t dampen the pounding of her heart in the slightest.

That seemed to be the mood all around. Hammer flirted with a dwarven axe-maid, her scars displayed proudly, her femininity diminished not at all by golden sideburns and bulging muscles. Twin elfkin women with a slightly olive-green cast to their skin and rough patches on their necks where their sea elven parent sported gills seemed engaged in making a towering orckin blush. The man was not at all comely, but his shoulders held a primaly masculine appeal which contrasted with an aura of shyness, even sweetness, that few warriors of any race managed to hold onto for the time it took to collect a dozen battle scars and a greatsword charged with fire-energy. An old man with the amber skin common to the far east looked on with amusement twinkling in his almond-shaped eyes. A rugged halfling man in a bearskin cloak propped his fuzzy feet on a table and sipped a massive tankard of honey mead while scratching the fur of a small wolf. An elven tavern maid tossed him an orange. The halfling’s sleeve merged with his hand for an instant to form a bear-paw, which slashed the orange in two before the bear-changer’s hand returned to normal to gather the orange wedges and dine.

As if a gathering of hero’s and young elven waiters were not mythic enough the barkeep himself, apparently a burly elfkin with dusky skin and silver hair, was clearly revealed by the young healer’s mage-sight to be hiding in an illusion, yet elven star-mages were said to know the art of weaving illusions no mage could detect. In the company of those who wielded magic it was the equivalent of keeping the hood up on your cloak, hiding your identity even as the fact of it drew every eye.

“Friends,” Deiryan called, his voice filling the room without rising, “gather round. A new day is born; the time has come for the telling of tales, singing of songs, and sharing of wisdom.” The all pulled the tables back, barkeep adding a pair of hands of force to the efforts to clear the floor quickly. All assembled formed a circle round Deiryan with the orckin to the elf’s left and his daughter to the right. The girls face grew bleak as she helped her father uncase and tune his harp; she ended by cupping the one of Deiryan’s ruby bracelets before sitting in the kneeling fashion of elves and easterners.

“Close your eyes,” Deiryan began, “for eyes see only that which they’ve seen before. Heed not your ears, for ears hear only what they want to.”

“Open your hearts and I will sing of endless eons alone, of the wonders of our Mother the Earth, the sorrow of the forsaken children, and the beautiful gift you of the younger races have that is forever beyond the elven peoples."

As the golden haired elf spoke he stroked simple music form the intricate elven harp; simple tunes, yet fitted so perfectly to the tale and to the listeners that emotions resonated out of their deepest souls.

"We are the firstborn of the mother's womb; sprung whole and perfect in an instant at a word from the Unknowable Sky God. The blood and bone of the Earth transmuted with a breath into hundreds of millions of elves.”

“The Unknowable God, the divinity and beauty that permeates all of Creation, made us perfect, the ultimate masters and stewards of the world we inhabited. Strong in magic are we, strong enough to fell the mightiest predator. Graceful and swift are we, strong and enduring. We dream totally for an hour or two and are rested for the entire day. We join soul and body without fear of bringing children into an unready family, for we must will new life to quicken within ourselves and our beloved. Our senses are as keen as a wild beast’s, our eyes perceive in the dimmest of light, behold infinite gradations of color beyond human comprehension. We walk in the coldest rain like a pleasant shower, roam the deserts in the lightest garb and do not burn. We live for thousands of years, accumulating skill and knowledge and wisdom and art. So have we always been, unchanging. Our eldest ancestors were able to begin to comprehend the Unknowable God, as will be our final children at the end of time.

“We awakened to a primal world full of savage, alien beauty. There were no flowers to blanket the land, no birds or butterflies to paint the sky, no warm and fury animals to love our children and warm our nights. The spirits taught our first children to live and love and laugh and learn. We danced to the music of the stars, learned the songs of trees and crystals, befriended insects as long as our arms, reptiles as tall as the trees.

“But then the first great snows came, enveloping the earth. We had no hair to warm us save atop our heads. We could not endure the chill that makes water into ice. There were no fur bearing beasts to skin, nor cotton-flowers, nor feathers to make mattresses of. We fled to the warmest parts of the world, warming ourselves with fire and magic while the lizards learned to resist the cold as we do, to bury themselves in the snow and sleep out the winter. Some could not find the new gifts, so they died, but they past the gifts to their children, and their children's children, and thus did they change. We watched our brothers evolve, yet found no such gift within ourselves, no new power save knowledge to pass to our children.

“So we died.

“In time the snows receded, the world warmed, and the beasts changed again. The cycle continued, new beasts finding their ways into the mountains, in and out of the seas. We watched the first beasts join our winged brothers in the sky, and our brothers of the sea spoke of larger creatures finding their way into the deeps, of worms and crabs making their homes in the trenches where the sun never shines and the weight of the water could crush steel, where only our mightiest mages dared to go.

“And yet we did not change.

“The magenta elves where the first to die completely, the last of their children wiped out by the fourth great cold. Endless eons past. We watched the great colds give the children of the warm reptiles hair like our own, only that covered their entire bodies; learned to hunt them and keep warm with their skins, to harvest their hair and weave it into cloth.

“And then the Great Dying came. A vast sky stone struck the ocean, sending a wall of burning water around the world. We hid beneath our shields, linking with those too weak to endure, and wept for our brothers the beast whom we hadn't the power to save. The weather was changed as never before; a cloud of ash blackened out the sky, denied us the song of the stars and the warmth of the sun. Snow piled as high as the mountains. Ash burned our lungs. Our winged brothers flew high, seeking to hear the stars, and the ash poisoned their lungs till all had fallen. We pined for the stars, wept at the emptiness without them till our magic wilted; many died for the lack. We burned the trees till no wood remained save the seedlings we kept in the backs of our caves, then we burned our own dung and the bones of the fallen. We grew what food we could, though once we prided ourselves on taking only what the Mother offered. We hunted the tiny beasts that endured, rejoiced at taking a beast the size of a rabbit after an hour’s hunt. We ate the insects and the spiders and called it a feast; yet we could not give our children the gift of digesting their nutrients, so we starved.

“It was then that we first encountered the forsaken children. We rejoiced when hunters whispered that they'd seen a triceratops pushing through the snow in the distance and were torn between encouraging its survival and bringing home meat enough to feed us all for a month.

“Then the triceratops, always a gentle eater of leaves, started eating us.

“The forsaken children are spirits who have spurned the gift that the Sky God denied us. Rather than rejoice for its children who are stronger, who adapt, it rages for the loss of those like itself and seeks to destroy the Mother. Seven and twenty of our mightiest remaining mages tore it apart with the power of the stars, but it was only scattered like dust on the wind. Nothing can kill a spirit.

"Over half of our remaining diversity was lost before the sky cleared; our winged brothers were never seen again. And yet there was cause for rejoicing, for we were no longer alone. Quetzelcoatlus had crawled into the Mother's womb and dreamed and dreamed and dreamed, sleeping away the icy millennia, till he Awakened. Dragons where born, strange and wonderful and terrible creatures who shared the gifts of language and numbers. We watched other speaking creatures rise and fall. Many denied the Mother's embrace with the first grasping at intelligence, and thus did whole races of monsters walk the Earth. At first we did our best to slay them, but then our greatest thinkers and mystics whispered that perhaps they too could give their children that which they lacked; greater intelligence, new spirituality, ethics, and love.

"It was so.

"The eons past, endless oceans of time beyond imagining. Were the Mother an elf, we elves would live and die faster than mayflies, you humans would come and go before she could perceive your existence. One by one we died. The silver elves were approached by the Tempter, offered an artificial way of changing for the simple price of denying the song of the stars. They embraced the Tempters gift and their spirit withered, 'till most sought to destroy all those who had what they lacked. We call them Unseelie now. They refuse to see that if they'd just come back to us, embrace us, dance with us, we could teach them to hear the stars again. Weep for them, and fear them, for theirs is the power to twist both life and death.

"So many brothers dying, in the colds, fallen to the plagues that finally evolved the strength to touch us before the Alihandren people, now long dead, taught us to heal them. Now only Ebon, Indigo, Verdant, Golden, Sea Green, and the Unseelie remain.

"And yet a beautiful thing was born; you. So very like us, so young and strong with infinite possibilities within your blood. Do you understand the gifts you of the human and halfling people have given us?" The elf took a hand from his harp to comb through his daughters hair, "the elfkin carry our blood, our longevity, our memory, our power, and yet from your blood they gain the gift of change. For the first time we who have loved the Great Cycle of the Mother can be a part of it."

Tears ran freely down Dahlia's cheeks, tears matched by all the others who listened, even the human men. Only Saidyara’s eyes were dry. Those cat-like emerald orbs shone, her face was grim and loving as she again cupped her father’s ruby bracelets.

Deiryan waited patiently as the emotions passed, then began, “To finish this I need three teams, Kilminee…”

“Wait, wait, wait,” the dark skinned human demanded, “that’s supposed to be the lore that will tell us how to end this war? That doesn’t tell us shit about this forsaken child thing…”

Deiryan and the barkeep laughed while several others glared at the mocha-skinned swordmaid in outraged shock. “Of course it does,” Deiryan’s voice suggested there was something cute about the swordmaid’s ignorance. “If you listen the lore tells you what it is and why it does the things it does. Understanding a foe is infinitely more important than knowing its capacities.”

Saidyara spoke up, tracing unseen patterns on the bracelet with one finger; her voice was grim. “Your ancestors tell stories about Anansi, who is spider, and Cat, and Mosquito, tales about the god who is the entirety of a beast. Similar tales of these gods are told on the other side of the world, Coyote and Raven, Owl and Lynx and Wolf. You might one day meet a bear who speaks; should you lie with such a bear your children will be like Frolo over there.” The halfling in the bearskin bowed. “A forsaken child is an undead god, thirsting to be avenged upon the Earth that destroyed its children. All it touches dies, and thus does it feed upon the life it seeks to destroy. The more it feeds the stronger it becomes. It has now reached the point were normal prey does not satisfy; it wants people and places of particularly strong life, like healers or Aramina’s Valley. As a spirit it can fade in and out of physicality, allowing it to teleport, and can bring certain others to it the same way. As a spirit it is immortal, the best we can hope to do is dissipate it for a few hundred or thousand years. This one is among the five most powerful, each the most lethal predator of the era in which it lived. It has only been dissipated for eight hundred years, though we thought it eliminated for ten times that. In words humans might understand it is called Tyrannosaurus rex.”

Dahlia did not speak Old Reeman, though she knew the sound of it, but the mocha-skinned swordmaid and her paladin friend nodded while the green-eyed sorceress breathed, “Tyrant King.”

Deiryan, seeming resigned to letting them get off with an explanation rather than thinking things through continued, “there is a traditional war party for dealing with a forsaken child. Nine elven champions trained in certain spells and techniques assail it. Most occasions all survive such a war party, which is why my increasingly cautious race always uses it. But there are only twenty-seven elven champions in the world today, and only four have been gathered thus far. Aramina’s Valley is held by trolls, but the forsaken child cannot enter. I fear that if we do not act now this holy land will be defiled till the creature can enter and feed. Besides the incalculable loss to the world I do not know if anything could stop it after that. Using my influence as youngest champion I persuaded those in command of this war to allow me to attempt to destroy the forsaken child myself, with King Samnaratch taking my place in the circle if I fail.

“Yet destroying the forsaken child is my problem, yours is dealing with its minions. It has established a bond with the king of the reptilians, the mother-consciousness of the trolls, and the eldest swamp-dragon. Tonight we must all make synchronized strikes, Kilminee, you and you friends must move against the eldest dragon, he makes his eerie on a hill in the swamp called The Fang.”

He turned the half-orc, “friend Jeremy, you are said to be an old hand at slaying trolls. I have provided you warriors to watch your back,” his outstretched hand indicated the axemaid, the commoner from Shallotte, and the Easterner, “a healer,” the bear-changer, “two mages skilled at invisibility and channeling their strength into a healer,” the sea elfkin, “and one of Shallotte’s fine focus mages with bodyguards. The troll’s mother-consciousness is sixteen feet tall with three heads, do you think you can handle her for me?”

The orckin considered. “That’d the biggest one I’ve ever fought. Well sir, trolls heal as fast as you can kill ‘em, but they can’t stand up to Blaze here,” he stroked his greatsword affectionately, “with that army I expect I could handle every troll in the valley. Just tell me one thing? Are those varmints animals or plants?”

The elf gave a delighted laugh, “Neither my friend, they’re mushrooms.”

“Mushrooms?”

“And so, ladies, to the rest of you falls the Reptilian King. Are you with me?” He met first Dahlia’s eyes, then the three from Shallotte, the redheaded maiden, and lastly his own daughter who threw her arms around him fiercely. “I can see you are. Lady Firehair, we all need to sleep now.”

The fire healer nodded and blue swallowed the room.

The Sirocco’s Tooth Trident

By the time Lioness came down from a beautiful sleep in a beautiful bed and a hot bath with fragrant oils that left her skin feeling soft as silk, her hair as lovely as Quin’s, she was ready to forgive the insult of being ensorcelled into sleep. After all, it was the first time in three eight-days her dreams had been undisturbed, filled with Deiryan rather than monsters, music rather than blood, friends rather than abandonment.

Based on the muttered curses behind her, Lydia had not. The Tomboys’ found neither fire-healer nor elf to complain to, though, just the barkeep inside his disguise and a meal of fruit and cream and, Lord and Lady, was that mousse made of chocolate? She’d only tried the delicacy from the other side of the world on two rapturous occasions, for only three remote gates lead there and the natives were cautious about white people after an attempted conquest in her grandfather’s youth. Not that she blamed them.

The tomboys ate in companionable silence. The elf’s daughter joined them, then the redheaded maiden, and finally the tall, brown skinned halfling.

Lioness almost asked for more, but remembered tale after tale warning her to eat lightly before a battle. She mustn’t go hungry or she’d faint from tension, indeed there were vague memories of being roused and fed honeyed bread with cheese, but a full stomach would slow her down.

“So,” the elfkin began, “I’m Saidyara, well met.” Save for the sleeve-shield she was neither armed nor armored, but elfkin were known for elven star magic and lethal unarmed fighting. The elfkin’s clothing was white streaked with silver in the shirt, deep purple so dark as to be near to black in the snug leather breaches and bodice. Her cloak was black velvet clasped with a silver falcon. Where the firelight hit her auburn hair purple streaks came out.

“I’m Cat,” the redhead offered, “I’m a ranger.” A ranger was one who practiced an elven martial art that, along with martial prowess, attuned them to nature. The redhead’s musical voice swelled with pride at the proclamation. “I’m best with my bow or at surprise attacks, but I manage with my scimitars, and Deiryan gave me a little edge.” With that she pulled the hood up on her black velvet cloak and disappeared. Lioness reflexively closed her eyes and peered behind them till she could see the auras around her, but there was still no sign of the red-haired ranger. “That’s extraordinary! There’s no power-glow. You are still there, aren’t you?”

“M-hm.” The musically voiced redhead was abruptly there again; hood spilling down to reveal hair that matched the hearth-flames. Besides the cloak Cat had foregone any armor save for gorget and half-leathers; a half-inch of rawhide boiled to the shape of her loins, stomach, chest, and the small of her back with slender shoulder straps. It was low enough to bare a modest expanse of cleavage. In adventure tales spun by men this armor served only to display a swordmaid, but Anakierie of Steel and Roses fame and her own training told Lioness that this armor, not unlike the leather beneath her own robes, protected the most vulnerable parts of the body. The belly housed vital organs that lacked the protection of the rib cage. A proper strike to a woman’s breasts could be as agonizingly intense as kicking a man’s genitals, causing an instant of agonized hesitation, and the genitals of both genders could shed a lethal about of blood. A neck wound a quarter inch deep could kill the strongest warrior. The ranger was smaller than Quin, who was physically less impressive than Lydia in every aspect but bust-size, but she was just as sleek, her muscles just as toned. The ranger’s bare skin was only softly bronzed, smooth as velvet, and marked in places by pale white knife-fighting scars.

While this was the first time Lioness had ever seen a real woman forego shirt or surcoat when so armored the tourmaline-eyed sorceress knew from her own practice how quickly the sword-arm tired and could not fault Cat for wanting to keep any excess weight clear of her body. The cloak was currently worn as a cape, the way Deiryan had worn his in the battle, clasped by a silver rose at the shoulder and a silver chain.

“Human mages will learn to do that in time,” Saidyara assured her.

“Well, I’m Quinterra Winterstar,” the lilac-eyed paladin began, “but please call me Quin. I don’t want to hear anyone call me “lady” who isn’t male, preferably handsome, and about to kiss my hand. This is Lydia; we’ve trained together for a long time and have a bunch of teamwork tricks. She’s brilliant with bastard sword and knife. The platinum-blonde kitten is Lienessa Whitefire, but under the mage robes lurks a Lioness.”

Lienessa still flushed at that joke, all the more when the women laughed and greeted Lioness. The name served only remind her of last nights insecurities, suddenly making her grateful she hadn’t had all day to fret over them. She was dressed much the same as always, in sturdy embroidered robes over armor with a prism-shaped meditation crystal strung round her neck, staff leaning against the table, crossbow slung across her back with a spare clip in the harness. She’d added her favorite diamond earrings, though she’d been avoiding such temptations to orcs and bandits, and her gold-rimmed spectacles were firmly in place.

That left only the tall, dark skinned halfling. “I’m Dahlia.” She smiled naturally, her voice as warm as her dimples. “I’m an earth-healer. I’ve never really done this before, but I know how to use this staff, and it is quite powerful. I’d prefer to stay behind you guys and use my sling till someone needs healing. I can’t speed-heal or anything, but I can stop bleeding, including some mortal wounds, in a few seconds.”

“That‘s quite enough in my book,” said Quin, “and I can do that too, in case you didn’t know how paladins worked. I can generally heal one fairly serious wound or stabilize four people in a day. Any thoughts on how we’re going to do this? Those things are as tough as old oak.”

Lydia snorted, “I’m still not all too clear on what we’re going to do.”

Deiryan chose that moment to enter. “You’re going to come down here and climb into a boat. That boat will be teleported to a willow in the swamp. You will wait there till the smaller moon passes behind the larger. Then you will sail due north to the reptilian city and kill the lizard in the largest hut. If we don’t find you afterwards the rendezvous, if we succeed, is the highest pine on the eastern edge of the swamp, near to Aramina’s valley; if we fail either Lirmain’s Stand or watch the sky for a purple star and follow it. When the Moon’s Dance Partner emerges again I will strike. Simple enough. I could give advice but you already know it.”

“Keep the mages in the center and fight in a circle. Work together. Do you really think it’s that simple?” Lydia demanded.

“Could anything I tell you in ten minutes prepare you any better? Would any more complicated plan last five minutes?”

Lydia shook her head and settled back with a sigh. Deiryan began removing lightly glowing lotus-like flowers and pining them in the ladies hair, or over their armor for the two with helmets. “These will give you a little luck, not anything you’re likely to notice, but perhaps enough to tilt the balance. And these,” he removed two roses and offered them to Dahlia, “will speed heal a fairly serious wound if you crush them over the wounded person.” Then the handsome elf offered a quiver of long arrows gleaming with fire-energy to Cat. “Kilminee thought you’d need these more than she. The gods walk with you this night.” Then Deiryan hugged his daughter fiercely and whispered, “I love you” into her hair.

“It’s time.”

The warrior and the paladin deliberately settled the open faced helms they’d lacked the time to don in the first battle over their heads, Quinterra deliberately letting her silver hair spill freely down her back. The danger of it being used against her was very real, but so was the psychological power of an enemy knowing he faced an agent of the goddess. Then the lilac-eyed paladin turned to her mocha-skinned friend and asked, “Will you help me with my breastplate?”

“No,” Lydia grinned as she lifted the cold iron up and settled it over Quin’s shoulders.

Deiryan did not follow them to the ground but rather climbed to the top of the Inn and sat on a branch, singing into the night. The barkeep opened his hands to the sky and began to sing as well, calling down a moonbeam, which danced through a rainbow of colors, then speared out to draw the outlines of a rectangular barge, which filled in with gently glowing blue-greens. At the back of the boat a deep, blue X of wide spars protruded, spun, and then went still. A rudder stretched down, its control bar into the barge. Elflights like dancing torches, only twenty times as bright, burst into being at the front corners of the barge and licked along the strange propeller, then were dimmed to less than moon-glow. The elfkin put his hands together; then drew them apart with a chord of braided colors between them. He knotted it seven times then passed the chord to Saidyara. She pressed it into her heart and shuddered; then it was gone. “That should last you two days, Lady Bard.”

“Thank you. Shall we go, ladies and Quin?”

As the paladin laughed they all stepped into the floating barge. Light and music filled them.

The first hint of reality was a stagnant stench. The willow around them drooped sicklily. Nothing in the dimly seen swamp hinted at life, none of the heady scents of swamp flowers she’d found in florist shops, just spoors, rot, sulfur, and alchemical flame, like the whole world was dead.

Such dark thoughts were all Lienessa had, for silence was imperative. She couldn’t imagine how long she spent brooding over her powerlessness and cowardice and the certain knowledge that her failure would kill not only these young women but Deiryan as well. She wanted to know these people, wanted to have their friendship to draw strength from, wanted the delusion of the last battle, the madness that told her it was all game.

All she had was trembling, and Lydia’s hand on her shoulder, and Dahlia’s fingers lacing through her own.

They could not see the stars, but Saidyara’s head was cocked to one side. “It’s time,” the auburn elfkin whispered, her voice a hollow echo of Deiryan’s. The boat began to whir as the propeller spun and they slowly sailed out of the bower of the willow. The star-barge moved smoothly across the still water for many minutes, Dahlia chanting beneath her breath and seeming to peer in all directions at once, perhaps sensing for the energies of life, a trick forever beyond one who was not a healer. Cat stood with magic arrow knocked in one of the oak, ram-horn, and sinew composite bows young elves used before their magic made such things redundant. The Tomboy’s sat with loaded crossbows and an otherwise invisible rod of transparent crystal shimmered in Saidyara’s hands.

“Cat, beneath you!” Dahlia abruptly screamed, and the redhead drew and loosed straight down into the water beside the boat, flames racing up the arrow for an instant before they were swallowed by the swamp, loosing rank steam. Blood bubbled up to the surface as Dahlia hissed, “it’s moving away now, you’ve got to stop it before it raises alarm!”

“I see it,” the auburn elfkin hissed and a pinpoint of destructive light, a glimmer-bolt just like the one Lioness had used so futilely in the last battle, leapt from the crystal rod to be swallowed by the water, then another, and another, and another.

“That got it,” Dahlia gasped, normally cheery voice hollow.

A few minutes latter the healer called that there was another reptilian out to the left at about fifty feet, but it was gone before Saidyara could hope to locate its aura beneath the water at that range.

“Those things swim as easily as we walk,” Lydia hissed, “we’re sitting ducks on this boat.”

Lienessa couldn’t stand it, and yet it would not end. Goddess, maybe if we brighten the lights we’d be able to spot these things before they strike. Or at least we can stop imagining they’re out there, about to pounce on us… “Ahead right!” Dahlia cried just before shrill thrums filled the night. It was warning enough for Lydia to raise her shield over her face. Quin ducked and took a javelin on the helmet. Lienessa froze, but her mage-shield was created with better reflexes than that and deflected three of the weapons before collapsing from the force, dead energy bursting away like ash before vanishing.

Dahlia, Saidyara, and Cat dropped flat in the boat, but the elfkin’s shields still took a blow and a javelin sprouted from the redhead’s shoulder.

Lioness screamed louder at the sight of her new friend injured than from the attack itself, but Dahlia crawled over to her, removed the bone-headed spear, and crushed the flower.

Having not ducked Lydia began drilling the reptilians on the island of peat with crossbow bolts the instant Saidyara brought the lights to full. Silver flashed atop the paladin’s head as she healed her own concussion before Quin added her efforts to the battle but, while one of the monsters had taken a bolt, none went down, and, having loosed their missiles, the beasts began diving into the water to swim towards the boat.

As Lioness wildly recast her shield, at perhaps half the strength she would get laying it carefully with a few minutes work, a sheet of cranberry red starlight floated out over the lake, seeming to drift but moving faster than a horse could run, spreading out into a spider-web pattern and growing brighter, then tapering into a giant net before falling over the monsters and the peat bog.

“We’ve got to hurry,” Saidyara gasped, “that won’t hold them long. How are you feeling, Cat?”

As the redhead straightened up and whipped the blood away from her shoulder, baring smooth, fair skin, the boat’s fan took on a higher pitched hum and the craft leapt forewords. “Like I just sprinted a mile then jumped in a cold river after I haven’t eaten for a week,” the ranger gasped. “Quin, your foot’s on my bow.”

The wait was not so bad this time, with adrenaline turning fear to excitement and the bright lights keeping the sorceress from jumping at ghosts; though the Lioness still devoutly wished she could cast Dahlia’s spell and sense that which was hidden by the water. “Twenty some odd from the left,” the halflingkin warned, “I’ve got them.”

The nut-brown maiden sang with a voice of wild beauty, sunshine in the midst of the gloom. As the reptilians came into sight, writhing through the water like snakes, the swamp began to churn. Grasses and roots and mosses moved like questing tentacles to grab at the beasts, the zone of motion extending from the edge of the boat to beyond the scope of the light, forcing the monsters to thrash and tear their way through.

The healer had to throw up another such defense as the torch-lit island came into sight, directly in front of them this time, and they maneuvered around the tangle only to see Dahlia abruptly begin to tremble like a cornered rabbit. “We’re surrounded. There’s hundreds of them.”

Lienessa began to whimper as gently luminessing eyes came into view above the water all around and malevolent burbling filled the night. To the east a huge, slimy creature came into view, like a ten-foot humanoid beast made all of sickly vines and bulging belly and bony claws. “A troll,” Dahlia whimpered.

“Cat, your arrows,” Quin ordered calmly as she sighted down her crossbow, “Saidyara, can we get any more speed out of this thing?”

The paladin’s relentless hope shamed the Lioness’s fear, and she asked herself what Marius Razorwind would due in this situation.

Razorwind; the House Spell. Marius wasn’t powerful enough to have normally cast that, but our House Spells are all conditioned into us… no, branded into us, by our family arch-mage at birth. It’s our only chance; I have to call Whitefire.

The spell was far beyond anything most veteran human mages could ever channel. She’d tried to cast it once, when younger and heady with the joy of magic, despite warnings that the attempt might kill her, and had stopped when the pain became overwhelming. She’d suffered migraines for weeks.

Mages channeled multiple elemental energies by using conditioned associations with the Old Reeman language, the complexity of this should take days to cast; Razorwind was nothing by comparison. All she needed now was her own name. “ Flama Abla.”

As the Lioness spoke impossibly intense and complex sensations first flowed, then ripped their way out of her womb and up, into her hands. It was unendurable, heat like the sun, cold like ice, a thousand knives of agony and a night of lovemaking all in one instant. Lioness screamed as capillaries burst throughout her body, bruising from waist to fingertips, and pale flames danced out of her fingers.

All that for fire enough to light four torches; the family arch-mage could have shattered an iron wall with the initial casting, but the Lioness ordered them up, over her friends heads, to the four corners of the boat.

When the tiny flames touched the water it went up like oil, silver flames racing along water that frosted over where touched, fed the flame as it froze. The temperature on the boat dropped five degrees in the next ten seconds and then began to plummet. The sorceress jerked her fog-covered glasses clear of eyes shifting to violate as she firmly compelled the energy away from the boat before loosing control of it all together.

The silver flames raced out, across the swamp, spreading in an ever-building wave of intensity from cream to silver; drawing strength from the tiny life forms it slew and the few fundamental particles it broke into smaller, or changed into others. The leading edge trapped the reptilians in ice; they thrashed for an instant before the ice grew too thick to resist. Then the cold drove the creatures into torpor, mercifully sparing them the agony of feeling their cells lyse from water expanding into ice, their hearts and lungs freezing, then shattering. As the flames consumed their infinitely richer life force and more vulnerable fundamental particles silver deepened into argent so pure and beautiful it was agony to see.

The tourmaline-eyed sorceress reeled from conflicting emotions nearly as intense as the sensation of the casting. Power, a rush of exulting power as intense as a swig of well-aged elven fire-brandy. Behold, for I have laid low an army! Yet simultaneously there was horror, overwhelming awareness that hundreds were dying in agony at her hand, hundreds! And terror, sheer terror of herself, of what she could do, of what she would do with this power. The tale of Mirandan-town played a thousand times in her head in the next minute.

Long ago, when memories of the kingship of small provinces were still fresh in the noble houses and such things were common, Lars Shatterhawk brought Mirandan-town into rebellion. King Winterstar sieged the town, following all the codes off gentlemanly warfare, but when Rikarus Whitefire was slain his daughter Nirrela unleashed her house spell upon the city. Not upon the walls, or the gates, but straight into the rain-soaked city. The five mages who’d slain her father resisted with shields and fire spells, but the spell had built too much momentum before it reached them; gaining the power she couldn’t give it from water and lawns and civilian bodies. Yet when at last the five fell Nirella lacked the power to cast the neutralizing spell. Whitefire raged throughout the city and for miles beyond, slaying ever man woman and child, every pet and work-beast, every rat, roach and flower. Had Whitefire cousins not arrived it might have consumed all of Shallotte before burning itself out; it might have made it to the ocean and consumed the world.

The only sound remaining in the dense fog was the inhuman gurgle of the entrapped troll and the crackling as brilliant argent flame displaced air. Ever since Nirella the Whitefire family had two house spells. Many believed that having two weaves burned unnaturally into their spirits that way damaged them, that there was good reason for Lioness to be so slight, that the healers could not fix her eyes, but what other choice was there? “Dahlia, get that flower ready.”

The second spell unleashed a gray pulse that shot out to swallow the world. To one who comprehended the bizarre chemical/spiritual reaction there was a fairly simple element to remove, making it impossible; it could normally be done in an hour if you knew the way. All it cost Lioness was a moment of incalculable agony.

The flames died almost instantly, but Lioness doubled over, coughing ropes of blood before Dahlia crushed the flower over her back and the world vanished.

A moment latter the ethereal sorceress thrashed as a full body tingle announced that her nerves were working again, a sigh announced that her pain was gone, and exhaustion like nothing she’d ever experienced before warned that any further magic would send her straight back to the healer.

But… She still had her crossbow, and she wasn’t completely incompetent with her staff, and if a vital opportunity came up there was little she could do to herself that Quin couldn’t fix. The Lioness stood, straightened her robe, and told the stunned faces around her, “I believe we have no further business here, shall we proceed to the chieftain’s hut?”

Even Saidyara, who, as Deiryan’s daughter, must have seen such as this all the time, was frozen in awe. Now the elfkin shook her head and gasped, “Hurry, the Moon’s Dance Partner is about to emerge!”

Only an elf could know any such thing in the midst of this fog. Frost was forming on metal armor. The swordmaids raced across the ice into the reptilian village as dirty snow began to fall, and found the largest hut by following the gleam of a bonfire up a small hill, identified it by the two towering guards that raced to defend it.

Cat drew three arrows and called, “Right.” Her flaming arrow hit the beast on that side, piercing and searing through chest muscles to take it between its hearts and quickly roast them both.

The other swordmaid’s loosed on the second, Lydia’s bolt grazing harmlessly while Quin’s pierced its side; Saidyara’s glimmer bolt blasted a chunk from its shoulder while little Dahlia cracked open it’s head with a sling stone that thrummed with earth-power.

A third beast seemed to loom out of nowhere, pouncing at Lioness, but the ranger’s swift hands fit a second arrow to her bow and knocked the monster back with the force of her shot, into the beast behind it, and both went down under the swordmaids’ second volley.

With the monsters slain Cat gave a wink and pulled up the hood of her cloak, then was gone.

“Left, right, right, left,” Lydia ordered, describing the directions in which they should scatter after going through the entrance, before personally smashing through the crude door and taking it, along with the dagger that quickly embedded in it, with her to the left. As the swordmaids burst in and forced their eyes to adjust to the dim light they were met by laughter rather than further attacks.

“Girl children?” a guttural but perfectly intelligible voice asked, “The Rigel sends me girl children? It is insulting me he does.” The reptilian squatted easily on the floor, eyes on level with towering Lydia despite his seated position. Four dim blue swamp-oil lamps lit the creature’s room. Occasionally white-hot sparks jumped between the tines of the trident he held across his chest to create bursts of blinding visibility.

The swordmaids all paused, frightened at the revelation of the monster’s intelligence but glad for the opportunity to catch their breaths. Saidyara’s elven eyes had an emerald shine in the dim light, and her nod told them that no ambushers lurked in the shadows, lest they were buried in the piles of gold and cloth and other booty along the back wall.

“Yes, I see your interest that I know your language,” the monster taunted…

Crimson gleamed along its mottled hide, like spots of blood, and Lioness realized that there were deposits of iron imbedded in its skin. This was one reason these creatures were so tough and resistant to magic, and the gift was particularly abundant in this one. Yet that was peripheral to her fascination with the trident.

“…That I know your ages despite your full height. This is good, I want you to know why you must die; why my hatred and my master’s is stronger than you or the Rigel.”

Vast power coursed through the trident in infinitely complex weaves, dozens of spell matrixes threaded through its shaft of steel and crystal, azurite and hematite, ruby and marble, mercury flowing like blood through veins of copper and granite, feather spars embedded in amber, all merged and swirled together to form one shaft and three tines, woven with microscopically intricate veins of fire and air, water and earth, empowered by both masculine gold and feminine silver. Truly this was the work of an arch-mage of legend. If the reptilian knew how to harness a tenth of that power they were dead as surely as if their heads were already split open.

“The master took the king of clan Sissithiss and his two sons to his lair in the bowels of the earth and told us the truth of our people…” The beast paused, nostrils flaring, and one eye swiveled towards the left wall. “Well, well, cunning one. Let the girl child who smells of roses and human blood show herself. I had thought only elves knew that trick.”

When Cat faded into sight, blushing at the failure of her ploy, the reptilian continued. “Once we ruled this world, fishing and studying and coexisting with our neighbors the elves and dwarves and dragons. We wove cloths and tapestries of such great beauty that immortal elves humbled themselves to study our craft. But then the elves warred among themselves and stole us away to use as pawns. They swelled our fingers and our claws so we could not spin or weave, they laced our bodies with iron so we could not call magic. When we rebelled they stole our intelligence, and when we failed they stole our capacity to create.”

“Now we live in the dreariest swamps, driven away from lakes or seas. Now we make war to take from you that which we can no longer create. My master offered us revenge, but the king and his eldest son were cowards who denied this gift, so I took the trident he offered and slew them.”

The reptilian flourished the black mace in his tail, exhibiting the carpets and tapestries and jewelry stacked in the back of the hut, “You have that which we cannot, and that is why you must die. Shall we begin?”

Cat, Quin and Lydia had already taken the opportunity to lay their ranged weapons against the wall and draw their preferred melee ones. As the reptilian finished he shot to his feet, flipping the trident point down to hold like a quarterstaff as blue white lightning pulsed around it.

The swordmaids had prepared for this moment as if of one mind, Lydia by hiding her new dagger behind her shield and now plunging her sword into the bare earth of the hut to grab and hurl the dagger, Cat and Quin by drawing a dagger as their off hand blade. As the reptilian stood all three projectiles flew true, yet the monster spun the trident’s shaft and sparks of lightning blasted two of the daggers aside. Only Cat’s blow struck home, lodging shallowly in the chieftain’s rippling chest and drawing little blood.

The chieftain laughed as he lunged towards the silver haired paladin, a woman with seemingly nothing but a knitting needle for her defense. The highly trained fencer had her main gauche in hand by the time he arrived and tried to knock the blow left as she stepped right, yet blue-white sparks surged up her arm, magic only partly blunted by her iron breastplate, and the numb arm went limp an instant before it was ripped half way from it’s shoulder by a tine of the trident.

All the others struck in that moment. A ray of violet magic took the reptilian in the left eye, leaving behind a brightly glowing sphere of light, which it couldn’t hope to see through. A second ray loosed from Dahlia’s hand was evaded by a subtle twist of the reptilian’s neck. Lydia cleaved a shallow gash in the monster’s back, but the monster’s weapon shaft deflected Cat’s scimitar strike. The ranger screamed as lightning arced into her body but still managing to drop to her knees and plunge the sharpened front of her sleeve shield into a vulnerable point beneath the beast’s knee, not severing muscles but drawing more than a little blood.

The mace in the monster’s tail was arcing out to finish Quin as Lioness’s crossbow bolt flew wild of the tangle, but instead the bludgeon shot down, thinking to catch Cat in a vulnerable moment, yet the cunning redhead jerked her sleeve-shield free to deflect the blow before throwing herself to her feet and stumbling away.

The swordmaid’s had the monster truly encircled now, and it hesitated at the unfamiliar situation of only being able to look in one direction at once, backing the swordmaid’s away with wild swings of the lethal trident. Cat ordered Quin to let her in and the paladin obliged, already exhausting the goddess’s healing power to bring her arm into something resembling working order before realizing that the elfkin, though armored in platemail of starlight, was unarmed!

The monster had already turned to strike at Cat, straightening up to plunge his trident over the redhead’s guard and into her chest, piercing both lungs.

Dahlia screamed and scampered to the fallen woman as the monster’s tail-mace hurtled towards Saidyara. The elfkin smoothly drew nothing from her waist and abruptly held a living crystal sword in both hands, knocked the mace wide then continued the motion in a tight circle to slash open the monster’s side.

Lioness chanted.

Lydia struck, catching the monster on its wrist as it tried to parry, yet, with a crack like a breaking branch, lightning transferred up the blade into the mocha skinned swordmaid.

Lioness’s cheeks and arms bruised as the guiding column of wind formed and her crossbow bolt embedded in the monster’s side, blasting through the thing’s hide as easily as leather but still not really seeming to slow it. Yet the eye that caught hers spoke of pain and promised death for it.

The reptilian parried Saidyara’s blow, but the living crystal did not allow lightning to transfer. His mace cracked the elfkin’s shoulder, iron blasting easily through starlight armor to steal the use of that arm. A second lunge towards Lydia was caught on her shield, but the hearty swordmaid staggered back at the lighting arcing through her body, letting the reptilian through. Quin lunged at the monster but couldn’t strike past the static field as it stepped past her as well…

Lioness screamed as the reptilian loomed over her; the scream seemed to stretch on and on into infinity as her shield shattered beneath the cold-iron tail-mace.

When the trident took her in the torso, above the hip, Lioness didn’t really feel it. She didn’t understand why her head had hit the floor till she saw her own mangled leg flying across the room, splattering the swordmaids with crimson. The scream stretched on, was it hers or theirs? A word joined it, “Sister!” as Lydia hurled herself at the reptilian.

The magic of the trident was so beautiful, so simple in its complexity, like a spider-web a hundred miles wide. She could see every detail now, understood exactly how it was numbing Lydia’s arm, blasting her to the ground as her sword flew across the hut. She understood how the crackling aura around it worked, how it would keep the others back long enough to plunge its tines into her sisters eyes. Understood how it was emitted and why it did not electrocute its wielder, but if she wove water right between those two channels…

As the reptilian howled in triumph and raisded its weapon blue-white lightning abruptly arced down its body, stiffening its muscles, subjecting the monster to its own attack over and over in an endlessly repeating cycle that didn’t end till a living crystal blade slashed open its throat at the same instant that a silver-flaming rapier pierced its eye.

In Lioness’s fading vision Dahlia appeared, face wet with tears, hands streaked with blood. Energy surged into her, over and over; trying to sooth her charred heart and block the flow of blood from her mangled leg.

The sorceress felt the pain then, the pain and a terrible emptiness, a convulsing in her heart as it began to beat again, pumping nothing through her body, for there was no blood left to flow, and yet the healer would not let her die.

The pain was unendurable, but in Lioness’s somehow still aware mind hope began to kindle. Perhaps she could be saved, perhaps the legendary power of the elves could restore her if this woman could just keep her going, find her blood to bring the air from her lungs, if she could just live long enough for help to arrive, for the green skinned healer to come or the woman with fire in her hair to sweep in like the hero of legend that she was.

Lioness understood that she and Dahlia thought these things as one; they had achieved a perfect communion. The halflingkin shared her pain and was willing to fight beside her, fight for that desperate edge of hope…

Their pain was shared. Lioness felt the healer’s exhaustion as clearly as her own, felt her aura begin to fray, bruises boring into her body. “You’re killing yourself.” Lioness spoke quite clearly, for there was nothing else to do with the air in her lungs. “You are killing yourself!”

The halflingkin would not listen.

“Wind from the west, to my hand, strike at my command.”

Their was a horrible tearing within Lioness as the power surged through her with a truth and strength she’d never felt before. The halflingkin was blown off of her, scraping across the roof to the back of the hut, then dropped on the pile of precious tapestries.

Magic flooded the world, washed it away, all save for one final image.

Deiryan was smiling at her.

Stepping Into A Legend

Dahlia wept as she forced across the room. “Damn it all to the coldest hell! I saved Jingo, I saved Cat; I will not let you die!”

Yet when the maiden arrived the sorceress’s aura had already gone dim.

Then the sound struck her, a spirit-sound like an iron bell that could be heard on the other side of the world. The healer was swept away by it, thrown into the air for the second time that minute and smashed against the wall. Saidyara struck next to her, scream of “Fa…” cut off by the impact. The silver-haired paladin was knocked off her feet while Lioness’s corpse lay undisturbed and Cat’s unconscious form was jerked across the ground by her cloak. Lydia, the only one of them truly devoid of magic, was untouched, but hefted her blade and searched desperately for the enemy who’d done this to her friends.

“Father!” Saidyara cried as she peeled away from the wall, then collapsed to the ground weeping as Dahlia dragged in a breath and raced to see if Cat was still stable.

“What happened?” the mocha skinned swordmaid demanded, “Did we loose?”

“No,” Saidyara gasped as she sagged into the embrace Quin offered, “we won.”

It was not the sort of voice in which one made such pronouncements. “Then what happened?”

“Bloodfire,” the elfkin mumbled, then drew a breath and repeated it in a proper bards voice so all could hear. “My father’s ruby bracelets are living crystal spell talismans, like my glimmer-rod or his ring. They cast Bloodfire, which destroys living tissue to release it as destructive force. The blast was purely spiritual, which means my father was touching the forsaken child’s manifestation and channeling the blast into its true self. It might take it hundreds of thousands of years to reform.”

“But at what cost your father?” Dahlia asked, looking up from Cat’s still breathing form.

“His life. Father wouldn’t have done that unless it was the only way. He was probably in the beast’s maw.”

For a few moments only quite sobbing and the reek of cooked reptilian and scorched human broke the silent reverie. Then Lydia, the most coherent for all her pain and apparently more used to loss than any of them, took charge. “We have to move,” she commanded while whipping her blade clean on rag pulled from her belt, “Quin, you haven’t cleaned your sword.”

Dahlia looked up from her patient, in such agony from magical strain that she might as well have participated in the fighting. “We can’t move her. I’ve managed to scab Cat’s wounds and shield the blood out of her lungs, but if we carried her now it could all come apart, she’s hanging onto life by a thread, and if I have to stabilize her again I might be too.”

“Then we need a stretcher. Saidyara, snap out of it,” the brown-eyed woman commanded. “We need a stretcher. Some kind of level, floating magic-thing. Can you do that?”

“No good,” the elfkin managed, “the boat is still ice-locked. We’ll have to wait for the swamp to thaw.”

The mocha-skinned swordmaid shook her head; then took up Cat’s bow and enchanted arrows, “Then I’ll just have to kill that troll before it breaks free.”

Dahlia’s eyes widened as they focused past the brown-eyed woman on the form standing in the door. She was tall and beautiful with skin the argent of Whitefire feeding on a body and hair blacker than coal. The maiden screamed as the Unseelie glided in, superhuman in her grace and beauty, slender as an elm and strong as a river. She wore a scanty dress of wine red silk with living bracelets of azure flesh wrapping up her arms. Her delicate yet powerful shoulders were adorned in string after string of spherical rubies, and the slits on her neck spoke of gills.

Dahlia screamed and grappled for her sling, but the silver-elf ignored her long enough to tell Lydia, “That has already been dealt with,” in a voice like a mellow flute. She scanned the room as Lydia raised her blade, “You have nothing to fear from me. Tell them, Saidyara.”

Hope seemed to blossom in the elfkin’s face. “Myshara, I haven’t seen you since I was but a child.” The silver elf seemed to inspire poetry in the auburn bard, or perhaps she merely wished to speak elven, “Fear not, for this is Myshara Nightjewel, the mistress of three powers. The only silver elf in living memory to embrace the stars. Please, Lady, can you help Cat and Lioness?”

“Cat and Lioness, how delightfully you swordmaids play at the shaping-game. The larger one is Cat, yes?” Her eyes fell on Dahlia, “Your work is well done here, but you must leave the rest to me lest you burn yourself out.”

The Unseelie knelt before Cat and strands of pure green leapt form her hands.

Pure green! That is raw life energy, drawn not from her life force, nor converted from some other power, but true life-magic!

“It is done. If I sped her to health she would cannibalize her muscles for the nutrients, but she can be moved now, and will be whole within a day, and those dreadful scars will be gone. There must be food when she wakes in an hour; much food, for all of you.”

“What about Lioness?” Dahlia demanded.

“Hush, child, one thing at a time.” The healer placed her hand on Dahlia’s head, who stiffened, then relaxed as she moved on to others. Her body was floating in the half-numb warmth of blocked pain. “There, you will all be whole in a few hours, but I do not care how much you wish to do naught but weep, you must eat till you are engorged, then eat again as soon as your bellies allow it.”

“Now for this tiny Lioness.” The Unseelie gasped as she knelt over the tourmaline-eyed sorceress. “It is true, the people of Shallotte have found a way to make living magic items.”

The silver elf closed cat-like eyes that were purple without, black within, and a thousand multi-colored strands leapt from her hands into the corpse. This was star energy, not life. She continued thus for many minutes, mumbling, “Remember child, remember!”

At last Myshara opened her eyes gravely and turned them on Lydia, “What has this girl to live for? A husband? Children?”

Lydia paled even further at the grim tone. “She has a sister who loves her.”

“And friends,” Saidyara asserted, “many friends.”

“Swordmaids,” the silver elf dismissed them all, “it will not suffice. The child will not return, and I will not waste power on the call.”

Dahlia shrieked. “You have more power than any healer in the world can dream about and you’re not even going to try?”

The elf shook her head as if ashamed, not at her inaction, but some other failure. “I’m sorry, child, not everyone has the same eyes as I and, even after eight hundred years beneath the stars, I sometimes forget that. Look here, at the residue of her aura. See how the colors have bled into each other, pierced each other, faded to gray in places? With this sorceress’s final spell she burned herself out. I have failed to make her spirit remember its true pattern. The body is a simple thing to heal, but if I called to her soul it must choose between remaining in its next existence or returning to a body devoid of everything that makes her special, not just magic but inspiration. She would be as inhuman as these lizards you’ve battled, or as an elf gone deaf to the stars. I lived that hell for over a thousand years. Perhaps some perfect love could make it endurable, but the fellowship of a team she cannot be any part of without her magic? I think not. She will not return, and I will not leave another to the icy embrace of death to give her a chance she will not take. Make ready to leave, I will see to it this hero is buried with the planting of a memory tree.”

The honor she named was reserved for great elven heroes, but it only set Saidyara off again. “What news of my father, Lady?”

The silver elf smiled grimly and held up a specific ruby sphere, “This is all that remains of his body, which is more than I can say for the forsaken child. As to his spirit, we shall no naught ‘til we try.”

“Come then, I cannot teleport more than myself, but one who can will be here soon. Gather your things, and, by the Moons, you call yourselves swordmaids? You haven’t taken a second look at your prize!”

Dahlia did not understand till she focused on the jewels and rugs at the back of the cave. With a grim laugh Lydia bundled jewels and coins into a tapestry and drew it closed. It was small recompense for a human life, but it was wealth, wealth enough for them all to live in luxury for a year at least with some prized pieces left over to show her children as she told the tale of the first adventure of her roving.

Quin stood over the trident nervously. Was it broken? Or would its fury be unleashed on the next to touch it? The paladin nervously tossed a dagger atop it.

“I don’t believe that it will activate till someone grasps the shaft,” Myshara commented.

“Lioness did something to make it turn on its wielder. Otherwise we would have all died.”

“When did the backfire end; when the reptilian died or when the Lioness did?”

“I don’t know.”

“Hmm.” The silver elf calmly picked up the quintescent weapon and handed it to the paladin. Before anything more could be said the barkeep strode in carrying a blood-soaked black bundle that Dahlia identified as the remains of Deiryan’s cloak wrapped round something. The snowy owl Moonshadow rode his shoulder. “I have found it all, Lady, all save for the bracelets.”

“Take of that ridiculous disguise, Samnaratch, this is no time for your games. Your people need to see their king.”

As the elfkin bowed in acquiescence his dusky skin lightened to gold, white waves of hair became flame red curls swept away from handsome, elven ears. It had to be the king of Elithiira, for he wore plaitmail armor of yellowy crystal, and only one suit of such sized for an elfkin existed. When he spoke again his voice was rich and noble, its playfulness stolen by the solemnity of the room. “They await us at Lyraim’s Stand.”

“A moment yet. Let us make our call while his memory of the world is fresh.” The silver elf opened the bundle, revealing Deiryan’s sword, sleeve shield, three daggers, and ring. She removed the last and placed it on Saidyara’s finger.

The elfkin maiden stammered in panic, perhaps fearing she was being presented with an inheritance. “Living crystal is linked to its wielders spirit. Hold that and think of your father, everything you’ve ever known and loved about him. Call to him, remind him what he has left behind.”

The Unseelie took the sword in her own hands while Samnaratch held the sleeve shield and placed daggers into the owl’s feet. Myshara murmured what sounded to be endearments, some of them quite sensual, while Samnaratch whispered stories of his misspent youth studying under Deiryan and Saidyara sang as she cried, seemingly composing as she went.

A gleam began to emerge from the crystalline blades, a glow that first flickered, then danced, then pulsed like a heart.

‘Round the neck of the Unseelie who heard the song of the stars a single ruby orb began to match its glow.

Many miserable hours latter the surviving swordmaids sat in the common room of the inn where they’d heard tales alongside legends. Cat had indeed awakened, but only long enough to stuff herself on meat and fruit, then sleep again, over and over. Saidyara paced nervously, for there was still no word as to whether Myshara had succeeded in growing her father a new body. Lydia paced like a caged cat and murmured that the real innkeeper should bring her honest wine instead of fruit juice, and Quin starred at the same page of the book she’d turned too an hour ago.

Dahlia didn’t really notice save for the moments when Saidyara or a bar maid forced her to eat. It was all her fault. Lioness could be alive now if she hadn’t been so stubborn. If she hadn’t forced the sorceress to cast a final spell Lioness would be alive again, perhaps stirring now to eat and scratching at the new leg the life-mage had grown her.

“Everything I do turns to bile,” the healer whispered, the first sound she’d made since sunrise.

“Oh, is that what I am?” Cat teased as she knelt in front of the halflingkin and hugged her fiercely. “Thank you for saving my life.”

Abruptly Dahlia broke down into honest sobs in the redhead’s arms. As her tears stretched on music from an elven harp drifted down the stairs to mingle with her emotions. They listened for a long time. The music reached deeply into each of them, setting loose memories of the sorceress she’d barley known, the friend from her earliest memories, the sister she’d never dared to acknowledge. The maidens held each other, weeping and laughing till all were purged.

A silent moment latter an indigo-skinned elf slipped among the swordmaids, favoring them with a heart-stopping grin. “Deiryan!” the glad cry came from all their lips at once as Saidyara rushed to embrace her father, who spun her ‘round the room, then broke away to hug the others.

“Thus have you all been tested and found yourselves,” the elven bard intoned when the laughter and greetings and kisses past. “Perhaps you’ve found each other as well. And you’ve found this,” the reptilian’s weapon floated into the handsome elf’s hand. “The Sirocco’s Tooth Trident, masterwork of Nikaleo the Arcmage, founder of human focus magic; a weapon of legend as potent as the Electrum Blades. You don’t know each other, but you have fought and bled and wept as a group, and now have made a legend. How will it end? Will you fight each other ‘til the last woman standing claims the prize; give all the world yet another warning of how power corrupts? Will you sell it to a king and divide the mountain of gold only to wither away under the shadow of wealth? Or will you use it together as you won it together, tell the world that your legend has just begun?”

The swordmaid’s exchanged meaningful looks, Dahlia finding certainty growing in every eye but her own. Cat was the first to speak, placing her hand upon the trident, “For the Storm and the Lioness.”

The other tall women quickly joined her, hands clasping each other over the weapon, “The Storm and The Lioness.”

Dahlia stared at the taller women, her own confusion holding her back. Did she want that? To form a family with these women she barley knew, one of whom she’d saved and another whom she’d killed? “I… I have to think about this.”

Deiryan smiled at her as the others made entreating noises, “It might help you to think if you walked in the woods.”

“Of course, exactly,” and then she fled out the door and down the rope ladder, head spinning as she stumbled through the grass, then dropped into a bed of clover.

A small hand settled onto her shoulder, “So granddaughter, now you have learned two of the three hardest lessons every healer must learn.”

Somehow it was no surprise that Granny Featherfoot was here and knew all that had transpired, but she let out a delighted squeal when Jingo settled down next to her and stretched his arm across her back. “Two of the three lessons,” Dahlia replied, “What to do when there are those you cannot save and when there are those you should not save, but what is the third?”

“The third is the hardest of all, child, that is when the one you save hates you for it.”

She would return to a body devoid of everything that makes her special, not just magic but inspiration. She would be as inhuman as these lizards you’ve battled, or as an elf gone deaf to the stars.

“You say I’ve learned the lessons, but I don’t think I have. How do you do it? How do you live like this, live with this?”

“You live. You could armor yourself against all emotion ‘til you never had to feel for your patients or anyone else again, but locked in that hell your talent would wither and die. You live with your arms open, sharing your joy and pain with your friends. The same as you have always lived.” The old halfling left then.

Dahlia slid her arm around Jingo’s waist and squeezed him, sagging into the embrace that was so strong for his tiny frame. They sat there, together in silence, for a very long time. “You’ve gone roving now, haven’t you?” the halfling youth asked. “You’re going to leave with those other girls, and I won’t see you for a very long time.”

Tears shone in Dahlia’s eyes as she turned to look into his deep brown orbs. “I think so. You could come with us.”

“The only man among a half dozen swordmaids? I think not. Besides, I’ve still got two years on my apprenticeship. I suppose we all have to grow up sooner or latter; just promise you’ll never forget me.”

“Jingo, I love you! I could never…”

“Sh,” the halfling covered her mouth. “Never is a long time, and we’re very young. I love you with all my heart, but a lot can happen to you in the wide, wild world. If we’re meant to be you’ll come back to me, but don’t go out there with some crazy promise you might not be able to keep.” Then he kissed her to forestall further protests and let her know that he wasn’t just saying that to be free of her, that his love was real.

Dahlia sagged into his kiss, warmth flowing between them with the magic of the caress, on and on as the sun sank low. Then she broke it. The halflingkin had slept a little in those endless, empty hours, rested just enough for one spell. The maiden sang to the trees and the clover and the wildflowers. They stretched out and merged to form a scant shift of living leaves and flowers. Dahlia tucked a wild rose into her hair and held the verdant dress against her ripe body, “Will you dance with me?”

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