Arc 1: Chapter 7: Ill-omened Road
We went northward, and though I had wanted to be left behind in my half-delirious state, I kept my mouth shut once I’d come to. I wasn’t in much of a position to be turning down free care and a ride out of the demesne.
I rode on a small cart pulled by the itinerant doctor’s chimera. It was an ugly beast, big, with a mottled gray hide covered in coarse fur and an enormous hog’s head. It had a dense mop of hair hanging low over its four glassy eyes and huge curling horns hanging low to the ground, their weight bowing its head so it seemed to walk in a perpetual depressive fugue. Its humped back blocked my view of the road. It smelled bad, shat a lot, and its brassy lows had me gritting my teeth halfway through the first day of the journey.
Olliard sat on the cart’s bench, guiding the smelly beast with a grandfatherly fondness that spoke of long familiarity. His gentle murmuring lulled me to sleep more than once despite the rough ride. His apprentice sat next to me in the cart, ignoring me.
Perhaps the angel comment had been in poor taste.
The landscape drifted by in a surreal blur of images. First dense woodland, then rolling hills, then a gentler patchwork of lighter woods and wide, cultivated fields. It was a clear day, pleasantly warm, the recent storms having washed the land in an emerald sheen. Shallow lakes had formed here and there from rainfall. At one point I saw brooding clouds and flickering lightning in the distant horizon, and felt a tug in my chest. Instinctively, I knew that direction was east.
Not long after, clouds rolled over the land to cast that shining, emerald world in gloom. A gentle snow of pale gray flecks began to fall in a lazy dance from on high.
“Ash rain,” Olliard commented darkly. “Been a few months since the last one. Thought we were done with these.”
“There are parts of the subcontinent still burning,” I said.
Olliard shook his head, grimacing. “It’s been years now since the fighting ended. Nearly a decade since the old capital burned.”
I didn’t reply. It wouldn’t do my traveling companions any good to know that much of the destruction wrought by the death of Elfhome was supernatural in nature, and that some of those wounds might never heal. Nor did I want to explain that there were demons still loose, keeping the storms of choking smog and ever-burning flames lit even after ten years.
We hadn’t managed to hunt down all of them. There were too few members of the Table left.