Arc 3: Chapter 6: Ambush Beneath The Corpse Moon
My world has two moons. Apparently, it used to have three, but that’s a story for another time. One of those moons is alive with the same magic that suffuses the land, making it gleam bright in the night sky. It is the larger of the two, dominating the firmament, almost a second world hovering in the night above my own. I hear elves live there, and other things. When I was a boy, they would come down at times in silver chariots and shining coaches to dance in the glades and forests with their cousins.
They stayed in their cold kingdom above in recent years, and who could blame them?
The second moon is dead, a corpse hanging sullen and gray in the sky, more distant than its neighbor and lacking the soft luminescence of Od. It rose high tonight, enjoying a rare dominance. Wil-O’ Wisps and ghost lights drifted through the trees, melding with the wan illumination of the Corpse Moon high above. Beneath its baleful eye, nine feet of muscle and anger strode down the forest road.
Karog stopped, glowering into the deeper shadows ahead of him. Beneath his ragged hood his eyes, yellow and ringed with red, suddenly widened at the same time his slit nostrils flared. “I smell you, Elf Friend.”
I stepped into the moonlight, blocking his path. I wore my armor beneath my red cloak, my pointed cowl up, and had my naked axe on my shoulder. He’d be able to see the auratic gleam of my golden eyes beneath the shadow of my hood, no doubt.
“We were interrupted earlier,” I said to him. “There are things I want you to tell me.”
Catrin and one of her fellow wenches, one she trusted, had observed Karog in the Backroad. He’d stayed a while, drank some mead, talked to no one, then abruptly left. She’d followed him from the shadows, using her dhampir ability to swim through darkness to keep me appraised of his whereabouts. After that, all I needed to do was get ahead of him and wait.
Karog lowered his head, baring his wolf’s teeth. His breath sent out a great gust of frost into the frozen air. “You are a fool. And I will tear you limb from limb.”
I glowered at him, matching the hate in his eyes with my own. “I haven’t forgotten your part in what happened at Cael. You and I have a debt to settle.”
Karog let out a single snort. Then, without warning, without so much as a shifting foot, he charged.
Nothing that big should be able to move that fast, but the ogre’s speed was explosive, and disconcertingly quiet. He didn’t draw the weapons he’d used inside the inn, only rushed me with bare hands and preternatural fury.