Of Truth and Beasts

How or why had this ugly little creature come all the way out—up—here? But for protruding boulders and loose stones, there was little cover in this area, and yet he had not noticed the creature before. In its rush, it had sent gravel down slope. It would have done so whether it had climbed down or up to get to his level.

Ghassan rolled onto his hands and knees.

The lizard froze on a boulder beyond the gravel slide’s edge; it had noticed him.

His thoughts galvanized as he blinked slowly. In that sliver of darkness behind his eyelids, he raised the lizard’s image in his mind. Over this he drew the shapes, lines, and marks of blazing symbols stroked from deep memory. A chant passed through his thoughts more quickly than it could have passed between his lips.

He felt the lizard’s tension, poised in the baser response of fight or flight. He wanted the latter as he opened his eyes and still kept the little beast’s presence fixed in his mind. When he hissed at it, feeling the flight response seize it, he fed its instinctual fear with his will.

The lizard bolted.

Ghassan scrambled upslope after it, slipping and sliding on loosened gravel. The lizard must have someplace that it holed up; it was too far from the lower reaches to have merely wandered all the way up here.

The lizard was faster, or he was slower, than expected. By the time he reached the boulder, it was gone from sight, but he still felt its presence in his mind. He followed that blindly.

An immense rock protrusion jutted outward just around the slope’s bend. Years of erosion had built up above it, creating a dangerous outcrop of loose material. He did his best not to make the slope’s material slide as he worked his way toward the outcrop.

The closer he came, the more the presence felt as if it came from below. He did not care for traversing underneath that much amassed loose gravel and earth. Angling down toward the overhang, he inched along with many upward glances.

A flash of brown-gray darted in under the outcrop, and Ghassan froze. He could still feel it in there.

He carefully stepped farther down as he sidled around below the outcrop, watching those tons of dirt and rock atop it for any sign of shifting. Then he saw the hole and dropped on his knees in despair.

The lizard had simply run inside its den, a slit beneath the great stone, barely large enough to reach into. It was certainly no entrance into the mountain. But he had learned one thing.

Ghassan did not need to search alone.

He released the connection to its limited instincts, as it did not have the necessary mental function that he would need. A mammal of some kind would be better. He carefully hauled himself up, sidled along the slope, out of the outcrop’s path, and then turned downward. Once panicked into running, the lizard may not have dived for a true entrance. But other forms of wildlife existed here.

Some might use other hiding holes here to take cover against high winds, cold, rain, and sleet. And perhaps one of their refuges was not naturally formed, something large enough for a dwarf, or him, to enter. 

Chuillyon stood in the remains of what appeared to be some sort of small dwarven settlement too small to even have been a village. Apparently, Wynn and her companions had spent a good deal of time here shortly past dusk, and then had moved on toward the foothills into the range.

“What was it, do you suppose?” Hannâschi asked, crouching to finger the edge of a half-buried foundation stone by the light of her cold lamp crystal.

Her face looked too pale, her cheeks slightly sunken, and her gold-brown hair hung dull. Shâodh was faring only a little better.

Chuillyon cursed himself for being a fool, and not for the first time in recent nights. If he could find away to go back in time for one moon, he would have managed all of this differently. Upon leaving his homeland, he’d decided they were better off traveling light. He had requisitioned horses instead of a wagon to ensure greater mobility, should they need to bypass Wynn or shadow her more closely. They had brought water bottles, blankets, crunchy flatbread, dried fruit, and limited grain for the horses.

In his younger days, he and Cinder-Shard had traveled long distances with far less. They’d always managed to forage for themselves, and he had not foreseen why following one small, human journeyor would be any different. But it was different, and in his zeal to discover Wynn’s true goal, he had not calculated the possible outcomes carefully enough.

Although he had seen an ancient map showing the Slip-Tooth Pass, the distance had been difficult to gauge. They had traveled toward the mountains longer than expected, and though he had intellectually known they would enter some barren terrain, he had not fathomed quite how barren. The closer they came to the range, the less there was to forage for themselves or their horses.