Chapter 2

Just as she started to back away, a gravely yet soft hissing voice right behind her head said, "Did you see what you wanted to see little Elven girl?"

Tamalain froze in place on hearing the voice behind her. She felt a jolt of adrenalin slam her heart and started it pounding in her chest as another wave of raw terror seized her mind. By what effort she never knew or understood, she was able to stay frozen in place.

"I know your there girl, I can hear the pounding of your heart, I can smell the scent of fear coming from you. Oh yes, I know you're a girl for, shall we say, other reasons." It gave an evil hissing chuckle that released even greater shocks of fear into her body and mind, even as she was fighting to regain control of herself. "Oh come now child, I will find you and kill you, you know. I have always found your race to be a tasty snack, still do in fact. Now come out and play, I am in the mood to toy with my food before feeding."

Tamalain stopped struggling with her fear and just felt for her hearts beating. She willed it to slow down and relax back to its normal quiet rhythm. As her heart slowed, she looked into herself at the fear that gripped her mind. Slowly, oh so slowly she worked at the fear, forcing it down into the back of her mind, making it merely a thing to ignore until she had more time to deal with it more directly. She felt a sense of calm settle over her and she was able too once again think clearly. 'That fear effect, it is an area effect spell, a very powerful one too, ' she thought.

"Very good child, your hearts pounding is fading along with your fear. I know you are near by, so now we will just have to find you in a less direct manner." She heard a hard fast intake of breath, and then with a slow smoke filled exhale, it filled the area far to her left down wind. When he did not see her in the cloud, he slowly turned towards what would be the center of the arc, with her squatting dead in the center. She knew she had to see her enemy so she would know what she was up against before she would try to escape. Very slowly, carefully she rose to her feet, taking a small pebble between two gloved fingers as she rose. That was a risky move when camouflaged; the pebble could break the camouflage if she moved too quickly.

Once she was standing, she turned around, being careful not to scuff her feet or disturb any of the brush around her. As she came up and around, she found herself nose to nose with a Dragon type creature terrible to behold. Its body was twice the size of a large horse; the neck extended a good eight feet from the body, and was as thick as her upper legs to support its head. The tail extended back twenty feet, was spinney, and spiked down its entire length. Its skin was a black so deep it seemed to have purplish undertones. Its eyes seemed to glow a sickening shade of purple that made her stomach twist in knots. It is of the four-legged variety of dragon, with its large wings folded tightly to its body. The talons were evil looking and sharp, the needle pointed nails about six inch's long on all four claws. The teeth, well, she saw enough of them to add a new level of fear that had nothing to do with the spell that continued to cast around her.

Her heart once again tried to begin its heavy pounding but she stopped it before it could start. She knew it would breathe out more smoke soon, and she was right in its path. She also knew she would only have one chance to escape, so she flipped the tiny pebble to her right. It bounced off a branch ten feet away making a sound like a twig snapping.

The creature spun and blew out a blast of intense fire that flashed all the brush in its path to ashes in seconds. Even aimed away as it was, the blast cooked the facing outer layer of her leather armor. She quickly tried to cast escape but the spell fizzled, leaving her exposed to attack. She knew that she would need a full minute before she could try and cast escape again, so she had to act fast or die even faster at the beast's teeth and claws. The dragon started to turn towards her as she became visible, but Tamalain did not wait for it to finish turning. Pulling out both of her large daggers, she went into full speed battle mode. Once again she cursed Jordan for putting her behind a desk and under that spell for so long, she found she was slower than she should be and clumsy in her actions and reactions.

She jumped towards the beast aiming to stab it in the eyes. She misjudged the jump and the movement of the dragon. She ended up flying over its head and landing on its back between its massive wings folded. She then tried to drive the pointed weapons into the beast spine, in hopes of crippling it. She activated the lightning bolt ability she had killed Thornbreak with, but her misjudgment caused her to miss the spinal column as it spun about while trying to shake her off. One blade dug into the muscle at the base of the left wing, the other lodged in the spine ridge in the center of its back. The scales blackened and burned at the entry point, but the charge did little else to the spine. The wing base on the other hand burned and cooked heavily as the blade drove deep into the main flight muscles of the left wing. She jumped as the dragon lurched to the side as its damaged wing dropped uselessly, unfolding to the ground. The enraged beast released a roar of agony that summoned hundreds of others to its aid. She hit the ground running and did not look back.

"I will hunt you to the end of time for this insult Elven witch; I will kill all of your kind as I should have done when you first appeared at the end of the Age of Scale." Now she knew what it was that she was up against, The Drakota. They were the servants of the greater Dragons, the fighters of the dragon kind, and none too smart if legend and myth had it right. She ran away from the crater, but not towards her two poorly trained footpads. She needed less than 30 seconds before she could try to cast escape again, so she went down slope rather than up. It was then that she knew what part of the old ridgeline she had stumbled upon in her hurry to escape. She heard the sound she had been expecting and dropped into the ditch in her path and kept running as a blast of flame shot over her head. Even though the blast missed, she felt the intense heat and smelled the leather on her back partially cook from the heat.

She now had a few seconds to think as the fear faded. These were extinct, wiped out in the final dragon wars so many ages past. Yet here they are; did they hide a clutch of eggs, casting some sort of stasis on them? That must be the case, yet what woke them, think Tam, Think, what does a dragon egg need to mature, heat, lots of heat. Ah, horse crap, the Luclin flare must have caused the eggs to awaken and hatch. One male and a dozen or so females, they must mature fast for so many to have laid eggs already. More for that later, wings appeared over her head, DUCK! She acted without thought and crouched without slowing.

Tamalain ducked down as a pair of razor sharp claws tried to latch onto her from above. They missed her by mere inches or so she thought, she kept low and moving fast. Once she cleared the ditch, she found what she was looking for further on down the slope, a large pile of tumbled stones she used to rest on after her run up the hill. She dove behind it just as she felt the twinge of the Escape spell resetting. Without thinking, she cast it and felt the pull as she quickly flashed into a sparkling cloud and was gone. The lead male charged around the pile to witness the last of the spell effect.

"Blast, the portal spells must be coming back, that wasn't supposed to be possible anymore." He turned and growled at a female to come and pull the weapons from his back. Carefully, she pulled the one that had tangled in the spines. It pulled away with no difficulty. The second dagger was harder as the muscles had bound and cooked around it and would not release it. "Just pull it out, I will deal with the damage later," he roared in dragon speech. She grabbed it in her jaws and pulled hard, the wing root tore and he started to bleed badly, but the weapon came out. The scream he gave out was heard miles away back at the main camp causing the evacuation to begin. Gray wasted no time on this. He wanted the camp packed and gone in less than 30 minutes.

Tamalain materialized right where she had planned. With hardly a break from the diving roll she had been in when she ported, she yelled, "Up now you two, we have to run even faster than before. If those Drakota catch us, we are dead, now move it!"

Both had been dozing when she appeared and startled when she yelled at them. "What's the rush, we have time before they get here," said the taller scout.

Tamalain backhanded him in the head as she passed him. "Run you worthless worm, I may not like doing this, but I will not leave you behind to be eaten by that fire breathing Dragon kin. Now move your ass's boys before you get the ultimate ass chewing!"

Both heard the scream from the weapons where being pulled out and almost lost their bladder control, they were now convinced to run that much harder and faster. Even their best efforts could not match Tamalain Arrowmark when she was in full battle mode. She felt something burning inside her; it was warning that she was getting low on mana.

Just as she was running dry on power, she saw the camp up ahead. Gray already had everybody up and packing like mad to move out in minutes. That roaring scream had induced terror in everybody even this far out. "Gray," Tamalain yelled as she staggered into camp, "Drakota! Hundreds of adults, thousands of eggs, we have to get word back to the council!" She collapsed into unconsciousness as her exhausted mana ran completely out. The two scouts made it back just as the personal moved out at a near run. "More running sir, this just isn't fair." They both complained.

Their commander sent then to the head of the column to lead the way. He also informed them they were relieved of scouting duty until they went back to school and learned how to be scouts.

Tamalain regained consciousness several hours later as the tired horses needed a short break for watering and feeding. She saw Gray standing nearby, looking at the sky in the direction they had just come from. He had been seeing winged beast on and off for the last two hours. He looked down when she moaned and tried to sit up. "Stay down a bit longer Tam. You really burned yourself out getting back down the mountain."

"What happened, are they following us yet? Did those two incompetents make it back?" She moaned as she fell back on to the furs she was laying on.

"In reverse order, yes those two made it back and are on point. No, the Drakota are not following yet. They are maintaining an air presence now though. As to the first, you tell me."

She related most of the events to her arrival at the ridge. He looked very disturbed at the numbers she told him. "Are you sure of that nest count. It hardly seems possible that they could have reproduced that quickly in such great numbers."

"That is what I saw up there Gray. I was almost peeing myself with terror from the area effect fear spell they had going. That takes a massive amount of power to produce on that scale."

"Well, I suspect Tam it was more of one male and several hundred ready female eggs that hatched first. You were seeing the older generation and the eggs were from them."

"Ok, I can accept that theory. It makes more sense than the one-year maturation I was thinking of. Now where are we, and why aren't we still moving."

"It is coming up on sundown so I figured on stopping for an hour to give the animals a rest. You need several more hours sleep yourself young woman. The cleric said you had used every, last scrap of mana in your body on the run back. You are lucky you are still alive."

"It wasn't just the run that got to me Gray; it was the working escape spell that drained me so much."

"The Escape spell is functional again? That ability died with the portal network Tamalain Arrowmark. How did you gain access to when nobody else can?"

"I felt a funny twinge earlier in the day and the ability was there, ready to use. I did have to set a bind point though. It was blank in my mind, so I used a medallion given to me by the old Necromancer shortly before he died. He said it would allow me to return to a place I was once before. I used it and it worked, it set my bind point where I left the two kids in hiding."

"Did you have any trouble casting it?" He moved over to the cart and sat next to Tamalain.

The first attempt failed, so I was on the run for the next minute or so, the second try worked thankfully or I would be filling a Drakota's belly now. It was during the run I lost both of my daggers. I left them imbedded in its back. I also found out they are very resistant to magical attacks. The lightning strike barely singed him."

"I can almost bet it was the pulling of the daggers that made him roar so loud. Where in his back did you plant your dagger blades?"

"I was aiming for his eyes, but I misjudged my timing and landed on his back. One ended up trapped in the spinal ridge, the other though I managed to drive into the muscles at the base of his left wing. They did cook a bit so the blade may have been more than a little stuck."

"Yes, that would explain the scream of agony we heard. You know you have also grounded him. What little is known indicates magic resistance includes healing. You might very well have crippled him for life."

"He did promise to follow me and wipe all the Elven out as they should have done when we first appeared." She paused. "No, he said 'as I should have', not they. Could he have been there at the final battle, then slept in stasis all this time? How could he have survived all these thousands of years, even in stasis spell."

"I can't answer you on that one Tamalain, which is about all I know about them. The High Elven might know more, but I doubt any of the wood Elven do." Gray looked around and saw that most of the horses were ready to move again. "Up people, we have a hoard of pissed off dragon kind back there ready to come done for a snack. Mount up and move out!"

Nobody decided to argue so within minutes the caravan was rolling at a pace just short of a run. "You try to get a few more hours sleep Tamalain you are still not ready for another speed run."

Tamalain felt inside and saw her mana pool was still far lower than it should be. She quickly found that with the complete loss of mana, all her abilities shut down, even the one that helped keep her power pool full. She carefully reactivated the needed abilities, closed her eyes, and fell straight away to sleep.

She appeared in the dream world and her Grandmother was there waiting for her. "That was way too close for comfort Tamalain. I am going to haunt Jordan's nightmares for years for what he has done to you."

"No Granddame, no need for that. I have my own way of dealing with him. Tell me, had you ever encountered anything like that big bastard before?"

"Nothing in that size range, I did have a hand in the final take down of Lady Vox though, but that was many long years before your father was even born. She was about ten times the size of the Drakota, and meaner."

"That is going quite a ways back in history. What about the Sleeper, I have heard tales of that, but nothing that made any sense."

"I stayed as far away from that encounter as I could. Sometime earlier, I was by higher authority, informed not to go up Veeshans peek more than once. I am glad I was on the Plane of Knowledge at the time. I was assisting in setting up a exploration run into the Plane of Time. That was not much fun for any of us either. We never made it past the second lock the resistance was so heavy. Later a larger group raided in and cleared it out, but boy did they pay the price for it. We all paid for their trespassing in fact. Time split into multiple paths of new possible futures. Some better, most were worse. I'm not sure if we got one of the better ones. I did see a vision of one time line where the portal network was crashed almost 400 years before ours, but Luclin stayed together until about the same time as ours went up."

"With escape working again, do you think the entire network will be restored?"

"That is up to the gods, so I have no idea. Well Granddaughter, you are at full charge, time to run again. Set your bind point well away from the town. Others may be able to link to it and wizard port there. Be safe child." With that last thought, Tamalains eye opened and she felt fully refreshed.

The wagon she had been loaded on was bumping along the rough dirt track at a dangerously high speed for this late at night. Most of the drivers had runners out front with lit torches to lead the way. Others stayed close behind the one in front of them, using them as guides. Tamalain sat up and discovered that she was not stiff, sore, nor hurting in any way. She was hungry and thirsty though. Gray was sitting next to her, dozing while the run went on through the night. She decided he needed to call it a night after she looked back and did not see any wings in the dark, even with infra-vision.

She nudged Gray and he woke up with a start and almost panicked. "Calm down Gray, there isn't anything wrong for the moment. You need to call off the run until after sunrise. It's time to allow everybody and the animals some rest."

Gray just nodded and called out to the lead runner to look for a good place to stop for the remainder of the night. It only took a few minutes for the entire caravan to pull to the side of the road and everybody except a few guards and the handlers were asleep.

"Gray, I am going ahead, I need to get the second group turned around before they get too far from town."

"Are you ready Tam, I know you were wiped out just a few hours ago."

"I am fully charged and rested. I have to go, oh yeah I am taking this bread and cheese with me, I am famished." She took several large bites then drank down what remained in her water skins. She stopped at the wagon that was loaded with water barrels and refilled both the skins she carried. After getting her fill and topping off the skins again, she made her way to the front of the caravan. She gave a quick wave to the leading guards, kicked in the Journeyman's run and vanished into the night.

Four men, human men that is, had set up camp on a hillside along the main road where it split off towards the Greater Faydark Upper Pass. They had some hopes of playing at being bandits and making their fortunes that way. Several days earlier when the caravan came through, they had laid low, as they did not feel like taking on over a dozen armed guards. It was coming up on dawn and the one on watch called the others quietly that some one was coming down the high road fast.

One of the men had learned a simple version of the tangle foot spell to slow their target down to make for easy picking. The caster saw the moving target and cast his spell. He was elated that it worked and had brought the person to a near dead stop. It was the last thought he ever had.

Tamalain felt the tangle foot grab her and slow her to a crawl. She didn't even have to think about what she did next. First infra-vision came in to play to get a clear number of targets, four of them. 'Large, possible humans, too bad for them she thought.' She pulled her bow around with her right hand and four arrows from the quiver with her left, holding each arrow between two fingers. She nocked and fired all four in just over a second, dropping all four targets before they even knew they were the ones in danger.

As the caster dropped, so did the spell, she sped back to full speed in a second and put away her bow. She had made the decision not to check on them, as time was more important than making sure they were all dead. She need not have worried about them though; she had switched to Dragon hunter arrows, steel broad heads. All four had died as her shots went clean into each of their hearts.

About 30 minutes later just as the sun had risen over the horizon, she came to the second group. "Who is in charge," she asked the guards on duty at the time.

"Mister Graph ma'am, but he will not be up yet for at least another hour."

"Too bad for him then, alert the rest of the guards, and get everybody up fast. This lot has to be turned around and running for their lives back to town in less than an hour."

"Why should we do that ma'am, I mean, who are you to give us orders," ask one of the guards.

"Now I really know why I hated that desk job most of all, I am not even known by my own troops. Captain Tamalain Arrowmark at your service, now as I was saying. There are several hundred very pissed off and hungry Drakota about to come pouring out of the Greater Faydark upper pass region. The Upper Glenn's is the first obstacle and major food source in their path, we need everybody back to town, and all the defenses readied before they arrive."

"Ma'am, anybody can make a claim as to who they think they are. I need proof before..." He was drawing out a small club as he was approaching her. When he later regained consciousness in the infirmary in town, he found he had two broken arms and a concussion.

Tamalain looked at his partner, "Now, you do as I say or you will be joining that insubordinate idiot, got it?"

"Yes Ma'am! Get this camp up and moving back to town NOW!" He ran off yelling for the sergeant of the guard and the commander to help get things moving.

The guard commander for this group approached Tamalain carefully. "Ma'am please calmly try and explain to me exactly why we need to get everybody up and moving back the way we just came from."