Legends of the Dragonrealm, Vol II - By Richard A. Knaak Page 0,280

was one problem with his people, Faunon thought as he stepped back from the rock-hard corpse. They either had no inclination toward curiosity whatsoever or they were obsessed with finding out about everything under the sun. No moderation save in a few individuals such as himself.

“Just a minute more, Rayke,” he returned, putting just enough emphasis in his voice to remind the other elf who was in charge here.

His companion said nothing, but the flat line of his mouth spoke volumes enough. Rayke had angular features that reminded Faunon of a starving man, and the look on his face only added to that effect. Angular features were not uncommon among the elves, but Rayke’s were more severe than most. Faunon’s own visage was a bit rounder, more pleasant, so some of the females of his tribe were apt to tell him time and time again until their lilting voices got too much on his nerves and he had to excuse himself from their company somehow. There was another problem with his people: when they saw something they wanted—or someone—they became very, very persistent. He sometimes wondered if he was really one of them.

“Well?”

Faunon started, realizing he had lost track of things. Doing so in front of Rayke made it doubly annoying. He pretended instead that his daydreaming was actually a collecting of his thoughts. “Notice anything wrong with this?”

“With what?”

“The bodies and the land.”

“Only that there are a lot of the former scattered around the latter.” Rayke smiled, pleased with his clever response.

Faunon kept his own face neutral, trying to hold back his anger. “And the land seems relatively untouched, doesn’t it?”

The two of them scanned the area, though each had done so several times already. There were inclines where it was obvious that there had been none before, for trees and bushes jutted at angles no self-respecting plant would have chosen, almost as if something had dug up the ground and then only halfheartedly tried to repair the devastation. A few trees appeared to have withered and petrified much the way the avian dead had, but most of the wooded region seemed fairly healthy overall. Still, Faunon found it astonishing that he was the only one who had paid any note to the peculiarity of the landscape.

The other elf lost hold of his smile. “It does. We’ve come across some areas where the land was overturned, but, even there, the plants and smaller animals were thriving.”

“As if they had been bypassed, protected… or perhaps healed,” he added, suddenly feeling that the last was closer to the truth.

“Protected by what? Certainly not the Sheekas. They would have protected themselves first, I think.”

“Perhaps by whoever fought the bird people and then vanished,” Faunon suggested. Likely, they would never know. This land, which his own people could not claim as their birthplace, having fled to here, as legend put it, from the horrors of another world countless millennia ago, had an air of mystery about it that defied the efforts of the elves. Faunon himself knew that the Sheekas and the Quel had not been the first masters here; that, in fact, several other races had preceded them. This was an old world despite its vitality.

Rayke sighed. “Are you going to begin that again, Faunon?”

“If need be! It isn’t enough to know that the Sheekas have suffered a calamity that may speak the end of their reign; we have to know if their disaster has the potential to reoccur! If we—”

Something huge went crashing through the trees, sounding as if it had fallen from the sky at a remarkable speed. Faunon, whirling, caught sight of a huge black shape moving in and out of the trees that finally registered in his mind as a horse… but what a horse! A stallion, to be sure. He stood taller than any that the elf had ever seen and ran with a swiftness that the wind would have been unable to match. If the steed was responsible for the din they had heard, he had changed his ways in swift fashion, for now the animal ran as silent as the shadows he so resembled.

“What is that?” Rayke whispered. He had turned pale. Faunon knew that his own visage matched in shading.

“Let’s follow it!”

“Follow it? Do you see how fast it runs? We will never catch it!” The other elf sounded almost relieved at the last.

“I don’t intend to catch it! I just want to see what it is! Follow me!” Faunon raced after the black