Not Magic Enough and Setting Boundaries - By Valerie Douglas Page 0,47

soft breeze rustled the thin grasses, a faint whisper of sound. He listened to the sounds of the night and became aware when they went silent save for the sound of the grasses.

The owl took silently to the wing, swooping into the night and not by choice. Something had disturbed him.

Cautious, Elon drew his swords.

They came out of the night, the firbolg, their pale fur mimicking the moonlight as they rushed across the ground. Nor had they come alone. A boggart leaped for him.

Chapter Three

A feline scream drew Jareth out of sleep with a rush. For a moment, he could only stare in breathless astonishment…and in wonder.

He’d never seen anything so swift, so strangely beautiful or so very deadly as watching Elon of Aerilann fight off firbolg and boggins alone in the moonlight.

The Elf moved like water - smoothly, gracefully - his swords swirling around him almost as if they, too, were fluid, as if the steel bent like reeds in the flow of his movement. Yet where they touched, blood flew. There was no sound save for the cries of the firbolg and boggins. Bodies littered the ground around him, as steel flashed like lightning in the thin moonlight. Every movement was graceful and sure as he wove a web of steel around himself, denying entrance as Colath took up his swords and went to join him.

There was no pause, Colath simply stepped into the flow of Elon’s movement and became part of it. It was as if they were one person; extensions of each other, one stepping in where the other wasn’t.

Jareth saw the firbolg leap and scramble to the rocks above him and them and fired a mage-bolt, sending it spinning out into the night as he rolled to his feet, calling up power. Energy flared around him, gathered in his hands.

A boggart leaped to one of the rocks and then toward Colath. Jareth picked it out of the air.

It wasn’t his first fire-fight, but he felt the same mixture of terror and exhilaration as he spun and turned in response to the motion he saw at the edges of his vision as Elon and Colath defended the entrance to their little shelter.

While he could take no pleasure in killing even these vicious things, Elon couldn’t deny it felt good to move; to fight cleanly - rather than be mired in seemingly endless debate, negotiation and discussion. It felt good as well to have Colath at his back once again in honest battle rather than the verbal kind, and surprisingly, to find he trusted Jareth to cover them both. As he had trusted him earlier in the day with his own life, sensing the wizard as he drew power. More, to draw him into the familiar pattern of he and Colath - to know and trust that Jareth would fill a space that hadn’t been there before but now was.

And he did.

Faced with such determined opposition the firbolg fell back. The tipping point had been reached between losing too many for the pride to recover and the prey they might win, if they succeeded.

The boggins were more stubborn but a last spray of mage-fire from Jareth was enough to discourage them and convince them to quit the field of battle, too.

If it hadn’t been for the risk that men would pass so deep into borderlands territory and so encroach on Dwarven territory from the rear, Elon wouldn’t have risked it and their lives to set a marker so close to the borderlands. Too many centuries of men ever pushing their boundaries had taught him a lesson that wouldn’t be unlearned.

Wiping the blade of his sword Elon looked to Jareth. It had grown light while they fought, bright enough to see the young wizard’s resolute expression.

There was hope yet though, to be found in him.

A clatter of hooves on stone warned them of riders approaching from the depths of Dwarven lands.

To Elon’s surprise, he saw it wasn’t a party of the men but one of the Dwarven Wives, and she wore a Lore Master’s jewel suspended from the heavy golden chain around her throat. Both a leader and a user of magic…

He, they, would do well to go cautiously here. Very cautiously. He glanced at Jareth, worriedly.

The young wizard met his look, quickly concealing his own apprehension.

The Lore Master was perched on one of the small, sturdy Dwarven ponies they used in the mines to pull the carts of ore. A coterie of massive Dwarven men - their