"Do you truly understand that you will one day order your warriors into battle, knowing that many of them will die on the field?"
Breathing didn't get any easier.
"Do you truly understand that you may have to turn your army aside, knowing full well that in doing so you will leave a To-gai-ru village unpro-tected, and that the Behrenese will likely take out their anger against your insurrection on that unprotected village? Perhaps your actions will lead to more children watching their parents die - or even more horrifying, will lead to some parents watching their children die. Are you ready to take that responsibility, Brynn Dharielle? ?
She stood there, trembling, unblinking.
"Is the potential cost worth the gain?"
That last question grounded her again, tossed aside the images of poten-tial horror and clarified the potential victory. Victory for To-gai meant only one thing, in truth, but to Brynn Dharielle, that one thing outweighed all the pain and all the deaths.
"Freedom," she whispered, her teeth clenched tightly.
Belli'mar Juraviel stared at her for a few moments, then nodded his approval.
She was learning.
Lozan Duk watched the curious couple sitting at the campfire that warm summer night in the rolling foothills of the Belt-and-Buckle, a mountain range that Lozan Duk's people considered the very end of the world.
Lozan Duk was not too concerned with the female, for though her skin was darker and her eyes a bit unusual in shape, she did not seem so much different from the other bumbling humans who every so often wandered into these lands.
But the other one, with his angular features and diminutive form...
At first Lozan Duk and his companion, Cazzira, had thought the second creature a human child, but closer inspection had nullified that viewpoint. He was no child, and indeed spoke in the tones of a leader. And more than that, this one had a set of features that neither of the onlookers could have expected: a pair of nearly translucent wings.
A branch to the side shuddered slightly as Lozan Duk's companion re-turned, leaping through the boughs as nimbly as any squirrel might. ?Denkan ? she said with a nod, confirming their suspicions that the wings Were akin to those of a debankan, a butterfly.
The two hesitated, staring at each other, at a loss. Their histories told of lv one race of creatures who sported such ornaments, the Tylwyn Tou, the elves of the day.
But those creatures, the Tylwyn Tou, had receded into the oldest memo-ries of the Tylwyn Doc. To many of the younger people, they had become no more than legends.
Was this, then, a legend come to life? For the diminutive creature down by the campfire surely resembled the Tylwyn Doc, with his deceivingly deli-cate stature and his angular features, except that his hair was light, where the Tylwyn Doc had hair almost universally black. And his skin, though creamy, seemed somewhat colored by the sun, where the skin of all the Tyl-wyn Doc, creatures who rarely if ever ventured out from under the nearly solid canopy of their forest home of Tymwyvenne, was milky white.
"And what does that mean?" Lozan asked with a shrug.
Normally, the procedure for dealing with intruders was fairly straight-forward, and certainly of uniform intent.
No reasoning being who wandered into the realm of the Tylwyn Doc, the Doc'alfar, would wander back out.
Intruders were given to the peat bog.
Lozan Duk looked back down at the duo, particularly at the curious crea-ture who seemed in many ways a mirror image of himself, and wondered.
PART 1 TO THE EDGE OF DARKNESS Chapter 4 Details, Details
Their bickering was becoming more than an annoyance to Yakim Douan. ?The pirates must be handled more delicately!" yelled Yatol Peridan, the highest-ranking priest of southeastern Behren, the land known as Cosinnida - and a man well-known to be in league with many of the no-torious coast runners. The argument that he was now making in Jacintha - that the crackdown Yatol De Hamman had imposed along his section of the coast, the area north of Peridan's territory and just south of Jacintha, was unreasonable and dangerous for security - almost had the Chezru Chieftain laughing aloud. How transparent this one was! Yakim always got a good chuckle out of Peridan's antics; he had only appointed the man as a Yatol because Peridan had done a fine job in getting valuable marble up to the palace in Jacintha for recent improvements.
"The pirates must be handled!" Yatol De Hamman countered angrily. ?Leave