She got hit hard on the side and nearly thrown from her perch, unexpectedly buffeted by Sunset's right wing. It hit her again, and the horse dropped suddenly. A javelin had driven through the poor pegasus's wing, right at the joint.
Innovindil leaned forward, imploring the horse for his own sake and for hers, to fight through the pain.
She got hit again, harder.
Sunset managed to stop thrashing and extend his wings enough to catch the updraft and keep them moving along.
As they left the copse behind, Innovindil believed that they could make it, that her magnificent pegasus had enough determination and fortitude to get them through. She turned again to see to the javelin in Sunset's flank - or tried to.
For as Innovindil pivoted in her saddle, a fiery pain shot through her side, nearly taking her from consciousness. The elf somehow settled and turned just her head, and realized then that the last buffet she had taken hadn't been from Sunset's wing, for a dart of some unknown origin hung from her hip, and she could feel it pulsing with magical energy, beating like a heart and flushing painful acid into her side. The closer line of blood pouring down Sunset's flank was her own and not the pegasus's.
Her right leg had gone completely numb, and patches of blackness flitted about her field of vision.
"Fly on," she murmured to the pegasus, though she knew that every stroke of wings brought agony to her beloved equine friend. But they had to get over the forward elf line. Nothing else mattered.
Valiant Sunset rose up over the nearest trees of the Moonwood, and brave Innovindil called down to her people, who she knew to be moving through the trees. "Flee to the south and west," she begged in a voice growing weaker by the syllable. "Ambush! Trap!"
Sunset beat his wings again then whinnied in pain and jerked to the left. They couldn't hold. Somewhere in the back of her mind, in a place caught between consciousness and blackness, Innovindil knew the pegasus could not go on.
She thought that the way before them was clear, but suddenly a large tree loomed where before there had been only empty space. It made no sense to her. She didn't even begin to think that a wizard might be nearby, casting illusions to deceive her. She was only dimly aware as she and Sunset plowed into the tangle of the large tree, and she felt no real pain as she and the horse crashed in headlong, tumbling and twisting in a bone-crunching descent through the branches and to the ground. At one point she caught a curious sight indeed, though it hardly registered: a little, aged gnome with only slight tufts of white hair above his considerable ears and dressed in beautiful shimmering robes of purple and red sat on a branch, legs crossed at the ankles and rocking childlike back and forth, staring at her with an amused expression.
Delirium, the presage to death, she briefly thought. It had to be.
Sunset hit the ground first, in a twisted and broken heap, and Innovindil fell atop him, her face close to his.
She heard his last breath.
She died atop him.
Back on the hillside, the three orcs lost sight of the elf and her flying horse long before the crash, but they had witnessed the javelin strikes, and had cheered each.
"Clan Karuck!" Dnark said, punching his fist into the air, and daring to believe in that moment of elation and victory that the arrival of the half-ogres and their behemoth kin would indeed deliver all the promises of optimistic Toogwik Tuk. The elves and their flying horses had been a bane to the orcs since they had come south, but would any more dare glide over the fields of the Kingdom of Many-Arrows?
"Karuck," Toogwik Tuk agreed, clapping the chieftain on the shoulder, and pointing below.
There, Grguch stood tall, arms upraised. "Take them!" the half-ogre cried to his people. "To the forest!"
With a howl and hoot that brought goosebumps to the chieftain and shamans, the warriors of Clan Karuck leaped up from their concealment and ran howling toward the forest. From the small copse to the south came the lumbering ogres, each with a throw-stick resting on one shoulder, a javelin set in its Y, angled forward and up, ready to launch.
The ground shook beneath their charge, and the wind itself retreated before the force of their vicious howls.