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Through a stand of border aspens before the open plain, he saw three
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silhouettes with sparking eyes. They rushed, one after another, upon a fourth
fleeing before them.
Still, he kept on, slipping in behind one aspen.
In days past, Sorhkafâré would have leaped to defend any poor victim. But not
now. It did not matter if anyone out there on the plain still lived. He peered
around the aspen's trunk.
The three hunkered upon the ground with lowered heads, tearing back and
forth. Beneath them, the fourth struggled wildly, its pain-pitched voice
ringing in Sorhkafâré's ears.
The sound of such terrified suffering ate at him.
He lunged around the tree, running for the victim's outstretched hand.
Halfway there, the figure thrashed free and scrambled across the matted grass
with wide, panicked eyes&
Glittering, crystalline eyes.
Sorhkafâré's feet slid upon autumn leaves as he halted.
Out on the plain, dark silhouettes chased and hunted each other with cries of
fear and hunger. The moon and stars dimly lit shapes tearing into each other
with fingers and teeth. With nothing else to feed upon, the pale creatures
turned upon each other.
These things& so hungry for warm life.
One of the three lifted its head.
Sorhkafâré made out a pale face, its mouth smeared with wet black. Its eyes
sparked as if gathering the waning light, and it saw him. It rose, turning
toward him as the other pair chased the fourth through the grass.
Sorhkafâré heard his own breath. He retreated a few paces, just inside the
forest's tree line.
This pale thing he saw& a man& was human.
His quivering lips and teeth were darkened, as if he had been drinking black
ink. He sniffed the air wildly and a ravenous twist distorted his features. He
began running toward Sorhkafâré.
This one smelled him, sensed his life.
Sorhkafâré jerked out his long war knife and braced himself.
The human came straight at him, its feral features pained with starvation.
Perhaps it gained no sustenance in feeding on its own. But he no longer cared
for anything beyond seeing these horrors gone from his world.
It ran straight at him like an animal without reason.
When it stepped between the first trees of the forest, it stopped short,
hissing and gurgling in desperation. Sorhkafâré saw the man clearly now.
Young, perhaps twenty human years. His face was heavily scratched, but the
marks were black lines rather than red. His flesh was white and shriveled, as
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if it were sinking in upon itself. The thing cried piteously at Sorhkafâré and
took another hesitant step.
Why would the horde not enter the forest, if they were starved enough to turn
on each other?
Sorhkafâré raised his knife and cut the back of his forearm. He swung his
bloodied arm through the air.
"Hungry?" he shouted. "I am here!"
The sight of blood drove the man deeper into madness. He charged forward with
a scream grating up his throat. Sorhkafâré shifted backward, feeling blindly
for smooth and solid footing.
As the pale man lunged between two aspens, he grabbed his head with a
strangled choke. He turned about and cried out but not in anguished hunger.
This was a sound of fear and pain as he whirled and wobbled. The man stumbled
too near one aspen, and he clawed wildly at the air, as if fending off the
tree.
Sorhkafâré watched in stunned confusion. A howl carried around him from
within the forest.
It was like nothing Sorhkafâré had ever heard long and desperate in warning.
Two of the silver-furred wolves burst through the underbrush and out of the
dark, their eyes glowing like clear crystals tinted with sky blue.
The first slammed straight into the screaming man and latched its jaws around
his throat, ripping as it dragged him down. The second joined in, and their
howls shifted to savage snarls as they tore at their prey.
The man's scream cut off in a wet gag, but still he thrashed and clawed.
On instinct Sorhkafâré ran in to help the wolves, but they kept snapping and
tearing at the man's throat.
One of them shifted aside. It pinned the man's arm with teeth and paws. The
other did the same, and they held him down as the first one looked up at
Sorhkafâré.
The wolf waited for Sorhkafâré to do something but what?
The man's throat was a dark mass shredded almost to the spine yet still he
writhed and fought to get free. Black fluids dribbled from his gaping mouth
and blotted out his teeth. A mouth that either snarled or screamed with no
voice.
He could not still be alive. No one could live after what these wolves had
done to him& tearing at his neck as if&
Sorhkafâré dropped to his knees and snatched the man's hair with his free
hand. With so little sinew left on that neck, it was easy to hold the head
steady. He pressed the long knife's edge down through the mess of the man's
throat until it halted against bone.
In a quick shift, he released his grip on the hair and pressed on the back of
the blade with all his weight.
The blade grated and then cut down through neck bones.
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The pale man ceased thrashing and fell limp as a true corpse.
Sorhkafâré sucked in air as he lifted his gaze to the first wolf, its muzzle
stained with wet black like his own hands. He stared into its eyes as his mind
emptied of all but two truths.
The forest would not allow the horde in. And if one got through, these wolves
sensed it and came.
He climbed to his feet, still breathing hard, and crept back to the forest's
edge to look out upon the rolling plain.
Dark forms rolled, ran, leaped, and crawled in the grass. Others barely
moved, little more than quivering masses choking in the dark. Pale figures
chased each other slaughtered each other.
Sorhkafâré stood watching, unable to look away. Every figure that came close
enough for his night eyes to see was human.
He saw not one elf. Not one dwarf. Not even a goblin, or the hulking scaled
body of a reptilian locathan, or any of the other monstrosities the enemy had
sent against him.
Only humans.
He turned and stumbled back toward First Glade. The wolves paced him all the
way to his people.
He found Snähacróe kneeling behind an injured human youth, bracing the boy up
while Léshiâra worked upon the boy's leg. In the past days, these two shared
company more and more.
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