It did not take them long to realise that they were being hunted. The past day had been a blurred nightmare for Kilan as he struggled to keep up with his aged mentor. Kilan's mentor, an old ranger, never broke a stride as he cut through the undergrowth, tangled brambles and thorn-spiked bushes reluctantly yielding way to the expert forester. Kilan's mentor always instructed him to think of the wilds as one whole living being, a sprawling entity that treated its guests according to how it felt about them. Kilan now reasoned that they must have truly earned the ire of the wilds for the undergrowth seemed to reach out to them to drag them down as they passed. It had been like that since they had left that.. place. That ghastly place.
Kilan shut his eyes to dismiss the memory, and was rewarded by hitting his head on a low-hanging branch. "Keep sharp, lad," came his mentor's voice from ahead, as Kilan ducked under the offending branch while swearing under his breath. Looking up, his eyes met the gaze of his mentor who was looking back the way they had come. He knew what his mentor was thinking.
"How did they keep up with us?" he managed to say between gasps.
His mentor did not reply. His eyes narrowed as if he had spied something in the dark trees behind them. Kilan turned to look and saw nothing. Without saying a word, the aged ranger unstrapped the long bundle he carried behind him next to his longbow. "Not they, lad," he said as he laid the bundle on the ground. He swung his own longbow around into his hands in one fluid motion. "It. There's only one following us."
"Only one?" repeated Kilan, suddenly feeling hopeful. "Then we outnumber it! We can-"
A grunt from his mentor interrupted him. "No, lad. You must take the artifact yourself and get it back to safety. I'll stay here to buy you time." Kilan began to protest, but his mentor silenced him with a shake of his head. "Too many lives have been spent retrieving this artifact, lad. If we both fall, many more fill follow if this falls into the wrong hands. After I deal with it, I will meet you later. Now go!"
Unable to find anything to say, Kilan's jumbled thoughts eventually flowed into the strict obedience that years of training with his mentor had taught him. He hefted the long bundle over his shoulder, strapped it securely behind his back and after one last look at his mentor, he turned and continued through the unfriendly wilds.
Kilan's mentor scanned the darkness ahead of him. Warriors taught a maxim in their guilds, which was "Know your foe". Rangers taught a similar maxim, which was "Know your prey". They considered their maxim the more difficult one to follow; warriors mostly dealt with humanoid foes with two hands, two feet and a limited potential of what their foe could physically do. Rangers faced creatures with possibly more than two feet, hands, fangs, claws, sometimes wings, occasionally scaled or thick furred hides and an almost unlimited number of ways each of these could be used to bring your life to an abrupt end. To rangers, there was simply no contest over whose profession was more hazardous.
The problem about that maxim was that here, they were the prey. The thing that was hunting them had been doing a remarkably good job at it; the group had numbered eight when they had left the Necrolyte King's tomb. Since then, members of the group had been picked off one-by-one, with almost surgical precision. Grasping his longbow firmly, the old ranger knew that when the time came, he would have only one shot to stake his claim for survival.
A flare in the darkness caught his eye. The old ranger lifted his bow and fired, just as a blinding flash of light overwhelmed him, knocking him onto his back. Blinking away the dazzling specks of light from his vision, the old ranger glimpsed a dark figure stand over him and immediately saw the first mistake he had made about the hunter.
It was a huntress.
Any further thought was quickly extinguished as the huntress raised a weapon and brought it down hard.
The huntress stared impassively at the body of the old ranger before her. She then shifted her gaze upwards, towards the direction where that younger ranger had gone.
"You have done well," came a rasping voice behind her. The huntress frowned and turned to face her employer. She did not appreciate being snuck up to, especially by a creature like the one before her. Wrapped in an old, tattered priestess robe and standing in the darkness of the trees, the liche seemed to be a form of darkness in itself.
The huntress lowered her weapon, but did not keep it. She looked down again, this time to a feathered shaft sticking out from her shoulder, its point protruding behind her. The old ranger's arrow had narrowly missed her head. Reaching up with her other hand, she snapped the shaft and pulled the point all the way through, barely grimacing at the pain. Dropping the broken arrow pieces, she looked back at the liche. "What are your orders, favoured One?"
The liche smiled. Rotting lips parted to reveal black-stained teeth. "You have accomplished your task remarkably well. With the haste that young ranger is making, the Ivory Staff will soon be brought to exactly where we want it."