Within half an hour of her departure from the village, Amandil had noticed the guild members following her.
The highway leading north toward Felwood was long and sparsely populated, only a few outposts and rural family fortresses housing single clans dotting the landscape. People rarely wandered out of such places, and consequently she didn't interact with anybody. As she walked on foot, and remained on foot, she easily spied the five women trailing her, their nightsabres creeping along as they pretended to be out for a stroll. A mere half hour stroll.
Finally irritated enough by the behavior, Amandil, stopped walking and pretended to sit down for a break. Even if Lilith was intimidated by these people, she appeared to be easily intimidated in general. Amandil, on the other hand, wouldn't simply roll over and allow herself to be shaken down for information or simply because a few cavalrywomen needed to earn the chips on their shoulders. Amandil had been enlisted as cavalry, and she was enrolled in a highly sought after course to respec as an entirely different class. She had nothing to prove and knew she wasn't some peon.
As she fiddled with her staff, the guild members down the road slowed nearly to a halt. For one minute, two minutes, five minutes, they waited for her to start walking again so they could continue pretending not to follow her. When she refused to budge, they approached, acting as if they bore no interest in the novice sitting in the grass. Only when they'd passed right in front of her did they suddenly turn, all of them pulling their nightsabres to stare her down in an obvious attempt to both impress and scare.
"Good evening, sister," the leader of the group said in a nasally voice. The woman had impressive silver hair but also a strange birth defect in her nose that caused one of her nostrils to wheeze every time she inhaled.
The others formed a half circle around Amandil, never dismounting from their sabres as the sat up straight to proudly show off their tabards that bore the ancient elven runes for 'war.' "Evening," Amandil replied, doing her best to appear unimpressed.
An angry smile spread across the silver haired leader's lips when they failed to garner the reaction they'd wanted. "You're an awful long way from Moonglade," the woman said, obviously searching for information.
Refusing to divulge details that weren't their right to know, Amandil kept her sentences as general as possible. "It would appear so," she replied flatly while taking a sip from her waterskin and not offering any to them.
Two of the guild members whispered to each other and then laughed, and Amandil did her best to make a show of not caring. The ringleader, who was likely filling in for Gwynneth, tried to push further. "Perhaps we should escort you to your location; this is dangerous territory, and full of quite a few wanted criminals hiding from civilization."
"No thank you."
Even two of the chatting guild members looked offended by the answer, and their stifled laughter came off as forced. Their attempts to make a strong impression via arrogance were failing and they knew it. The silver haired ringleader in particular seemed incensed.
"Sister, it's quite dangerous out here, especially for an initiate restoration druid."
Staring into the grass as if she wasn't even listening, Amandil slouched as she sat and easily gave the impression that she didn't intend to move. Especially if they didn't realize she was feral, which would grant her a means of moving away from them undetected. "Thank you for your concern," she droned.
Done with pleasantries, the ringleader finally frowned. "I'm the quartermistress of WAR; we're here to rid the land of all sorts of vile criminals as well as intruders. I'm going to need to ask you about the whereabouts of several known outlaws last sighted in this-"
"I'm not legally obligated to answer you."
All five of the sabre riders looked shocked. The silverhead, apparently the guild's quartermistress, shed her outer civility. "Excuse me?" she asked in an almost passive aggressive tone.
Thank the goddess that Gwynneth isn't here to identify me, Amandil thought to herself. "You're free to ask anybody any question; but I'm under no legal obligation to answer any of them." She looked the quartermistress right in the eye, neither passivity nor aggression tainting her unflinching gaze.
For a few seconds, angry silver eyes flicked from Amandil's blank expression to the staff and back again. Neutralized and not willing to answer for assaulting whom she had assumed to be a healer, the quartermistress titled her head back in the direction of the Oaken Glade, a silent order for the others to return. "We've wasted enough time on this one," the lead rider muttered acrimoniously as they all rode back.
A few more rounds of laughter could be heard before the five riders finally disappeared from Amandil's vision. Waiting until they were gone, she pulled out her map and studied the location of the mustard stain one last time. Far away from even any local path or hamlet, the spot appeared to be on a plateau, hidden among what appeared to be labeled as bramble patches. A large tangle of trees nearby almost resembled the dwellings of the quilboar to the south, a rather foreboding image. She couldn't go back, though...she'd come too far, and she'd need to return to Moonglade soon; after a few days with only a brief note promising to come back, she'd left her mother with far too little for the woman's nerves to be calmed.
Hiding in the bushes briefly, Amandil tapped into her mana pool once more and shapeshifted, transforming herself into the sleek panther once again. Her true form hidden, she started to run with a jumping start, hanging away from the main road and allowing her sense of direction to carry her toward the spot that had been marked on her map.
Alone and in her element, the druidess pondered her situation. If she really was going to meet her father, Faraldor, then a major chapter in her life was nearly closed. A question mark that had hung over her head would be dispelled.
Her background had been an embarrassment in her younger years. The main reason for that was her birth date: she'd been born outside of the main wars of her people that had resulted in the men waking up from the Emerald Dream. In cities, there was often a minority male population, ones that either weren't druids (very few) or were carrying out tasks assigned by the Cenarion Circle. Children were born all the time due to the interaction, but that was only in a few select locations. For night elves, an essentially wild people living in forests, the overwhelming majority of the population dwelled in small villages and groves of only a few dozen people.
Therein laid her problem: traditional settlements had no men. Their populations were already so low that there was little reason even for night elves from other villages to visit. The men went to the Dream, the women undertook the Long Vigil, and that was how their then immortal lives played out. Every few millennia a crisis would occur such as the wars by the satyr or silithids, and the men would temporarily wake up, contribute to the fight and then spend short periods of time visiting their families before they returned to their barrow dens. During those times, children were conceived.
Serenity Grove as one such place: everybody who hadn't been born before the Sundering was then born just after the Satyr War, the exile of the Higborne or the War of the Shifting Sands. Only Amandil had been born outside of one of those windows, and thus grew up as the only child in their village at the time.
For hours she ran through that forest in the far north of Ashenvale, her mind troubled as she revisited old wounds. Why? Why had she grown up without other people her age to play with? Why had she been born at such a peculiar time? And why wouldn't anybody ever talk about it, ever?
All her life, she'd felt like a bastard. Marriage wasn't common among their kind during immortality, but it wasn't about that: it was about not knowing. The other young women in the grove all had the occasional stories to tell about their fathers; even if they never met them, they still knew about them from their mothers. All of them had been sired by druids of varying types, and speculating about how they'd react the next war when they got to meet their menfolk was a recurring topic of discussion. And every time, Amandil hadn't been able to participate in such discussions. She had no idea who her father was, and her mother blatantly changed the topic the few times she brought up the matter.
Blinking the thoughts away, she leapt over a few hedges and landed on a very low hanging branch that appeared to drag along the ground. After what must have been nearly half the night, she'd wound an agonizing serpentine trail through the bramble forest. Very little ground had been gained due to the difficulty of the steep and thorny terrain, and there was likely still a ways to go.
Trying to catch her breath, Amandil surveyed her surroundings while still in panther form. She was very close to the border between Ashenvale and Felwood, and the contrast showed. Many of the purple and green leaves in the canopy began to turn orange or even black, and the vines that wrapped around everything became thornier. The very ground itself felt corrupt, as if a measure of the environmental disease in Felwood had expanded outward. Perturbed by the feeling of degradation, she leapt upward into the boughs of the nearest tree, nearly slipping off due to her poor perception.
From her new vantage point, she could see the difference. Off in the distance, the canopy became even darker still when Felwood itself began, and the transition made her current position seem better in comparison. That still left the last leg of her journey, however, since she had to find a way to wrap around to the southwest retreat further into Ashenvale but at a higher altitude. Sifting through her mental image of the map, she tried to think of ways to reach the destination. So engrossed was she that she didn't notice the two green spotlights shining on her from another branch.
