AUTHORS NOTE

200,000+ Words! Woohoo! And still, so so much more to go!

HUGE shout out to the favouriters:
Adelaide Darkburn, Archer1eye, David Arcwing, DecadentLily, Dragon13246, Drouppi, Greengiant503, Havok22, Kar-Vermin, MCDragonClaw, Natalie Moreland, Onisatsu18, Sudarat Thabudda, TrimusicaDrag00n90, bbmkastan, jamer2918, joshuaelfaker, mateo84mm, slyksylva, and yorukakusaku

And everyone who has ever reviewed!

Archer1Eye - Thanks for the heads up about the mistaken chapter upload! Oh! I'm a horrible person and a much worse author. I feel that in order to not make things too easy for my protagonists, I have to run them completely through the ringer. Then again, one of my favourite authors is Robin Hobb... so... I'm not as bad as her at least! (Seriously, I just discovered that Robin Hobb is a pen-name and her real name is freaking AWESOME: Margaret Astrid Lindholm Ogden.

Havok22- Maybe a few days. But vacations are boring, so I think I'll push those few days all into this chapter ;-) Chapter 81

? Day of High Summer? 768 n.c?

I woke up with a splitting headache and surrounded by… hay? I let out a groan and clutched my hands to my head to try to lessen the radiating pain. A whispered prayer to Tenebrae to Cure Light Wounds later, I was feeling much better and I moved some of the hay that surrounded me. The hole I made in the hay revealed to me that I was in some sort of lean-to, it was dark outside and three figures were sitting around a campfire.

I crawled out the side of the haystack and one of the figures turned around, "you're awake!" Came a male voice, a voice that sounded like Captain Marus.

He stood up and gestured back past me to the side of the lean-to, "your horse is there, along with all of your belongings."

I turned to look and indeed, my horse was tied up to the lean to and eating some of the hay.

"What happened?" I asked as I walked towards them.

The other person stood and came out from behind the captain, it was Sergeant Coggs.

"Well now, Ma'am, as far as we can gather," he said, looking apologetic for a reason he was about to reveal, "on account of you going inside that magical darkness, you managed to kill the orc wizard and the biggest damned orc I've ever seen; but one or the other knocked you off the wall. Down you fell all the way to the ground. When you hit the ground the darkness disappeared and the Wall Sergeant called out to me to tell me what had happened. We couldn't come for you right away, but once we had sorted out the remainder of the orcs, we rushed down to see if you were still alive. You were breathing a bit funny, with bloody bubbles coming out of your mouth and we called the priest to come down. Now, when the priest started doing his praying to heal you, it actually seemed to make everything worse! You tensed up in pain and let out a gurgled scream. The priest... he shrank back in horror and muttering curses; calling you spawn of darkness or some such. He wouldn't do a thing to help you and instead jumped straight onto his horse and rode off. Said he was going to bring the Inquisitors straight down here. Well now, the captain and me, we both know what you had done for us. My men would be dead if it weren't for you and likely the entire tower would have been lost if you hadn't have taken care of that wizard. That's not the sort of thing a creature of darkness would do… why, you had plenty of opportunities to help those cursed orcs."

He spat on the ground in disgust when he mentioned the orcs and the Captain continued the explanation, "so the Sergeant came to me and together we brought you out here. We fed you a potion of healing, which didn't seem to hurt you the way the priest's prayers did, and hid you here. We both expected you to take much longer to heal up and neither of us wanted the Inquisitors to get a hold of you. Nobody who has been taken into the temple of the sun has ever come back out again, they say."

I was shocked at how much they had done for me and how much they were potentially willing to sacrifice just for me. Tears started to form, but I blinked them away.

"Thank you," I whispered.

"Never mind that," the Captain said, brushing away something in his own eyes, "if you feel well enough to ride, you should leave right away. There's extra rations in your saddle bags. Make sure to follow the wall and stay out of sight of the towers. I don't know where the nearest Inquisitors are, the priest may need to ride all the way to Castlemere or only to the next town."

I nodded and stepped forward to give them each a whispered word of thanks and a hug in turn.

The old sergeant had turned red and the captain cleared his throat, "off with you now."

I turned and mounted my horse and only once it was walking, I turned to look back and we waved to each other as I rode into the darkness.

I followed their advice to the letter, riding far enough away from the wall that I had to periodically ride back towards it and adjust the direction I was heading to match the curve of the wall. I occasionally crossed a road or path and when I did, I paused to look and listen for any riders before I did so. We set up a cold camp, without a fire, in the forest about halfway through the night and continued our journey early the next morning. I was extremely thankful for the generosity and kindness of the soldiers in filling my saddle bags with rations. They had included a sort of sweat and chewy oat biscuit, which I munched on as I rode as well as a loaf of bread and a round of cheese that I ate when I stopped for the night.

It was a lonely and stressful journey. I had little to compare it to except for my trips with Malkarov and I missed very dearly his voice and instruction. At night, I cried for Shard; there wasn't a single night that went by without me falling to sleep with tears in my eyes and my heart torn to shreds with a gaping hole of emptiness inside of me. The sense of loss that I was feeling was surrounding the smallest spark of hope, a flickering flame of hope inside the eye of an early spring storm.

I kept myself occupied and tried to calm my wild meandering thoughts during the day by looking out for spell and potion components. I had more room to store them with the horse and hoped that I might be able to sell them in Allarth, if not to a wizard somewhere along the way. I wished that I had some glass storage jars when I spotted a stand of trees with cicada shells attached to the sides of them. Their fragile natures were likely the reason for their value, but I they would unfortunately not last the journey without getting crushed.

I noticed when I adjusted my journey such that I was then heading towards Celestine's end instead of travelling with him crossing from right to left; and I noticed again when I had changed enough that Celestine was now crossing from my left to right. That meant that I had made my way around the top of the great wall, that ran from one side of the pass to the other in a great concave semi-circle. I remembered Sister Tera teaching us about "The first stand", when the armies of man held the pass in a great line so that the first wooden palisade walls and towers could be built behind them. After that first wall was finished, the armies retreated back to behind their wall and held that, mostly, for a hundred years while the great towers and high stone wall was built. Since then, she had explained, the walls had only been breached on three occasions (four now, I supposed) but the orc enemy had been beaten back each time.

When I first caught sight of the great mountains rising up in front of me again, I adjusted my course more to the west, to get farther away from the towers and walls.

It was finally, on the sixth day since I departed the Screaming Harpies Tower that I reached the base of the mountains. It was about half way between midday and nightfall when I started to look for a cave of some sort to spend the night and hopefully feel safe enough to light a fire.

It was just after nightfall that I spotted a cave, it was a large one looking like it went deep into the mountain side. Something made me stop and pause however, and I was glad that I did. As I sat there, immobile on my horse, I noticed a light appear from inside and watched a figure walk out to the mouth of the cave. I stayed as still as I could and hoped that my horse would not make a sound. Movement in the trees to my right caught my attention and I glanced sideways to see another man sneaking towards me. He was keeping to the darkness, the shadows made by Luna's lights; shadows that did absolutely nothing to hide him from my sight. He had two blades drawn, a short sword in one hand and a long poignard in the other and his features were hidden by a dark cloak with hood drawn.

I reached down to rest my hand on my own sword and moved my feet out of the stirrups, ready to slide down off the back of my horse in as smooth a motion as I could.

The man stopped and paused, in the shadow of a tree no more than ten feet away from me and I considered for a brief moment the possibility that he was peaceful. I determined that it would be better for me to take advantage of this moment and used Tenebrae's gift to drop a sphere of darkness around us both. He reacted immediately by jumping behind the tree that he was next to, putting it between us. I slid down off my horse and drew my sword, but instead of walking straight towards that tree I moved off to the side so that I could get sight of him once more. He was crouched down, with both blades at the ready and listening for any sound. I whispered a prayer to Tenebrae for a spell that would immediately end this situation with the least potential bloodshed. She granted my prayer and my next action was to deliberately step on a stick. The crack of the stick echoed in the quiet of the forest, but he did not react at all. He did not even move a muscle. My Hold Person prayer worked! I strode up towards the man as quickly as I dared, the prayer would not last forever and pulled the sword and dagger from his grasp. These I stabbed down into the ground on the other side of the tree from him. He was a young man, not much older than me and was clean shaven. His nose was crooked, as if it had been broken in the past and had not been set properly. A scar traced a line down the left side of his face from his eye all the way to his jaw. Underneath his cloak, he seemed to be wearing very utilitarian clothing, with numerous bags hanging from his belt.

I placed the end of my sword at his throat, slightly cutting the skin.

"Did you think me an easy target to rob or murder?" I asked, in as menacing a voice as I could put on and cancelled the Hold Person, willing it to end.

I noticed a bead of sweat roll down his forehead as he swallowed audibly, "nay lady, my intention was not robbery or murder but merely to find out if you were friend or foe."

His accent was strange, almost a drawl and not something I had ever experienced.

"What are you doing out here, in the middle of nowhere, if not for banditry?" I demanded.

I watched his hand slowly move down his leg as I spoke, inching closer and closer towards his boot. I increased the pressure of my blade on his throat and warned him, "do not think for even a moment that I cannot see you reaching for that blade."

He froze and moved his hands out to his sides with his fingers splayed, "easy, easy lady," he drawled, "we're not bandits, but adventurers. Yonder cave is rumoured to be an entrance to the underworld and a tribe of troglodytes. They have been attacking a nearby logging settlement and we are contracted to kill them."

His story sounded plausible, but I wondered whether I could so readily trust somebody who only moments before was sneaking up on me with blades drawn. The answer to this problem was only a divinely implanted piece of knowledge away.

I prayed for Zone of Truth and asked the man, "did you speak the truth just now? You are merely adventurers?"

The man appeared to fight the compulsion of honesty for a moment before he visibly sank in frustrated failure, "yes. We are just adventurers," he said.

"If I withdraw my sword and do not provide a further threat, will you attempt to harm me?" I asked.

He didn't even bother fighting that question and stated simply, "so long as you don't try to kill me, I have no intention of doing likewise."

Satisfied, I withdrew my sword from his neck and resheathed it. I cancelled the Darkness and strode back to take up my horses' reins.

"Your sword and dagger are on this side of the tree," I told the man, after I noticed him just standing and looking at me incredulously.

"What?" I asked, "were you afraid I was going to kill you or something?"

He shook, visibly and I realised that I hadn't cancelled Zone of Truth yet.

Before I could cancel it however, he blurted out, "yes," he looked crestfallen at the admission.

"Sorry," I apologised, "I forgot the prayer was still functioning. Do you think that your friends will mind some company for the night? I'd rather not look for another cave to hold up in and I'd desperately like a fire."

"The rest of them wouldn't mind, I think," he said, "in fact, they'd likely try to convince you to join us for a fifth share of the contracted reward."

The man collected his swords, and slipped them into sheaths at his belt and we walked together towards the cave.

The noise of my horses hoof falls alerted the man with the torch before we came very close and I called out, "ho there! I ran across your friend…"

I looked at him pointedly, realising that we hadn't traded names and he said, "Garth, Garth the Swift."

"...Garth in the forest here. I wonder if I might intrude upon your hospitality for the night?"

Before the man could speak, two other figures appeared behind him and I gasped in shock. One of those figures was a woman, but the other was much much shorter and bearded.

Was that... a dwarf?