A World Left Behind
A warm breeze slid through the sparse trees at the mouth of the Underdark. It would be autumn soon, and too cold to come this close to the caves. Cold seemed to emanate from them always.
Selena tipped her head back and looked up at the clear late summer sky. The cold never bothered her. It must have been the genie blood. For what does the earth care about cold? Next to her, her sister Alyssia shivered.
“Why is it so cold here, Selena?”
“It’s the Underdark. The ‘evil’ in it radiates cold, some say.”
“Should we really be so close to it then?”
“Don’t worry,” Selena smiled. “The evil doesn’t venture out this far.”
Selena’s eyes snapped open as a branch nearby snapped. She sat up, reaching for the sword that lay next to her.
“Relax, ’tis only me,” grumbled Rosie’s deep, accented voice. “I didn’t mean to give you a fright.”
“What were you doing?” Selena rubbed the sleep from her eyes.
Rosie’s dwarven form stumbled into the firelight, his mail jangling a bit as he settled on a stump by the fire. “The horses started to wander a bit, I just wanted to corral them. You get back to sleep now, lass.”
Selena grumbled and lay back down. As her eyes drooped shut, she wondered if she could dream of home again. It was nice to see Alyssia again, so young and happy, as she once was.
Morning came with a long, slow drizzle of rain, and Selena and Rosie rode on in silence.
“Why do you think they sent us?”
The question startled Rosie, as it was the first sound besides rain and dampened hoof beats for more than an hour.
“What?”
“Why do you they think the Besk are sending us here? What do they need us for?”
“There’s no tellin’. Probably someone stirring up trouble. Why else would they send peacekeepers?”
Peacekeepers. What did that even mean anymore? The Besk had eroded so far that it seemed as if keeping the peace was the furthest thing from the leadership’s mind sometimes. They were too busy devising plans to thwart and overcome the Myratir. When had it all come to this? And how did she get here, so caught up in a war that wasn’t hers to fight? Ah, but she knew the answer to that. She cursed its name in the dark of night. Loung.
Selena touched the necklace at her throat. A dragon flower. A constant reminder of her oath of fealty. It was slightly bent and misshapen, almost like some wildflower. But a dragon flower all the same. This was her war now. Loung had commanded it. And there was no escaping that.
It was summer at home, now, nearly half way across the world. The youths would be apple picking and staying up as late as the last traces of light in the sky would allow. Selena wished she were one of them. Wished that she were back home, leaning against Xander, watching the light drip away to the far side of the mountains. But that was impossible, she knew.
Even if she were home, Xander would be indoors this time of day, tucking his children in to bed. Children. Still so hard to believe that reckless Xander was a father twice over now. A boy and a girl, Alyssia had written her. The girl a spitting image of Xander, and the boy just like his mother. Selena thanked the cloudy gray sky above that she didn’t know the mother. Couldn’t picture her face. Couldn’t quite complete the mental image of the life she knew Xander was leading now. It was the smallest of mercies, but it was the only one Selena had now.