1st Draft Fridays - A Fistful of ... (#6)

Redskin Plains

The first time Waislen led them to a portal that set Lallie's teeth on edge and cost a bit of time to use, she set her jaw and followed. Marsdenfel had held the like, accessible by Leathin and those he permitted to join him.

She didn't ask how Waislen knew about the strange one out in the middle of the plains, didn't ask about the way the too-silent, too-still cave set her feral side on a wary, quiet alert.

She didn't ask about the multiple layers of wards that Waislen bled to pass—those explained why the portals lacked persons or other guards, why nobody used them. It seemed a wasted opportunity for income that Marsdenfel sorely needed. The portals, improving travel across the plains, could easily fuel trade.

The wards possibly explained why the elves so easily accepted being locked away from Marsdenfel, but...

Something about the portals, the wards, tickled Lallie's senses as not elven, and she didn't think it was just that portals were a faerie magic to begin with.

She didn't ask about that portal, or how it was mere leagues from the next batch of contagion that Waislen treated, or why the pattern persisted with increasingly nervewrackingly wrong caves and oddly unprotected cesspools.

She didn't ask, and by the time she realized that the portals had been made by the original natives of these lands and therefore something Waislen had learned about from Grehafen, she'd also noticed that whatever was following them, watching them, wasn't as simple as a necromancer.

The necromancer, in fact, was her traveling companion, who after finding that first pool was using her own magic to find more.

And something was watching them, something that somehow persisted and followed as they did. Maybe it was a person, a part-faerie who wasn't quite in this reality, but...there was so much about magic and about the history of the area that Lallie didn't know.

That ignorance was going to bite her, she was certain, but Waislen wouldn't answer questions, and Lallie comforted herself with the thought that even if the elf had somehow condemned them both—intentionally or unintentionally—at least her feral side would never break free to hurt anyone else.