Erin was frozen in place, her face a mask of panic. She stammered out, “What are we going to do? Oh my God. What are we going to do?”
“Get a hold of yourself, right now!” Lynn snapped at her friend, her usual patience entirely absent. “Defend yourself. You don’t have a choice!”
Lee could not have said it better.
They had all witnessed what the bestial riders were capable of, their deadly skill on vivid display as they destroyed the ill-fated horsemen with efficiency and ferocity. Perhaps the only good fortune that Lee and the others had in that moment was that there was no time to contemplate their odds of survival.
The brevity, urgency, and naked truth of the perilous moment, and their surge of adrenaline, excepting Erin, served capably to steel their resolve towards defense.
“Over here! All of you! Get to cover now!” Lee yelled out to the others, darting for an inviting spot by the trunk of a very large, old tree. Its mass of thick lower branches provided at least some degree of protection and cover over his head, while allowing him to try and monitor what was happening above.
Lynn and Ryan responded immediately, racing towards Lee, but Erin remained behind, still frozen in place. She had not even grabbed a weapon in the interim, and looked for all purposes as if she had been stricken dumb.
Lee cursed angrily under his breath, as he ran out from beneath his protective position by the tree. He raced over to her, his mind of singular focus.
Reaching out, he grabbed her upper arm, forcibly jerking her forward as he half-dragged her to the closest tree. A sibilant hissing of air preceded the dull thud that struck behind him, as an arrow embedded itself into the earth, right in the spot that Erin had just been in.
As they reached the tree, Lee spun her around to face the direction that they had just run from. The long arrow fletched with black feathers protruded from the ground as a visible, sobering lesson for Erin.
“Do you see that? Get a hold of yourself, or you will get killed, or get someone else killed!” Lee shouted quickly at her, incredulous at her stupefied behavior. He had never felt a more searing ire, though he knew that he could not have left her standing there.
He reoriented himself with his bow and set an arrow once again into place, his head tilting up as his eyes locked onto the treeline above.
Ryan was setting another arrow into his bow, having loosed one errant and desperate shot at the hovering rider that had fired upon Erin. The rush of the moment, and his inexperience with the bow, had resulted in missing his mark by a wide margin.
Lee aimed carefully, taking a couple of deep breaths and letting his hands steady themselves. He had once taken archery lessons as a youth, though the compound bow that he had used then was markedly different than the simpler wood construct that he now held.
He reminded himself that the concepts were still the same, even if the feeling was awkward. It took a considerable amount of pull to ready his shot, and in his rigid concentration the creaks of the bow sounded loud to his ears
Through the branches, he could see that the rider on the flying beast was readying another arrow, and searching out a target as it continued to hover in place.
Several other cries indicated that the one firing the arrows down on them was not going to be their only nemesis for very long. The archer was joined just moments later by another, the rider that had originally marked their location. It had broken off from circling and had come into view next to the first archer, readying its own great longbow.
Lee was about to let his own arrow fly, just as a blood-curdling cry rang out from behind and above him. Whirling about, he looked up just in time to see a large shape crashing down haphazardly, bouncing off tree branches and breaking others as it plunged towards the ground.
The wings of the creature folded as it finally tumbled into a free fall through open space towards the hard earth. Its rider had already been cast out from the saddle, shrieking in dismay, and then grunting loudly as it slammed into the forest floor.
Two sickening thumps resonated as the bodies of both steed and rider were crumpled against the hard earth, their forms distorted and broken. There was no life evident in either of them. Lee’s eye’s widened as he saw the shaft of an arrow sticking out from the neck of the winged creature. It was fletched with a lighter, different kind of feather than the deep black ones of the attackers.
Sparing a glance, he looked across to Ryan and Lynn to see who had fired the accurate arrow that had slain the steed. Both of them looked back at him with expressions of sheer astonishment. Ryan was standing with another arrow in his right hand, his attention drawn to the commotion near Lee. It was obvious that he had not suddenly gained great skill with the bow.
Lee turned quickly to look back behind him, his arrow notched as he strained to pull the string back again.
GUNTHER
Gunther, in his close and careful attention to the four strangers, only became aware at the last instant of the appearance of a large Trogen warrior, mounted upon a Harrak steed in the air overhead.
He recognized their distinctive forms instantly, and he realized their deadly intentions.
Steed and rider crossed through the air slowly overhead, its rider looking down upon the four strangers. It yelled out a cry of warning, before settling into a circling pattern.
Gunther knew what would occur. There would be several others in the vicinity, as the Trogens had been flying over the Saxan forest in substantial patrols during recent days.
That was unnerving enough, as their mere presence was a harbinger of ill-fortune for the Saxan lands. Their hostile posture towards the four strangers, woefully unprepared to deal with the wilderness, much less a Trogen sky patrol, sent a sense of dread racing through Gunther. The quartet was in mortal danger, and now Gunther wished more than ever that the Wanderer had remained with him for a little longer.
The woodsman’s biggest advantage was that the Trogen warriors knew nothing of him, their attentions clearly fixed upon the party that he had been shadowing.
Quickly, he made some frantic calls of his own, sounding again much like a bird, though any of the natural fauna within the area had abruptly gone silent at the invasive disturbance from the sky rider’s shout.
The coded warning resonated to his accompanying Jaghuns, as the creatures halted where they had been edging themselves into positions creating a perimeter around the four strangers. Three methodically worked their way back to Gunther, crouching down in silence near to his side.
Dexterously, Gunther pulled his large hunting bow out from where it was slung over his back. Made of a select length of yew, the sturdy longbow suddenly became an extension of himself as he readied an arrow.
The Trogens were flying unusually low, and were probably gauging their height based upon the range of the common Saxan self-bow. They were not factoring in the larger type of bow that Gunther carried, based upon the kind carried by the hardy fighters that dwelled in the western edges of faraway Norengal.
Gunther’s broad travels had given him a significant advantage this time, even if they had brought him so much darkness. His eyes scanned above in scrutiny as he kept the arrow pulled back, carefully searching out his first target.
As the Harrak circled above the trees, he stepped closer for a better shot. He knew that his Jaghuns would provide plenty enough of a warning if anything threatening to himself were to unexpectedly emerge.
With their eyes and ears applied to warding him, Gunther could afford to concentrate his attentions on the airborne warriors and the four imperiled strangers.
One of the female strangers was currently in a hysterical state, remaining out in the open while the others had taken to a nearby tree for cover. He could not believe her sheer stupidity, aghast at her incompetence.