The Last Satyr: The Two Paths Part 2
A Parting on the Surface

"What do we do now?"

With the exit caves of The Three Candles now successfully blocked up, Sar asked the question of Graybeard and Shinayne. The three held a council on the outside plains of grass and mountain rock on which way to go. Graybeard’s mission to free Sar and the satyrs had ended in success. However, it still remained that the Black Dragons should safely reach Moon City and, as it was Graybeard who had made this promise, it was up to him to carry it out. Sar also offered his help, but Graybeard refused. He wanted Sar and his satyrs to head to the Men of the North to obtain the promised return of their horses there. They could then use them to speed their return to their home above Gold Creek. There, their lives could return as they were once before. Graybeard asked only that the satyrs join with the elves in tracking down the displacer beast in the forest to kill it. To this, Sar readily agreed.

Yet when Sar departed in the morning for the east towards the Land of the Rim, some fifty satyrs stayed behind, having fallen in love with the beautiful drow women of the Black Dragons. This, even though many of the Black Dragons had brought their husbands with them (No satyr had ever let a husband stand between himself and the object of his affection.). These satyrs had volunteered to escort Shinayne’s people to Moon City so that they might live with their goddess, Eilistraee. Although the motives of the fifty satyrs were in obvious question, the need for them was not. The Black Dragons were blinded by daylight and as, as drow, subject to instant execution by any surface dwellers who chanced upon them. Without these satyrs, not one of Shinayne’s people would have survived the trip. Accordingly, Graybeard turned and led them west for Linthiel.

Graybeard studied the problem of their traveling to Moon City after he and Sar parted company. The Black Dragons could only march by night, when blinded by day. Yet the fifty satyrs with them (It turned out there were exactly fifty drow Black Dragons without husbands) could not travel by night and still protect them by day without rest. So Graybeard decided to order the Black Dragons to advance by night while the satyrs slept and stayed behind. Then, by day, as the Black Dragons sheltered from the sun and slept, the satyrs caught up.

However, this soon proved a poor solution for, during the day until the satyrs caught up, the blinded drow were defenseless. Further, the satyrs had to search to replace them, which took time, leaving them defenseless even longer. It was like trying to thread a needle with one end in daylight, and the other in shadow.

Reluctantly, Graybeard soon gave the order for the lengths of the daily marches to be halved, reduced to just before dawn and at dusk, while sheltering or sleeping in the hours between. That way, the satyrs were always on hand to defend the Black Dragons while they slept. It was not a very satisfactory solution because there were still some hours of daylight when the satyrs could see and hours of night where the Black Dragons could see which went wasted, but it allowed for a mounting of a guard. Yet now the trip took twice as long. Any enemy would have twice the warning of their approach. As Graybeard saw it, conflict and battle, if not the slaughter of the Black Dragons, was inevitable and spirits fell. It was only a question of when and who intercepted them. Would it be orcs, men, trolls, dwarves or even his own Light Elves? All were enemies of drow and would give the Black Dragons no quarter. And, if the fight was in daylight, the most expected time, a guard of only fifty unarmed satyrs was hardly a major force to be reckoned with.

But now was the best time to work out the problem of their travel, for there was no one between them and Linthiel. No enemy should be encountered reaching there. But, after that, they could be anywhere and everywhere.

Left behind in the underground cavern, the boy now fought for his life with the drow woman in total darkness.

The suffocating darkness that enveloped them mingled with the earthy scent of damp stone. His own huge, sharp knife remained poised over the boy’s throat. He could feel its cold blade. He had intercepted it with both hands but the drow woman was on top of him, pushing down with not only her two hands but also all her weight. The blade slowly inched down to his throat. Every fiber of his being screamed at him to resist, to survive, to escape the impending doom that hung over him.

Images of his friends, Graybeard, Sar, and Shinayne, flashed before his eyes like fragile memories. Would he never see them again? Would his life end like this?

He felt the knife tip finally begin to press against his skin, felt it prick, and saw her cruel, dark smile of approaching victory to his imminent defeat.

“Whack!”

With a sudden, swift blow from an axe, the drow woman’s head left her shoulders and fell next to his, her body spurting blood everywhere from the decapitated neck. For a second, it seemed even the headless corpse of her body would still successfully kill the boy, the blade remaining pressing down, but then her dead hands let go of the knife and her body fell, limp and lifeless, to the side.

“By Jing!” cried a familiar voice. “I thought you would have been long gone from here by now!”

Someone was standing over him with an axe under an elf lantern light to light him up—someone short and stout—Marroh!

“What are you doing here?” the boy gasped gratefully and sat up.

“I might ask you the same question. Here you are—out here in the dark wrestling beautiful women—and losing too, I might add! What’s a dwarf to think?”

The boy had been given a second chance at life. As he tried to catch his breath, he clung to the glimmer of hope that, perhaps, there was still a way to emerge victorious from the perilous depths of the drow’s underground world.

“You’re alive?!” the boy managed.

“I was when I woke up this morning. Why? Has something changed?”

Now Amien ran up, breathless, holding his own elf lantern light aloft.

“Sorry I’m late,” he gasped his apology to the boy, “but your hoofed feet move much faster over rock than my booted ones.” He looked over at Marroh beside him as he caught his breath and a look of surprise came over him. “Do my eyes deceive me?”

“They do not,” said Marroh. “I told you we would meet again in this life!”

“But how is this possible?” asked the boy, tossing aside the dead drow’s body off himself in disgust.

“You mean how is it not possible?” asked the dwarf in reply. “We little people have to outthink you big people. So we never build walls that can be used to trap ourselves inside! We always have a secret tunnel to get out of a city. When they unfairly attacked us with fire beetles, we reciprocated by unfairly leaving. We’ve been out here in these rocks for several days now. We’ve even killed quite a few of their sentries.”

“How did you replace us?”

“Find you?” grunted Marroh. “We’ve been watching your elf lanterns approach for hours! Do neither one of you know what a straight line is? You zigged and zagged all over the place!”

“We were tracking this drow,” said Amien. “We thought she had young Joe as a prisoner.”

Left lying on the cold rock floor, young Joe vaguely heard distant voices speaking from where he lay. He thought he knew them. Was that the satyr and Amien? And was that the voice of Marroh?

He tried to answer, to call out and let them know he was here.

Perhaps he heard them now because he was joining them in death. Each breath of his became shallower than the one before. A deathly cloud came over his mind and it did not lift.

Not far away, the battle for Mills Breath’s keep was still going on and with no victory in sight.

Although Leradien could no longer get up, in her dying gasps, she still valiantly held up the elf lantern light in one hand for Ronthiel to see by, even though it blinded her to do so.

Ronthiel had taken cover behind her black spider’s abdomen and any arrows directed at him harmlessly bounced off it. He then returned his own arrows with uncanny accuracy. He never missed once. Although the orcs launched their arrows from narrow window slits intended for maximum protection, he consistently hit their throats until no more orc arrows came from the keep.

He still had five orc arrows left he had collected when he was done.

He waited, watching the windows, but there wasn’t an orc left to be seen. Yet the gate itself remained closed.

Ronthiel now hurriedly moved from behind Leradien’s abdomen to reach her. They had hit her badly and repeatedly. Six arrows stuck out of her everywhere. He heard a bubbling, hissing sound like that other drider had made before dying.

“Leradien!” he pleaded, desperately looking at the obviously fatal wounds. “What can I do?”

“Hold me,” she breathed, her weakening fingers dropping the elf lantern.

“Oh! Don’t die, Leradien!” he told her. “Hang on! I can’t let you die! I’ll do anything for you to stop it. I love you, Leradien!”

“One more kiss?” she begged, whispering through closed eyes.

Without hesitation, he kissed her full on the lips. He gave her the best kiss he knew how. If this was to be her last kiss, it would be one for her to remember.

She kissed back—surprisingly well.

“Mm!” she said in delicious enjoyment. “I should die more often!”

What the -?!

He could feel she was smiling. She didn’t feel very hurt. Then she even pulled the arrows out of herself, casting them aside. Wherever the arrows fell, they were smoking and sizzling with her black blood, their tips dissolved almost to nothing as her wounds instantly healed.

Her ruby-red eyes turned to his, watching him stare at her in disbelief, smiled slightly, gave a soft laugh, and then she abruptly stood up on all eight legs and tossed her magnificent hair white back for him to see, good as new.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I’m okay. Demon blood does not easily die and heals quickly.”

“But you took six arrows!” he gasped, looking at her. Yet even as he spoke, he saw there wasn’t so much as a trace of her being hit. Ronthiel stared at her. “You’re all right?” he gasped in disbelief.

“My demon half will do whatever it has to do to keep me alive,” she said with a pleasant smile. “Demons don’t like to die any more than we do. I could have taken twenty arrows.”

“You’re not hurt?”

“I am completely healed. I have never been better!”

Ronthiel stared in wonder. It seemed impossible, but he certainly had no plans to argue with her, either.

“And just as lovely as ever too,” he noted wondrously.

“Thank you!” she replied, tossing her beautiful hair enticingly for him again. “But flattery won’t make me forget what you said. I’m going to hold you to your words. You said you loved me and you’d do anything for me. And I expect a clean cave!”

He had said that; he realized.

“You tricked me into thinking you were dying!” he countered.

“True. But you still said it and quite freely. What’s the matter? You don’t think I’ll make you happy?”

He did not argue with that. On the contrary, he knew she would make him very happy. For some reason or another, everything seemed much more intense to him now, including his love for Leradien. It just bubbled up and boiled over out of him. He couldn’t believe he felt this way over any girl, but it most pleased him that it should be Leradien.

She did not wait for his answer, looking over the dwarves’ keep.

“So it looks like you took care of all the orc guards,” she noted.

“It was almost as if I couldn’t miss.”

“You couldn’t,” Leradien answered. “You don’t think I’d come out here and risk my life with Draugo’s second-best, do you?”

Ronthiel wondered what she meant by that as he walked up to the gated door. It had taken a terrific pounding and yet it still held.

“I don’t know what the dwarves made that door out of, but it can’t be broken in,” Leradien told him, “At least not by me.”

Ronthiel studied it, noting where her claws had ripped two of its massive planks outwards.

“Maybe the trick,” he said, “is to pull it outwards instead of pushing it inwards.”

He pulled on one board testily and the entire battered gate fell down backwards in pieces.

“You’re right,” she said in agreement.

In seconds, her forelegs had tossed all the remaining massive planks away the door. While the dwarves designed the door not to be driven inwards, tearing it back outwards was a much simpler task. The crossbar on the other side did not prevent that. She tore it all away in mere seconds.

“The impossible now becomes easy!” she said of it. “I recommend I enter first in case any orcs remain.”

Leradien didn’t wait for a reply, but looked instead at whether she could squeeze her long legs and self within.

“Hmm!” she said of the now tight doorway. “It seems I’ve grown just a tad bit bigger since the last time I was here! You may have to go in first after all.”

But she finally made it in and no orc arrows met her as she entered, and so Ronthiel followed her.

There was a dead orc on the floor at every window, each one neatly shot through the throat by his perfect shots. The accuracy was almost uncanny. Ronthiel was good with a bow, but he had never been this good.

“As I recall,” Leradien said. “The hospital infirmary is in the basement. At my size, I’ll never fit down there. You’ll have to look for the boy yourself while I collect your arrows.”

Ronthiel nodded and, after collecting five of his arrows from the dead drow, took up his elf lantern and went down the stone steps. This was where the wounded were being kept when he was last here.

He found the entrance to the infirmary and shined his light inside.

“He’s been poisoned,” Amien said, inspecting young Joe after they finally found him.

He, Marroh, and the boy stood over him. Young Joe was not moving, with eyes closed and barely breathing.

“She must have decided to do him in at the last minute,” said Marroh.

“No,” said Amien. “She could have used her dagger for that. The poison was necessary for a purpose. She poisoned him to keep him here while she went after you. She planned to come back and revive him.”

Amien found and seized the body of the dead drow woman.

“Then somewhere on her is the antidote,” he said. "Ah! Here!"

Searching her, Amien produced about six different medicinals from her knapsack and held them up for all to see.

“So which one is it?” he asked. “I’ll bet five of these others are just more poisons.”