Lust Leads to War: Ch. 2

                                         Chapter 2: Flight

                                                    *********

     “The dungeons are underground. There is eight feet of solid rock from above, north, south, east, and west. It was guarded by three of our best guards. And you are telling me that one human got past them?”
     Rauron stood there deep in thought, as the Lord sat there, his booming voice echoing all throughout the hollow stone dungeon as he screamed at the guards. He had known that something like this would happen. The human was intelligent. He knew how to be discreet, and how to do things without being noticed. Rauron had warned the Lord of this when he’d stolen the guard’s keys the first time he was served breakfast. Now two weeks had past, and Sheke was gone. Just to spite the Lord, Sheke had released the other prisoners as well. They were now inside an empty dungeon. Three guards had been killed by a knife, which the human had stolen along with a pair of boots off of one of the bodies.
     “What are you doing standing there?!” cried the Lord, startling Rauron out of his line of thought. “Find them! All of them!”
     Rauron hurried out of the dungeon. The night was not ideal for a search. The sky was full of clouds, which obscured the half-full moon. There were many tracks in the soft grass around him. He started to follow them westward.
     But wait… Rauron thought suddenly. Sheke is smarter than that. The other guards will go for the larger group, so he will head somewhere else. He searched the grass around the entire area, eventually finding not a single set, but two. They lead eastward, away from the other prisoners.
     “Very smart, Sheke,” said Rauron, “very smart.” He followed the second set of tracks at a brisk pace for awhile, until he thought he saw something: a flash of white light. He walked towards the spot where he’d seen it. Then he heard voices.
“—need to stop doing that you fool! They are searching for us!” said the first voice.
     “They are too busy with the other group. That’s why you let them out, right? As a distraction!” replied a second voice.
     “Elves have very good eyesight, even in the dark,” retorted the first voice. “If they have one brain among them, he’ll see our tracks, and they’ll catch up to us. Then they’ll see the blinking lights show you’re setting off over here.”
     Rauron knew the first voice as Sheke’s. His voice was easy to recognize; the second he knew from a prisoner in the dungeons. No name came to mind, but he could see in his minds eye a young face of light complexion: a youth in his early twenties, around five feet eight inches tall, with wide hazel eyes and long blonde hair.
     Yes, Rauron thought to himself. That’s the special prisoner; the one that has to be drugged. The enchanter. That explained the flash.
      “—worrying too much,” said the second voice faintly. Fool! Rauron thought to himself. He’d stood there pondering who the voices were as the two went on with their escape. He ran foreword, his footsteps soft as he could manage, in pursuit of the two voices.
      “—like to know where you got that knife,” said the enchanter’s voice.
      “Shh!” warned Sheke, “keep your voice down. Do you not understand that we are not yet free?”
     “We are safe,” said the sorcerer. “No one will notice our trail until morning. By then it will be too late.”
     “You don’t give the elves enough credit,” whispered Sheke.
     “Or you give them too much,” muttered the enchanter.
     “They say the elf’s eyes can adjust at night just as well as they can during the day. Their footsteps are like those of an ant, yet their strength like that of ten men. If they do not want to be seen or heard, then we will not see or hear them until our hands are bound, and bags over our hea—get behind that tree! Now!”
      Rauron heard Sheke thrust his companion behind the designated tree, and then felt someone kick his feet out from underneath him. A pair of boots appeared next to Rauron’s face. He looked up: above him stood Sheke, smirking down at him.                                                               
     Rauron felt cold steel on his neck, and realized that Sheke had stolen his sword as he’d fallen. What a stupid situation to have landed himself in!
     “We should kill him,” said the voice of the sorcerer. “A prisoner would only slow us down.”
     “Get up,” Sheke ordered. He kept the stolen sword pointed at Rauron as he obeyed.
     “Let me do it,” said the sorcerer, coming to stand beside Sheke. His hazel eyes were filled with hatred as he glared at Rauron. And yet there was an excitement in them. A gleam in his eye that showed he’d been looking foreword to this for a long time. His hands glowed red. Rauron could feel the heat emanating from them. He knew that he was about to die.
     “No!” cried Sheke. He grabbed the enchanter by the elbow, and his hands stopped glowing. “Ishelk, you are acting too recklessly. He hasn’t done anything yet.”
     “He will,” retorted Ishelk impatiently. “He’ll tell them where we are going.”
     “He’s only been following since the drug wore off, and you decided to see if your power would work again.”
     “That’s a half hour!” Ishelk pointed out.
     “We were careful enough in our speech that he doesn’t know anything of consequence,” replied Sheke calmly. “We can just let him go.”
     Sheke raised the blade, and swung it down. Rauron saw his death approaching as if in slow motion. There was pain, and then darkness.  

                                                            *********
     
     “I still don’t see why you didn’t kill him,” said Ishelk. “Why show him mercy when he would not have done the same?”
     “He didn’t do anything to us, Ishelk,” responded Sheke.
     Ishelk didn’t see the point of being merciful. They had locked him away from sunlight, from the clean smell of the air, from his own home. They’d repressed his power by forcing that horrible-tasting liquid down his throat every twelve hours.
     Ishelk smiled as he moved closer to the fire. The fire which he’d built with his own hands - his own power – the power which the elves had so long kept dormant inside him was now flowing through his veins again, and it was hungry for revenge.
     He’d been only ten years old when he’d first walked into the forest. And that day had ruined his life. The guards had quickly surrounded him; he’d been startled, and he panicked. The uncontrollable power was taking over. There was a flash. Tree guards lay dead before him. More of them came. Ishelk had passed out from the effort it had taken him to unleash that power. Nine years had passed by as if he was in an inescapable fog. Minutes seemed to last hours in that place. Guards came by seemingly every month to force the drug into his protesting mouth.
   But then a new face had appeared at that door; a horrifying face at first look with its catlike eyes. But the man had offered Ishelk his hand, and they had run out of that horrifying place. But his childish view of the world was gone. The dungeon had made him cruel, and pessimistic. He’d gone through than anyone ever deserved to go through before he was fifteen years old.
     My family must be dead, Ishelk thought. His mother had been ill when he’d left. His father had walked out on him not long after he was born. The elves had stolen his life. He was hungry for vengeance. He clenched his fists, and there was a burst of hot light. Revenge would be no problem.

                                                       *********

     Sheke couldn’t shake off the feeling that they were going to be caught. Their escape had been mainly to the stupidity of those guards, but there were other guards. They were much more cunning. The decision to let Rauron live weighed heavily on his mind. There was the feeling all around him that there were eyes in the trees; the feeling of being watched. The sound of the soft wind through the trees sounded like hundreds of arrows flying through the air. The sound of a squirrel sounded like an army marching through the trees. There was a foreboding feeling in the air as Sheke sat there feigning sleep. The fire was still burning, but they wouldn’t be able to see. The trees grew too close together here.
     Flash!
     Sheke leapt up, sword drawn, looking for the source of the sudden burst of light and wave of heat. He turned, and saw Ishelk smiling to himself.
     “Fool,” he said quietly. “There could be eyes among the trees. Rauron can’t have been the only one to have seen the trail!”
     “Just playing,” muttered Ishelk. “Go back to sleep.”
     Sheke lay back down and continued to listen to the night around him. All was quiet. There was a pleasant breeze running through the air. Perhaps it wouldn’t be too bad to sleep. He shut his eyes. He was there. Sheke sat up as quickly as he’d lad lay down, the horrible image still burned onto the inside of his eyelids. Even if it was only the ghostly image, Sheke was still frightened by it. He breathed heavily until the image went away, then he lay back on the cool grass, listening attentively to the forest around him.
     Snap. The sound was like canon fire in the still night. The air had become dead all around him. Someone was in the trees. He gripped the handle of the sword even tighter. He heard footsteps. Not just one set, though: there were several of them.
     “Quiet!,” whispered a voice.
     “Shhh!”, came a second.
     Suddenly, one of them jumped out of the trees. Sheke was up before the guard had even raised his blade. Rauron’s sword was embedded in the gut of the first guard. Six more came swiftly from the trees behind, one swinging his blade at Sheke just as he entered. Sheke easily parried the attack, and beheaded the guard. Another came from behind, succeeding in grabbing Sheke by the neck, and wrestling him to the floor.
     BANG!
     Smoke rose from the bodies of the seven dead guards. The circle of trees that had been there before were now charred and blackened stumps, the result of Ishelk’s handiwork. He had managed to protect Sheke and himself in the act, but had also cast his defensive bubble around one more by mistake: Sheke had been wrestling with one more guard and the explosion had occurred. Rauron had managed to survive the blast, but Sheke had won the fight.
     “You are more trouble than it is worth to keep you alive again, Rauron,” Sheke panted.
     “Bodies can be troublesome,” Rauron retorted.
     Suddenly, a shiny, glowing red box appeared. Out of it stepped a strangely dressed boy of medium height. He wore a black shirt, and blue pants made out of some strange material. His messy black hair went about down to his ears. There was something strangely dog-like about him. He glared down at Rauron for a moment with his attentive brown eyes, then kicked him, and said, “No copyright infringement,” stepped back into the box, and was gone.          
     “Okay,” said Sheke, with an air of utter bemusement. “Anyway, you’re more trouble than it was worth. Ishelk was right. Goodbye Rauron.”
     “I know that you’re planning something,” said Rauron quickly. “If you let me live, I’ll help you.”