El-Vador's Travels by J. R. Karlsson Read Free Book Online

their enslavement of his
now-docile people.
    He
began learning Orcish. A long and painful process aided in part by
his father, he needed to understand his enemy in order to overcome
them. Everything he did now was obsessively bent to that end.
    'We
have to do something.' he said to his father one day as the man lay
in bed, as feverish as his mother had once been. 'If we don't, this
occupation may become permanent.'
    'We?' asked Cusband. 'Boy, I am wasting away. I feel my strength
being leached from this old wound. I urge caution first and will
offer you my mind if nothing else. We must take time to mourn the
loss of your mother and recover what we can of ourselves as life goes
on. There will come an opportunity eventually, son. When exactly it
shall present itself I do not know, it will come and you must be
ready.'
    It
was getting increasingly difficult to wait for that time to arrive.
The days ground in as if attempting to irritate him, at those times
he would venture out into the forest and take out his frustrations on
whatever was living in there. So long as he brought back more game
the Orcs did not care where he ventured.
    Cusband
seemed to understand where he had gone, in spite of his illness he
was still a proud man and felt he didn't need his son's help to
recover. He knew that the boy needed to venture out into the world
beyond that of Orcish control lest the same temperament he possessed
snap and spell disaster for the entire settlement. When El-Vador
returned, Cusband would query him about his hunting and correct him
on specifics, offering insight about how to strike and when. He knew
that it wasn't game that his son was thinking of hunting and prepared
him accordingly.
    Time
marched on a pace and El-Vador continued to hunt, his hatred for the
Orcs unabated by its passage.
    Silent
as the beasts he stalked, the young Elf slipped through the woods.
When he came to the edge of a clearing he went rigid as a statue, his
eyes scanning the area before he ventured out into the opening. He
was like so much emptiness, at one with the forest and gliding
through it without disturbing a branch.
    Something
was speaking to him, but not in any way he had known before. It was
as if it echoed through his head endlessly, drawing him onward in
bedazzled fascination. He shook his head but it would not relent, the
sensation was one that he could do without. Like most things in these
woods he vowed to hunt it down and put an end to it.
    His
father had urged him to go by this path for reasons unknown, it had
been a strange conversation, though the man's illness was making him
less lucid these days. A wariness stole over him, he knew every
inhabitant of this forest but he had not been in this part of the
woods before. Caution was a hunter's ally, he embraced it without
letting it control him utterly.
    The
silence that followed was not one of concentration that he was
accustomed to. He was not mentally blocking out the external sounds
in order to track a single prey, this was different. As if his senses
and the surrounding forest noises had been smothered in pelts and
rendered dead and useless to him. It seemed unnatural to him, that
not a single creature would stir in this place that he had been sent
to.
    El-Vador
clucked his tongue experimentally. In the stillness it seemed oddly
loud and out of place, as if carried by some unseen force.
    He
readied an arrow before continuing down the trail, having a weapon
there and ready to use filled him with reassurance.
    Without
abandoning caution entirely, he continued at a slightly quicker pace.
There was something unsettling about how much the surroundings seemed
to have changed without doing so at all. The trees were much like any
other yet somehow they felt different to him.
    He
scratched his head, wondering why and how such a feeling had gripped
him.
    The
eerie silence ate away at him in a way that nothing else could, his
mind was left naked with nothing but his grief to face. He had