Daelith proved to be Hector’s better with the staff, and especially the sticks, much to his frustration. The half breed son of Celdan moved with the acrobatic grace he had seen from Shael but with the forthright cut and thrust of Highlander form, no doubt passed on by his father.

The sticks were thinner than the wooden training swords Hector normally used, and whereas he wielded one sword they held a stick the length of his arm in each hand.

Daelith grinned, the telltale sign he would start his attack. He swung low with one stick and hit overhead in a double leveled strike, then twirled his batons in a flourishing blitz that Hector managed to block and parry the first few, and grunted as the last blows struck his wood paneled protected chest with a rhythmic tututut.

“You handle the sticks well,” Daelith noted.

“I have trained under the blade since I was four,” Hector said. Trained under the guidance of one of my father’s killers, he thought. “But it is incomparable with your skill. How old is your span, Daelith?”

“Hmmm, around nine decades. Not a century though,” Daelith tugged the hair of his goatee absentmindedly. “I’ve lived in the Elder Forest throughout my life. The forest has a way of… making the years pass by without notice. The decades feel like the wind, shifting and flowing without end, without interruption of the humdrum mundane. Which is why I will help you cousin,” He flashed an honest smile, “In your endeavor of succeeding your Empire. What a tale this will all make, what a call to adventure!”

“Do not mistake adventure with the plight of our people,” Shael entered the meadow, her rich golden eyes gleaming under the unfiltered light of the suns. Open sky was hard to come by in the dense forest, but pockets of such meadows and groves allowed for the suns’ rays to descend unhindered to the forest floor.

“I meant no disrespect Warden, but do you not feel a sense of thrill when stepping past the Long Wall?” Daelith asked.

“It is not so much a thrill as when someone were to try and end your life, of which there are countless within the Empire’s borders,” Shael answered. “The only reason to cross the wall is in the rescue of our kind in servitude,” she glanced at Hector, “To man. Take off that armor. Your idea, I assume?”

Daelith shrugged. “It would not help to gather many injuries in training, not when Hector still has much to learn and has not yet ascended.”

Hector unbuckled the bone clasped leather strappings holding the wooden shells contoured round his shoulders, chest, elbows and knees.

“Pain must be experienced, it is inevitable,” Shael intoned. “Pain is a vice. It is fear that must be ignored, and you cannot ignore pain when it screams at you in the rush of battle. Pain is a reminder to not repeat past mistakes. Mistakes you will learn in your training. You must overcome the fear of pain. For you cannot master others, but you can master yourself. With lesser foes pain can be used as a tool to manipulate into a reaction.”

Shael lashed her staff out in an upward swing directed between Daelith’s legs. He brought his sticks low to block before she swiftly reversed her movement to a downward strike much to his surprise, his mouth half open as he opened his eyes to see the stave motionless near the top of his skull.

“All males have the same mind when it comes to their most precious possession,” Shael said with a dull tone. “Whom did you train under?”

Daelith bowed his head, “My father has trained me in his way with the sword and Warden Hathos in Ro et Daal (path of war).”

“You will help me train with Hector as well. Show me your Ro et Rav, (dance of war) the both of you.” Shael stabbed the butt end of her staff into the grass.

Hector was unnerved, it was the first time Shael had uttered his name after all this time. He breathed in and placed his hands together as if in prayer, raising them from his head and lowering them to his chest. Daelith followed as Shael faced them in turn and they began the dance. Shael shifted to the side, body bent low as one arm reached to the sky.

Her movements were slow and relaxed, flowing from one form to the next and rapidly increasing her speed to which Hector saw but could not follow. She and Daelith swayed and kicked out into the air, spinning and twisting with a grace from untold years of practice. Behind each form was a dodge, a block, a parry, or a counter strike be it from the fist, elbow, knee, foot, even rarely the point of a shoulder or the frontal part of the head. Hector stumbled and fell off balance many a time to copy their haste and by the end of the dance he labored with breath and was hot with sweat.

“Your form is sloppy. I can see you have grown stagnant with your practice,” She told Daelith, then turned her attention to Hector. “And it is not the form you should focus on, but the flow between stances. No one form repeated is ever the same. Make it your own, the Ro et Rav does not master you.”

They began their sparring in earnest. Shael insisted Hector was not ready to train in the way of the Arrden (stick) and so he faced Daelith with his own staff (Dockvii). In the end he sported a collection of welts and bruises, as Shael reprimanded Daelith for moving too slowly, to which he shrugged to Hector in silent apology. Still, he felt that Daelith held back most of the strength in his blows and lessened the sting of the stave that whipped upon his limbs.

Daelith dropped his staff onto the grassed ground. “It is enough,” he said with finality. Shael glared at him, and he met her stare without even a brow raised before turning to leave, “I’ll see you all at the first meal.”

Hector supported himself with his staff. Bright lucid pain streaked across his arms and legs. Sweat dripped down his nose and face, stinging his eyes.

“You must wash yourself,” Shael without a word took his arm over her shoulder as he used the staff as a walking stick. “The cool waters will bring down the swelling.”

He hobbled for the most part to wherever she was leading them, which was another cresting waterfall similar to where he had first met Celdan. There was a pool deeper than the first he had seen, a greenish blue in color due to the moss that lay at the bottom.

“Take off your clothes,” Shael said tersely as she took off her own. Hector turned away. “You have already seen me naked, have you not?”

He heard a splash and he took off his gifted leather jerkin and pants, folding them neatly beside his staff. He dashed to the water as he caught Shael scrutinizing him, or rather below his midsection. She looked away, her cheeks reaching a rosy flush. Was she?...

He plunged into the pool. The water was cold, but not frightfully so. He felt the moss slippery upon his feet, padding the rocks underneath.

“I am sorry about the other day,” he wrestled with the silence, save for the rushing of water overhead and the never ending chirping of the birds. “I was caught off guard by your offer. I did not know of the… conditions that your kind have with choosing whom you couple.”

“So you will take me then?” She sounded neither hopeful nor dejected.

Hector shook his head. “With my kind, we mate only with those we wish to be with.”

Shael frowned. “Be with?”

“We do not duel for each other. We simply… speak in agreement of each other’s desires. Sometimes words are not even needed. We do not take coupling as a permanent union. Sometimes, very rarely, if the person is special to us, we choose to not couple with any other besides them, and choose to stay with them as our mate.”

“Yes. That is only natural. Why would you do no other such thing?”

“Perhaps because my kind is not a fully committed race as yours. Perhaps we are scared to give such devotion, as the other can simply break off the union.”

“That is not the way of our kind.”

“Why then, must you win over your mate through Ravshi?”

“We do not have to accept the other as our mate should they win,” Shael pointed out. “But we know whether our offspring will benefit should they prove our better.”

“So it is all for the betterment of the next generation, and never about your own desire, to be with the one you believe can best give you happiness?”

The bare shoulders of Shael not covered in the reflecting water moved in a shrug. “Respect is earned through Ravshi. That is all that is needed to mate in union.”

“So the sole purpose of mating with me would be to strengthen the ties with our people.”

“Yes.”

Hector sighed and waded out from the glimmering pool, turning his back to Shael. She followed, and he gingerly faced away from her.

“How will we dry ourselves?”

“Follow me.”

He took his clothes and boots under one arm and his staff with the other to see her still naked body walking to a nearby tree. Their bare feet pattered up the spiral staircase, and Hector’s gaze wandered to the small of her back further down to the curves of her bottom. Her legs flexed as they moved up each step, and he marveled at the form of her body.

The staircase stopped halfway up the tree to an open hollow, radiant with the suns’ rays. Shael placed her clothes near the entrance and rummaged through her pack. Hector kept his gaze upon the floor as she bent down, her rear arched upward for him to see.

He sat down at the center of the circled floor and tucked his head down, closing his eyes. He felt a hand brush against his arms, Shael kneeling to handle a bottle containing syrupy ointment the color of amber tree sap. The sensation was odd, a cool yet burning feeling. The warmth of the suns dried the salve as it seeped into his soothed skin.

“This will help heal your wounds,” she murmured. The softness of her breast grazed his back and Hector shifted away to one side.

“You must be still,” she said in curt order, then her eyes lowered to between his legs. “I thought you did not find my body pleasing.”

“I cannot be your mate, Shael.”

Her eyes locked with his.

“Then why does your body tell you it is ready?”

“It does not mean I wish to be in a union with you.”

“You are odd, Hector Riordan.” She moved closer, then sat down behind him, her back facing his. “Your words are not true with what you do. Are all your kind like this?”

“We are not a straight forward people such as yours,” Hector admitted, letting out a short breath of relief. He fought to control his body, and his wandering mind. “Much of our nature contradicts what we seek to do, as to what we do.”

“Spoken like the beginnings of a Seer,” Shael said. “You have learned much in such a brief span. It must be startling for you.”

“It is,” Hector said in earnest, and paused. “Shael, my kind have committed atrocities upon your people. Why not kill me and Celdan, and be done with it? How could you have treated him as your own after everything he has done?”

“It was not my Tribe that agreed to spare him. This happened generations ago, long before my great ancestors had left this world. There was a vote from all the chieftains of the five Tribes. The Orrkin left a message to our Seers: place him in the vault of their Ancients. They were willing to ignore the guidance of Serendrial’s firstborn, to kill one who had killed countless of our own. But Celdan’s mate, Muriel, the Elder Seer of the Odigwe, convinced the other Seers to null the decision of the chieftains, and follow the will of Serendrial.”

“Your goddess Serendrial, does she guide your people?” Hector took care of his words, his head to one side, while Shael’s turned to the other.

“It is the Seers’ duty to interpret her way. Her firstborn grow ever more distant from us, most of their kind never straying far from the first Arbor. Some patrol the forest grounds deepest round the Arbor in a never ending circle. We leave them alone in their vigil, and they leave us in turn.”

“It seems you are not truly allies with the Orrkin. We always thought the native races acted in unity.”

“They are neither friend nor foe. But our interests lie with the preservation of the first Arbor, to uphold all life.” Shael stood up. “The suns have done their work. Let us see what your kindred have made for the first meal.”

***

“The day favors us,” Celdan announced. “Daelith has brought home harvest from the Anmir, taken every five years. Ishavala!”

Hector looked upon the boiled eggs, each the size of half his head resting under their wooden bowls. Their shells were cracked at the top and had been scooped out and replaced with an assortment of greenery and red vegetables filling its oozing orange yolk. Hector spooned out a dollop of the brightly colored meal and the taste of hot spice flashed on his tongue. He gagged from the cup of mint leaf juice in an effort to quench out the heat burning his mouth, much to his onlookers' amusement.

“What creature could make an egg of such size?” He asked after he had recovered, his lips now numb from the spice.

“The Anmir are greatly coveted and farmed in their respective Tribe,” Celdan explained. “You may know them as great turtles.”

“Turtles,” Hector breathed. He had read of such creatures from accounts taken by explorers of the Elder Forest. The inked illustrations showed creatures larger than a hound but not reaching above a man’s shoulders, their back protected with a great shell, their scaled limbs stout and clawed, their heads beaked, their eyes circled black.

They continued in conversation, Daelith peppering Hector with questions of the current state of the Empire to which Hector could only answer with the limited knowledge he had of the political clime and ways of the Aristocracy.

“Much is hidden within the teachings of the Academy,” he confessed. “I would have had to ascend to even enter.”

“This Academy is news to me,” Celdan said. “Back in my days the Faith was the teacher and judge of the Gifted. The Mandate stated that all Gifts of the Mythic be used with honor, or it was deemed that the mageborn was unworthy of their Gifts.”

“The Mandate is still enacted,” Hector explained, taking another sip of the refreshing drink. “But the Faith have lost much of their power. The Aristocracy chose to harbor and judge their own, the Faith merely as keepers of the holy relics.”

“So the centuries pass, and the powerful skew the Ancient Laws to whittle away whatever influence the common folk have left over their own destinies. Let us talk of more pleasant winds. The razing has halted, the war machines now stand abandoned near the Green Pass.”

“No doubt Queen Lyssa and Roth have announced my death,” Hector murmured. “There must be a reason why they would lift the siege.”

“The powerful never are satisfied with their current position. Their greed calls for more. From what you have said of Roth and Lyssa, they have both no longer found a use for the other. As Crown Steward Roth stands next in succession, but through the right of conquest, a Law I conjured in times past, Lyssa will fight for the High Throne. Civil war is certain, and that is how we will find our footing into the Empire.”