The Light of Burning Shadows by Evans Chris

Author:Evans, Chris [Evans, Chris]
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Pocket
Published: 2009-07-28T05:00:00+00:00

EIGHTEEN

Tyul, now garbed in black, followed from a distance as the body of Kester Harkon was carried through the maze of back streets and alleyways of Nazalla. Several times the figures he pursued would pause and turn, looking back the way they had come. Each time they saw nothing out of the ordinary and continued. Had they looked up to the flat rooftops they still would have seen nothing, but they would have at least been looking in the right direction.

Tyul jumped lightly from roof to roof, his movements little more than a wisp of shadow. It was an odd sensation to be this high and not be surrounded by trees. Tears came to his eyes at the thought of the forest. In some part of his mind, he knew that following Chayii Red Owl had been the right thing to do, though that part receded deeper into the darkness with each passing day. As an elf in the Long Watch bonded with a Wolf Oak, he willingly took the solemn oath to protect the great forest from the Shadow Monarch. That the oath would take him so far from home had never occurred to him.

He leaped across an alley, then crouched low, as the figures below stopped and looked back again. Tyul remained motionless, waiting for the group to continue. Images of Black Spike came to his mind. To see the body of a Wolf Oak so desecrated pained him deeply. That Jurwan offered up his ryk faur to be used as a ship’s mast mystified Tyul, but then so much of the world made no sense to him. More tears welled up in his eyes. The pain enveloped him and it took all his concentration to block it out. The Wolf Oak was dead, yet something of it remained. Tyul felt it with every breath.

He knew, as all elves knew, that to have a Silver Wolf Oak as ryk faur was to risk your very sanity. Now, though, he saw it differently. His bonding with Rising Dawn had opened his mind to a plane of existence few elves would ever experience. He was closer to the natural order than most living things, and it was intoxicating and at times overwhelming. He knew, as few others ever would, that the spirit of the Wolf Oak really felt sorrow in its death as its limbs were slashed, its roots cut, its crown shorn, and its body desecrated with iron and made to serve on a sailing vessel, instead of being returned to the mukta ull, Mother Earth, to be reborn.

Tyul understood pain. He sensed it in Jurwan, too. They shared a bond, each affected by a Silver Wolf Oak, though Jurwan’s experience was very different. Tyul wondered again why they followed these men. He sensed nothing of the Shadow Monarch. But Jurwan had told him it was important, so for now he would track them as only he could, and when necessary, he would return them to the mukta ull.

The

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