Dee cursed silently as she avoided another lightning strike aimed at her. The world around her seemed to slow down to a crawl as she quickly moved sideways and continued her escape. Even with her speed and the weird phenomenon of everything around her seeming to slow down, something like avoiding a lighting strike was impossible. The speed of the lightning was simply too fast. However, it was not impossible to avoid the aim of those flinging the bolts at her. She could feel the moment when the power of the lightning reached critical mass and started to strike, and moved away from the spot the elementals were aiming at. No matter how good the elementals were at controlling lighting, they couldn’t make it change course while already in the air.

Dee had struck against the elementals a dozen times now. Dispersing their bodies was not all that difficult, but the centaurs had intelligently added something to the spell used to summon the elementals, and those elementals dispersed by her power would reform after a few minutes. Few of the elementals had wandered too close to Dee in an attempt to compensate for their lack of aim, and had found out that it was impossible to reform after being struck by the holy spells that carried the death element. Unfortunately, even with the invisible hands she could control, Dee’s range was not that long and the elementals had quickly wised up and stayed out of range. Now they only struck at her from long range, forcing her to zigzag and slow down her advance.

It would only take a few moments to kill all of the elementals if she turned around to face them properly, but she couldn’t do that. The whole point of the elementals was just to slow her down and block her movements. The few times she had tried, a combined attack of hundreds of centaurs that were chasing her had convinced her otherwise. That’s why she couldn’t fly either. It wasn’t that the storm elementals would kill her, but they would tie her down and slow her enough to allow the centaurs to attack her with their combined attacks.

The power of those combined attacks would be fairly scary coming from the almost twenty thousand centaurs that were chasing her. A full warband had peeled off from the main warhost to chase her down. It’s not like the majority of the centaurs had other things to do besides take part in the ritual summoning more elementals to attack the city. Besides, centaurs were born cavalry. Chasing enemies was among their strongest qualities. Even so, in a straight off sprint Dee would be able to run the centaurs into the ground, but she wasn’t allowed to run straight. Unlike the centaurs, she had to keep dodging those damnable lightning bolts!

She had blocked some of the bolts with her wings just to gain a little headway, and while she hadn’t suffered much in the way of actual damage, there was a limit on how much she would be able to take. Especially since she had to direct most of her defensive abilities and focus on countering the spells of the mages among the centaurs. She had a lot of defenses with her limited resistance to magic, ability to dissolve incoming spells and protective holy spells, but there were hundreds of mages among the centaurs. That didn’t leave a lot to spare against the storm elementals that kept harassing her.

She had struck back at the centaurs several times, but there were simply too many of them to fight effectively, and it was not like the centaurs were defenseless. There was another problem. Where was she running to? The inhibition against making portals seemed to stretch for hundreds of kilomel, and even if she did run out of range it wouldn’t be that simple to create a portal. It was one thing to make a quick portal when no one was trying to stop you, it was completely another to do so with hundreds of mages ready to mess with your portal the moment you started forming one. She wasn’t the only one capable of messing with the spells of others.

At the moment she was running towards the great forest. According to the information she got from Razark, the Autumn court’s border fortresses were left only with a skeleton crew. Enough to keep the fort from falling against simple attacks, but certainly not enough to ride against a centaur warband of this size. If she ran to one of the forts there was no guarantee the elves would allow her inside even if she changed her appearance, and even if they did allow her in then she’d just be trapped in the border fort instead of the city where she had escaped from a few hours ago.

So she chose to aim into one of the gaps between the fortresses instead and planned to run towards the forest itself. Luckily the distance to the forest wasn’t that far. Craghold was one of the cities closest to the forest due to the fact that it was on the border of the mountain range that delineated the Winter court lands. The terrain and availability of resources forced the city closer to the forest, and the elves didn’t mind as much because they considered the city to fall between the zones of control of the two courts. If some problem crept up they could always blame the other court for the problems.

Dee’s plan was to lose the centaurs in the forest. Cavalry in general was rather crummy in a forest, and even though centaurs weren’t exactly standard cavalry they didn’t have much experience with forest combat either. Only something like the specially trained cavalry of the elves would be really effective in the forest environment and could move unhindered through the woods. Dee on the other hand would have no problem with the trees, and maybe the trees would stop some of these attacks by blocking lines of sight. Besides, the heavy mana environment would help hide her presence. She would only need a short moment of peace to break the tracking spells placed on her. Then she’d only need to lose the pursuers in the shadows of the woods.

Of course the centaurs also realized this possibility and they had sent some quick moving units of light archers to block her path. While the main host of the centaurs couldn’t keep up with her, the light units could overtake her with some effort. Unluckily for them, Dee quickly proved why that to be a bad idea. She might not have been able to face the main warband head on, but a group light archers? She didn’t even bother slowing down. Their arrows were uselessly brushed aside by her tails and wings, while her claws and floating weapons tore the centaurs to pieces. She considered this attempt at blocking her almost insulting. It wasn’t the number of centaurs that worried her, it was their combined attacks and a few archers were not capable of anything like that.

It did show the centaur’s resolve though, as the mages of the warband ruthlessly fired their spells at her even when she was among the small group of their own warriors. The centaurs weren’t much good at stopping Dee, but they worked pretty well as shields for her, taking a couple of spells that she didn’t bother dispelling as she noted where they would hit.

It took hours of continual running, but Dee was finally getting closer to the tree line. She had to give the centaurs credit for having the stamina to keep up with her. Even though she had to expend a lot more energy avoiding all the attacks, she also had the stamina to run at full speed for weeks straight. Something good had come from the endless stairs on the damn old fart’s mountain! The centaurs were able to keep up with their top speed for this long, and that was commendable. Not just that some individuals kept up with her, but that the whole warband kept pace. A group is only as strong as their weakest link.

As she approached the forest, she sensed something approaching her from the opposite direction, namely specifically from the forest. Her senses told her that the group coming from the front was made up of about five hundred cavalry. Actual cavalry with steeds and not more centaurs. At first she assumed that it was a part of the Autumn court armies that had been left behind to patrol the border and which had noticed the approach of the centaurs and planned to intercept. That idea was quickly dashed though.

Why would a group of five hundred elves engage a warband of twenty thousand centaurs? Even assuming that the elves were higher ranked, a generous assumption considering that the centaurs had several hundred higher ranking members among them, it would still be a stupidly one sided battle and to the benefit of the elves. There was another thing. The beings didn’t feel like elves. They felt similar but not the same. It didn’t take much for Dee to guess them to be Sidhe. The Sidhe also seemed to be chasing something. One of their number seemed to be running away from the rest and had either lost their steed or never had one in the first place.

As the two groups were moving so fast in opposite directions, it didn’t take long for the Dee and the front runner of the Sidhe to catch sight of each other. Dee only got a quick glance of a woman dressed in dark purple leather armor and a similar color breastplate covering dark grey almost black skin. The woman had silvery almost white hair covered by a hood while a diaphanous veil covered her face. The two locked eyes for a fraction of a second, noticed that both of them were chased, and got the same idea.

The two made an identical ninety-degree turn, Dee to her right and the Sidhe woman to her left, now both running in the same direction. Dee noted that the woman was exhausted and running out of strength. Her attire suggested that she had been mounted at some point, but had indeed lost her mount and had lost much of her strength running away on foot. She was tired and slowing down. “Hop on!” Dee growled with chagrin.

The woman took a quick look at her monstrous form, and whispered a small ‘Thanks.’ while she made a leap from a root jutting out of the ground to get atop Dee’s back. ‘And now I’m a bloody mount.’ Dee grumbled in her mind. She felt like throwing the Sidhe woman off, but the woman’s presence was necessary for the success of their joint little plan.

Their idea bore fruit soon after. The centaurs and the other Sidhe chasing the woman ran into each other, and if they wanted to continue chasing their respective prey, they would have to run after them together. That was the straight line towards their quarry and it crossed with the other group of hunters. Needless to say, the two sides were less than enthused to run into one another, and cooperation was not in the cards for either group. Centaurs couldn’t leave witnesses, as the Sidhe could get help just as easily as Dee. The Sidhe on the other hand didn’t exactly like the idea of the centaurs tramping through their forest.

This is where the fearsomeness of the Sidhe became obvious. The Sidhe were outnumbered about forty to one, but that made the fey warriors to consider it a relatively even fight. The Sidhe were natural warriors and mages. All of them had abilities with both mana and ki. Most of them also spent thousands of years honing their martial prowess, not to even mention physical abilities that were surprising to say the least coming from such lithe frames.

The Sidhe lived with a philosophy of life that seemed odd for most other races. As the lives of the Sidhe were for all intents and purposes endless, they usually focused on one facet of life and mastered that to the best of their ability before trying something new. Usually the first path chosen was that of combat, for obvious practical reasons. A Sidhe might choose to master the art of woodworking or painting, but that was usually after they had spent a thousand years to reach their peak as warriors and mages. There was a reason why they were considered one of the most powerful races along with other such races as vampires, angels and dragons.

The Sidhe cavalry cleaved into the centaur warband, leaving dead bodies everywhere they passed. This delayed both of the pursuing parties however, allowing Dee and the Sidhe woman to escape unhindered. Dee took to running in places that would leave hard to find tracks such as on the branches of the trees and any rocky outcroppings they ran into. The mountains were still right next to them after all so such places were plentiful. At the same time, she was finally free of the barrage of attacks for the first time in several hours, which gave her the much needed chance to start breaking the tracking spells placed on her. The spells were the type that tried to reapply themselves immediately as long as they were provided with mana, but the centaur mages were busy elsewhere at the moment. That gave Dee the chance to break the spells.

This brought a glance from the tired Sidhe woman. She could feel the spells shattering, as she was a mage herself and the spells were rather flashy. “Are you going somewhere specific?” Dee asked idly, her focus on the spells and finding footing on the treacherous ground.

“Away from here. The further away I can get the better. Where are you going?” The Sidhe woman asked.

“Well, I just got out of Craghold which is under siege by the rest of those mutated ponies. I’m a scout for the Radiant Sun and need to get a word to the headquarters.” Dee explained simply.

“Radiant Sun?” The surprise in the Sidhe woman’s voice was clear. “I didn’t know the paladins hired monsters nowadays.” Her tone made it clear that the word monster was more in jest than an insult.

Dee found that the woman’s attempt at humor at their current situation was quite appropriate and decided to play along with it. “Yeah, it’s terrible how low the standards have gotten. Next thing you know the order will be hiring something really bad like…humans.” She gave a fake shudder.

The woman gave a small laugh. Dee found her smoky and raspy voice quite pleasant. “Well, if the order headquarters is your goal, then I don’t mind coming along. It will accomplish the goal of ‘far away from here’ that I wanted to achieve. Though the closest teleportation gate is pretty far from here, especially if Craghold is not available.” Some of the larger border forts had their own gates but those were also under the suppression of the field blocking teleportation.

“That’s not a problem. We just need to get away from this spatial suppression.” Dee said simply.

“Oh? I was wondering why the spatial suppression was so big and I’m sad to inform you that there’s another similar suppression field that the people chasing me applied, but that one is much smaller since I don’t actually have the ability to teleport without items. Items which I lost when I was ambushed, I hasten to point out. You have a method though?” The woman asked.

“I have my wily ways.” Dee said with a toothy grin. “We just need to get deeper into the forest then. I doubt the people chasing us have time to come after us any time soon.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure. The group after me was well trained.” The woman pointed out instead.

“Be that as it may, but it will still take time to slog through twenty thousand centaurs. Besides, I don’t know if you noticed, but they weren’t exactly a random group of raiders either and we’re moving pretty fast away from them. Even if they can track me, it will take some time and effort.” Dee reassured her.

“There were twenty thousand of the silly ponies? Well. I didn’t expect that as I didn’t see more than a part of them. That changes things a bit. Still, we should hurry.” She spurred Dee on.

“Understood. I was just distracted by the tracking spells. Hold on.” Dee leapt off the ground and started gliding above the forest floor. She didn’t want to fly above the trees where they could be noticed, but as her wings were from an angel she didn’t need to flap them to gain elevation either. That allowed her to fly through the forest rather freely, albeit the maneuvers she had to make to avoid the trees were a little risky.

Despite her tiredness the Sidhe woman’s laughter sounded in the forest as Dee’s aerial maneuvers flipped them around several times. Dee didn’t have time to be careful about her rider due to the current breakneck speeds, and simply had to hope that the woman was able to hold on. Her flight speed was much faster than her running speed, even if it didn’t quite match her speed in the angel form. On the upside, she could use the trees to push for more speed or a quick change in direction. This did have the unfortunate result of pretty much pulverizing the particular tree, but she decided in favor of using speed instead of trying to mask their tracks anymore. If the people chasing them would be able to track them over the small stretch where she had tried to hide their passage, then trying to lose then over a longer distance would not succeed either. There was a risk of losing more speed by being secretive than the people hunting them lost in tracking.

Eventually the two made it out of the suppression area of the spell, and Dee immediately created a portal towards the Radiant Sun headquarters and leapt though. One of the things she had learned about the portals was that she didn’t need to keep the entrance to the Astral Plane open while she traveled through, although closing it did leave the risk of stranding her in the strange plane. Now it was more important to lose their pursuers though, so the entrance behind them winked out as soon as they had passed.

Dee looked towards the Sidhe woman, kind of hoping to see her floundering in the weird space with its own rules, but was disappointed. It took the woman no time to figure out how to move in the weird space using just her mind. ‘Why does everyone else figure this out faster than me?’ Dee cursed silently in her mind. “Follow me and I’ll lead you to the exit.” She said to the woman. One of the downsides of this travel method was that only she could sense the exit as she had formed it. That had been a little problematic when she escorted all those refugees through, and they saw the endless space around them.

The Sidhe woman simply gestured Dee to lead the way. The distance they traveled meant that they had to spend several hours in the Astral Plane, but for once Dee didn’t feel any weird presences observing her. Due to the distance of the jump, they didn’t get very close of the spot Dee was aiming for, but she was improving. They had actually dropped out into the garden maze of the Mystic’s guild headquarters.

“Well, that was actually closer than I thought.” Dee mumbled to herself.

“I take it this is not where you aimed at?” The Sidhe woman asked with a slightly amused tone.

“No, but it’s much closer than usual. You know what they say, practice makes perfect.” Dee said faking smugness. Secretly she was a little worried about Razark. Even though the latter was relatively safe with his strength, you never knew what could happen. At the same time Dee shifted out of her bestial form, and used her normal form instead.

For the briefest of moments there was something that might have been a flash of recognition in the Sidhe woman’s eyes, but Dee judged that to be unlikely. It would be somewhat problematic to open an unauthorized portal straight into the Radiant Sun headquarters, so much so that there might be a lethal response, so the two had to run the rest of the way. While the two started their run towards the headquarters, Dee finally asked. “Now that were not in immediate danger, I realize that we didn’t introduce ourselves during that little mess. I’m Haydee, though everyone just calls me Dee.”

The Sidhe woman gave a tired giggle. “You’re right, we didn’t. In our defense, we had something else in mind at the time. You can call me Noyala for now.”

‘You can call me Noyala for now? So not her real name. Not surprising all things considered.’ Dee thought to herself. “As far as I’m concerned you’re free to go, although I can imagine the order might want to ask you a question or two. I can see you’re tired though, so rest might be in order, and I’m not sure you’ll get any following me, for a while at least. If you need money for the inn, then I can give you some.”

Noyala seemed to consider for a moment, before shaking her head. “Something tells me that I’ll reach my goals faster by following you around. I can meditate while you make your report, and we Sidhe don’t actually sleep much. Meditation should be enough.”

“Suit yourself, though I do feel compelled to ask what those goals are.” Dee said simply. The woman might be a decent source of information on the Sidhe side of things.

“Many things, but the most obvious among them is revenge. I wasn’t alone when those riders attacked. I had people with me. People who are now dead.” There was steel in the woman’s voice now that she thought about the lost people. Also a bit of bloodlust when she mentioned revenge.

Dee took a good look of the woman while they ran. Noyala was tall for a woman, almost a hundred and ninety centimels, although that still left her a fair bit shorter than Dee. She was lean and looked well trained, although her armor did a good job of covering most of the details. The few places that showed her skin revealed the smoothness and clear complexion so usual to races related to elves, though the color was very different. The dark grey color signified her as an Unseelie of the Winter court. A Seelie from Summer court would actually have a greenish skin tone.

Dee could sense power in the woman, although much of it was spent in her escape and the battle that most likely preceded that escape. Dee judged that the woman was most likely of a similar rank to herself, though that might be inaccurate. Both a mage and a warrior though. The most noticeable feature of the woman was of course the long ears pointing out of her hood, from what looked to be dedicated slits in the dark purple cloth. The grey ears were longer than even the usual elven ears and actually reached above the woman’s head. The right ear had a complex system of earrings and a small chain connecting them. Dee guessed the earring symbolized something, but had no idea what.

“It’s always the ears, isn’t it?” Noyala remarked with clear amusement. Her attention on the other hand was drawn to Dee’s tails. “The same with your tails. Where everyone’s eyes eventually wander I mean.”

“True. The most distinguishing feature and all that. Although I was wondering more about your earring. It seems to have some significance.” Dee replied shamelessly.

“Ah, it does. Our earrings are something that identifies rank as well as house and family. You’ll find out later if necessary.” Noyala replied, declining to comment further.

Dee had wanted to ask what had happened to her to cause such a chase, but they reached the headquarters before she had the chance, and other things demanded her attention. She had a message to deliver.