Aveliene awoke from the pleasant dream of devouring the assassin when an angry roar shook the ground and made the leaves and branches of the surrounding trees tremble. She went from lying sprawled on the ground to on her feet with her war-knives in her fists in one fluid movement.

She grabbed her pack and slung it over her shoulder without releasing either knife, quickly sliding her arms into the straps and settling it on her back. She ignored the fact that her braid had come partially undone and was outside of the leather tube she normally kept it in.

Another roar shattered the normal sounds of the woods and Aveliene sheathed her knives and took off toward the source of the sound at a dead run. Whatever making the noise had to be huge, and to Aveliene that meant a Horror of War or another living weapon that had been released during the Lich King War.

She leaped over fallen trees, bushes, and rocks, making her way steadily toward the noise. She climbed a large pile of cracked and broken rocks that had probably once been fortress quickly, using her hands to help pull her up the pile by grabbing saplings and pulling.

At the top of the pile of rubble she paused, staring at the scene in front of her before smothering giggles with her hands.

In a large clearing a half dozen men were facing off against a huge upright lizard that stood nearly forty feet tall. Its flanks were armored with black iron that had been fused to its flesh, the small atrophied arms had been replaced by massive black iron arms that were crawling with eye watering arcane runes. In its massive jaws magic flared as the giant lizard chewed on the screaming form of a mage, the huge teeth shattering the mage's protective magics.

One of the armored men ran forward and shoved his sword between the massive armored plates that had been fused the flesh of the lizard's belly, then yanked it out and darted back, obviously expecting the giant lizard to react. Aveliene giggled to herself as a long moment passed while the huge living weapon chewed up the now silent mage.

Suddenly the creature made a sound that sounded suspiciously like "Urrr?" then roared, its massive jaws opened and it let loose with a roar of pain nearly thirty seconds after it had been stabbed. The unswallowed pieces of the wizard fell to the ground, and a sound of dismay could be heard from the gathered men.

Good luck, suckers. Aveliene thought to herself, moving back the way she came.

She knew better than to challenge the massive living weapon. It had probably been released to deal with the keep whose rubble she was climbing on, or it had wandered onto the High Roads on its own, or followed someone else on the High Roads and then hung around.

Behind her another roar of pain sounded out, and the ground shook as men screamed.

Idiots. Aveliene mentally sneered.

Less than twenty minutes run from where the morons had decided to engage a modified Thunder Lizard in combat, the High Roads went from dappled glades and rolling fields into thick forest. The trees were stunted and twisted, the shadows fell menacing, and the wind carried whispers and mutterings that made the hairs on Aveliene's neck stand up.

Something's wrong here... The thought snaked through Aveliene's mind, and she dropped her masquerade in order to let her senses reach out. When she was shapeshifted her senses were slightly muted, limited somewhere between the form she had chosen and her own, limited by flesh she garbed herself in. In her own form, her senses were sharper, her reactions quicker, and the chances she could be caught unaware dropped.

The woman knelt down, poking her fingers into the rich earth and bringing a few grains of soil up to her lips. As soon as the soil touched her tongue she spit it out, and kept spitting for a few moments to clear her mouth.

Corruption. But it's too early. She looked around her in shock. Her Step-Mother had spent the entire Lich King War keeping an eye out for the Eternal Enemy, watching for his plots and machinations, and hadn't seen anything that looked like his work.

But the corruption she could taste in the soil could only mean one thing.

The World Ender had been at work in the Kingdom of Shulafta.

Does Step-Mother know? She wondered, glancing around the forest. Of course she does, silly, would she really send her most beloved daughter to some ruined kingdom to kill an ugly one horned mule? No. She mentally chastised herself. You don't send Fraker the Axe to pick posies, you don't send the Sterile Queen to perform animal husbandry.

She knew enough about the High Roads to know that just because a section of the High Roads was contaminated that it didn't mean that the regular parts of the Six Worlds that coincided with that section of the High Roads had been affected.

Still, it was a good seventeen days from where she'd be able to drop out of the High Roads and into the Kingdom of Shulafta. The problem was she couldn't move around the contamination.

Unlike most road, the High Roads were both malleable and fixed. While the pathways may appear to change, while one could move from lush rain forest to desert in a handful of strides, what map-makers and most sages who had never spent time in the High Roads did not understand is that the basic paths never changed. Aveliene could not go around the corruption, since a change of direction would lead her down a different path, take her to a different place, possibly even one worlds away from her destination.

No, if she was going to get to Shulafta, she'd have to move through the corruption.

Which meant that it was deliberate. Someone was trying to block access to the ruins of that kingdom, but for what reason, what purpose, Aveliene had no clue.

Maybe that's what Step-Mother wanted, silly girl. Aveliene mused, standing up and looking around.

Now that she knew what was wrong, she wondered how she had missed it. There were no animal sounds, no buzzing of insects, and the leaves, branches, and grasses that moved seemed to move wrong, not in tune with the breeze.

Her expression went blank, and she stared for a long time at the path in front of her. To get too far off the path meant she would be lost in the High Roads until she found another path or the one she had originally left. She had no choice but to follow the one she was on, since she couldn't take a path to a place on the other side of Shulafta and then enter the High Roads and approach from the opposite direction. No matter where you were, no matter how far away, the path from one place to the next was the same. Only the Great City of Novak was an exception, but even its roads followed the rules to an extant. To travel the High Roads, one needed to know the landmarks. Each landmark was a days travel from the next. People had tried to move slowly each day, only to find out that it took them longer to reach the landmark. Everyone who was familiar with the high roads knew that each landmark was a days travel from the next.

Moving quickly she started down the road, her normally fluid and graceful movements jerky.

She skipped over that patch of flowers, kicked the tuft of dandelion fluff free with with a toenail as she passed, bypassed that pile of leaves across the trail, leaped up into the trees to run along the branches and skirt that enticing river embankment.

Within a half hour, she was covered in sweat and had covered less than ten minutes worth the ground.

She spotted a huge misshapen hornet's nest and stopped, her nose less than a handspan from it. She rocked her hips back and forth, trying desperately to regain her balance. A fall to the ground would land her in the middle of an outcropping of rock that had thrust their way up from the loam, and if she fell forward the hornets would react with a savagery.

One hornet climbed out of a hole in the side of the nest, and Aveliene cursed inwardly. It was jet black, with a tiny skull in bright green on its thorax. The stinger was nearly a half inch long, and a bead of dark green venom was glinting in the light. It crawled around for a moment, fluttering glimmering wings, and Aveliene realized that the wings were still wet. It had felt her breath and left the nest to try to dry its wings.

She inhaled and held her breath, her gyrations lessening as he momentum bled away. The hornet crawled around sluggishly, stopping to preen at its antenna, but still Aveliene held her breath as it wandered around the misshapen paper nest.

You're new, aren't you? Aveliene asked silently. She'd seen these hornets before, watched as they'd decimated the elven inhabitants of a hiem. The venom would paralyze an elf, and the hornet would quickly burrow up the elf's nose and into its brain. Alchemical changes would cause the hornet, even a worker or warrior, to quickly metamorphis into a queen. The hornet would order the elf to seek a quiet place where it wouldn't be disturbed as the hornet went through the change. Through arcane methods the new hornet queen would use the unlucky elf's own body to begin laying thousands of eggs within the elf's abdominal cavity. Once they began to hatch, the worker would gnaw huge sores in the elf's skin, allowing the bees to come and go at their leisure.

Once the new hive had been built inside some unlucky, still living, still aware elf, the queen would command it to return to the nearest elven settlement.

And once there, the hornets would swarm on the elves, each insect out to create a new hive.

The fact that the hornet was living in a misshapen paper hive told Aveliene that this was fresh, that the hornets had not migrated here from some hiem that had fallen to the Eternal Enemy. Rather, something or someone had placed the hornets here to prey on any unlucky elves who happened to use this section of the High Roads.

Moving slowly Aveliene reached behind her, her dexterous fingers easily opening up the small belt pouch at the small of her back. She felt inside for a moment, centuries of practice allowing her to pick the correct token from the pouch. She held it in two fingers, and closed the beltpouch with the other four fingers on her six fingered hand.

She slowly brought her hand around, stopping when the breeze stopped, slowing when the breeze slowed, and moving when the air currents stirred. She reached out to the trunk of the tree and pressed the gently throbbing ruby into the bark, ensuring that the rune was pointing away from the trunk, the symbol for elemental fire pointing directly at the hive.

Just in case. She told herself. She had not survived eons of warfare and assassination work by being sloppy or unprepared.

She moved upward, climbing branches after checking each one for any insects or swollen nodules on the wood, until she was almost thirty feet above the nest. She ran along the branch and jumped to the next tree, slithering down the branches until she could see the forest floor.

From there she kept moving.

Less than an hour of careful movement and Aveliene caught a whiff of heavy corruption that made her stop. She went perfectly still, recognizing the scent as the hunting pheromones of one of the Eternal Enemies most potent weapons.

Reavers. Aveliene hissed internally. She looked around carefully, eyes first, then slow movements that imitated the swaying of the branches in the steady breeze. There.

The six Reavers appeared to be massive bipedal insects, thick pebbly green mottled chitinous armor, four arms, two which were grasping claws, one a fine multi-fingered "hand" with almost a dozen tiny tentacles and "fingers", and the last one a normal arm with a large "spike" instead of a forearm and hand. The "spike" had perforations in it, and Aveliene knew that when that spike was driven into the body of a living creature, fierce maggot-like worms with chomping jaws would eat into the flesh of the victim. Additionally the Reaver could burrow into the victim with small barbed and pointed tentacles.

Those that were punctured by the spike, living or dead, inevitably became hosts to whatever type of Reaver that the massive insects were charged with creating and sowing.

The insects heads were almost tiny, merely a platform for the massive eyes, crushing jaws, and four antenna that jutted from the forehead. Aveliene knew that the Reaver's brain, what little of it there was, was located in several sections within the torso. Large nodules of nerve ganglia were scattered about, to prevent a single injury from stopping the Reaver completely.

Reavers were tough. As tough as the Eternal Enemy was able to engineer. The Eternal Enemy wasn't like mortals, who viewed crushing defeats as the end of their plans. The Eternal Enemy viewed defeats as a way to improve upon his designs, as ways to prevent a defeat in the future.

Unlike mortals, the Eternal Enemy had all the time in the world to engineer his creations. He would be around far after the sun went out. Time, and space, had no meaning to the Eternal Enemy.

Aveliene stared at the sextant of Reavers below her. They were busy throwing carcasses into a pile. The leader, identifiable only by its wings and the rows of cyst-like nodules beneath the folded wings, was carefully maneuvering each one so that it interlocked with those already stacked. The crackling of bone and the tearing of flesh was audible to Aveliene almost fifty feet away.

Compost pile. Aveliene identified it with a chill. The Reavers, nicknamed "Nannies" by her Step-Mother, would pile the bodies up, then infect them. The gravewyrms would heat the pile of flesh to make it ready for the eggs that Aveliene could see that the leader was carrying. They would have to keep adding flesh, to keep the pile hot, to give the gravewyrms and other catalyst insects that the Nannies would inject into the pile flesh to work with so they could excrete the chemicals that the immature Reavers would need to grow to maturity.

The hornet nests and the other lesser Reavers she'd seen were nothing more than perimeter guards, placed to keep people away, possibly kill them in order to add more to the compost.

From the color of the cysts and the size of them, Aveliene could tell that the lead Nanny was carrying more Nanny eggs.

Aveliene quickly ran through her choices. If she bypassed them, they'd spread through the High Roads, driving living creatures before them and multiplying rapidly. Nannies only needed compost piles until they could build the complex birthing hives, but to do that they would need to incubate the Reavers that could extract metals from living creatures, objects, and raw ore. If she dropped back and told her Step-Mother, more than likely the Eternal Elba would simply send her right back to fight a guerrilla war against the Reavers, which in the meantime would have explosively multiplied. Finally, she could take the only reasonable option.

Aveliene thought for a brief moment, running all the permutations through a six month timeline, then slowly exhaled, knowing she only had one choice.

Her choice was a poor one, if they infected her, if her body's natural and enhanced resistances could not cope with the infection, she would have to be slain, then reborn. The last thing anyone wanted was for a Reaver to be born from the body of a Wraithkiller, much less from the body of the Sterile Queen.

She drew both of her jackal-man war-knives, inhaled deeply, and dropped down in sight of the Reavers, leaves crunching beneath her boots.

"Hey! Over here!" Aveliene yelled, even though all six of them were already turning toward her.

Without bothering to see if they were giving chase, she spun and began running back the other way, back the way she had came. A glance over her shoulder showed that they were following, all six of them giving out eerie hunting cries. A pair of cries sounded from either side of her, and she knew that the sex behind her had called in the rest of the hatching. She had hoped that the other two had been killed, but at least all of them were following her now.

She deliberately triggered the Reavers hiding along the path. The rocks unfolded to reveal armadillos with tentacles on their backs and fearsome insect jaws, the patch of dead leaves erupted into a grotesquely distorted wolf with six legs and a head that was split down the middle to create hideous maw that bellowed out its hunting cry. Along the bank of the river foul creatures covered in moss and algae rose, dripping, from the water, headless creatures with starfish bellies that revealed their teeth and maws as they gave chase. As she passed the bees she gave a mental command and the gem exploded in an eruption of burning acid heavily mixed with necromatic energy, destroying the hornets and their nest. She flipped a gem into the patch of flowers ahead of her, running through the energy and feeling it claw at her innate protections as it incinerated harmless looking flowers that in reality tore at flesh and attached to any creature unlucky enough to wander into them in order to drink their blood.

Another glance back showed they were falling behind, and she dropped another gem, this one a chunk of jade inscribed with necromatic and infernal runes. The wolves triggered the spellmine as they overran it, and acid burning with hellfire erupted, necromatic energy ripping and tearing at the wolves lifeforces. The other Reavers howled in rage, redoubling their efforts to catch Aveliene, disable her, and use her to breed more Reavers.

She could sense the rage and hunger of the Nannies, and knew that the "queen" had identified her, and was encouraging the other Nannies to catch her, that they'd identified her as a prize that was worth exposing all of the ones that would normally lay in wait.

She burst through the forest and into a clearing, where the massive lizard had been, and still was.

Shattered pieces of armor littered the clearing, broken weapons were between its massive feet. The clearing was scorched and blasted from magics, all of it giving mute testimony to the fierceness of the battle.

The gargantuan upright walking lizard had its head slumped down, revealing that the top of its massive muzzle had been plated with black iron plates, that its skull was protected by more of the same. The massive eyes were closed, and the nostrils flared as it inhaled slowly. The metal arms were hanging limp by its sides, blood still smeared across the arcane runes that covered all of the black iron.

The ancient Kobold living weapon had feasted, and now it was sleeping, digesting its meal.

Aveliene swerved, running along the side of the huge thunder lizard, and plunged her blade into the end of the massive toe. Her strength, her momentum, and the enchanted blade all served to sink the war-knife to the hilt and let her drag it the entire length of the toe, over the massive knuckle, and along the side of the foot until it pulled free at the backside of the humongous foot.

She snapped her wrist to flick the blood from the knife as she kept running. Behind her the living weapon exhaled, still asleep, and the Reavers howled out their hunting cries.

Moving quickly and agilely, Aveliene moved up the tumbled rocks that had once been a keep, once again using the saplings to pull herself rapidly up the hill.

The vast sound of the living weapon suddenly jerking awake suspiciously sounded like "Huurrrm?" and Aveliene jumped, clearing the crest of the hill and putting a set of massive stone blocks between her, the living weapon, and the Reavers.

RAAAWWRRRGGGG! sounded out behind her, the enraged pained bellow shook the leaves, loud enough that sound made her ears ring. There were shrieks of rage from the Reavers, and another roar from the living weapon, and Aveliene giggled to herself. Aveliene waited a moment and peeked over the top of the rocks to take a look at the scene.

One of the Nannies had climbed up on top of the giant lizard's head, but a quick swipe of one of the metal hands snatched it from its perch and delivered it to the waiting jaws. Two chomps, and the living weapon tossed its head back and swallowed. A foot stomp crushed two of the wolves, and a lunging bite scooped up another Nanny.

Aveliene watched as the living weapon, a legacy from a war eons ago that had been released from a vault for reasons unknown during the Lich King War, gobbled up every one of the Reavers, and pounded after the Nanny Queen when it ran into the woods. The earth shook with each footstep, and the lizards bellowing cry, louder than thunder, caused of shiver of fear in Aveliene's core.

She'd seen one during the Lich King War, released by her Step-Mother from the ancient vault it had been held in statis within. It had routed the opposing army nearly by itself, and unlike the one chasing the Nanny deeper into the woods, that one had still retained its weaponry from the bygone war it had been created for.

She waited a few moments and followed the living weapon. She needed to be sure that it destroyed the Reavers in the area. The Reavers would make the mistake of attacking it, viewing it as food or an enemy to be destroyed, an interloper in their territory. They would keep attacking until they were all gone, and the living weapon would snap them all up like Fraker the Axe and a plate of shrimp.

Aveliene smiled wide as she ran after the relic.

He who does not fight and win is most beloved.