Later that night, Gix and I took another meal while on the move. I wanted to cover as much ground as possible, so I couldn’t make any stops, I just ate in the saddle and threw pieces of meat in front of Gix for him to catch. As I rode through the forest, it suddenly dawned on me that the humans could track me down with their dogs. They might not have an easy time catching up with a land raptor, but if they kept to the trail, they would find me eventually. I gripped the front of my saddle and steered Gix toward a tree.

“Climb,” I said. Gix jumped into the tree, and I held tight to the saddle to keep myself from falling off. He dug his foot claws into the bark and ran up the trunk, flapping his primitive wings to add a little extra propulsion. When he reached a desirable height, he leapt onto the thickest, sturdiest branch and clung to it. I left the saddle and removed some rope from my backpack, which I used to tie myself to the branch, and I kept my dagger in my hand in case I received an unwelcome visit. There were many ways to throw a predator off your trail, but one of the best ways was to use magic, and in order to commune with nature again, I’d need to rest in order to regain my focus. I leaned back against the trunk and closed my eyes. The hard wood was not comfortable to lie on, but no Kobold lived long unless they had enough hide to tolerate uncomfortable conditions.

Over the next hour or more I did my best to keep still and slowly drifted into sleep. In my dreams, I was back in the forests of Tsa Thac. They were similar to the forest in the human lands I’d fled to, but the trees were older and the terrain was rockier, with great mountains along the horizon. In my mind, I had the notion that I was recently condemned as a heretic, and excommunicated by my tribe. I was running, but whether it was my own feet at work or if I was riding my raptor, I couldn’t quite tell. I knew I was being chased, but when I thought of my pursuers, the only images that came to mind were the humans, elves, and dwarves I had once fended off from my tribe's territory.

I’d been excommunicated for offending the dragons, but I’d never heard of members of any of these races serving dragons. I ran as fast as I could, but I still heard their shouts behind me, even the guttural cries of the dwarf, who I knew to be slower than its companions, and even slower than me. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed motion in the trees. I turned my gaze to it, and saw it was an elf with a head topped in long dark fur and armored in a coat of gleaming white-silver mail swinging through the branches. I must have been running on foot, because there was no way the elf’s mode of transportation would be able to keep up with a land raptor.

I remembered this elf, it was part of a party that attacked me and my fellow surface rangers about a year ago. We’d killed it, we’d fed its body to our raptors, and our tribe’s wyrmpriest had given its armor to a young blue dragon who came by to demand tribute. How had we defeated the elf then? I recalled setting up traps with the other rangers, while Zakrak offered herself as bait to lure the elf away from its companions and into the traps. I mated with Zakrak once, it had been one of the greatest pleasures I’d ever had. I never did understand why females had such thick patches of hide on their backs before I found myself involuntarily digging my talons into them as I convulsed uncontrollably the first time I mated.

It would have been really nice if the dream had shifted into a memory of a mating session at that point, but instead, I found myself frozen in place for no reason I could think of. The elf was now in front of me, and had suddenly acquired a spear, which it pointed under my chin.

“You are a traitor in the eyes of the Five!” the elf said, speaking draconic as clearly and fluently as any tragesi wyrmpriest, in the same exact voice as one, in fact. “Now die!” yelled the elf, and it thrust its spear at my throat.

Suddenly, I was no longer on the ground, but up in the trees. My arms and legs were tied to the branches and my eyes were bearing the full brunt of the sun. I didn’t remember my eyes being held open when this happened in real life, but right now, it seemed that I could not blink to keep the dreaded light out. I forced my eyelids down, working against my own body just to get some relief from the giant blue ball of flame burning away my eyes.

Finally, it worked, I managed to get my eyes closed, only for them to open again when I stopped concentrating. I kept blinking, hoping I could just keep the sun out of my eyes for good, but every time I did, my eyes were gently forced open and the constant on and off of the sunlight’s sting led to the rest of my body writhing against its bonds. Then I realized something was wrong, my legs felt as though they were tied together, but when the wyrmpriests had me condemned, all of my limbs were tied to different branches. I kept blinking and struggling, confused about the inconsistencies I was experiencing, when suddenly, I opened my eyes to the real sun.

I threw my arms up to block the blue sun rays that breached the forest canopy from entering my eyes, which I could now keep closed. Keeping them shut, I forced myself to slow my breathing, something that was difficult with the sensation rope around my legs making me think I was still being tied up as a punishment. After I finally got my breathing under control, and my heartbeat slowed down, I remembered that I'd tied myself to this tree so I wouldn't fall off.

After the sting of the sunlight went away, I opened my eyes and took a look around, I was back in the forest I had fallen asleep in. I looked at the rope around my legs, feeling a discomfort that I'd never known before being banished. I must have felt the ropes while I slept, and it reminded me of when I’d been tied up in the trees on the Isle of the Dragon’s Maw.

Gix was still laying in front of me, and seemed to still be asleep, perfectly balanced on the branch, with his head nestled in the feathers on his back. I untied the ropes around my legs and put them back in my backpack, then climbed on Gix and shook him awake. The supernatural bond I had with Gix made him recognize my touch before he was even conscious, negating the raptor's instinct to consider anything that surprised him a threat. Instead, he calmly perked his head up and looked at me attentively. “Watch,” I said, and I climbed down through the branches. I stopped before passing the lowest branches and listened to my surroundings.

All I heard were the whistles and chirps of birds and the occasional croaking of frogs, no visible or audible sign of any intruder. I continued climbing down and slowly placed my feet on the dirt. Although I'd learned to live above ground and in the trees, I was most comfortable with solid ground beneath my feet. I had started my career as a ranger exploring caves, making sure nothing attacked the tribe from underneath and securing new territory for expansion of our warrens, so I felt a stronger kinship to the ground than to the trees. I took another look around the forest, listening for Gix if he called out an alarm, and prepared to shoot a crossbow bolt at any creature that came too close. The bright light penetrating the canopy forced me to squint, slightly hampering my vision, but nothing came into sight, so I allowed myself to relax, and I knelt down to place a hand on the ground.

With my hand on the dirt, I closed my eyes and focused my mind on my attachment to the earth. I felt my conscience slip from my body and into the ground. I saw the world from the dirt’s perspective, felt the presence of various minerals under the soil, felt the roots of every tree, every blade of grass, and every worm digging their way through the dirt. My mind moved into the grass and the trees, now I could, for lack of a better word, feel the sensation of feeding on the dirt through the roots and basking in the wholesome sunlight to make use of the food from the dirt and gathering air, breathing without lungs, and releasing air that could be breathed by those who did have lungs. I drifted into the animals that fed on their leaves, and then to the animals who fed on them. I could feel the chase, the tracking of the scent left behind by the prey and the following of the footprints they left behind. I concentrated on this, and on my desire to cloak myself from it, and grasped the power I sought with my mind.

Now that I’d accomplished the reason that I’d gone to sleep so early in the first place, I brought my mind back to my body. I retraced my steps from the predators to the prey, then to the plants and the ground, until I found and entered the image of a familiar red kobold kneeling with his hand on the dirt.

I opened my eyes, and took in my surroundings with my natural senses once again. I was always taken slightly aback by the change in perception, my own eyes gave me a sharper distinction than the vague, mostly hazy imagery in my meditation. Unfortunately, when I gave my mind to nature, I always saw too much at once to use it as a means to navigate my surroundings and locate anything useful. Perhaps practice would make it possible, but until then, trying to do that would give me a different spell entirely. I lifted my hand from the ground and examined my own hide, twisting my forearm and flexing each of my fingers, still regaining the awareness that this appendage was part of my body and that it was my mind controlling it.

I hefted my crossbow in my other hand, feeling its weight with a greater intensity than usual, and slung it on my back so I could climb back up the tree. As I continued moving, I quickly got used to making use of my physical body again, so I was properly in tune with my limbs by the time I got back to the branch where Gix still surveyed the forest floor. I put one hand on his back and the other on my chest.

“Pass without trace,” I whispered. I felt the magic energy I’d gathered exit through my palms and infuse itself throughout Gix’s flesh and mine. It would mask our odors and keep us from leaving footprints for the next few hours, we’d be impossible for anyone to track without magic of their own. I snapped my fingers to get his attention, when he turned his head to me, I pointed to the ground, and he jumped down from branch to branch before landing on the dirt. I climbed down after him, jumped into the saddle, and rode diagonally to the way I’d been riding before.

I rode at a fast pace to make the best use of the Pass Without Trace spell. Even with hours of scent blocking, running fast would help make a bigger gap in our trail. I considered trying to rest on Gix’s back so I could prepare another spell to mask us again, or perhaps gain a different spell. Even the simple spells my Experience granted me could be the difference between survival and death. Problem was, sleeping on the move didn’t feel like such a safe option, not when it was just me and Gix. I’d slept in a lot of rugged places, in trees, on rocky ground, concealed in thorny underbrush (having literal thick skin can be very helpful sometimes), but, unlike the back of a moving raptor, I could lie down in those places. While land raptors had very smooth strides, the constant weaving between the trees led to shaking that would make falling asleep difficult. Of course, I didn’t really need to sleep, I just needed a long period of rest, but I realized any resting at all would require me to stop paying attention to my surroundings, and where I came from, giving up awareness while on the move was a method of suicide.

I stayed alert and kept my crossbow at the ready, and over the next several hours, we’d made it close to the edge of the forest. With the continually thinning treeline, I had a better view of the sky, so I used a hand to block out the light of the sun to determine its approximate position without looking right at it. It was past its highest point, it would be night in a few hours. I’d taken an early sleep last night to get a head start in masking my trail, but that meant I had to deal with the sunlight stinging my eyes and an incessant afterimage even when I looked away. Furthermore, I knew from fighting adventurers in Tsa Thac that the daylight hours were when humans were active, so I’d have to limit my activity to the night if I wanted to evade detection.

I commanded Gix to climb another tree. He stopped running and began to survey the forest to find one with branches that looked sturdy enough to support us, we jumped and climbed up to a height great enough to keep us out of sight, and we settled in as we had done the night before. With my legs tied securely to the branch, I lay back against the trunk and closed my eyes. We were low enough in the canopy that the branches did a decent job of blocking the sunlight, allowing me to consistently rest without disturbance. As I continued breathing calmly to get my body in a more restful state, the hours passed by and I eventually drifted off.

Once again, I dreamed I was back in the forest of Tsa Thac, but I wasn’t on the run this time. This time, I was a hunter. I crouched down and crept slowly through the underbrush, the sound of my feet sinking into the mud drowned out by the showers of rain and the booming thunder. I was walking alongside a trail of crushed vegetation, which was covered in an unusually vivid trail of blood. Large round footprints, three or four times bigger than mine, had been left along this trail, and they were slightly stretched at the back. The creature that left them had been in a hurry.

When I caught up with the source of the tracks, I was on the edge of a clearing, where I spotted a juvenile sauropod reaching to the branches with its long neck to devour the leaves and even a few twigs. It was too small to reach any higher than the lower branches on a medium-sized tree, and its back right leg had a gash sliced into it, the kind left by a hand-crafted slashing instrument. A whistle rang out, a long, drawn out note, the signal for everyone in the hunting party to hold their attacks and wait for everyone else to get ready. If the sauropod could hear this pitch, it was to stupid to understand what it meant. I raised my crossbow and held my breath in preparation for the signal to strike.

I looked to my right and saw a kobold with green scales. His name was Gikgik, and he claimed descent from dragons, a claim backed up by his sorcerous powers. Gikgik hid behind a bush as he watched the sauropod, and his tail swished back and forth in uncontained excitement, though, in true kobold fashion, his facial features remained still.

Gikgik glanced at me and opened his mouth just enough to let his teeth show. As he did so, he began to drool, no doubt anticipating the opportunity to bite into the flesh of the dinosaur we hunted. Technically, the meat was meant to be taken back to the warrens for distribution, but we hunters frequently treated ourselves to the first tastes of our kills, especially when we took down a mighty beast like this.

The signal to attack went off, three sharp whistles in quick succession. I heard the sound of a boulder trap being manually triggered, and Gikgik summoned a ball of compressed smoke between his palms, a spell designed to choke, rather than cause unnecessary damage to edible flesh. I pulled the trigger on my crossbow, but when I turned back to my target, it was gone, and the crossbow bolt was replaced with the image of a meat pie, flying at the speed of a projectile, yet I saw every detail of its motion, as if it were flying slow. Everything else went dark, the pie was the only thing I saw. I knew where it was flying, I remembered the target, and I desperately wished not to see my mistake again.

I closed my eyes and turned away, just as the squishing of the pie against someone's chest sounded out with a startled scream, which quickly turned from fear to anger. I ran from the scream, though it never sounded any further away. When I opened my eyes, my fellow rangers were standing in front of me, all very angry.

"How could you do this, Toktok?" yelled Gikgik.

"Is it true, would you really do such a thing to an esteemed Speaker of the Breath?" demanded Tarbol, our huntmaster. Though Tarbol was no bigger or older than me, his crossed arms and stern glare bore down on me like the fury of a very pissed off dragon.

"We get to be one of every other generation that gets to see the Festival of Ten Wings, and this is how he uses it!" exclaimed Zakrak.

This wasn't right, these rangers and I had hatched together, we'd relied on each other for survival all of our years, we understood that the foolish pranks we played on each other were made in good humor. No matter what went on between us, we always had each other's backs (in more ways than one, when it came to Zakrak and some of the other females). Even the anger of a tragesi Wyrmpriest from the Dragon’s Maw wouldn’t turn us against each other, not over a little prank, but here they were, treating me with the same petty judgement as the religious fanatic who triggered my pie trap. I held out my hands and tried not to look threatening, hoping I could calm them down and get them to listen.

“Please, stop!” I said. “Come on, it’s me! Are you really going to turn on me over--”

The other rangers immediately fixed their eyes on my right palm, and what they saw made them reel back and scream. I turned my hand inward to see what had scared them, and on my palm, I saw the mark that no member of any draconic race wanted on their body. It was a picture of a dragon with its neck, body, and tail curled in a circle, and its wings were twisted backward as if they were broken, melted into my flesh. The heretic’s brand, a visual declaration that you had fallen out of the dragons’ favor and could no longer be welcomed by any of their servants.

“Get away from us, you filthy apostate!” yelled one ranger.

“You brought disgrace to us, Toktok. Leave now or die!” shouted Tarbol, pointing an accusatory finger.

I was about to continue trying to reason with them when I lurched awake, and suddenly felt the sensation of rope gripping my legs. The ropes held firm as I reflexively squirmed against them. I knew in the back of my mind these were the ropes I’d used to keep myself in the tree, but all I could think of was being tied up and exposed to the sunlight. Having rope around my legs had become the same as being dragged away by a wild animal. My panicked state had me thrashing about uncontrollably, but I had too many years of experience in the wilderness to allow myself to start screaming and attract every predator in earshot like an idiot. I clamped my jaws shut to keep any noise I made to a muffled whimper, and forced myself to take long, deep breaths as I looked at my legs and confirmed that it was just the rope that I was using to keep myself in the tree. Rope, holding me in a tree, just like the wyrmpriests’ punishment for my “sacrilege”. No wonder it made me so uncomfortable.

Unfortunately, trees seemed to be the only safe place to sleep in the surrounding area, and I sure as all nine circles of Hell wasn’t going to sleep high above the ground without a guarantee that I wouldn’t fall. Luckily, it was night, the right time to travel, and also to look for a better place to rest. I unfastened my ropes and climbed up the tree, using the talons on my hands and feet to dig into the bark. I ascended through the clusters of branches, and at the top of the trunk, I climbed along the highest reaching branch until I could see the sky. I was south and west of my homeland, but the positions of the stars remained largely the same. Darting my eyes around, trying to find a space between the clouds, I made out pieces of familiar constellations. Toward the north, there was Haldrath the Overseer, whose presence was marked by stars that formed the outer edges of her wings and a string of stars curled around the north pole, the tail of Haldrath, who forever surveyed the world on behalf of the Five, watching for any who would stand to defy her. The Five had her own constellation, five separately floating dragon heads that sat closeby to Haldrath the Overseer, listening carefully to whatever warning she had to give.

I shrank back in the leaves, fearful of being spotted by Haldrath. She may have been beyond the sky, but a dragon’s senses sharpened as they aged, and she was not only older than ancient, but also part divine. I could only hope that a little banished kobold like me would be too trivial for Haldrath to make note of. Taking a deep breath and reminding myself that a goddess like the Five had better things to do than bother herself with the fate of the victim of the biggest overreaction in history, I climbed back up to continue checking the stars. Accounting for the time of year and positions of the stars, the sun had only been down for about two hours, and it was springtime, so I had plenty of time to find a new shelter before it rose again.

When I climbed down to the branch I slept on, Gix was already awake and waiting for me. We climbed to the ground, where I knelt down and reached out to the earth, repeating the process I’d taken the day before to prepare the Pass Without Trace spell, and used it on both of us again. I jumped on Gix’s back and rode off, once more in a direction diagonal to the way we came from, back into the forest rather than continue out into the open. We moved slowly so I could scan the ground for differences in minerals, any sign of a rock formation that might have an opening, and also any sign of dampness in the soil. My waterskin was running low from the last time I filled it, and while I could tolerate hunger for as much as over a week, thirst was a far more urgent problem. I was a good couple dozen miles south of the Oplinisti Mountains that bordered Tsa Thac, putting me at an uncomfortable distance from a potential source of a stream.

Though the thought of steering even slightly closer to my former home was far from pleasant, dying of thirst scared me more, and anxiety was no excuse to not look for an important resource. I turned north and watched for any signs of the land becoming more elevated. I closed my eyes and focused inward in a manner similar to how I connected with nature to gain access to spells, but this time, I concentrated on my own mind and talents. I sifted through my knowledge of geology and my sensory awareness and focused on them until everything else crept further back in my mind, giving a small boost to the senses I’d need to notice the changes in the earth.

Over the next several hours, I rode up to a higher elevation and began scouting for signs of a stream. I had Gix slow his pace to make it easier to listen for the sound of running water, and rode west to avoid getting too close to the Oplinisti range. After another few hours of quiet riding, we found a river and stopped to drink. I dismounted and kept watch while Gix drank. The forest was quiet in the night, but my darkvision revealed a good share of animals that still roamed. I spotted an owl with brown plumage on its wings and back and a white face and breast resting on a branch, surveying the ground for prey. If I were a smaller creature, I’d have jumped with a start and sent a crossbow bolt into it then and there. A predator that could see in the dark and fly silently was more threatening than almost any giant monster that stomped around and roared to announce its presence. As it was, I expected no threat from a rodent hunter, but I could probably expect some meat out of it. Keeping still and not breathing, I raised my crossbow when the owl’s head was turned and fired. The bird’s ears must have been as good as its eyes, because as soon as I pulled the trigger, it leapt from the branch and flew away, and my bolt sailed harmlessly through the space it left.

There was no point in pursuing a silent flyer after it disappeared, so I just loaded another bolt and kept my eyes and ears to my surroundings until Gix finished drinking. When he was done, I let him take watch while I drank and filled my waterskin. After reclaiming the spent bolt, I rode down the river in the hopes of finding a cave along the banks. Normally I checked upstream for springs with cave openings, but I’d gotten close enough to Tsa Thac as it was, and rumor had it that silver dragons patrolled this side of the Oplinisti Mountains to keep the red dragons from flying over and causing problems for the humans. The further away I was from them, the better.

I rode down the river until the sun began to illuminate the colors of the forest and still couldn’t find a cave to sleep in. I steered Gix away from the water and examined the trees. I was too afraid of letting my fear of ropes get the better of me to settle for sleeping on a branch again, but luckily, I found a tree that had fallen over and been eaten up from the inside. I dismounted and examined the interior of the fallen tree. The inner wood of the tree had long been decayed, but the bark looked like it was still sturdy. With a solid shell to surround me and one opening to limit the directions a predator could approach from, it would make an adequate shelter.