>>5288147You do not get a chance to observe negotiations, busying yourself instead with reopening the passage as quickly as possible. You imagine that you can feel the Dragonshape failing, deteriorating, and you imagine what will happen if you both fail to reunite your split party AND negotiations deteriorate. A dozen elves, two dozen, springing up behind you while your own magically-augmented strength fails you, outnumbered and alone with hostile mammalian primitives and their venomous cohort…
No. Fear is the enemy. Fear is BENEATH you. You ARE fear. You are the ancestral terror of snake sin the minds of all monkeys. You are DRAGON.
You roar as you rip away the last of the stone, exploding forth into the chasm. The Pit-Guard’s apprentice stares back at you in shock, the young Steeltalon having been doing his best to match your efforts at reopening from his own side.
“Superior One?”
You take a moment to catch your breath again before answering.
“In your own time,” the Novice says, deadpan snark irrepressible in that moment, disguise as concern. You recognize it still, and glare in the direction of her voice.
“Hurry,” you wheeze, beckoning to him and to the others. “Elves. DO not attack, but be ready.”
You turn around, blade low but not sheathed, and return to see how your comrades have faired in negotiations…
>20But you see you needn’t have worried. The dark-skinned elven outcast has not only been talked into staying, but has somehow descended the cave wall from his high-up outpost to join Paeris and the Elf-Specialist. He regards Paeris with obvious suspicion and wariness, yet seems mostly intrigued by the other Reptilians, and even laughs—a strange sound, as mammals make it, but one your recognize the meaning of—as the Elf-Specialist says something in what you assume to be the elf-tongue.
“What did he say?” you ask Paeris, eyeing the strange ape-man.
This is your first glimpse of a pure-blooded elf, almost the first true mammal you have seen besides the odd human slave or sacrifice in passing… Bizarre! He almost resembles the shape the Novice adopted with her amulet, but his skin is not a rich brown as hers was, but an almost bluish hue of near-black. He has the same peculiar shapeliness, too—you only know that this long-haired, fine-boned mammal is a ‘he’ because he lacks the pronounced chest-glands associated with female mammals—the ‘mammaries’. In his attire, made primarily of leather straps and with much bared skin, it would be hard to miss them were they present.
“They are speaking of their mutual hatred of surface-dwellers,” Paeris answer quietly in True-Speech. “Especially surface elves. He was delighted to learn of my true nature, after his initial instinct to gut me subsided.”
Hm. Curious.