On the Mountainside.
The wind stirred as Havillah struggled to rise up, her aching bones protesting against the bindings that were her heavy Triban robes, tightly wound around her sleep laden body. Something had woken her up, alerted her but now Havillah could not tell what. She was still sleepy, her exhaustion fogging her mind, making it quite difficult for her to process her whereabouts and surroundings.
What was it? She forced herself to sit, prodding her mind in an attempt to strip back layer after layer of that fog that seemed to grow back with every effort that she made. Her frustrations increased, as clear thought remained tenuous.
Where was she? Havillah blinked and rubbed her eyes. It was still dark out and the cloud that had just rolled in masked the stars and their glimmer from enlightening her. Then she heard it. The howling of a wolf for the second time.
Everything was beginning to make sense now. The sounds being much clearer in her mind and much nearer than she had perceived them the first time. That howl was that had caused her to wake up. She had panicked to such a point that she had tripped over her robes and rolled in them resulting in the wrapped up form that she had woken up to.
Even in her sleep, her senses had been sharp enough to sense the danger. They had roused her from her deep slumber and for that she was extremely grateful and would have bragged her prowess had she known that her Guide would answer her.
Havillah looked around. This way and that way but in the deep darkness that the cloud had brought in the girl could not see anything. She could feel though, feel the blades of grass crashed beneath her hands. The icy wind that was whiping through her hair, gripping her as it tore through a flesh like jugged ends of biting teeth.
Everything felt wrong and eerily.
Panicked, Havillah turned to grab her knapsack only to come face to face with a pair of luminous yellow eyes. The eyes were sickly yellow one that reminded her of the element sulphur and that breath...Oh, it reeked even as it left the long and blackened snout in a plume of thick black smoke, black as tar that was only rivalled by the wolf's ever shifting form.
How? Havillah stumbled up to her feet in a state of shock. Her back touched the bark of the tree only then noticing that she was surrounded by an army of those things. Massive wraith like dogs, with big yellow eyes so bland because they lacked pupils and a breath that reeked, reminding her of cracked rotten eggs even as the fumes burnt down her own throat with every breath that she breathed in.
"What do I do? What do I do? Oh Light!" She mumbled silently, her panic growing when she noticed that her Guide was not answering. Was he missing, had he forsaking her and left her when she truly needed him and at the mercy of these...these things! In her distress, Havillah could not find a better word to call them.
Another step backwards and she remembered that her back had already met the trunk of a not so sturdy tree. The nearest wolf snapped at her flashing a set of gleaming black teeth that were rugged in a manner that resembled chiselled obsidian claws glinting in the little light that their luminous eyes seemed to be radiating. The rest of the pack growled and of a sudden they all lunged as a unit.
A trepidated Havillah edged upwards striving to keep her toes from their dripping mouths and sharp canines.
Her back hit the branches even as twigs buried themselves into the thick braid that she had plaited earlier. She was safe for now, she silently thought as she looked down at the tinged eyes glaring at her, seemingly taking their sweet time to taunt her as if they enjoyed the very fact that they were making her squirm and almost water her drawers. Thirteen sets of eyes. Her mind registered without struggling. She had not counted. How she knew that Havillah could not tell even as her thoughts continued to keep active with matters and other things that were far removed from the one thing that truly mattered which was to get her to safety.
Was this a Terror? In sooth she did not know. Killion had once mentioned to her of the existence of other Terrors and even now as she continued to stared back at them it seemed to her that she had gotten complacent and forgotten that well known fact.
This world was not safe, she already knew that, but she had thought that being this far removed from civilization the terrors would not haunt her. Or maybe it was her arrongance. To think that they would not touch after her successful deposition of the dragons. How callous she had been, to let the praises get into a head when she knew very well that she had no idea how she done it or if in the first place, she was truly the one who done it.
Anyway, what was up with their wraithen forms? The dragons had had a form to speak of, but these...maybe it was their own way of being indestructible as their bodies would form and reform like the shadows that were swimming all around them.