“When people hear of hippogriffs being the tamer version of griffons, they don’t realize that such things are relative. A hippogriff will still peck your eye out.”

Geroken One-Eye, cataphract.

This was the day I was “rescued”.

We didn’t take long finding the trail. This was less a purposefully cultivated road and more a game trail, worn down by the constant movement of animals. We followed it mostly in silence. Maarken and Esen never really spoke to each other anyway, but I was lagging behind now, perched on Hugred.

Partially out of boredom and partially because we were very likely to run into some if we kept going this direction, I practiced and perfected my squirrelfolk disguise. Bushier sideburns, a red closer to brown for the hair. It was all tiny details, none of which I was actually certain on. It had been a long time since I saw one in person. Would I actually fool one? If not… well, the tales of squirrelfolk wrath were little more comforting than those of elves.

Esen and Maarken were growing tense as well, I could see it in their postures, and the way they glanced around. The forest was growing darker, not just from a lowering sun but from the growing canopy over our heads. It was ideal for an arboreal ambush, the same tactic they used to wipe out our caravan. I almost resented their wary gaze at the branches above. What right did they have to be afraid? They were the powerful, people who willingly sold their bodies for violence because they believed, rightfully or not, that they could handle it.

I was falling apart the longer the silence dragged on. My ears twitched in every direction. I could hear branches rustle, but every glance upwards only revealed birds and squirrels. A crow eyed us for the possibility of food. A sparrow nervously chirped, hopping from branch to branch. And then, suddenly, silence. The crow was looking elsewhere, and I followed its gaze. Nothing but leaves, at least to my eyes.

The first javelin came from the opposite direction and struck like a lightning bolt. Maarken stumbled for a moment, but in an instant he was retaliating, whipping out his own javelin and throwing it in one smooth movement. I heard branches crack, but couldn’t see if anything was struck.

“Pargrym, catch up!” Maarken yelled.

Hugred’s sluggish gait picked up into a lurching lope and I held on for dear life. I shut my eyes tight. I could hear the solid thunk of bowstrings over Esen and Maarken yelling. Hugred’s footsteps I felt more than heard, jarring me to the bone.

But under them, there was another set of footsteps, no, hoofbeats! They caught up to Hugred and I was grabbed by the back of my shirt, violently tugged off of his back. I opened my eyes, but in my position, all I could see were the feathery legs of my captor’s mount.

Maarken turned when he heard my confused wail. He raised another javelin, but he didn’t get the chance to use it. He had to jump away to avoid being trampled by the mount I was on, letting us barrel past him.

“Pargrym! Fuck!” That was the last thing I heard clearly. Swiftly, the voices of my companions became little more than incomprehensible sounds echoing off the trees. My captor slowed for a moment to pull me up onto his mount, facing backwards.

My fingers dug in for grip and I found a texture more like feathers than hair. Well, I thought to myself, I found a hippogriff. Good job me. 

I managed to turn enough to see the rest of my ride as well as my captor. In the usual manner of hippogriffs, the creature’s long bird-neck sat awkwardly on its mammalian torso. As it ran, its undersized head bobbed. Overall, it didn't look all too different from a pigeon, but for the fleshy horns over its eyes like two chicken's combs. I shied away by instinct. When I was young, a large rooster had mauled me. I was pretty sure chickens were particularly vicious animals. Fitting, I suppose, for the barbarian who rode ahead of me.

The thing that struck me first wasn't anything about her physiology, bizarrely. There were so many odd little things I could have noticed. That ultra-fine layer of fur on her exposed hands and face, the fact she had a damn fluffy tail, one with a vicious kink halfway down where it must have broken and healed. But no, what I noticed first was the look of pure adrenaline-fueled glee in her face.

It was so different from what I had seen when Maarken was fighting. He had been serene, almost emotionless. This squirrelfolk couldn't contain her excitement. Her near-mad grin showed her razor-sharp incisors, pushing me even closer to panic. A chattering laugh came from her lips, high and piercing.

"Eekeekeekee! Never had a rescue like that eheh!? Don't worry we'll do them like we did the rest eekeee!" She didn’t talk like the books I had read. It was a rush of polymorphic confusion and unorthodox syntax. It took me a moment to parse what she was saying and another to remember that she saw me in my guise as a squirrelfolk.

“Uh, no, not had.” I barely managed to spit out some garbled version of her language.

“You’ve got a crazy accent, pal! Must be from far away. Well that’s a good thing. Means we won’t have any beef with your people, eh? ‘Cept maybe the greytails, eekeekee!” She half-turned to study me and I made sure my disguise was perfect. I had based it on illustrations of her species from the south, but she was dressed very differently.

She had a cheap kettle helm and a chainmail shirt, clearly gained from trade with whoever was giving them steel tools. What disturbed me was the twine necklace she wore, threaded through severed ears, dried into strips of leather. Thankfully, something else caught my eye before I counted how many ears were human and how many were goblin.

Over her chainmail she wore a buckskin mantle, stained varying shades of brown. I had never seen anything like that, not in my pictures or in person. At first I assumed it was just camouflage like some monster-hunting ogres used. But the more I looked, the more I saw how the edges flowed into her surroundings.

Magic itself was common. There was instinctive magic like that which belonged to many fae, including myself. From birth, disguising myself however I wished was a simple matter of thinking about it. In fact, before I was even conscious I was coaxed into the form of a human infant to be placed with a human family. My magic at the moment of birth was likely more powerful than I would ever achieve through my own effort, no matter how much I trained.

On the other hand, you had magic people learned, like the common black and white magics, or even Esen’s criminal grey magic. If they really insisted upon it, anybody could copy my own magic, often called “blue” magic by those experienced in the mystic arts. It took a lot of study to use learned magic safely, since any uncontrolled magic could pretty easily kill the user.

White magic, despite its incredible use in sealing cuts and mending bone, could cause wasting and ravenous tumors without discipline. In the same way, black magic destroyed the bodies of those who used it just as easily as those it targeted. This was the simple reason why very few people were masters of both magic and the martial arts. Failure in either field very easily put you in a grave. Even a mastery of grey magic couldn't save you from that.

Even so, mages were not rare. Every village had a reasonably competent healer or two, and any self-respecting member of the clergy could command at least one of the great branches of magic. But this was different. This was magic imbued into an object. That was the kind of thing only the most brilliant users of magic could pull off, and consequently, only the richest and most powerful could afford.

The only magical object I had ever seen in my life was wrapped around a squirrelfolk warrior. Likely she had simply bought it with mountains of stolen silver, but another option came to mind. Such a noteworthy item would make an excellent gift of alliance. If that were the case, we were dealing with more than trade, but outright treason.

"You like it? It's magic. Worthy of a warchief, yes?" She had caught me staring.

"You? Are chief of war?" I bought myself time to gather my thoughts with an obvious question. 

"Ki'pokiki'meo'loki!" She proudly proclaimed, an entire personal description wrapped into a name.

Squirrelfolk names were complicated, but the basic translation was “Chief Pokiki, sired by Meo and belonging to the Loki people”. Even what she gave me was an abbreviation. An average squirrelfolk knew their ancestral name going back five generations, and the few rulers powerful enough to be considered kings in their own right traced their ancestry back all the way to the gods, thousands of years ago.

“Uh. Malki’bene’ungo.” Malki, of no special title, sired by Bene and of the Ungo people.

“Well, Malki, I grant you permission to call me Ki’Pokiki. As Pokiki spoke, the forest became darker still. This had to be the true heart of the woods, a core that had never been harvested by humans.

Around us were trees with branches too thick for an ogre to hug. They loomed huge in all directions, ancient and gray and huge as the mountains. They were selfish lords; few plants grew in the shadows they cast. I felt a chill, not just from the cooling shade but from the feeling of being deeper in enemy territory than ever before. Were those glimmering eyes in the leaves, or just glimpses of sunlight?

“We are home.” Ki’Pokiki’s mount stopped. At first, I didn’t see anything. We hadn’t even passed the first ancient trees I had noticed. But it didn’t take me long to realize I should look up. There, in trees, was what I would come to know as The Pinewood Iron Fortress.