In the Lorr Foothills

Valla stood staring at where the elemental had been, unmoving, hair moving slightly as the wind. The sky had lightened to a hazy periwinkle in the east, the mountains dark and forbidding against it. Doren scanned as far as he could with his Sight, finding only the faint lights of wildlife around them. There weren't even traces of the elemental's power. This was why the Promised feared elementals so much. Not only could they take on the guise of any being they wanted, but their magic was insidiously subtle. Detecting their workings and influence was almost impossible. Doren remembered the one he had fought, the blood and death of his fellows in the battle, but even as the elemental had fallen it had never taken on its true form. He had never wondered before why it hadn't. Doren had not cast the killing blow, but he was certain it had died. He had seen it fall, and his captain had told them it was vanquished. But why would it remain guised if that were true? As much as he had learned about elementals, they had never mentioned the conditions in which they took their true form. He had learned stories of them tricking travelers and bewitching humans, going feral and destroying entire countries in blizzards and tidal waves, even conspiring with daemons for the joy they got from chaos. He had learned their influence was invisible if they chose, their glamours were impenetrable, and their power was always monumental. He had also learned that with enough force and iron, they could be brought down, although never safely chained or restrained. Any fight with an elemental was a death match, because they were ruthless, and they were too powerful to defeat without having to destroy them. So he had been taught.

Standing rigid and wary, not willing to let his guard down as long as they were still near the mountains, Doren looked at Valla. She stood unmoving as if frozen to the spot, eyes closed, power flaring as she searched. Doren knew she could See further than he could. He started to relax slightly at the thought. Faced with the elemental, she had been calm and collected, unthreatened even. As he reflected on this, he tensed again as it struck him for the first time since the town that he still did not actually know what she was. He had no reason to trust her other than his own instinct.  It was possible, as he had suspected before, that she was actually a dragon, or even an elemental herself, toying with him like in the stories. Her odd communion with the elemental was a deeper sign of her strangeness than anything before it, and it was disconcerting how little he had really even considered the question of her nature since they'd left the Witch's town. Nothing had concerned him until now, no matter how odd her behavior, not her sleeplessness or her strange type of magic. She had known the elemental was following them for so long, and she had said nothing. She had wanted it to stay. There was no reasonable plan or trick behind this that he could think of, but it was all too strange to ignore.

As he considered this, moving slowly around to face her, keeping his hands low but still holding his sword, she started to sway where she stood, lowering her hand unsteadily, eyes still closed.

"I'm rather tired," she murmured, turning her head towards him. And with that, she toppled gracelessly to the ground, leaving Doren in a defensive stance over her, confused but still wary and unwilling to discount the possibility this was a trick. Valla was motionless. Memories of the old battle with the elemental played in his mind, and he held onto them, trying to summon the derisive voices of his old brethren as they called him foolish, hopeful, and gullible. He had always been too soft, and here he might well have walked into a bizarre elemental trap, to die painfully and be immortalized as the most shameful of all the Shamed ever to be cast out from his order.

After several long moments, he edged closer. She was breathing weakly but steadily, head lying serendipitously on a small tuft of dead grass and not on any of the rocks that surrounded it. She looked calm, her face unlined and free of pain in stark contrast to how she'd appeared after the confrontation in the town. As quickly as it had come, regret filled Doren at his fit of cowardice. How different were his speculations that she was a scheming elemental from the innkeepers' that she was a daemon? How different was his ignorance of the elementals from the village's ignorance of the Burned Realm? It seemed more and more as though everything he had learned before was wrong somehow, or at the very least incomplete. Wasn't that why he had turned away, and been cast out? Because he had doubted what the Order's actions really meant?

Sighing, Doren left Valla on the ground - she seemed comfortable enough there, and until they set camp there was no better place for him to put her - and turned to a cluster of boulders that offered fair shelter from the wind a few dozen paces away. As he set up their bedrolls and a fire, still keeping vigilant for anything he could See and keeping note of Valla who snoozed carelessly where she had fallen, Doren considered his doubts and their situation more. There had been no destruction when the other elemental had appeared. Valla had shown herself to be something more than human, but it was hardly the first time. And after all, Doren had thrown away caution and good sense at the timeless, nameless tavern in the Witch's valley. Nothing in his life was reasonable anymore. She could go and sprout a second head when she woke and he would have no reason to change his choices. There was nothing waiting for him anywhere. And of course, he had promised.