“Seriously? Intersystem? You’re full of shit.”

“I shit you not.”

“You are shitting me.”

“Not. No shit.”

“Wow. Shit.”

Thern lifted pen from page, waiting for the murmured conversation to continue. She wriggled her back against the hedge behind her, but gently, gently, so the speakers on the other side wouldn’t hear a rustle. The light was fading fast, the sun slipping down over one horizon while Heaven’s Eye clambered up over the other. She’d covered nearly three pages of her journal in what had begun, in her imagination, as research for her epic and had become, as this conversation got stranger and stranger, evidence of…well, of something. Something bad. Probably bad. Certainly very strange.

Because the trolls on the other side of the hedge had only that morning been scarcely able to grunt out “Drop your weapons and raise your hands. This is a robbery.” Well, actually something more like “Drop stuff. Hands up. Give-ee give-ee.” And their mastery of that many syllables had marked them as virtual geniuses of their kind, the Pilophus Arbuckles of trolldom.

The context for that utterance had been their suddenly coming upon the caravan of refugees Thern had joined as it made its way along the Great Spiral Way (which was neither a spiral nor especially great, being more dirt and mud than pavement and just wide enough for two carts to pass each other, as long as one went off the road to do so). Refugees. It wasn’t exactly the right word for that group – a good thing, since “refugee” wouldn’t fit easily into the syllabic scheme she’d settled on for The Wyrm and the Night and the Dwarfmaid’s Norwing Way. “Norwing” was another issue altogether, since it could have with some fairness been said she had coined it in order to fit the reverse-sprung thrice beat alliteration currently in vogue in the Sea’s Reach Confederacy. Could be said because she had, and she desperately hoped she could get it to catch on before she showed up in the Confederacy looking for a patron. Which meant at some point she’d have to figure out what it meant.

Refugee, at any rate, didn’t fit, since, ask as she might, no one seemed to know what they were all running away from, or to. The Companions in the group simply shrugged when asked, rolled their eyes at their Adventurers, and said things to the effect of “if you want to know, you ask them, see what you get.”

There were some fifty of said Adventurers in the group, the most she’d seen in one place all at once outside of the Tournament of the Mount that was held at the start of each questing season at the foot of the Mount of the Oracle. And when asked about that peculiar caravan they said nothing, insistently and very firmly spoke with their silence. Slumped shoulders, drooping heads, faces pinched and anxious – they looked beaten and battered. Strangest of all – well, at least as strange as anything else – were the looks of suspicion they gave the Companions.

Companions had been keeping Adventurers alive for time out of mind – why should the Adventurers be so careful of them now?

Despite their obvious anxiety, they had no one else to get them where they needed to go: the Isle of the Brothers of Departure, where all quests found their end, to which all Adventures eventually retired after writing their tales of glory across the paling parchment of this fading world.

That’s good, Thern thought. If she could only remember it until they got someplace where she could get a few minutes of peace with paper and pen.

So the Adventurers slouched towards the Isle and their Companions surrounded them, ready to give their lives to see them safely home.

Then along came the trolls.

Thern was pretty certain the trolls hadn’t planned to ambush the mongrel troop. They’d come charging out of the forest that lined the slopes above the Way, stopped dead when they saw the sprawling train, then turned and clambered back up the way they’d come. After a conversation that began with grunts and growls and built to what sounded like a tickle-fight, the trolls had re-emerged, retreated again, and re-re-emerged, now with massive clubs clutched in massive paws.

That’s when they’d had their burst of eloquence. Unfortunately, by that time the refugees had passed their position, and so they’d made their speech to the backsides of two decrepit mules which happened to be bringing up the rear of the column.

Thern had chuckled for about three seconds. Then the trolls had charged, and she remembered that brains or lack of brains played a limited role in the bashing, smashing and squishing that had given trolls their reputation as some of the creatures most to be avoided when traveling along narrow, muddy trails in the wilderness.

Two full-grown bull trolls barreling through the scrub, waving their massive clubs and howling, however inarticulately, were a sight to make a Paladin of the 21st Tier fill his breeches.

Thern, axe in hand, had gone in exactly the wrong direction, racing – as much as a dwarf can be said to “race” – toward the trolls and her own pulping.

Then the owner of the donkeys, a shortish, lumpy figure completely buried in the folds of a tattered grey cloak, had stopped, turned, and raised something in a plump, pasty hand, pointing the chunkiest, ugliest wand she’d ever seen at the brutes just as they closed, the squishing ends of their clubs about to make two-donkey-lumpy-person (now revealed to be a lumpy-Mage) pudding.

Iggy had once tried to explain the concept of “momentum” to her by scratching out a sequence of numbers and letters as arcane as any spell. When that failed miserably, he drew a picture of what she thought was a stone giant with spectacles in a windstorm, but which he insisted to be a cart moving at speed.

The concept now became clear as a crystal, clear as crystal with an Invisibility charm upon it, as whatever spell the lumpy mage had cast with his bizarre little wand put both trolls out mid-swing. Momentum kept those massive clubs moving through the arc they’d begun; momentum almost brought them down on donkeys and mage; momentum almost mixed up a nice batch of two-donkey-lumpy-mage pudding despite the cooks being incapacitated.

Momentum, Thern thought. Got it.

She expected Lumpy Mage to throw up a Shield or Translocate himself out of harm’s way. Instead he slapped his donkeys’ behinds, and threw himself forward with a squeal. Though he very nearly lost the chance of ever making lumpy-babies with Mrs. Lumpy-Mage, neither club, found its mark.

When Thern reached him he was puffing like a blacksmith’s bellows and trembling all over.

“That was bravely done,” she told him, though were she herself to describe a mighty Mage in the aftermath of his having saved hundreds of people, she might have taken a different tack. Maybe left out the fact his blown face looked like a radish. A radish about to explode. If it were in the nature of radishes to explode.

The noble Necromancer, his gnosis now nullified… No, “nullified” made no sense at all, and “gnosis” was a stretch. Well, and this guy hadn’t actually summoned anyone back from the dead. Blasted alliteration….

The Mage sat himself up. A Faery, though not the willowy kind that tended to leap from treetop to treetop firing off arrows charged with elemental might at Abyssal fiends. More the kind that sat around reading penny-serials about those kinds of elves. And eating cakes. Lots of cakes.

“Sure. If you say so.” He sat up. He noticed his brutal little wand lying in the dirt and snatched it up, slipping it back into the folds of his cloak.

Thern offered him her hand and hefted him up, then turned her attention to the stone cold trolls. She poked at the nearest with one booted foot. Nothing. Not even a snort. “These two went down hard. That was quite a spell.”

“Spell. Sure. If yer say so.”

That accent – Thern couldn’t quite place it. If he hadn’t clearly been a Mage of some skill, she might have asked where he was from. Funny thing about Mages, though – the more they advanced in degree, the sneakier they got. “Reticent” was the word Iggy liked to use, but, based on her own experience with spellcasters, “reticent” just didn’t imply the proper degree of…well, sneakiness. She’d always been a firm believer that choosing the right word was all about connotation.

“I’m thinking we should tie them up before we leave them. This lot’ll take a good long time to get far enough away that these two won’t come at them again.”

The Faery grunted. “You might be right there. Leave it ter me.”

Thern laid her axe on the ground and swung her pack off her back. She’d had a coil of rope in it when she left Harper’s Inn the other night. If it was still there, buried under her books….

“Leave it ter me, I said.”

“No, it’s not a problem. I thought I had a rope here, but if I don’t, we can come up with something.”

The hand the Mage put on Thern’s shoulder was not a friendly one. Thern wasn’t sure how she knew, but she had no doubt he meant that squeeze to be threatening. If he’d been a Brawler instead of a Mage, he might actually be hurting her a little.

“I've got this. You'd better 'urry along and cotch up wiv the uvvers.”

Thern straightened up, almost protested again.

Then remembered. Mage. Just dropped two bull trolls in their tracks.

“I’d better hurry along, then. See if I can catch up with the others.”

“Nuff said, yeah?”

“Nuff said,” Thern replied, though to her thinking not nearly enough had been said. With a last glance at the brutes on the ground, and a nod to the lumpy Mage, she’d retrieved her pack, swung her axe over her shoulder, and sprinted – as much as a dwarf can be said to sprint – back to the caravan.

When the Mage rejoined the refugees a few hours later, he had two new companions. Hulking, odiferous and – she’d now learned – suddenly very talkative companions.

“What about roaming charges, then? It’s not like we’re in network out here.”

“It’s not like we need to worry about a few roaming charges. Not with what we’re getting paid for this gig.”

“True enough.”

“No shit.”

As Thern crossed the final “t” on the trailing end of their conversation, the sun finally dipped down behind the horizon, casting darkness over her journal. She slipped her pencil into its sheath in the notebook’s spine and reached down to slip it back into her pack.

Forgetting that she’d leaned her axe up against the pack when she’d discovered the trolls and hunkered down to make her notes. She lunged as the grey blur that was the axe slipped along the grey blur that was the hedge towards the slightly darker grey blur that was the ground.

The grey axe hit the grey pavement of this miraculously paved section of the Great Spiral Way with an impressive clatter. A real testament to the weapon’s weight and quality.

The hedge behind her burst into rustling. Thern didn’t know if the trolls had just stood up, had started coming over the hedge, or were getting ready to leap it in a single bound. Nor was she especially eager to find out. Those two had been horrific enough when they’d been only slightly smarter than their clubs. Now…whatever change had come over them, well, it left her with a knot in her gut that felt a hair too close to genuine terror.

She crammed her notebook into her pack, snatched up her axe and ran for it.

She waited for the thump of two massive bodies hitting ground, having vaulted the hedge. She waited for guttural cries, threats, calls for her to stop and take her tonic. She waited for something massive to come hurtling down out of the skies to squish her. A club. A boulder. A chunk of the road.

She heard that rustling continuing, then stopping. Then nothing more. She risked a peek over her shoulder.

Two whitish blurs stood in front of the hedge. She couldn’t tell if they were watching her, if they’d even seen her scurry away in the dusk. But they certainly weren’t chasing her.

Which meant they wouldn’t. Even if they had seen her, it would have been impossible for them to get a good look at her in the dark. Even if they made out she was a dwarf, there were a dozen dwarfs in the caravan.

Then one stooped, picked up something from the ground.

Thern felt a very deep pit open up in the deepest corner of her gut.

It can’t be. It isn’t. I would have heard it fall. They’re only checking where I was sitting. Looking for signs. That’s all.

She thrust her axe through its straps on her back, and with the freed hand, dug into her backpack.

And discovered it to be completely lacking in notebook.

Thern stopped, turned back to face the trolls. They still stood there, two white bulks against the darkness.

Light flickered suddenly to life, a match that revealed two craggy faces leaning over a leatherbound notebook that Thern knew to be filled with some of her greatest work.

And dozens of clues to her identity. Such as at least thirty references to the “doughty Dwarfmaid”, twenty odd “Thern, Thrall of Light”s and one forever to be regretted “So said Thern Spinecracker/Truest in all of Tallboy’s Ferry.”

For the first time in her forty-six years of life, her mother’s warnings about being so full of herself really struck home.

The light flickered out. And now the thumping of trolls in pursuit filled the night.

Thern dove off the road, let herself roll into the nameless but odiferous muck at the bottom of the ditch that lined the road, and curled up, waiting for the squishing to commence.

The trolls passed her in the darkness. She waited just long enough for their thumping progress to fade, and then she crawled off into the darkness.

They’d know where she was going, if the really cared to find her. But now more than ever, she needed to find Iggy.