Day 22

The fire was still smouldering and Lanua was still asleep when I roused at dawn after a warmer night than I had been expecting this far north. I had not slept soundly. My dreams were haunted by the Elemental. More than once I awoke with a tight grip around the hilt of my sword.

Later on, when Lanua had awoken, we ate some of the meat she had caught before running into me yesterday. Over breakfast she told me about how she preferred the excitement of the wilderness above the monotonous poverty of the village.

She had always wanted to leave. She spent half of her time out in the nothingness north of her home, living off just what she could find for herself. When she went back to the village it would be to bring back a bounty of food. Meat from trappings mostly, but on rare occasions she would find the tracks of the herd and be able to bring back a beast with juicy, tender muscle meat, and lots of it too from a single animal that would rely on its legs to escape the many dangers here. It would also come with lots of fat that would be used to keep warm - first by the animal, then later by the villagers. Finally, the hide and fur would become clothing, rope, or whatever else the people could use it for. But as far as Lanua could tell, there was only one herd in the wilderness, and every time she saw it it was always a lot smaller than she remembered it being the time before. She told me that she wouldn't be surprised never to see it again.

To find food wasn't the reason she was out here this time though. In her previous journey into the wilderness, Lanua had found some pearls of frost, just as K'Ylin and I had, but Lanua had found them long before us as she travelled deeper into the wilderness often. Like K'Ylin, Lanua realised that they precluded an attack from the "monsters" that I suspect to be Ice Elementals. Unknown to K'Ylin, however, Dwarven texts that Lanua had found in the mountain recorded that the signs of activity from the Ice Elementals appeared long before the previous attack. In fact, the pearls of frost had disappeared two months before the last attack even began. Lanua had also read riddles about how the Dwarves had won the battle. The red, glowing rocks had played a vital role, but nowhere did it say more than that; there was nothing to explain why the rocks were so important.

In an attempt to prepare to defend the village from an attacking Ice Elemental, Lanua had come to the North to spend a few days observing them. After that she would head west to a city, named Pon, mentioned in the Dwarves' runic texts. It seemed the Dwarves had thought Pon might be a second source of the red stones and, with the nearby mine home to only fragments, Lanua wanted to try and find some at Pon and make it back in time to defend the village.

We shall both set off tomorrow. I would not be able to sit idly by waiting for an attack that I know everyone is ill prepared to counter, and Lanua has a better chance of getting to Pon quickly and safely with someone watching her back. We will allow ourselves one month to find some red stones. After that we will make out way back to Old Traders' Village and defend it with or without the mysterious and unlikely weapon.

Now we must rest. We sleep again where we did last night. Our packs are full of the meat we caught today; we don't know how easy it will be to come by food in the West - neither the Teeluw nor inhabitants of Old Traders' Village have been out that way since there were Dwarves in the mountain.