The Last Satyr: The Company is Formed Part 1

The boy got up off the ore pile and walked out into the clearing, stopping at the dark edge of trees that grew there, and peered into the blackness ahead.

“Leradien?” he softly called.

A black shadow moved. He saw the familiar glow of softly illuminated red eyes and a floating, cloudlike mane framing her flawless features and perfect form in the darkness.

“How did you know I was here?” she asked in a sultry voice filled with promise for a young satyr boy.

“I didn’t,” he said. “Ronthiel did.”

Her gaze turned towards the elf boy with mild surprise, like a cat suddenly intrigued by a darting mouse. “He can see me in the dark?”

“I didn’t have to see you!” Ronthiel declared, coming over. “You black-hearted monster! You think I don’t know why you’re here?”

“I think we’re all about to find out,” she noted in mild annoyance.

“It’s the loneliness, Master Satyr,” the elf told the boy. “She can’t stay away from you! It’s eating her up. It’s driving her insane! She wants to capture you!”

“I really should have let them kill you,” Leradien said with a touch of warning.

“Then why else are you here?” the elf asked. “Why hide in the wood?”

The boy wondered the same thing. This wasn’t the first time she’d been secretly nearby. He remembered she had seen the fairies kiss him. Was Ronthiel right? Was she here out of maddening loneliness?

“Why are you here?” he asked her curiously.

“You know why I’m here,” Leradien replied. “You asked me to protect you. Or have you forgotten about the drow?”

“Don’t you believe her,” exclaimed Ronthiel. “A drider protect a satyr? It’s the drow that are trying to kill you! She’s one of them!”

“She’s only half-drow,” the boy reminded him.

He remembered, though, that she had offered to protect him from the drow, so that might explain why she was here. Yet she had also threatened to kill the two fairies and Rebecca, too, out of jealousy and so she had also been here watching him even before she learned about the drow.

“I haven’t forgotten,” the boy said. “I also haven’t forgotten you’re jealous of other women.”

“Insanely jealous,” she finished for him. “But I believe those are the very words your friend wants to hear.”

“They are!” Ronthiel agreed. “You’d kill any woman that looks at him!”

“No. Just the ones he looks back at,” Leradien retorted.

“You see?” Ronthiel told the boy. “She admits she’ll kill any woman you look at! And she’s here watching for them now. I told you, Master Satyr, it’s the loneliness! It drives them insane! She’s ready to kill every woman in this village over you. And then she’s going to eventually realize the only way she can truly have you forever is to kill you herself!”

“Ah, yes!” Leradien laughed. “The best way to show your man you love him is to kill him! Why didn’t I think of that before?”

“Mock me, will you?” accused the elf boy. “I’ve noticed you have yet to call me a liar. Why is that?”

Leradien’s red eyes glowered at Ronthiel.

“For one so observant, I can only wonder how you miss so much,” she said with anger. “Perhaps it is because your head is so full of wood that you’ve never bothered to notice that I also have the body of a Light elf?”

Ronthiel blinked, dumbfounded. Yet then he saw it too. True, Leradien had the white hair and eyes of a drow but not their dark skin. She had the light skin of an elf!

Leradien’s eyes remained on Ronthiel, seeing his disbelief.

“When the boy told you I was a half-drow,” she explained. “He did not mean I was half-drow and half spider demon. He meant that I was born half-Dark and half Light Elf. My mother was a Light Elf the same as yours.”

“See how she looks like a Light Elf?” the boy pointed out to Ronthiel, who now stared at Leradien, realizing that what the boy said was true.

“I admit she’s got foreign blood in her,” Ronthiel reluctantly conceded. “But we don’t know what it’s from. It could be from something even worse than what we’ve imagined!”

“All my traits are elvish,” Leradien said. “Unless there are light-skinned elves that aren’t Light Elves, then my mother was a Light Elf.”

“Even if you’re telling the truth,” Ronthiel steadfastly observed, “you’re still a drider. You still went through that same horrible pain of transformation and you’re still experiencing the same loneliness. You’ll still go insane!”

“Maybe,” Leradien replied. “But while I was born with drow eyes, I was born with a Light elf’s skin and a Light Elf’s nature. It was because I rejected my drow nature that a drow priest punished me for my disobedience by sending me a demon spider. If I were of a drow mind, I would now consider myself cursed for my failing Lolth and wanting to be changed back. Yet, if I have the mind of a Light Elf, then this body is my reward for having refuted Lolth. The boy knows which one I am,” she said, looking at him. “Do I hate my body? Do I think myself ugly or beautiful?”

“No,” the boy said with a nod of agreement. “You are quite content as you are.”

“She’s lying!” argued Ronthiel. “She has to say that. She’ll say anything you want to hear if it means avoiding that loneliness. And how do you know she has a Light Elf’s nature? If she has drow nature, she can lie and still say that!”

“I understand your advice is well intended,” the boy said. “However, I have already taken up the subject of the drider with Graybeard, and he gave me his advice as well. Leradien stays.”

“Very well!” said Ronthiel, accepting his defeat. “I shall not dispute Graybeard’s wisdom. But I’m still in your debt for my life and, if I must pay that debt back by defending you from her, I will. But, as you can see, it’s growing late and I must be headed home. I shall see you tomorrow at school.”

With that, he turned and left on the dark, tree lined, wooded dirt trail for home without looking back. Leradien watched him go.

“Good riddance to him,” she said. “Let’s you and I go play.”

“No. Not yet,” the boy said. “When Ronthiel walks home tonight, will he be in danger?”

She shrugged indifferently.

“I expect he will be if that displacer beast is still about,” she answered. “The beast has both your scent and his. If it has instructions to track those scents down and kill them, then—yes—if it crosses Ronthiel’s path on his way home, it will certainly kill him.”

“Would you mind seeing that he gets home safe?” the boy asked.

“What?!” she exclaimed back in undisguised shock. “Me?! Why would I do that? I hope it eats him!”

Her eyebrows went down crossly and hands rested, elbows out, firmly on her hips as she made her objection to the task known.

“Because he’s my friend,” the boy told her.

“Well, he’s certainly not my friend!”

“He only says that because he thinks you’re a pure-blooded drow. He doesn’t know you as I do.”

“Who cares?” she said irately, her confronting posture unchanged. “He’s an elf! He’s living proof that they can live without a brain. I’m not going!”

“If things were reversed, I’d send him to look out after you,” the boy vowed.

“And would he go?” she demanded to know.

“I think he would. He has vowed to repay me for saving his life. Now! If you love me, you will do it.”

“No! If I love you, I would stay here and protect you from the displacer beast. I would not protect some stupid elf I do not love, who wants me dead from that pet, and leave you here defenseless!”

“Won’t you follow him for me, please?” he pleaded. “Just see that he gets home safe?”

Again, she remained set in her ways. “No.”

“That doesn’t sound like a Light Elf’s nature. That sounds like a drow’s nature.”

Her eyes flared at that, but she didn’t argue.

“What makes you think I can get him home safe?” she asked, deliberately changing the subject.

“You’re a drider. Everything fears a drider.”

“Evidently not you—you’re giving me orders!”

“I’m just asking you to as a favor to me.”

She eyed him sullenly, her posture shifting slightly.

“Every favor has its price. What do I get if I do?” asked a disgusted Leradien.

Oops! The boy had to think this request over. Her price would be high.

“What do you want?”

What did she want? Her drow mind turned that over. He waited for her to make him live with her.

“I want another kiss,” she decided. “You’ve kissed the fairies twice and me only once. That’s not fair.”

“You shall have it. Now go!”

She started to move away but then glanced back.

“But you better make it a really good one!” she warned.

He thought that sounded surprisingly good to him.

Yet the boy was about to learn otherwise.