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Twelve: To Dentos Crossing

Lying on the warm granite with a beam of setting sunlight shining on his face from a gap in the canopy on the far side of the river that fed Dentos Falls, Marc was unable to do more than stare up at Trent's and Dola's concerned faces as he gasped for breath. He hadn't thought he was going to make it all the way to the top of the last ladder, and had had a paralyzing instant of fear when he'd missed a wide rung with his foot and nearly fallen. Close to the fifty foot cliff's height, he wasn't sure if he could have survived the drop down to the glass beach.

They were all safely over the cliff's upper edge, though, and if Marc felt like he'd just scaled Mount Everest, at least he knew he would still be able to walk after he regained his breath. His vision was swimming, and the heat rising from the melted sand below was making him feel a little queasy, but he much preferred his dizzy nausea to the broken bones or worse that he would have suffered had he not clung with exhausted tenacity to the boards his hands had been on when he'd slipped.

Dola shook her head down at him. "I can almost believe you were telling the truth about being a human in your other life," she said. "No Oncan would have had nearly so much trouble with an ant hill like that."

"Thanks," he croaked up at her. He was pretty sure she was just trying to tease him good naturedly, but he still didn't know her well enough to be certain.

"Come on," Trent said, bending down and slinging Marc's furry arm around his broad shoulders. "You'll feel better after a drink."

Once Marc was back on his feet, he let his friend half carry him toward the top of the waterfall, staggering upriver a short ways until the water wasn't a violently churned white froth. Trent set him down on a flat boulder at the river's side, unable to find anyplace easier to get to the water with the river's steep banks, and Marc lowered himself to his belly, leaning over the boulder's edge so that he could reach down to the swiftly flowing water below. It was deliciously frigid, and he drank what felt like a full gallon despite the challenge of forming a small bowl with his half feline hands. Water kept leaking through the fur between his fingers.

"Better?" Dola asked when he pushed himself up to his hands and knees.

He nodded wordlessly, hanging his head between his shoulders for a few seconds before sitting back on his heels. "I guess I'm still getting used to being an Oncan," he muttered. The truth of the matter was that he hadn't felt any pins and needles in his face or legs for several hours. The irritation in his tail was still as vibrant as ever, but it had moved down several vertebrae throughout the course of the day, and he was frequently surprising himself by being able to feel his tail's first six or seven inches extending past his spine. He could even swing it from side to side, if he concentrated hard enough, though doing so caused the ring of burning discomfort at the edge of his tail's sensation to flare up even worse than usual.

"Considering you could barely walk this morning, you're really doing pretty well," Dola said, belying her earlier comment about every Oncan's ease of climbing.

Marc smiled at her encouragement and managed to lever himself up to his feet without any assistance, stepping back off the boulder to let Trent take his place. "I'm just glad Tolinom kept himself in good shape."

The other Oncan looked back toward the sea without a word, watching the tops of Falcon Wing's sails visible over the lip of the falls, and Marc was afraid he might have upset her by mentioning Tolinom. The ship was beginning to turn back toward the ocean.

"I don't know what I miss most," Trent said before Marc could begin to apologize, "Fast food or my old sneakers." He sat cross-legged on the boulder and pulled one of his big feet up to his face. Squinting at its sole, he pulled a short splinter from between his leathery toes, evidently left there by one of the ladder's planks during their climb.

Dola faced them again, and Marc was relieved to see her face untroubled, if somewhat perplexed. "Were you able to understand all that?" she asked Marc, giving Trent a peculiar look. "He usually speaks fluent Tsuravi, but sometimes he breaks into gibberish like that."

"Gibberish?" Marc repeated, and the black furred Oncan nodded.

"What on Gotrala are 'sneakers'?"

Marc couldn't help but laugh at that. "Sneakers are a kind of shoe where we come from," he explained, "and fast food is...well, just junk food, I guess. Unhealthy food from restaurant chains."

If anything, Dola only seemed more confused. "A restaurant...chain?" she repeated.

Trent sighed in relief after pulling a second splinter from his toes. "You must not have any big corporations here," he said as he stood up. He gave Dola a thoughtful look while hopping from the boulder to the grassy river bank. "The truth is, I've been trying to figure out how we can understand each other at all. You said I've been speaking Tsuravi, but neither Marc nor I have spoken a word in any language other than English since we came here."

Dola shrugged. "Tsuravi and your English must just be two different words for the same language."

Marc frowned. Dola's conclusion didn't quite make sense. "How could countries from two different worlds come to speak the same language?"

"Exactly," Trent said, turning to lead the way upriver, watching his footing carefully to avoid any sharp rocks or sticks as he stepped around and between slender trees. "That's one of the reasons I was so convinced this was all a dream. Finding myself in an alien world where everyone just happened to speak English seemed a little too convenient to be real. Most of the countries on Earth don't even speak the same languages."

"I still think it makes more sense that the dragon's magic gave you both false memories," Dola said as she knelt on the boulder to take her turn drinking from the river, ignoring Trent's departure into the sparse woodland. "That would explain why you both speak Tsuravi, wouldn't it?"

Caught in the growing gap between Dola and Trent as the Oncan drank and his friend walked away from them, Marc didn't answer. He couldn't let himself take Dola's suggestion seriously. It made just enough sense that he would have little trouble losing his mind if he considered it as an actual possibility.

"I don't know how far this village is supposed to be," Trent called from the other side of a stand of spruce trees, "but we'll have to hurry if we want to beat those rain clouds."

Marc looked back at the sky over the ocean, and sure enough, the clouds Captain Lebram had noticed before sending the three of them on their way were quite a bit closer than they'd been the last time he'd looked, growing darker as they approached. "How far upriver is Dentos Crossing?" he asked Dola.

She glanced at the darkening sky behind them and grimaced. "Far enough that we're going to get wet. We'd better get moving." Wiping her muzzle with the back of a furry hand, she got to her feet and followed in the direction Trent had left, Marc falling in step beside her.

After they'd caught up with Trent and walked quietly for a short while with the river flowing with noisy gurgles to their left and the breeze making the canopy whisper above them, one of Marc's last memories from Earth came to his mind. "Hey, Trent, do you remember anything from church about the Bridge of Babel?" He'd been puzzling over their ability to communicate with Dola and the crew of Falcon Wing, how everyone they'd met so far in that world spoke fluent English, if with varying accents, and had remembered the invisible presence back on his flight to Brazil mentioning the Bridge of Babel. Marc thought he remembered a bible story about Babylon that involved languages, but he wasn't sure. His parents were technically Christians, but their expression of their faith didn't extend much farther than hanging a portrait of Jesus in their bedroom. Marc had rarely been to church except for special Christmas and Easter services.

"You're probably thinking of the Tower of Babel," Trent said, hopping over a small tree that had fallen across their path. He was a Christian in every sense of the word, Marc knew. Trent went to church every Sunday, and if he didn't have all of the scriptures memorized, he at least understood most of the stories whose details Marc could never keep straight. "The people of Babylon worked together to build a tower that would reach all the way to Heaven," he went on. "To punish them, God scattered everyone to the four corners of the world and made it so that they couldn't understand each other. It does sort of make you think about our situation here, doesn't it? You're not thinking that we traveled back to a time before that happened, are you?" He looked at Dola. "There wouldn't happen to be a city in Eyralia or Bandarethe called Babylon, by any chance?"

Dola shook her head. "Your story sounds rather like the old myth about the Pavlian Well, though. It talks about an ancient race that dug a well deep enough to touch Gotrala's spirit, and through it, spoke to angels. The angels were angered, though, because the ancient people had injured the planet just to talk to them, so they turned the ancients that had dug the well into animals and made everyone else forget how to speak. Their children had to come up with brand new languages since their parents had become mute."

"That is pretty similar," Trent noted.

Marc frowned, only partially listening to them. "I could have sworn it called it a bridge, though, not a tower or a well," he muttered to himself, not meaning to say the thought out loud.

They both looked at him. "Who called what a bridge?" Dola asked.

Marc blinked in surprise, only aware at that moment that he'd given voice to the thought. Trent and Dola were both watching his face expectantly. "It was a voice that spoke to me when time was frozen before I came here," he told them, not bothering to explain that the presence hadn't spoken so much as bombarded his mind with a series of movie clips in fast forward in order to communicate.

"You talked to someone when time stood still?" Trent asked. His attention was suddenly focused so intently on Marc that he clipped his forehead against a low-hanging branch that he hadn't seen.

Marc nodded. "I'm not sure if it was a someone or a something, but yeah. I think it might have been what sent us here."

Trent's hand froze where it was comforting the small scratch below his hair line. "And you didn't think that was worth mentioning until now?" he exclaimed.

Marc shrugged, unable to keep his ears from flicking back in embarrassment. "We already had Dola and the ship's crew thinking we were crazy. I didn't think telling them that I've been hearing disembodied voices would help matters."

"That was probably a good idea," Dola muttered. "So what did this voice say to you about a bridge?" she asked skeptically.

He looked down at the ground in front of his feet, trying to remember. He'd been so confused at the time, and had felt so rushed by the presence's urgent demands, he hadn't tried to memorize what he'd been told. "It kept asking for my consent to travel," he said slowly, returning mentally to his seat in the plane. "I said that I didn't understand what was going on, and it told me that if I consented, it would give me the gift of understanding, that I would cross the Bridge of Babel. I think that's what it said, anyway."

Trent grunted. "No one asked for my consent. So you think this Bridge of Babel might have been a spell or something so that we can speak with people in this world, some sort of instant translation thing?"

"I sure wasn't given any other gift of understanding," Marc said with a shrug. "If the Tower of Babel took away people's ability to communicate, though, maybe the Bridge of Babel somehow gives it back."

Trent grimaced, looking like he was about to get sick. "I don't like the sound of that. That's undoing the work of the hand of God. What did this voice sound like?" He went on before Marc had a chance to reply, though. "Never mind, don't tell me. I don't want to know. Where was Brandon in all this, anyway?"

"Sitting beside me," Marc said. "He was able to move when time stopped, too, but I don't think he could hear the voice. He just kept trying to unfasten his seat belt."

"Heh, yeah, I can see how that might have freaked him out," Trent said with a smirk, easily shedding his discomfort as they moved away from the subject of Marc's invisible presence counteracting the Tower of Babel's consequences. Marc looked at his friend curiously until the big man went on. "I was playing my guitar in my bedroom when it happened, just jamming like usual, minding my own business. I had actually started fiddling around with a song I heard once on Crocodile Dundee, thinking about you and Brandon heading to Australia. I noticed that everything had gotten really quiet when I paused for a second, no birds chirping or anything, and the sound of my dad mowing the lawn outside just stopped. When I looked out the window, he was sitting on the mower, calm as you please, but he wasn't moving, and he didn't say anything when I shouted at him to ask what was wrong.

"So I tossed my guitar on the bed, thinking to go outside and see what was up, but as soon as it left my hands, the guitar just...stopped. It was just hovering there like some freaky magician's trick, and when I tried to pull it back out of the air, it wouldn't budge, like it was bolted to that spot, except there wasn't anything there for it to be bolted to."

Marc shook his head in wonder at it all before hopping over a small stream flowing toward the river to their left. "That had to have given you a scare."

Trent lifted his chin with mock dignity. "I handled myself admirably, I'll have you know. At least until I found out my door was locked from the outside. I couldn't even jiggle the door knob, and it had always been loose before. Luckily, I passed out before I could start screaming," he finished with a grin.

"That was it?" Marc said with a chuckle. "No voices asked you to give your consent to travel, or anything like that?"

Trent shook his head. "No voices, no. There was a weird, green light, though, coming from the sun. With everything else, I didn't pay much attention to it."

"Huh." Marc frowned, puzzling everything over. "Just before time stopped on the plane, the clouds outside turned a weird green color. Brandon and I thought that maybe it was because we were flying over the Bermuda Triangle, but that--"

"Wait a second," Trent interrupted. "You guys flew over the Bermuda Triangle? I thought you were flying west over the Pacific."

"We were going to, but we were rerouted after all those hurricanes sprang up past the west coast."

Trent grunted. "That seems like a whole lot of coincidence." They walked onward for a short while, a bend in the narrow, overgrown path they'd been following returning them to the river's bank. Stepping out from underneath the trees' shelter, Marc felt a few small raindrops fall on his shoulders and head, one landing on the back of his ear and making it twitch in surprise.

"So," Dola said as they picked their way over a scattering of large rocks, "humans have wings where you come from?"

Marc glanced at her. "What? No, we're just normal humans like Captain Lebram and her crew."

"But you just said that you and your friend had been flying over that place, that...Bermooda..." She stumbled on the name.

"The Bermuda Triangle," Marc finished for her, "and we were flying on an airplane, not by ourselves." He had a hard time not laughing at her bemused expression.

"An airplane is a big machine that people ride in that carries them from place to place through the sky," Trent explained helpfully, then cursed when he stubbed a toe on a sturdy stone.

Dola frowned at him as he hopped forward on one foot a few steps. "Now you're making fun of me, aren't you?"

Setting his foot down tenderly, Trent thrust a finger in the air and declared, "I always make fun! But this time," he finished in a more conversational tone, "it wasn't of you."

She narrowed her eyes at him before turning back to Marc. "Can you tell me what that was supposed to mean?"

"It was just a play on words," Marc told her, trying not to grin. "He was telling you the truth about airplanes, though. His description might have been a little simplified, but planes really are big flying machines."

Dola's expression was becoming more skeptical by the second. "I thought you said there wasn't any magic where you come from."

"There's not," he said, and when her feline eyebrows rose in a way that suggested he was missing something obvious, he went on to explain, "The people who invented airplanes did so using science, not magic. It all has to do with the shapes of the wings, aerodynamics, those kinds of things."

"So how do these machines fly?"

"I don't know. I'm not the one who invented them," Marc said with a dismissive shrug.

"Well, it still sounds like magic to me."

The rain was still only sprinkling in a light drizzle, but Marc was grateful that their path led them back beneath the low canopy of spruce and maple trees. The fur on his head was already matted down wetly against his scalp, and as the clouds around them changed the early twilight into the darker shadows of night's precursors, he expected the rain would start coming down more heavily before long. They walked for another ten minutes or so through the sheltering woodland before a quiet peal of thunder rumbled over them from the other side of the river.

"Around three hundred years ago," Dola said into the fading rumble, as if the thunder was a cue she had been waiting for, "the War of Liberation had swept across the old Tsuravi Empire."

"What?" Marc asked, surprised by the subject's abrupt introduction.

Dola shrugged a shoulder as she glanced at him through the gloom. "Look, whether you two are really from another world or you just have some complicated, magic induced amnesia, you need to know enough about the real world that you can blend in as much as possible." Marc didn't bother arguing that Earth was as real as Dola's world. "We agreed this morning that I'd tell you some of our history sometime, and now seems as good a time as any, while no one else is around to listen in on us."

"Yay, story time!" Trent exclaimed, jumping from foot to foot and clapping his meaty hands together like an overgrown child. "I love stories."

"I don't have to tell you anything, if you're going to be obnoxious about it," Dola snapped at him irritably.

Trent just laughed, and Marc hurried to calm Dola's temper. "No, no, we want to hear. We need to know as much about this place as possible if we want to find a way home." He shot his friend a cautionary glance, but wasn't sure if Trent noticed it in the darkness under the trees and rain clouds. "What started the War of Liberation?"

They walked in silence for a short time, the quiet patter of rain against the trees above them the only noise, and Marc was afraid Dola had become too disgruntled to continue. Eventually, though, she said, "A rebellion. Back then, Tsurav was ruled by an empire of humans. We Oncans were their slaves. We did all of their manual labor for them, and they kept us penned like animals in the same cages as Gnolls."

"Gnolls were their slaves, too?" Marc asked. She sounded bitter enough that he could almost believe she'd lived through the enslavement herself, but he didn't think she looked quite three hundred years old.

Dola nodded. "The records of the time all say the Gnolls were easily trained, that they could be used as intelligent beasts of burden. If that was true, then they changed a great deal between then and now, because the ones in the Frontier are as wild as they come." She flicked her tail idly when a bowl shaped leaf overflowed and dumped its contents behind her, flinging water into the undergrowth beside her. "The same records say that Oncans were stubborn and obstinate, and oftentimes had to be whipped to learn to obey the simplest commands." She said this with a strong tone of pride. "It was the Oncans that rebelled first. The Gnolls were content to remain the humans' lap dogs for almost fifty years, before the Singing of the Prophecy shook them out of their loyalty and they revolted, too. They never really joined the Oncans, though. They just raided and slaughtered anyone they crossed paths with, much like the ones in the Frontier do today."

"What was this prophecy that spooked them?" Trent asked. He'd been humming quietly to himself, and Marc hadn't been sure until then that his friend was even listening.

"The Prophecy of the Wanderer," Dola said, and Marc's ears perked up to sudden attention. Hadn't the invisible presence called him a wanderer back on the jet? He almost remembered it calling him a wanderer back in the void before his vision during his Phys. Ed. final, too. As Dola went on, Marc's stomach began coiling into an ever tighter knot. "They say it was so powerful that when it came to the prophet, it rose in the form of a song that everyone in Tsurasabi could hear. The longer it went on, the louder it grew, until it became so strong that the city's people began singing it themselves, unable to stop themselves, and the very walls of the castle where the prophet lived crumbled into dust when it ended. The Prophecy foretold the coming of a creature that would bring about the end of all life through its greed for power, and named the creature 'the Wanderer.'"

Marc thought he was going to throw up. He thought that thunder should have been crashing ominously at such a revelation, but evidently the gentle storm wasn't attuned to his nerves. The rain continued to patter down around them quietly.

"And that was enough to make the Gnolls decide to fight back?" Trent asked, unaware of Marc's rising sense of dread.

"Evidently. In the chaos following the castle's collapse, the Gnolls all broke free of their chains and cages and fled the city, and reports say that the Gnolls in other towns and cities across the continent revolted shortly after. That's when they all became so violent. Some people believe the Gnolls' aggression was just the first part of whatever chaos and destruction the Wanderer has planned for us."

"Sounds a lot like the Antichrist," Trent said conversationally, and Marc almost choked on a drop of saliva going down the wrong tube.

"How...how did you come to be here," he stammered after a long coughing fit, trying to direct the conversation away from the unsettling prophecy, "Sarutia, I mean. Tsuravi was a whole different continent, right?"

"The continent is just called Tsurav," Dola corrected. "'Tsuravi' is the language we're speaking, and a way to describe the people that lived in the Empire. But yes, our ancestors sailed to Sarutia from Tsurav."

She took a deep breath at their blank stares. "Right. The Neutral Party," she said, almost as if offering the title of a new chapter. "Some time after the Singing of the Prophecy, there was a great battle where two soldiers met and fought, an Oncan named Banda, and a human named Eyral."

"Eyral?" Trent repeated. "As in 'Eyralia' Eyral?"

"And as in 'Bandarethe' Banda," Dola said with a nod. "'Rethe' is an ancient word that means something like 'spirit of the land,' so Bandarethe translates roughly to 'the land of Banda's spirit."

Marc didn't think the translation exactly fit the way the name and the ancient word combined, but he let Dola continue without interrupting her.

"Anyway, the story goes that the duel they fought in the battle's midst carried them away from both of their armies, and they eventually reached the edge of a ravine, and both fell into it. Banda broke his leg, but Eyral landed safely, and would have killed Banda, except some of the ravine's cliffs were too tall and too steep for him to climb out of it on his own. So, they made a temporary truce until they found their way back to their armies.

"When they made it back to the top of the ravine a few days later, though, their armies had both left, and they couldn't tell who had won the battle, and though they both wanted to go their separate ways from there, there was neither an Oncan camp nor a human village for several days' travel in either direction. Banda couldn't walk on his own, and Eyral didn't know how to hunt for food with only his sword, so their truce held, and they agreed to head in a direction where Oncan and human settlements weren't too far apart.

"They probably both intended to betray each other at first, but by the time they made it back to civilization, they had become friends of a sort. There's another story about them fighting off a grizzly bear, or a pack of wolves or wildcats--it depends on the story's version--but I won't go into all that.

"The important thing is, by the time they returned to their respective sides, there was nothing either of them wanted more than to put an end to the fighting that had been going on for close to sixty years. So over the next few years, they both talked to other Oncans and humans until there were enough people on both sides who wanted peace that a treaty was arranged."

"So the war ended?" Trent asked. "Everyone lived happily ever after?"

"Hardly," she said, giving the big man a look that Marc couldn't quite read in the gloom. "The commanders on both sides planned to use the treaty as a trap to slaughter the opposing army. On top of the bloodbath the mutual betrayals caused, the Gnolls had somehow gathered a strong force and launched an attack on both Oncan and human armies in the middle of the battle. It was complete chaos.

"Many soldiers on both sides refused to fight, though, and instead fled the battle. They were condemned as deserters by their leaders, but there were so many of them, they could easily form an army of their own, which is exactly what they did.

"They called themselves the Neutral Party, and by general consensus, elected Banda and Eyral to be their joint commanders. Over the following decade, they harassed both of the other sides as much as they could, trying to discourage full blown battles between the Oncans and humans before they had a chance to start, but no matter how long and hard they tried, they couldn't convince the opposing sides to settle for anything short of genocide. Over time, the Neutral Party amassed a fairly large fleet through acts of piracy, and though it was never strong enough to truly contend with the Tsuravi Legion's fleet, it eventually amassed enough ships that the entire Neutral Party could be on the ocean at once."

"I think I know where this is going," Marc said. Dola nodded at him, but shot Trent a distracted grimace.

The big man had begun whistling a song that sounded like it belonged in a Hollywood blockbuster, tapping out a swift rhythm with his fingers against his forearms. "No, no, keep going," he said when he noticed them both staring at him. "This is good." He continued whistling as Dola shook her head in annoyed bewilderment.

"In secret," she began again, clearly struggling to ignore Trent's whistling, "the Neutral Party began filtering into the Infuli Ocean off of Tsurav's east coast, nearly a hundred thousand Oncans and humans on more than three thousand ships. They gathered out of sight of any land and, agreeing that the Empire and Oncan rebels would keep killing each other until nothing was left of Tsurav except ashes, the Neutral Party left the other factions to their war."

"And then everyone lived happily ever after?" Trent said, immediately picking up his whistling where he'd left off.

"I guess that's up to us," Dola said with a barely visible smirk. "The Neutral Party sailed across the Infuli Ocean to Sarutia, and while scouting ships spent nearly a year sailing around the continent searching for anyplace safe enough to anchor close to shore, the main flotilla stumbled across a bay hidden by a pair of pincher-like cliffs. They found that the coral reefs around the bay were passable in all but the lowest tides, and built a city on its shore."

Marc tried to remember the name of the city that Dola had told him was the only port in Sarutia. "That was...Boenfall?"

"Boendal," she corrected without missing a beat. "From there, the Oncans and humans went their separate ways for the most part, having been confined in close quarters together for so long in the fleet that tempers kept getting out of control. The humans settled in the Jade Hills to the north and east, and the Oncans claimed Bandarethe to the northwest. The descendants of Eyral and Banda have ruled fairly peacefully ever since."

"'Fairly' peacefully?" Marc repeated.

"Well, there were a few disputes between noble houses, insults on both sides. Just because everyone wanted peace didn't mean they all trusted or liked each other, and some humans still get uncomfortable around us Oncans..." She paused, apparently watching her footing carefully in the late storm's darkness. "None of those conflicts boiled into outright war, but relations were pretty tense between the two nations for a few decades over the past two centuries."

They walked on quietly for a short time, Trent reverting back to humming now that Dola's story was finished. The rain had been falling steadily harder, and by that time Marc was so soaked through that he no longer cared that it was coming down in buckets.

"So," he said to fill the silence. "I thought you told me you weren't a good history student."

Dola laughed. "I'm not. Everything I told you is just children's stories, an overview of our history that any child could recite by their eighth year. I always get lectured for letting my imagination get carried away, for making assumptions beyond what our historical documents tell us directly." She shrugged, her voice growing slightly embarrassed. "I couldn't even make myself stick to the facts in what little I told you two. Take that bit about Banda, Eyral, and the wolves, for example. My mentor would never have let me get away with including that in an historical recitation."

"You can't come up with a very complete picture of the past if you don't use your imagination to fill in the gaps left by the bare facts historical records can tell you," Trent pointed out. Marc was surprised to hear such wisdom from his friend.

Dola shook her head, though. "It's better to know few things that are true than many that are not." She said it in a way that made it sound like an overused cliché.

"Well, yeah," Trent admitted, "you can't forget which parts of the story are based on fact and which are just theories about what could have happened, but--" Whatever he had been about to say was cut off when Trent stepped straight into a solid stone and lumber wall, hitting the obstruction hard enough to make him stagger backward and almost fall. "Ow. I wish I could see in the dark as well as you guys. Didn't even notice that tree until it jumped up and bit me."

"That wasn't a tree," Marc said, lifting an arm to Trent's bare shoulder to help steady the man.

Dola stepped around the building's corner, her teeth gleaming in the shadows as she smiled. "We've reached Dentos Crossing."

A forked bolt of lightning lanced out of the sky beyond the town's shingled rooftops, its crash of thunder deafening Marc as he blinked against the jagged red imprint the lightning had left on his retinas. The storm was now truly over them, its rain falling in sheets rather than drops.

"Come on," he shouted over the thunder's lingering rumble. "Let's find an inn where we can dry off before this rain drowns us."

Looking as much like drowned rats as he felt, the others didn't argue.