if I were a betting man...

   Several days after their near encounter with the spotted black caped elves, Lyri noticed that Thalion had been especially quiet since leaving that part of the forest.  Finding him at the edge of a creek while she was gathering wood for their evening fire, she sat beside him.

  "Do you still hear Vondran's voice in your head or in your dreams?"

  Thal continued looking at the water, watching tadpoles in the shallows.  "No, and it is starting to worry me.  What if all of it was just my imagination, and I've put our lives in danger?"

  She put a hand on his arm to comfort him.  "It hasn't been your imagination.  Elder Elowin confirmed some of the things that he had told you before we left.  You mustn't let doubt enter your thoughts, Thal.  I know we've put a lot of pressure on you to lead us.  Perhaps we should rest another day or two here."

  Thal nodded, and Lyri left him to his thoughts and returned to where Eldrin and Kael were setting up makeshift lean-tos as they did every evening.

~*~*~

  While the elves were sleeping on the ground for their part of the journey, Alexander was choosing more modern amenities for his portion.  Five-star hotels were far and few between, but he would rather not settle for less so long as he was still able to meet with the gnoll's Chieftan each evening before he slept.

  Now, Alexander and the elves traveled by day and the gnoll's by night.  In the beginning, he had kept the same schedule as the gnolls and traveled at night.  But sleep evaded him during the day, and after a particularly bad case of influenza which took all of his physical strength and left him bedridden for a week, he realized that he could no longer drive at night.  He may have had gnoll DNA, but his body and organs were weakly human.

  His original anger and desire to destroy Kael and all the wood elves had manifested into a small, pea-sized bilirubin pigment stone, the color of pumpkin orange, in his gallbladder.  For now, its presence was only an occasional twinge in his right side that went away after three or six shots of bourbon.  But as the days passed without any sign of the elves, and Alexander's evening "nightcap" increasing in frequency during the day, there came another, as the original stone became larger.

  There was now a race within Alexander's body that his mind was thus far unaware of.  Would he die of an infection caused by the stones?  Would he die of a heart attack from the stress of the journey?  Or would the gnoll Chieftan finally have enough and make a meal of him?

  The gnolls were already placing bids for his appendages, and bets for how much longer Alexander would live....

 [This is an ongoing chapter a week story that began with the first Words for Wednesday for 2025 on 1 January. I'm hoping to continue it through 31 December, the last Wednesday of the year. To start from the beginning, click on the Words for Wednesday 2025 label to the right and it will pull up all of the weekly posts, beginning with the most recent. To start from the beginning, continue to click "Older Posts" at the bottom of the page until you get to 1 January 2025, then click "Newer Posts" to read the next date. You can thank Blogger for the inability to list them by chronological order under the labels.]

This week's Words for Wednesday prompts can be found here.