Nkayah yawned from her post in the tall tree. The job of scouting and protecting wanderers was always more exciting on the move. On the move, she had to stay on her toes, taking silent cover behind trees or climbing into the jungle canopy to maintain line of sight with the strangers and visitors who passed through Ekujae lands. She lived for the silent chase as she assessed outsiders’ motivations. For over a century and a half, Nkayah had ensured non-Mwangi travelers posed no threat to the Ekujae, and that they didn’t release any of the myriad evils trapped within the heart of the jungle—intentionally or not.
It was an important job that Nkayah took with the seriousness it deserved, but it could also be incredibly boring. Like right now, as she strained to keep from nodding off while watching two foreigners talk about, well, something. It didn’t help that the dwarf and half-orc interlopers spoke a language completely foreign to her. It sounded similar to the Avistani language the Aspis Consortium agents from Bloodcove spoke when they needed to hide their awful deeds, but she had no linguistic training to confirm it. Despite not knowing what they were saying, the experience she’d earned over decades of training made her confident that their intent wasn’t malicious. But they were stumbling—loudly—through a very ancient Serpentfolk ruin, and that meant that they still posed a threat.
She strained her jaw as she stifled a yawn and adjusted her position to ensure she didn’t get too comfortable. A wilderness nap could wait until the pair of foreigners moved beyond her territory and became someone else’s responsibility. Whatever they sought, the longer they spent out in the open like this, the longer they were in danger of needing more than just surveillance. Sometimes it helped to remember that even these boring parts of the job ultimately kept the innocent and defenseless wanderers of their lands safe, as well as protecting her people and the world at large.
The dwarf and her half-orc companion let out a series of surprised shouts, snapping Nkayah’s attention back to the moment. Doubtless, she wasn’t the only one in the area reminded of the visitors’ presence by their arguing. They seemed at odds about what to make of one particular section of the ruin, a strange stone that Nkayah had never noticed here before. Perhaps the situation wasn’t quite as boring as she’d thought!
She scurried from branch to bough, until she found herself balanced on a long, lonely limb directly over the foreigners. She was close to them, no more than ten feet above the half-orc’s head, so they could easily see her if they looked up, but they were too engrossed in the strange stone formation. As long as she didn’t draw their gaze, they wouldn’t be looking up any tiem soon.
The formation was a cone of rough stone, nearly seven feet from base to point, that rose like an incisor from the ground. It wasn’t worked stone like the rest of the Serpentfolk ruin, and it lacked the ophidian motifs and iconography that denoted the ancient Ydersian structures for what they were. This looked both organic and completely at odds with the natural order, and it was no wonder it had so grasped the visitors’ attention. The dwarf held her hand a few inches from the stalactite’s surface, but didn’t touch it, as though sensing for an aura of evil.
No, she wasn’t feeling an aura, but rather a steady stream of frigid air blowing from the stone’s otherwise smooth surface. Now that she recognized it, Nkayah could feel the steady airflow herself, and even at this distance. The chill made the skin on her arms prickle with gooseflesh. This certainly warranted more investigation, but she had to focus on her charges—the dwarf and the half-orc, not the ruin, which she’d be able to come back to once the pair no longer presented a threat. And the louder they got, the greater that threat grew.
Doubtless, her counterparts from nearby were already on their way to see what the fuss was about. Nhayah shook her head and loosened the harness holding her weapons to her body. This was going to get worse before it got better.
Her instincts proved accurate when the sound of arrows in flight drew her attention away from the outsiders and toward the edge of the ruins. She wasn’t the only Ekujae in the area anymore.
The dwarf and half-orc were still loudly arguing about the cold stone tooth. They hadn’t noticed the arrival of Nkayah’s kin, and she knew they wouldn’t hear her either as she skittered effortlessly away, mere feet above their heads. Without losing sight of the foreign travelers, Nhayah darted in towards the site of the arrows’ impact.
It didn’t take long to find one, embedded into the trunk of a gnarled tree: a darkwood arrow with dull gray fletching, clearly Ekujae-made. If she were on the ground, it would be at eye-level, meaning whatever they were shooting at was not terribly large. As she dropped down and pulled the arrow out to inspect it, her teeth clenched instinctively. Nkayah glanced at her surroundings to locate the arrow’s source, but knew her compatriots were as good at remaining unseen as she was. She’d see them when they wanted to be seen, just as they likely didn’t know she was there until she revealed herself.
The arrowhead was tipped with cold iron, finely sharpened, and faintly tingling with magical energy that pulsed lightly into her fingertips. Though the spell was no longer active, she knew what its presence meant.
“Demons” she hissed, still too soft for her charges to hear, even if they weren’t now yards away and engrossed in their investigation. She wished she could scream at them. Leave it alone, you fools. Leave our lands and stop meddling in things you don’t understand!
She pulled her bow from her back and swung back up into the branches with her free arm. She moved swiftly back to her spot where she’d previously kept watch and aimed her bow across the clearing in the direction she knew this threat would come from. She hadn’t yet determined whether the demon was somehow tied to the cold-air stone or simply drawn to the site by the outsiders, but regardless, the pair didn’t deserve to die at the claws of a vicious demon just because they were loud.
The underbrush rustled as the threat approached, and she notched a cold iron arrow of her own. A hulking form, only partially visible through the jungle’s dense foliage, emerged. She fired. The arrow flew true, and the dark form hissed as its iron head burned across its demonic body. The dwarf and her companion, suddenly aware that they weren’t alone in the ruins, stared, paralyzed with fear, and barely mustered the strength to look up and see Nkayah above them, fearless, with another arrow at the ready. She released the bowstring; the arrow flew and then… darkness.
She cursed as she dropped from the tree, racing for where her charges once stood, but could not find them in the darkness. The cool, constant airflow from the stone tooth let her know where it stood, where the dwarf and half-orc had been a moment before. She listened for their voices, but they were either too scared to scream or already lost. Then, her ears caught other voices, two of them, in her own tongue.
“Hunters!” she called back in kind. “Speak again so that I may find you. I am a scout. I can navigate to you in this darkness.”
The elves obeyed and signaled to her in hushed tones, somewhere off to her left. She made her way to them, slowly, not wanting to injure herself on a bit of the ruin she could not see. It took some time but finally, she connected with another form. The other thankfully stood firmly despite the collision.
“I am Nkayah of the Bat Clan. My mother was of the Hawk Clan. You’re demon hunters?”
The erratic sound of the others’ steps told her they were fumbling in the dark. “I am Kayoye,” the voice to her right began, “of the Velociraptor Clan. My mother is of the Gecko clan, and we hunt all forms of evil in this jungle. Today’s prey just happened to be a demon.”
“And I am Dafiyi, also of the Velociraptor Clan. My mother is of the Python clan. The darkness should wear off shortly. This is not its first attempt to escape us today.”
Nkayah sighed. Waiting without being able to see anything at all was incredibly frustrating, but she stood alert, with a firm grasp on her bow and an arrow at the ready. Soon, the demon’s magical cloak of darkness disappeared as swiftly as it had descended, and the dim, green-tinted light of the sun through jungle canopy flooded her sight. Finally able to see, the elves clustered together, back-to-back, and notched arrows, centuries of experience between them allowing the trio to work seamlessly as a defensive unit despite just meeting moments earlier. They rotated clockwise, six sharp eyes and six keen ears scanning the jungle from leaf-strewn floor to branch-woven canopy for any threat. The demon was gone, and no trace of the dwarf and the half-orc remained.
Nkayah cursed and kicked a piece of rubble. She rolled the events of the past few minutes over in her head: the serpentfolk ruins, the new-yet-ancient otherworldly stalactite, the demon, and the demon hunters now flanking her.
It was a coincidence. The cold-blowing stone and the demon were unrelated. That made things more interesting, perhaps, but also more complicated.
Dafiyi stared at the ground in concentration and muttered an incantation to himself, then pointed to the east. “Kayoye and I still have a demon to kill. We found it before, and we’ll find it again. And you?”
Nkayah surveyed the trees around her, searching for an answer. It came to her in the form of two familiar voices yelling in distress. The dwarf and half-orc were still alive!
She nodded to her kin and smirked, “Sounds like I still have two charges that need my protection, and what do you know? They seem to be in the same direction! I’ll have to return to check on that later.” She tilted her head toward the mysterious stone amid the ruins.
Swiftly and silently, she made her way through the dense jungle toward the frantic voices to the east. Dafiyi and Kayoye fell into step just behind her. This was more like it, she thought to herself. The job of protecting wanderers was always more exciting on the move.
About The Author
Isis Wozniakowska is a budding TTRPG writer, though she has been writing fantasy short stories since third grade. Her previous work includes Starfinder Society Scenario #3-21: Frozen Ambitions: Renewal’s Blight and contributions to Pathfinder Secrets of Magic. You can find her on Twitter at @wozenstein, provided you don’t mind seeing a lot of retweets from her favorite video game series.
About Tales of Lost Omens
The Tales of Lost Omens series of web-based flash fiction provides an exciting glimpse into Pathfinder’s Age of Lost Omens setting. Written by some of the most celebrated authors in tie-in gaming fiction and including Paizo’s Pathfinder Tales line of novels and short fiction, the Tales of Lost Omens series promises to explore the characters, deities, history, locations, and organizations of the Pathfinder setting with engaging stories to inspire Game Masters and players alike.
