Her right leg had gone completely numb, and patches of blackness flitted about her field of vision.

“Fly on,” she murmured to the pegasus, though she knew that every stroke of wings brought agony to her beloved equine friend. But they had to get over the forward elf line. Nothing else mattered.

Valiant Sunset rose up over the nearest trees of the Moonwood, and brave Innovindil called down to her people, who she knew to be moving through the trees. “Flee to the south and west,” she begged in a voice growing weaker by the syllable. “Ambush! Trap!”

Sunset beat his wings again then whinnied in pain and jerked to the left. They couldn’t hold. Somewhere in the back of her mind, in a place caught between consciousness and blackness, Innovindil knew the pegasus could not go on.

She thought that the way before them was clear, but suddenly a large tree loomed where before there had been only empty space. It made no sense to her. She didn’t even begin to think that a wizard might be nearby, casting illusions to deceive her. She was only dimly aware as she and Sunset plowed into the tangle of the large tree, and she felt no real pain as she and the horse crashed in headlong, tumbling and twisting in a bone-crunching descent through the branches and to the ground. At one point she caught a curious sight indeed, though it hardly registered: a little, aged gnome with only slight tufts of white hair above his considerable ears and dressed in beautiful shimmering robes of purple and red sat on a branch, legs crossed at the ankles and rocking childlike back and forth, staring at her with an amused expression.

Delirium, the presage to death, she briefly thought. It had to be.

Sunset hit the ground first, in a twisted and broken heap, and Innovindil fell atop him, her face close to his.

She heard his last breath.

She died atop him.

Back on the hillside, the three orcs lost sight of the elf and her flying horse long before the crash, but they had witnessed the javelin strikes, and had cheered each.

“Clan Karuck!” Dnark said, punching his fist into the air, and daring to believe in that moment of elation and victory that the arrival of the half-ogres and their behemoth kin would indeed deliver all the promises of optimistic Toogwik Tuk. The elves and their flying horses had been a bane to the orcs since they had come south, but would any more dare glide over the fields of the Kingdom of Many-Arrows?

“Karuck,” Toogwik Tuk agreed, clapping the chieftain on the shoulder, and pointing below.

There, Grguch stood tall, arms upraised. “Take them!” the half-ogre cried to his people. “To the forest!”

With a howl and hoot that brought goosebumps to the chieftain and shamans, the warriors of Clan Karuck leaped up from their concealment and ran howling toward the forest. From the small copse to the south came the lumbering ogres, each with a throw-stick resting on one shoulder, a javelin set in its Y, angled forward and up, ready to launch.

The ground shook beneath their charge, and the wind itself retreated before the force of their vicious howls.

“Clan Karuck!” Ung-thol agreed with his two companions. “And may all the world tremble.”

Innovindil’s warning cry had been heard, and her people trusted her judgment enough not to question the command. As word filtered through the trees, the Moonwood elves let fly one last arrow and turned to the southwest, sprinting along from cover to cover. Whatever their anger, whatever the temptation of turning back to strike at the orcs in the north, they would not ignore Innovindil.

And true to their beliefs, within a matter of moments, they heard the roars from the east, and realized the trap that their companion had spied. With expert coordination, they tightened their ranks and moved toward the most defensible ground they could find.

Those farthest to the east, a group of a dozen forest folk, were the first to see the charge of Clan Karuck. The enormous half-breeds ran through the trees with wild abandon and frightening speed.

“Hold them,” the leader of that patrol told her fellow elves.

Several others looked at her incredulously, but from the majority came nothing but determination. The charge was too ferocious. The other elves moving tree to tree would be overrun.

The group settled behind an ancient, broken, weatherworn wall of piled stones. Exchanging grim nods, they set their arrows and crouched low.

The first huge orcs came into sight, but the elves held their shots. More and more appeared behind the lead runners, but the elves did not break, and did not let fly. The battle wasn’t about them, they understood, but about their kin fleeing behind them.

The nearest Clan Karuck warriors were barely five strides from the rock wall when the elves popped up as one, lowered their bows in unison and launched a volley of death.

Orcs shrieked and fell, and the snow before the wall was splattered with red. More arrows went out, but more and more orcs came on. And leaping out before those orcs came a small flaming sphere, and the elves knew what it portended. As one, they crouched and covered against the fireball—one that, in truth, did more damage to the front rank of the charging orcs than to the covering elves, except that it interrupted the stream of the elves’ defense.

Clan Karuck fed on the cries of its dying members. Fear was not known among the warriors, who wanted only to die in the service of Gruumsh and Grguch. In a frenzy they defied the rain of arrows and the burning branches falling from the continuing conflagration on high. Some even grabbed their skewered companions and tugged them along as shields.

Behind the wall, the elves abandoned their bows and drew out long, slender swords. In shining mail and with windblown cloaks, most still trailing wisps of smoke and a couple still burning, they met the charge with splendor, strength, and courage.

But Grguch and his minions overran them and slaughtered them, and their weapons gleamed red, not silver, and their cloaks, weighted with blood, would not flap in the breeze.

Grguch led the warriors through the forest a short distance farther, but he knew that he was traveling on elven ground, where defensive lines of archers would sting his warriors from the tops of hills and the boughs of trees, and where powerful spells would explode without warning. He pulled up and raised his open hand, a signal to halt the charge, then he motioned to the south, sending a trio of ogres forward.

“Take their heads,” he ordered to his orcs, and nodded back to the stone wall. “We’ll pike them along the western bank of the river to remind the faerie folk of their mistake.”

Up ahead, some distance already, an ogre cried out in pain. Grguch nodded his understanding, knowing that the elves would regroup quickly—that they probably already had. He looked around at his charges and grinned.

“To the river,” he ordered, confident that his point had been made, to Clan Karuck and to the three emissaries who had brought them forth from their tunnels under the Spine of the World.

He didn’t know about the fourth non-Karuck onlooker, of course, who had played a role in it all. Jack was back in his Jaculi form, wrapped around the limb of a tree, watching it all unfold around him with mounting curiosity. He would have to have a long talk with Hakuun, and soon, he realized, and he felt a bit of joy then that he had followed Clan Karuck out of the Underdark.

He had long forgotten about the wide world and the fun of mischief.

Besides, he’d never liked elves.

Toogwik Tuk, Ung-thol, and Dnark beamed with toothy grins as they made their way back to orc-held lands.

“We have brought forth the fury of Gruumsh,” Dnark said when the trio stood on the western bank of the Surbrin, looking back east at the Moonwood. The sun was low behind them, dusk falling, and the forest took on a singular appearance, as if its tree line was the defensive wall of an immense castle.