The Son Of The Halflings (The Halflings of Athranor 1) E-Book

Alfred Bekker

• Herausgeber: Alfredbooks
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 610

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Alfred BekkerThe Son Of The Halflings(The Halflings of Athranor 1) Arvan Aradis is a human, but he grows up among the halflings and leads a quiet, tranquil life. Until he meets the elf Lirandil and learns of the terrible threat that has risen in the realm of the orcs. The corrupter of fate has awakened! Lirandil wants to forge an alliance against his dark hordes. Arvan and the halflings Borro, Neldo and Zalea join him. At the beginning they are just looking for an adventure. But not for the first time, it is the small race on whom the salvation of the world depends. The following books about the HALBLINGS OF ATHRANOR have also been published: The Son of the Halflings. The Heir of the Halflings. The Liberator of the Halflings Alfred Bekker is a well-known author of fantasy novels, thrillers and books for young people. In addition to his major book successes, he has written numerous novels for suspense series such as Ren Dhark, Jerry Cotton, Cotton Reloaded, Kommissar X, John Sinclair, and Jessica Bannister. He has also published under the names Neal Chadwick, Henry Rohmer, Conny Walden, and Janet Farell.

Leseprobe

The Son Of The Halflings (The Halflings of Athranor 1)

Alfred Bekker

Published by Alfred Bekker, 2022.

Copyright

A CassiopeiaPress book: CASSIOPEIAPRESS, UKSAK E-Books, Alfred Bekker, Alfred Bekker presents, Casssiopeia-XXX-press, Alfredbooks, Uksak Special Edition, Cassiopeiapress Extra Edition, Cassiopeiapress/AlfredBooks and BEKKERpublishing are imprints of

Alfred Bekker

© Roman by Author

© of this issue 2022 by AlfredBekker/CassiopeiaPress, Lengerich/Westphalia

The invented persons have nothing to do with actual living persons. Similarities in names are coincidental and not intended.

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Alfred Bekker | The Son Of The Halflings | (The Halflings of Athranor 1)

Prologue

Arvan

Halfling Speech

Gomlos tree

Dark prospects

Harbingers of war

Orcs bloodlust

Dreams, awakening and death

New findings

The meeting

The moment of truth

Departure

The demon

The forest giant

Air spirits

About the Long Lake

At the court of the king of the forest

The audience

The Battle of the Orc Gate

A new companion

Attack out of the blue

Direction thornland

Bird Rider

The pith of twilight

Whuon the swordsman

In the realm of the elves

Elbe Diplomacy

Aboard the 'Tharnawn

Burning ships

Revenge follows on the heels

Over corpses

The fight against Zarton

Arvan Aradis returns in the novel: | THE HEIR OF THE HALFLINGS

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Alfred Bekker

The Son Of The Halflings

(The Halflings of Athranor 1)

––––––––

Arvan Aradis is a human, but he grows up among the halflings and leads a quiet, tranquil life. Until he meets the elf Lirandil and learns of the terrible threat that has risen in the realm of the orcs. The corrupter of fate has awakened! Lirandil wants to forge an alliance against his dark hordes. Arvan and the halflings Borro, Neldo and Zalea join him. At the beginning they are just looking for an adventure. But not for the first time, it is the small race on whom the salvation of the world depends. The following books about the HALBLINGS OF ATHRANOR have also been published: The Son of the Halflings. The Heir of the Halflings. The Liberator of the Halflings

Alfred Bekker is a well-known author of fantasy novels, thrillers and books for young people. In addition to his major book successes, he has written numerous novels for suspense series such as Ren Dhark, Jerry Cotton, Cotton Reloaded, Kommissar X, John Sinclair, and Jessica Bannister. He has also published under the names Neal Chadwick, Henry Rohmer, Conny Walden, and Janet Farell.

Prologue

Meanwhile, some believed that it was just a legend.

But once the halflings lived in the earth and under the roots of the huge trees that towered in the forests on the eastern shore of Long Lake. Then there was a time when they cut their houses into the roots of the giant trees and hollowed them out with such skill that one could believe they had not grown naturally at all, but had been built by carpenters from the cities.

But one as well as the other had become far too dangerous long ago, for the orcs kept overrunning the grassmark of Rasal in great numbers and advancing into the forests. They killed most of those who got in their way - and the fate of the slain was probably more merciful than that of the few who survived such a raid.

The orcs, at any rate, were the reason the inhabitants of the halfling forest at Long Lake changed their way of life. Smoke had poured from the root houses too often, and the forest floor had been soaked in halfling blood too many times to simply leave everything as it was. The soldiers of the forest king, who ruled from his distant court on the northwestern shore of the lake, hardly protected the halflings from the raids of the orcish bands. Often enough, they were even a danger themselves, for secretly they despised the inhabitants of the halfling forest with their large feet and hands, their small, dainty figure and pointed ears. The fact that hardly any of them grew taller than a ten-year-old human child in no way prevented the warriors of the Forest King from practicing cruelty against the small people, although the soldiers were actually sent out to protect them. But they were probably more concerned with securing the borders than with protecting the halflings from the murderousness of the orcs.

It had been more than an age since the halflings from the forest by the Long Lake had changed their way of life. They had climbed the trees and soon became so adept at climbing that hardly anyone could follow them. If they first lived in branch hollows, they eventually built entire villages on the forks of the giant trees, which nowhere reached so far into the sky as in this forest.

The fate of the halflings was hard.

However, it was even harder not to be a halfling, but only to live among them ...

Arvan

Stay here, you stupid tree sheep!

Arvan tried to prevent the many-footed creature, overgrown with wool, from entering the outer branches with a stern thought. Even in the giant trees of the forests around Long Lake, these branches were often so thin that they could not support even tree sheep. Especially not tree sheep that were as fat as this specimen.

In addition, Arvan had to keep the herd together. That was the task assigned to him by the halfling tribe he lived with - also because he didn't seem to have any real talent for other things.

Arvan was seventeen years old. He had small human feet, but everything else about him was bigger and stronger than the halflings. He was not a skilled climber, his human body was simply not suited for that. However, he was also no good as an iron bender and blacksmith, because in the low caves, which were operated by the halfling tribes for the smelting of metals and which had to be left quickly in case of danger, he only fit when he slid around on his knees.

So his foster father Gomlo, tree master of the tribe of Brado the Fugitive, had decided that Arvan should tend the tree sheep. "These creatures are like you, Arvan," he had said. "They are sluggish of mind and movement, which comes to the same thing with most creatures. If you're reasonably observant, you can keep the flock together without having to climb too much, and that in turn means you won't crash as often as before."

That had been three years ago - and contrary to expectations, Arvan had proven talented, at least for this simple task. The many-legged tree sheep obeyed him. The size of these creatures varied between a large halfling's foot and a wild boar, depending on diet and breeding. With their clasping claws they found a hold on any tree bark, and they ate mosses, beetles, and caterpillars, sometimes slurping the resin.

Day after day, Arvan sat for hours on one of the giant trees that were reserved for the tree sheep, because the halflings from the tribe of Brado the Fugitive did not want them on their living trees, because they left their excrements everywhere. For a long time, these changed the resin of the giant trees, from which the halflings had been extracting the tree sap for a long time, a magical essence whose recipe was a secret of their people.

The trees of the tree sheep flocks were therefore at a safe distance from the residential trees of the halflings.

Arvan mostly just sat there, indulging his thoughts and dreaming of one day moving out into the big wide world and seeing all the things he had only heard about in stories. The wonders of Carabor, the largest city in the world with its ten thousand ships, for example. Or Aladar, the capital of the mighty kingdom of Beiderland, where there were supposedly huge buildings with golden domes whose splendor and brilliance dazzled the eyes. Or the shores of the Far Elven Kingdom, a land full of magic, but also wisdom, which was so isolated that hardly any halfling or human had ever reached it.

One day, Arvan thought, I will see all this with my own eyes.

In the end, though, he wasn't sure if it wasn't better to just take some more of the halflings' magical tree sap, sit on a herd tree, and just dream about these things. That was certainly less dangerous than making such trips himself - especially if you were as clumsy as Arvan.

Sometimes, when his head was completely empty from thinking so much, he passed the time by letting climbing plants knot themselves together more or less artfully. These also obeyed his thoughts when he tuned in to them. The only danger was that he sometimes did not pay enough attention to the tree sheep.

But at the last moment he had still been able to prevent a few escapees from straying too far from the herd by a stout-hearted thought.

Re-gathering a scattered herd of more than a thousand tree sheep was a test of patience. Arvan had already experienced this - when he had gotten up too late in the morning and the tree sheep, which slept through the night in the higher areas of the respective herd tree, had already awakened before the shepherd arrived. Half-shepherds then usually solved the problem by scrambling after the animals at a speed that was almost unbelievable for humans, and then rounding them up again. The tree sheep obeyed every intense thought, but most shepherds had to get closer than twenty paces to the animals to do so, and many also depended on shouting their commands at the same time, otherwise they were not strong enough. Apart from that, there were also very stubborn tree sheep now and then. Thought pigeons they were called, and every tree sheep farmer slaughtered them first.

In the herds that Arvan tended, however, there didn't seem to be a single Thought Dove. The shaggy creatures listened to him even when he stayed on the main branch fork, while some of them warped up to the treetop.

However, that was also Arvan's luck. Because to climb fast enough behind them would have been impossible for him.

Arvan had been focused on tying an elaborate knot of three climbing plants dangling from one of the higher branches. He had already caused by his patient influence that they hung at all in this unnatural regularity from the branch.

That's when he had noticed that one of the tree sheep, which had ventured dangerously far into the outer branches earlier, was making another attempt in that direction.

Come back here, you stupid moss lint!, he sent another thought command, and normally the tree sheep would have reacted immediately to this very energetic thought.

But just at that moment, something hissed through the air and an arrow pierced the tree sheep. It emitted a piercing scream, almost reminiscent of the voice of a halfling child, and fell into the depths, where it hit the soft forest floor dully.

A veritable hail of arrows followed. The shooters had to shoot out of the undergrowth on the ground. Four or five tree sheep, which had been searching the bark for beetles and moss lichen on low-lying secondary branches, were hit within moments. They cried out pitifully and also plummeted. Howls of triumph could be heard from the dense undergrowth.

"Up," shouted Arvan, who immediately jumped up. Normally, he didn't need to speak a thought or even shout for the tree sheep to heed it. But in such a predicament, one could not be clear enough.

The tree sheep were screaming along the branches. Up," Arvan repeated in his mind. You had to give tree sheep a direction, otherwise they were completely disoriented and even fell off the branch in their panic because they forgot to hold on tightly enough with their claws.

There was always some risk in letting the tree sheep search the bark in the lower parts of the herd tree. But the best tidbits were often found there, and eating the mosses that grew there in the fine bark crevices improved the quality of the wool. After all, poaching soldiers were not necessarily to be expected in the area.

Normally, all the shepherds would have been warned beforehand. This time, however, that had not happened.

More arrows were shot from the ground. The cries of the animals resounded through the forest and were answered by tree sheep on other, more distant herd trees, where the animals also panicked.

Arvan looked into the depths and saw soldiers bursting out of the undergrowth, among them many archers. They wore helmets and armor. The captain, however, wore no armor, but a chain mail and over it a white outer robe, on which were embroidered tree, crown and sword - the coat of arms of the forest king Haraban.

Get out of here, you stupid sheep! Arvan thought - and already the first shots missed their targets, because the tree sheep fled high into the branches. It was not difficult for the animals to run vertically up the main trunk, and they did this with a speed that even a good human runner could hardly achieve on a level course.

One of the arrows flew so close to Arvan's head that he instinctively dodged to the side. It had rained a lot lately. It was therefore slippery on the trees. Arvan had therefore been especially careful and even more reluctant to climb. How many times had he fallen in the past, desperate to emulate his halfling peers? Some thought it was a miracle that he was still alive and hadn't broken his neck long ago.

The soldiers paid no further attention to him, but they did not take him into consideration either. For them he was only a forest dweller and therefore not worth more than a tree sheep. Maybe even less, because you could eat them after all.

Arvan made a careless movement when another arrow almost hit him and stuck trembling in the main trunk nearby. This time he slipped, and down he went - he fell into the depths.

A network of climbing plants caught it. Their green strands were stretched to the utmost, bending the thin branches on which they hung far downward. The fall was thus cushioned. About a man's length high, Arvan now hung above the forest floor like a helpless hunting prey in a catch net.

A safety net that he himself had woven in moments of boredom.

His heart was beating up to his neck. After all - the climbing plants had followed his thoughts even better than many a stubborn tree sheep. But that was probably due to the fact that plant creatures generally offered less resistance to a foreign thought.

"Hey, who do we have here," a raspy voice called out.

"A giant halfling," replied another. They were speaking Relinga, the language used by most human peoples, and therefore had long ago become the lingua franca throughout Athranor. And since the soldiers of the Forest King Haraban were recruited from all over the lands, it was also the language of his army. Even the halflings could understand it, and some older halflings were already worried that their own language might be replaced by it at some point.

Arvan turned his head and saw that the forest floor was littered with killed tree sheep. The arrows of the forest king's mercenaries had taken at least a dozen of them out of the branches. Some had survived the arrow and fall, but were now being slaughtered in turn.

But the others are saved, Arvan thought with relief. A dozen lost, but a thousand and a half saved. Gomlo will be pleased with me.

One of the mercenaries cut the vines on which Arvan was hanging. He fell to the ground.

"In addition to roasted tree sheep, stewed halfling tongue - how do we like that!" exclaimed one of the fellows, leaning on his longbow. "Our menu is getting even richer than I dared hope."

The others laughed.

"Halflings are not animals, but citizens of Haraban's realm," interjected another. "And we're supposed to protect them, not eat them!"

The laughter became even louder and rougher.

One of them nudged Arvan with the spear shaft. He freed himself from the vines. "He's got small feet," said one guy, his full beard spilling out from under his helmet strap.

A ring had quickly formed around Arvan. The soldiers stared at him. Arvan wore a doublet of tree sheep's wool, held together in the middle by a wide belt. A long knife hung from his belt in an embroidered leather sheath. His halfling mother Brongelle had lovingly worked in the embroidery - as fine as it was possible only for the skilled hands of the small people. Arvan's trousers were made of tree sheepskin and ended just above his ankles. He was barefoot - and it didn't take a halfling for comparison to realize that his feet were not even half the size one would have expected from an inhabitant of these woods. Moreover, the boy even stood eye-to-eye with some of the mercenaries.

"You're not a halfling," one of the mercenaries said, puzzled.

"I belong to the tribe whose forefather is Brado the Fugitive," Arvan said in Relinga.

"He seems to me to be a curse of the tree demons made flesh," gasped another soldier.

Arvan pointed to the killed tree sheep. "You have violated other people's property. No one gave you permission to take tree sheep from the flock!"

"A big mouth and little sense," was the comment of the mercenary with the full beard. "And apparently too stupid even to climb!"

One of the other men put his hand around the hilt of his sword and drew the blade. "Let's kill him. Otherwise we'll be in trouble."

Then the captain intervened, who until then had been more interested in breaking the stubby horns, which were only about the size of a thumb, out of the foreheads of the dead tree sheep. They were made of a horny material and were either gray or black. The latter were very rare and were considered lucky charms and, in powdered form, medicinal. One could fetch good prices with them.

In the unshorn state, these horns were not visible in the sheep.

At least one of the horns was black and therefore valuable. Tree sheep blood stained the captain's overgarment as he held his trophy up to the light that fell through one of the few gaps in the branches of the giant trees to the forest floor. He laughed with satisfaction. "Let's see if the scar I got from the last campaign will stop hurting when I carry this." Then he turned to Arvan. "Who are you?"

"My name is Arvan."

"You look like a human, but you live with the halflings?"

"I guard the flock of Gomlo, the tree master of the tribe of Brado the Fugitive."

"Then he owns the flock and not you?"

"I am his son, and what you are doing here is against both the laws of the Halfling Forest and those of Haraban's realm."

"If he's the son of a halfling, I don't want to see the woman who produced that freak," the guy with the full beard shouted, and from at least a dozen hoarse throats there was dirty laughter to go with it.

The captain raised his hand. His face remained unmoved. He did not seem to share the humor of his men.

"Let's kill him," he then said. "Otherwise, there will only be unpleasant questions. If we're already being sent to this forest abandoned by the gods without being properly cared for, I don't want to be disturbed by halfling matters while we're eating, too!"

Then the guy with the full beard also drew his sword. He took it in both hands and stepped towards Arvan.

Then the blade whirled through the air.

Arvan drew his long knife, which was single-edged and very sturdy in halfling fashion, but not a weapon to defend himself against a swordsman. It served more as a tool, less for fighting. He parried the first blow with some effort. He just managed to knock the mercenary's sword aside and staggered back a step. His feet got caught in the remains of the vegetation that had kept him from hitting the forest floor. He stumbled and fell backwards onto the ground.

The bearded mercenary was already upon him and lunged for the killing blow, letting out a barbaric battle cry.

But the sound turned into a shrieking death cry.

A throwing axe penetrated the mercenary's forehead with tremendous force and split his skull. It had been hurled with such enormous force that it effortlessly penetrated the leather helmet - blood and brains poured out from under the nose guard. Motionless, mouth open and eyes frozen, the mercenary stood there for a moment, sword still raised to strike. Before he collapsed on top of Arvan, the latter turned on his axis to the left and was on his feet again in the next instant.

He turned around. A warrior with an animal-like mouth rushed out of the bushes. He was taller and stronger than the tallest and strongest of the mercenaries. In his left hand he held an enormous scythe sword.

An orc!, Arvan was struck by it. He must have hurled the throwing axe.

Four tusks protruded from the barbarian creature's mouth, which was open to a guttural scream. The attacker's clothes and skin were the color of mud, and his armor was apparently the carapace of a larger, beetle-like animal that Arvan did not know. The orc twirled his scythe sword and immediately knocked the head off the shoulders of one of the surprised mercenaries with the first blow.

The next one cut the captain's body in half above the waist.

Then the orc was only a few steps away from Arvan and roared to strike again. At the same time, more orcs emerged from the undergrowth everywhere and engaged the forest king's mercenaries in combat. Heads rolled, sword arms were severed, screams rang out.

The mercenary troop that had attacked the tree sheep consisted for the most part of archers, who were obviously neither particularly well equipped nor trained for sword fighting. The fight had hardly begun before almost half of them lay dead, mutilated or otherwise badly injured in their blood. Most of them had not even had the chance to use their longbows.

Arvan dodged the orc who had saved his life by throwing his axe and ducked under the blow of his scythe sword in a flash. The powerful blow went into the void. The orc uttered a surprised sound. He brought the sword around again, but the arrow of a longbow struck him in the eye.

The orc stumbled, roared loudly and clutched the arrow with one of his paws to pull it out of his skull.

Out of the corner of his eye, Arvan saw an orcish throwing knife rip open the archer's throat before he could insert another arrow. Blood spurted and the man sank to the ground, letting out a gasping sound.

The orc with the arrow in his skull had been seized with pure rage. In his clumsy attempt to pull out the arrow, the wooden shaft had broken off. He threw the upper end of the arrow away, grabbed his scythe sword with both hands, and charged forward, straight at Arvan.

The first blow was so hard that it knocked the long knife out of Arvan's hand. It flew through the air in a high arc and landed somewhere in the bushes of the undergrowth. The roar - half cry of pain and half howl of rage - was deafening. The ashy, foul-smelling stench that poured from the orc's mouth took Arvan's breath away.

He narrowly dodged a second blow - but probably only because the orc was disabled by the arrow hit in his eye. The scythe blade cut through one of the tree sheep lying on the ground, splitting it in half and digging into the soft forest floor for quite a bit more.

Arvan used the time it took the orc to tear it out again. Two steps and he was at the bearded mercenary's corpse. He took the sword and ripped the orcish throwing axe out of his skull.

Without thinking twice, Arvan hurled the axe at his opponent, who in the meantime had freed his weapon from the earth and the animal carcass.

He had put all the strength in Arvan's arms into this throw - well aware that it would hardly be enough to stop the orc.

But he had learned to throw and sling from an early age with the halflings. "Far, but inaccurate," had always been the verdict. "He'd better not go hunting if you want to be sure he won't catch your own companions."

Arvan remembered this assessment of his halfling teachers very clearly. But at that moment, it didn't matter. It was only a matter of saving bare life, no matter how.

The axe drove right into the orc's torn mouth. One of the tusks broke off. The warrior stopped moving and gasped. His roar had died away. Then he spat blood.

Arvan mustered all his courage, grasping the slain mercenary's sword with both hands. It was heavy as hell - much heavier than he had imagined. As far as swords were concerned, he really only knew the light halfling rapiers. The mercenary's blade, on the other hand, seemed almost monstrous.

He struck the orc with it. The orc parried the blow with a slight sideways movement of his blade. The rattling sound that came from his chest and that he choked past the throwing axe turned into a bark that was probably meant to be laughter. He snatched the throwing axe, whose edge was covered with bloody slime, from his mouth and hurled it back at Arvan. But Arvan was able to dodge it.

Arvan attacked the orc again with his sword.

Steel met steel, but Arvan could withstand the tremendous force of his opponent's blows only for a moment, then he was thrown to the ground.

The orc took another step forward and in the next moment was standing exactly where the mercenaries had cut Arvan from the vines. They were still hanging down to head height.

But now they started to move. Catch him! Arvan thought, and the tendrils wrapped around the orc's neck. Before he knew it, he was being pulled up and lost his footing. He kicked like a hanged man.

Then his neck snapped, his body went limp, and the scythe blade escaped his powerless paw.

Halfling Speech

None of the mercenaries were still alive, and some of the orcs were already tearing raw, bloody pieces of meat from the dead tree sheep with their bare paws, which they greedily devoured. But then their attention was drawn to their hanged comrade, and they paused in their activities. Some gasped in amazement. Others exchanged a few words in the language of their people.

Arvan swallowed. Sweat had formed under his hands, which he clasped desperately around the hilt of the mercenary sword.

One of the orcs, who had cracked a tree sheep skull with his tusks and sucked the brains out, smacking and enjoying, rose and took wide steps toward Arvan.

Is there still a plant somewhere that can help me and listens to me?" he pondered. But he had such weak knees that he was hardly able to grasp a thought that would have been anywhere near strong enough to impress even a moss lichen.

Arvan backed away fearfully while the orc bawled a few words in his language, which was composed of many cracks and hisses formed deep in his throat.

Some of his fellow soldiers fell in with a roar and brandished their weapons.

Arvan's gaze slid over their angry animal-like faces. Obviously, they felt their warrior pride hurt because one of their own was dangling like a hanged man from a gallows of vines.

The orc who had approached Arvan narrowed his eyes. Arvan noticed that his tusk was broken off at the bottom left. He extended his paw and pointed at Arvan. "You ... demon," he shouted - this time not in Orcish, but in a barbaric-sounding relinga.

Then followed a scream, so terrible and loud as Arvan had never heard it from another being. Even the trumpeting of the war elephants used by Haraban's mercenaries seemed like a restrained whisper in comparison. Arvan's sweaty hands clenched around the hilt of his sword. But it was quite clear to him that this weapon could hardly save him.

None of the tendrils he could influence were nearby, let alone a whole network whose individual plants he had accustomed and made docile to his mind in long, concentrated thought influence. They all hung down far above him from the higher branches. That the tendrils, which had strangled the other orc, hung down far enough at all, was solely due to the fact that Arvan had pulled them down with him quite a bit when he fell from the main fork and had stretched them to the utmost.

The thoughts just raced through his head. He thought of escape. But where to? Orcs were good and persistent runners. Trying to escape from them by running away from them was quite hopeless, even for a forest dweller.

So since that was ruled out, there was really only one other option.

Upwards!

He had been told all his life what a lousy climber he was - but perhaps he had learned at least enough from the halflings that he could escape an orc that way. The only problem was that the main trunk of his herd tree was at least fifty paces away. To get there, he would also have had to run past several orc warriors who were standing there waiting.

Once again, the orc with the broken tooth let out a piercing scream. This time, however, it was probably a call directed at his companions. Arvan even wondered if it was words he had heard. One of the orc's paws clutched the hilt of the scythe sword in his belt, the other stretched out as if to catch something.

Sure enough, one of the other warriors threw him a spear, and the orc, looming menacingly over Arvan, caught it. Then he stepped under the hanged companion and cut the plant strands with the tip of the spear. The body of the dead man hit the ground heavily. Thereupon the orc raised the spear and drummed with the other paw on the breastplate with such force that every other creature would have lost its breath. It sounded like a dull accompanying drumbeat to his final roar. The others joined in his roar.

Then the orc took the dead companion's weapons and whatever else he thought was valuable. Among them was a mud-stained bone amulet, which the dead man had worn under his clothes and which perhaps should have brought him luck. The amulet was kept by the orc who had cut the body loose from the vines. The weapons he threw especially loudly roaring comrades in arms. The certainty with which they caught them made Arvan shiver. Some of the throws with which the orc distributed the weapons to his warriors were so powerful that they would probably have injured or even killed another, less strong and resistant creature.

Then the orc with the broken tooth turned back to Arvan. "No man cries out for himself," he growled in barely intelligible Relinga. He pointed to the body of his dead companion and glared at Arvan. "Scream with him - demon!"

He uttered a battle cry, which the other orcs joined in - and then hurled the spear at Arvan.

It was a massive, powerful throw, but Arvan managed to dodge it. The spear with its forearm-length, razor-sharp tip of gray orc steel chased past him with a hair's breadth and stuck in a tree.

Howls of rage followed, and again everyone joined in. But the orc who had just missed Arvan snatched his throwing dagger from his belt and let it follow the spear. The blade grazed Arvan's jerkin at the shoulder, but missed, as the woodsman again dodged at the last moment.

Arvan remembered the words of his foster father Gomlo. "Dodging is the strongest weapon of the little ones! You're not quite as small as we are, but you're not big enough that you shouldn't practice this art!"

And Arvan had practiced it. At least as well as he could, even if the result was rather bumbling according to the halflings' judgment. The forest was full of dangerous creatures that were bigger, faster, and stronger than any halfling or human. Being able to dodge quickly was all too often the difference between life and death - for example, when the death flowers suddenly stretched forward with their long necks and shot their poison from the calyxes, which could still be deadly even at a distance of ten halfling steps.

The warrior horde fired at the orc with the missing tusk. The barbarian creatures shouted and roared and brandished their weapons. They cared far less for the flesh of the tree sheep than for the outcome of the spectacle that unexpectedly presented itself to them. A weak forest dweller had dared to stand against one of their own and aroused his wrath. This promised a bloody spectacle. Arvan had heard that orcs sometimes played foul games with those who fell into their hands, tormenting them as cat trees did with their prey.

The orc had two more spears given to him. He aimed very accurately. The tip of the spear scratched Arvan's upper arm. He felt the pain immediately and could only hope that the tip was not poisoned. He was able to dodge the second spear better. Both weapons stuck trembling in the wood of the tree, in which the first spear was already.

Arvan heard a beeping sound - so shrill and high-pitched that human ears could barely hear it.

The orcs paid no attention. They fired at Arvan's opponent, who took up his sword to slaughter Arvan in hand-to-hand combat. That he had not succeeded with three spear throws, the orc must undoubtedly feel as a disgrace.

He grasped his scythe sword with both hands and approached Arvan. It could only be moments before he went on the attack. The orc could not afford to let Arvan escape again. In that case, he would have become the laughing stock of his companions. Good thing, it went through Arvan's mind. If he has to prove himself, hopefully at least no one else from the horde will help him.

It was difficult enough to defend oneself against an orc, but to escape the attack of a whole horde was as good as impossible. That Arvan was still alive at all was undoubtedly a miracle.

The gods of the forest must be kind to me, he thought. They had often been. They had punished him often enough, but even more often they had been on his side and had always let him recover after heavy falls and injuries, which he, as the slowest and most clumsy among the forest dwellers of his tribe, had to suffer. They will also give me the strength to survive this terrible moment alive, he tried to tell himself confidently.

The orc made a lunge.

The horde held its breath. The roar died away and gave way to a tense silence.

Arvan was just able to parry the first blow of his orc opponent. Only with extreme effort did he manage to prevent the sword from being knocked out of his hands. He was only able to dodge a second blow. He ducked in time, so that the blade narrowly skimmed over him.

Before the orc could yank the sword back and slice Arvan's upper arm and ribcage with it, something hit him in the head. It was a herd tree chestnut - the most popular ammunition for the extremely effective slingshots used in the halfling forest to keep unwelcome intruders away.

Shortly after each other, more of these projectiles hit the orc. They burst on his skull and released a corrosive gas with a hiss. One of the chestnuts went straight into the orc's mouth. He flailed his arms and could barely see.

Thank you, friends, wherever you may have been hiding, Arvan thought. It was only a brief moment that he had gained from the chestnut slingshot fire, but it may have saved his life.

He ran off. The orc with the broken tooth was not able to follow him fast enough at the moment. And the other orcs were too stunned to act immediately. They scanned the surroundings with their gazes to find out where the halfling culprits were sitting, who had used their slingshots from concealment.

Arvan ran to the tree in which the spears were stuck. It was not a herd tree, but one of the smaller growths in the halfling forest. Barely fifty men would probably have been enough to encompass it, and it also grew only to a height that did not even reach the main fork of the herd and residential trees. The wood was black as night, but the bark had large pores and many bumps, so that it was easy to get a grip on it.

Arvan climbed up the main trunk. Any halfling would have laughed at his clumsy movements and also at the fact that he often only found a foothold on the bark or in the small depressions that existed on the trunk at the second attempt.

But no human, and certainly no orc, could have even come close to imitating him. He sprang up the trunk. One of the other orcs had awakened from his torpor and reached the tree with a few long strides. He jumped up to catch Arvan.

Arvan felt a paw at his foot. The orc deflected one of the slingshot projectiles with a casual movement of the other paw. The herd tree chestnut burst about ten paces away, where it had crashed into another tree.

At that moment it was revealed where the black tree got its name.

Demon Tree.

Exactly between the three places where the spearheads had driven into the bark and penetrated it, the tree literally tore apart. The bark cracked open. Behind it, there seemed to be hardly any wood left. A dark cavity gaped open, and dozens of bat-like creatures sprang from it. They had spikes the size of daggers on their heads, which they used in their attacking flight like war galleys use their ramming spurs.

Tree demons they called the halflings. One did well to leave them alone, then they remained peaceful.

But the orcs had disregarded that.

The black trees - too small to ever reach the light in this particular forest of giant trees - were often hollowed out by forest demons. At some point, they would rot and collapse.

Only a fool would throw a spear into a black tree, thought Arvan, watching as a whole swarm of winged demons immediately attacked the orcs. A dark stream of winged ones poured out from inside the tree. The first orcs were hit by the dagger-like horns as hard as any other weapon could. Again and again the tree demons attacked, plunging their horns into the orcs' bodies and making shrill sounds.

They were the sounds that Arvan had heard quietly before. Therefore, he was not completely surprised by what happened.

The orcs panicked. They had hardly any defense against the tree demons, who were always thrusting down with their horned daggers. Their large, clumsy weapons were hardly suitable to defend themselves against such an opponent. The sword strokes of the sickle blades mostly came to nothing. Only now and then did one of the orcs manage to kill a forest demon by slicing it with his blade. But then he was attacked by several tree demons at once.

Within a few moments, the spook was over. The orcs, who were usually not afraid of any opponent and were the toughest warriors of all Athranor, took flight, if they were still able to do so. Several of them lay dead on the ground. In most cases, dozens of horned daggers had pierced their bodies, and even a resilient orc could not withstand that. If the blow was violent enough, a poison also came out of the tip of the horn dagger, and that led to death within a few moments.

The corpses of the orcs lay sprawled on the forest floor, littered with those forest demons whose horned daggers were still stuck in the corpses and who stomped around with their winged arms and legs in an effort to pull the horned daggers out of the orc flesh and especially out of the thick skin above. Some of the tree demons had attacked their victims with such force that their horned daggers had even penetrated the armor.

The screams of the fleeing orcs could be heard for quite a while. Some of the tree demons chased them deep into the forest.

Arvan took a deep breath. He was hanging from the tree trunk at a height of three man-lengths, and had found a foothold on a small stunted branch and several protrusions and crevices in the rough bark. The muscles in Arvan's hands and toes were strongly developed, a result of frequent halfling-style climbing. It had taken him a long time to be able to hold himself up with his fingertips and his comparatively small toes alone.

Three halflings emerged from the undergrowth. With the use of their slingshots, they had made sure that Arvan had made it to the black tree at all.

"Arvan," called one of the halflings. He was slender and had dark curls from which his pointed ears stood out. Light-footed and almost silent, he scampered across the forest floor, past slain Haraban mercenaries and orcs from whose bodies the tree demons were still laboriously extricating themselves.

He had nothing to fear from them, for the winged creatures knew that he was not one of those who had incurred their wrath.

Halflings learned from an early age how to avoid this. One was never allowed to hurt a black tree with a weapon or in any other way. However, such trees were excellent for spending the night in their forked branches if you were on a long journey, because most night hunters avoided them, knowing that the wrath of the tree demons could be deadly.

The bats that had already freed their horned daggers from the orc corpses did not return to the black tree that Arvan had climbed. The tree demon colony would reunite somewhere in the depths of the forest with the help of their shrill calls and search for another black tree that was suitable for them. To this one, none of the creatures would ever return. Their peace had been disturbed in this tree, and thus it was a place they avoided in the future.

Apart from that, the tree had already been hollowed out to a large extent anyway, and they had drained it of all but a small amount of its life force.

"Is everything all right, Arvan?" the curly-headed halfling asked.

"I'm still alive, Neldo," was the reply. "But you see that I am in slight trouble?"

"Why is that?" asked Neldo, fastening his sling behind his belt, which also had a long knife and several small pouches on it. One of the pouches had its closing flap open, but the pouch itself was obviously empty. There had probably been Neldo's supply of herd tree chestnuts, which he had shot in its entirety.

Similar to Arvan, he wore a doublet made of tree sheep's wool, into which traditional patterns of halfling weaving were worked.

"Well come on down! What are you waiting for, you daring orc slayer!" Neldo grinned. "After all, if someone happened to pass by here now, they might almost think you alone were responsible for this carnage."

"Very funny," exclaimed Arvan.

He felt quite tense and looked anxiously into the depths.

"Jump," the second halfling, who had come out of the bushes, spoke up. His face was much rounder and his physique broader and stronger than Neldo's was. He also had freckles on his face, and his hair had a distinct red tinge. But of course, compared to Arvan's human-plump figure, he was still of rather delicate stature.

"It's enough that you make fun of me otherwise, Borro," Arvan shouted back, and the growing exasperation was evident in his face.

Borro shrugged and crossed his arms in front of his chest. "I'm not making fun of you," he asserted. "I'm just telling you what I would do next."

"We are your friends, after all," added the third in the group in a clearly higher voice. While Neldo and Borro had walked directly towards the black tree Arvan was still hanging from, the long-haired halfling girl had first looked around.

Arvan, of course, recognized her immediately.

Zalea - by far the most beautiful halfling girl of Gomlo's residential tree and probably even in the entire tribe of Brado the Fugitive. Her silky hair fell long over her shoulders, and her pointed ears stood out boldly. Her figure was so graceful that even the large halfling feet were hardly noticeable.

"The tree is completely rotten from the inside, and the tree demons have drained it of almost all life force," Arvan explained in an anxious tone. "If I move ..."

At that moment, the bark crumbled under Arvan's fingers, and the stunted branch he grasped with his other hand broke.

"Jump," Zalea and Borro called out at the same time, but Zalea in Relinga, which was now very common among younger halflings even in everyday life, and Borro in the language of the halflings of Long Lake, which he always fell into when something really horrified him.

The whole tree started to move and lost the last bit of its stability. A groaning and cracking could be heard as the rotten wood broke.

The tree came crashing down, taking a few other smaller trees with it. The three halflings had more than enough time to escape the doom, and Arvan also jumped, albeit at the last moment.

Anything was better than being buried under a giant tree. Even though black trees in the semi-blind forest were rather tiny, whoever got under one was pressed knee-deep into the earth.

The black tree cut a swath through the undergrowth. The branches, long since brittle from the forest demons' grub, lashed down, slaying here and there another tree demon who had been unable to free his horned dagger from a dead orc in time.

Arvan came to rest on the ground close to the main trunk.

Everything went well!, he thought - but the very next moment he suspected that this could not be quite true, because he felt a hellish pain in his side.

He tried to pull himself up - the pain became more intense. He also noticed that he was stuck on something. Leaning on his upper arms, he looked down at himself. A parrying dagger was stuck in his body. One of the slain mercenaries, lying backwards on the ground, had clutched it tightly while still dead, and Arvan had jumped right into it.

"Oh no," he heard Neldo's voice, who had just climbed over the massive trunk of the black tree. Within moments he was with Arvan.

Borro and Zalea, who had dodged the falling tree in the other direction, approached from there.

Arvan straightened up. His doublet was already soaked in blood.

"Oh, you've survived quite a few other things," Borro expressed his usual confidence. However, there was clear horror on the faces of Neldo and Zalea. And since Borro had also turned pale, Arvan assumed that he had only made this remark to cover up how bad things really were.

Arvan, however, remained calm. The forest gods had apparently bestowed upon him an incredible amount of luck and an indescribable amount of bad luck. He had no other explanation for how it could be that he had just escaped a whole troop of high-handedly marauding Haraban mercenaries and a horde of bloodthirsty orcish hussals, only to jump into the dagger of a dead man.

"We need to get you to the residential tree," Zalea said anxiously. "But first and foremost, we need to make sure the bleeding stops."

"You forest gods, I can't stand the sight of blood," Borro moaned.

"Then find some pointless ones," Zalea drove at him. "Quick!"

Borro looked puzzled. His eyes had grown wide while he had been staring at Arvan's wound. But now he made up his mind. The senseless one - that was the name of a plant whose splendid flowers bloomed senselessly in the shade of tall trees. In the ancient medicine of the elven healers it was an important medicinal plant, and also the halflings used it for a long time against almost all possible ailments and in almost every conceivable preparation.

"Be gone already," said the pale Borro, and again climbed over the trunk of the black tree with that skill and swiftness which halflings were justly said to possess.

Zalea turned to Neldo, "We need some healing clay, too."

"You'll find plenty of them around here," Neldo knew. He looked down at Arvan, who lay there with his face contorted in pain and his eyes closed. "Am I glad I'm a halfling," he commented.

"Yes, we do better in the forest than the humans," Zalea agreed with him. "But now go on."

Neldo hesitated for a moment, then ran away. His large halfling feet carried him springily and seemingly effortlessly over the uneven forest floor.

Zalea rose. "I'll just leave you alone for a moment," she said, "I won't be long."

Arvan's response was a groan.

A little later, Zalea found what she was looking for. Under a tree that would have been considered large in other forests, but in this one was merely undergrowth, grew a shrub whose leaves were so wide that even the thickest halfling belly could have hidden behind them.

Zalea tore off a few of these leaves while muttering a formula the halflings used to ask forgiveness from the forest gods when they mistreated the creatures those gods had made in their image. This saved one from being struck by baleful cursing powers that could lurk beneath any root in the forests of Long Lake.

She returned to Arvan with the leaves and said, "Now it's going to hurt."

"It ... can't ... get any worse," Arvan groaned.

"I'm going to pull out your dagger," Zalea announced. "I hope the others will be right back."

"Well ..."

Zalea grasped the now bloody hilt of the parrying dagger and pulled it out of Arvan's side with surprising force. Arvan clenched his teeth and his face contorted even more. Zalea immediately pressed the leaves she had picked onto the wound.

Arvan smiled wanly. "One would think that at some point you had reached the distant Elven realm and studied the writings of the healers there."

"It's halfling medicine my mother taught me," she explained, "now don't talk so much."

Neldo and Borro returned almost simultaneously. Borro had gathered plenty of the senseless flowers, and Zalea instructed him to grind them. Meanwhile, she loosened Arvan's bandage of leaves and applied the healing earth before sprinkling the crushed petals of the senseless over them. She untied the cord that had previously gathered her knee-length robe and tied it around Arvan's body so that the leaf bandage would hold.

"Now, back to the living tree," she said.

Neldo and Borro helped Arvan up.

"I was very lucky that you happened to pass by here," groaned the wounded man.

"That wasn't luck," Neldo objected, "We came to see you on the herd tree."

"It was pretty brave of you to attack the orcs with the slingshots."

"I don't think anyone would have thought you would either," Borro said.

"What?" asked Arvan.

"Well, to fight like that. With good luck, or bad luck, you left a real battlefield. That's something someone should try to imitate."

"In any case, we're all going to have to be very careful in the near future," Zalea feared, "If the orc raids start again now ..."

"Maybe some of them got away," Borro mused aloud. "If they tell the others what a disaster they've been through here, word might get around."

"It would only lead to more orcs invading our forest because they want to avenge the disgrace of their predecessors," Neldo said with little optimism.

"That being said, I don't think the tree demons spared any of them," Zalea opined, "None of these abominations will ever return to the lands of the orcs."

Not two steps far, Borro and Neldo had supported their injured friend, when Arvan suddenly shouted, "I have to get to the herd tree!"

"Such nonsense," Zalea countered.

"It will take days to collect all the tree sheep again!"

"So what," she countered, "Let someone else take care of that. After all, you are not the only shepherd of the tribe."

"No, but the best," Borro stated. Arvan looked at him in surprise, and Borro reinforced his statement by adding, "True enough. There's no one those stubborn critters listen to as well as you."

"At least one thing I'm not a sucker at," Arvan muttered.

Borro raised his eyebrows, which were rather bushy and a little upward, as red as his head hair. His pointed halfling ears tucked a little closer to his head as he did so. "Who said you were a jerk?"

"All of them. And it's true, isn't it?"

"You may be a little more unlucky than others at times, I admit," Borro contradicted him. "But you can't be blamed for your small feet, which aren't suited for climbing, any more than you can be blamed for your overlong arms or your slow way of moving ..."

"Borro," Neldo intervened.

"It's okay, I just wanted to say ..."

"Maybe you won't yak so much and just help take Arvan to Gomlo's living tree," Zalea suggested.

Borro listened to her most of the time without any arguments, because secretly the red-haired halfling was a little bit in love with her, even if he would never have admitted it.

The way back was tedious and long, especially since they had to cover it on the forest floor and not by moving from tree to tree. The branches of the giant trees often jutted so far into each other that a good climber could move many miles through the forest without ever touching the ground. Tree sheep, on the other hand, were foolish enough to occasionally venture into the outer branches of their herd tree, but they lacked the courage to leap over to the branch of the neighboring tree, let alone be capable of grabbing hold of a vine and swinging to the next tree. So they usually stayed on their herd tree.

Arvan's foster father Gomlo, however, claimed that this was not the true nature of these creatures, but that it was solely thanks to breeders from the Halfling people that tree sheep did not have to be chased for miles through the forest to round up the flock again.

About halfway through, Arvan said the pain had subsided. "I don't think I need your help anymore."

"And I think you overestimate yourself," Neldo countered.

"Let me go, it will go," Arvan insisted. The fact that these small figures were supporting him was embarrassing to him anyway. After all, he was much bigger and stronger than they were. That, after all, he had ahead of the little ones, even if they were tree-high superior to him in almost all other respects.

Arvan swayed a little after Borro and Neldo let go of him. For a few moments he was dizzy, but then he began to put one foot in front of the other. As he did so, he held his side - and ...

A bolt of lightning as long as a halfling's foot suddenly shot out of his leaf bandage, through the torn clothing and the hand Arvan pressed on the wound.

He winced.

"You mustn't press like that," Zalea scolded him. "Healing clay and senseless flowers not ground carefully enough are a very tricky mixture magically. But it helps."

Arvan took a deep breath. "I should hope so. If my heart doesn't stop in shock first."

"Stop it, you're not an old man yet. Not even by human standards," she reproached him.

She alluded to the fact that halflings generally grew significantly older than humans. A hundred and thirty year old halfling was nothing special, and there were some who had grown even older. Arvan didn't find such remarks at all funny, since they reminded him of what he had long since realized after all his years among halflings: as a human, you were at a disadvantage in every way compared to these small-boned pointy ears.

"Elf wannabe," he accused her, hitting her halfling pride. For in the old days, when there had been no humans in Athranor, the elves had tried very hard to impart their knowledge and skills to the halflings regarding their healing arts and magic, and to make them as familiar with the powers of nature as they themselves were. But then the Elven people had lost more and more interest in the world and thus also in the Halflings. Since then, there were two opinions among the halflings of Athranor regarding the little Elven knowledge they had learned.

Some were of the opinion that it was necessary to preserve it at all costs. They were derisively called would-be Elves, because they tried to emulate the Elves in everything, although there were only very sporadic connections to the light people. The others - and they made up the majority - were convinced, however, that the Elves had contributed only little to the Halfling culture and that this little had been developed in the meantime by the Halflings themselves to such an extent that the Halfling students had long since surpassed their Elven masters. Due to the hardly existing connections to the Far Elven Kingdom, this view could hardly be refuted.

For the majority, the designation would-be Elf was a provocation. Zalea came from a family of healers - and especially those classes, which had probably profited most from the learned Elven knowledge in the Old Era, were fully convinced of the superiority of their own people. Zalea was no exception.

Arvan smirked when he saw that she had turned red in the face. Normally, she would have responded with a pointed remark. But there were moments when she seemed self-conscious toward Arvan. Arvan had noticed this repeatedly. It struck him as odd, because he had no explanation for it. It only irritated him.

And even now she just looked at him and finally said, "If you can annoy me again, your self-healing powers seem to have awakened already, Arvan. That's good."

Gomlos tree

After Arvan's condition