“What is it with elves today!?! Baxor grumbled as a dark-skinned elf exited the forest into the area of devastation around his dragon’s bones, and this one didn’t even look fully grown. As she approached he growled; “What do you want little one?” “Little one!?!” Vashti snapped back. “You’re not much taller than I am!” “I’m a dwarf… I’m supposed to be short… what’s your excuse?” he sneered. In fact, at 4’10” he was tall for a shield dwarf and about three inches caller than her. “Elves come in all sizes,” she smirked humorlessly; she was well past done with her size being used against her. Regardless of how good a fighter she was, and she was far better than most of the males in her tribe, they always treated her like a child… her father being worst of them. She was going to prove herself to him once and for all. Looking around the barren area, and not seeing any sign of the party she’d followed from camp, she demanded; “Where’d they go?” “Up there,” the dwarf sneered, pointing to the line of slow-moving figures inching their way along the narrow switch-back cut on the right side of the cliff. They were about fifty feet below their goal, having taken most of the day to get that far. Adding with a chuckle; “You’d better stay down here, lass. You won’t make it a quarter of the way up before you lose the light and it’s suicide to try to climb that in the dark… even with elf-sight. They’ll have to camp up there in the wind tonight. It’s not pleasant… you can’t even get a fire started… and there’s nothing to find up there anyway. The dragon collapsed the mouth of it’s lair… there’s hundreds of tons of rock sealing it. It clearly didn’t want anyone disturbing it’s tomb.” Vashti felt her heart sink with every foot as she raised her eyes along the steep, dangerous path. Meeting a live dragon, or just finding it’s lair, would have shown her father that she wasn’t a child anymore, despite her height, but all she’d managed to do was follow a party of city born elves who wouldn’t have known how to hide their trail if they wanted to… which they clearly didn’t. Dejected by the prospect of a possibly lethal climb in the dark for nothing, she bemoaned; “All right… I’ll wait for them here. But if I don’t see them start down in the morning, I’m going up after them. I have a bad feeling about that flop Darcassan and his two thugs.” “If he’s the fancy-pants sun elf ‘lord-and-master’, then I agree with you, lass,” Baxor grumbled. Although he had hardly said two words to the dwarf, his shifty eyes never seemed to stray far from the sun elven woman they called ‘Syn’, except to burn holes of pure hatred in the back of the wood elven archer who appeared to be the party’s leader. “The other’s are probably lucky there’s nothing of value up there or he’d pitch them over the edge so he wouldn’t have to share.” “Supposedly their looking for a sword like Syn’s that belongs to his family but was given to the silver dragon for safe keeping,” she remarked, with clear skepticism. “I don’t trust him. I think he’s after the dragon’s hoard and Syn’s sword… but for some reason he can’t just take it from her. It’s got something to do with noble houses and their bloodlines… I don’t understand all that high magic stuff.” “Elves love their intrigue and magic,” the Baxor huffed. “Give me a simple axe and I’m a happy dwarf.”