Shadow of Hope XI
Finishing the sip that he was taking, Borlak turned his dark brown eyes upon the person addressing him. In his quiet manner, he replied, “Yes, I was approached and given an invitation that was just enticing enough to put the feet of my mount on a path that I had not intended.”
His head tilted slightly in thought, or maybe remembrance, a fond look sparkling in his gaze. “As for home,” he continued, “You are correct that it is not the great city. Nor is yours, I believe.”
“Or to many others,” came the sibilant reply, “Yet still they find their way there, I know. What is the saying in the great open…all roads lead? But the deep mountains are not so distant as the country from which you have come. Do you explore as I do? Or is your purpose some other? Perhaps to travel with these,” the lizardman waved at the nearby horses, then at one of the wagons camped near the bridge, “And those? It is a common activity, I know.”
“Nay,” Rôhn interjected, sipping a cup of the proffered tea and hunched on a seat still wearing his wet cloak as if immune to the dampness. He narrowed his eyes at the lizardman, more out of careful scrutiny than of any hostility, as raindrops dripped from the wisps of his bushy red eyebrows. He chose to offer his own insight to Borlak’s question with a curtness that betrays any lack of social savvy, “The Silveraen swamps as I see it.”
Addressing the scaled humanoid with still narrowed lids, he added, “Your people were well met by one of the Dwarf clans of Kräg-Dün less than two years ago. They fought honorably against the Northern Horde. One day, when Kräg-Dün returns to its former glory, the succor of the Silveraean Lizardfolk shall be forever memorialized in gold upon the Relief of the First Aeon in the Cavern of the Seven Clans.”