



“ Recruits, I want to see those practice weapons moving! Anyone who cannot keep up will not make within the month! You think a will give you an opening before she puts a blade between your ribs? Will a Raskghar? Push yourselves and level!” She could get there in five minutes at a run, even without alarming the Watch unduly, but she instead slowed and came to the main Watch barracks and heard the sound of voices and even the clack-clack of wood hitting wood in the morning. Instead, Gire hesitated and then broke off her beeline to The Wandering Inn. She pushed away the words the other Ekhtouch Gnolls had spoken to her. Firrelle is dead, the old ways are suspect…and magic is back. Or was that something else that she’d been lied to about, like Xherw and Doombringers? The ’s brow furrowed.

Everyone was watched, and if you stepped out of line, you were removed, unlike a tribe where everyone was supposed to be together. She had always been told Drake cities were like that no one could be private. Even so, a on patrol, a Drake with a nasty scar across her forearms, still whirled before she realized it was Gire. It was strange to Gire, and she knew she alarmed the Watch when she ran full-tilt, so she slowed a bit. They did have a heavier presence in the new district, the western part of the city, but as any Cellidel Gnoll would tell you, it was a pleasant change to have Gnolls who’d greet you and smile rather than suspicious Drakes who only came to arrest someone. He didn’t ‘finish’ a district without putting some kind of wall up, and the Watch was diligent in making sure this weak spot in Liscor’s defenses was patrolled. Soon, the teams would be hard at work laying more streets if you walked past the temporary walls, you’d see a new area in progress. The apartment complex was actually fairly similar to Cellidel’s, and since it was in the new quarter, it smelled of fresh bricks and mortar, paint and stone dust from all the construction. She blew past the young Gnoll girl practicing a spear routine with eleven others, and Hickery stared after Gire, mouth agape. Gireulashia ran, and she left a trail of wind in her wake. So they gave up they knew where she was going, anyways. They’d never catch her, and they knew it. She was so fast that she was three dozen feet away before the Gnolls could put one leg over the railing to copy her jump. He turned and saw Gire land and speed across the courtyard. She was out the door and vaulting the third-story railing of the apartment complex so fast the two Ekhtouch Gnolls were still rising as she leapt. A bloody stump where Gire had cut it from the Chieftain’s shoulders, a slightly surprised, melancholy look on her face. She looked around the room and saw, for a second, Firrelle’s head, staring at her from the center of her bed. Yet it seemed, to Gire, there was the faintest tinge of orange or red, despite this being impossible. The dark room with creeping shadows did not bother her in and of itself her night-vision was amazing. Hear the light snores of a Gnoll next door and the buzzing of a fly passing her window and every sound in a thousand feet-but she had learned to filter the sensory overload. She could hear them breathing, though her door was closed. She could smell the two Gnolls outside her room, sitting there, smell what they’d eaten for breakfast-slightly stale jam tarts, probably from a yesterday, since it was far too early to buy them fresh. Most people wouldn’t be able to see them Gire could. In the faintest light, Gire looked around the spartan room, and her eyes could pick out rough imperfections on the ‘smooth’ wall left by a less-than-perfect trowel. Even with dawn’s light breaking on the horizon, the High Passes left Liscor dark longer than other cities. And so, when Gire woke up in the temporary housing that Ekhtouch’s Gnolls had been given by Liscor’s Council for a month, gratis, she thought of Mrsha. Mrsha had done things, seen things that even the best of Ekhtouch couldn’t say they’d done. Mrsha would have been instantly disqualified in other times because she would drag Gire down by association she was not superlatively gifted in any one attribute-except for her ability to cast magic and get into trouble-even her nose was weaker than Ekhtouch children who were set to be or. And those weren’t friendships, more like mentorships. No one could beat Gire except adults, so she made all her friends amongst the older Gnolls. When two Gnoll cubs of around equal talent in one field grew up, they were often partnered together to compete. Less than a third if Mrsha ran around on all fours. Rather, that it took her fifteen years to make a friend, and that her first friend was half her age and less than half her height. Not about Gireulashia’s judgment of character or Mrsha herself. It said a lot that her first friend was Mrsha.
