Finders, Seekers

"No... not like this!" he cried. "This is not a Seeker's death!"

He remembered the stories of past Seekers who had ended their dance with Death. Name-Seeker, who gave her name to the Seekers, had died fighting a rabid mountain cat with her dagger. Young Whitefox, who died in the white-cold embracing his injured lifemate, giving her the heat to survive. Floodrunner, ** … **

The act of Sending was too much for his battered body to take. Snowstreak lost the desperate battle with unconsciousness, slipping into the black abyss of oblivion.

** **

Duskwhisper awoke, gasping in shock.

"I'm here!!" she shouted into the darkness. **I'm here!**

She sat upright, every muscle in her body tensed like a cat about to spring, searching in vain for an answer to her sending.

‘Wisedove,’ she thought to herself. ‘Wisedove can help... she can go out to him, find him that way!’ She threw on her ragged rain-cloak, pushed aside the door to her treetop den, and dropped through the branches to Wisedove’s den. The treeshaper was already awake. "Duskwhisper," she said softly.

"I was dreaming... ... I had been shot by humans and was dying by the stream... ..."

"It wasn't a dream," Duskwhisper interrupted. "I was awakened the same way. Someone's out there, ‘Dove, and he needs our help." Wisedove nodded grimly.

"I'll try going out to him... maybe I can find out where he is."

"Good. I'll wake up the others... we're going to have to find him soon. My healer's eye tells me he's been badly hurt... maybe even dying."

** **

Darkness. Peaceful, silent, unchanging.

Then... light!

Painful blue-white light, stabbing through his body, turning inside his guts like a knife... ... fading into quiet gold, like the sunlight on the rocks on the all-too-rare warm days in the Blade-Thin mountains.

Snowstreak's eyes fluttered open. An elf-maiden, her face framed by impossibly garish scarlet hair, was kneeling above him, her hands resting on his chest and her eyes closed in a look of extreme concentration. He could feel the light welling up inside his chest like a small sun, spreading warmth to the rest of his body, bathing away the pain of his wounds in pure, golden light.

He slipped once more into oblivion.

** **

Duskwhisper sagged into Teean’s arms.

"He'll... he'll be all right," she whispered weakly.

"I'm surprised he's still alive," Smokeweaver mused. "Those wounds were awful."

"I'll say," Wisedove replied grimly. She picked a bloody chip of stone from the dirt and handed it to Smokeweaver. "This fell out of the wound in his side. It’s a spearhead." She shook her head sadly. "These wounds were inflicted deliberately."

"That's nasty!" Twittersong shuddered, remembering the brutality of the stranger's wounds.

"I know," Duskwhisper sighed. "Longrunner, I want you to trace this elf's tracks back for about a day's walk. Find out if there are any enemies following this one... If you see anything just head back to the holt as fast as possible. I don't want you to get hurt too."

Longrunner nodded and took off down the trail. Duskwhisper wiped sweat off her brow and sighed. "All right," she said, "Wisedove, see if you can shape some poles. The rest of us will stretch our cloaks across them and carry him back to the Holt."

** **

The sun had traveled barely its own width in the sky when Longrunner returned to the Holt.

"Did you find anything?" Duskwhisper asked. She sat in the entrance of the den they had put aside for the wounded elf's use, fingering a frayed patch in the knee of her leggings.

Longrunner shook his head. "Wasn't too hard... just followed the trail of blood for a while. I got one hundred twenty, maybe thirty elf-lengths out before the blood-trail stopped. From there, I couldn't find anything else. No broken twigs... no trampled leaves... nothing." Duskwhisper sighed.

"At least there's no danger," she replied. The stranger stirred. "He's waking up," Duskwhisper said. "That's good."

The stranger awoke and sat up, giving Longrunner his first good look at the strange elf. What he had at first taken for a hood lined with gray fur fell away to reveal that the "fur" was the elf's own hair, in the most unusual shade of bluish-gray the golden-eyed Plainsrunner had ever seen. It was held back from his eyes with a dirty white headband, which matched the color of the single white lock over the left eye. The elf's eyes were a flat gray generally reserved for river rocks, and the tip of his right ear had been clipped off by some sharp blade. His clothing was ragged and patched, his body was thin and wiry, and the short knife he wore on his belt looked well-used. He shook his head once and turned to look at the two elves sitting right outside the den, his slate-gray eyes betraying no emotion. Duskwhisper broke the silence.

"Welcome to our Holt," she said. "My name is Duskwhisper, and this is Longrunner. We call ourselves Plainsrunners, and this is Stormsinger's Rest, named after my dead father."

"Snowstreak," the elf said softly. He raised his hand to his neck. "Where did you put my pendant?" he asked.

"Pendant?" The two elves looked at each other, perplexed. "We didn't see a pendant," Duskwhisper went on. "We found a spear. . ." she gestured at the long-bladed weapon, propped up against the tree trunk. Snowstreak got to his feet, walked unsteadily out the den and onto the wide branch.

"So I was not wearing the pendant when you found me," he said.

"We found only you, your spear, and a lot of blood," Longrunner said.

"We heard your send for help, I found you with my healer's eye and brought you back to life," Duskwhisper explained. Snowstreak laughed curtly.

"You should not have bothered." He touched his throat again. "The pendant was my last memory of my lifemate. Without it, I am nothing. Death would be far better than living without her by me." Duskwhisper was shocked.

"I had no choice!" she shouted. "I am a healer, and you were dying!"

"No choice?" Snowstreak said softly, stepping backwards to the edge of the branch. "There is always a choice, healer-maid." He took a single step backwards and wordlessly cast himself off the branch. Duskwhisper's heart leaped to her throat for a single horrified moment... ....then the blue-gray figure rose into the air and flew into a nearby treetop, where it perched in a high branch, lost in thought.

"He's an airwalker," Duskwhisper said to herself.

"He's an idiot is what he is," Longrunner said curtly. "I've never seen an elf act so rudely towards a healer before!"

Duskwhisper shook her head. "He has been through a lot. Give him some time, and I'm sure he will recover."

** **

It was almost sunset. Duskwhisper sat looking up at the tree were the stranger had flown off to earlier. He was still there. She watched him, wondering about his past, about the circumstances that might have brought him to them. She had been wondering all day, waiting for him to come down on his own so that she could try talking with him, but that plan obviously wasn’t working. He seemed as if he would never leave that tree, so the chieftess decided to take matters into her own hands.

**Snowstreak.** She sent towards him. He did not respond. **Snowstreak, please don’t ignore me.** she tried again. Still there was no response...or was there. In the tree, the stranger was rubbing his temples and shaking his head as if something were bothering him.

‘How odd.’ Duskwhisper thought to herself. **Snowstreak!** She sent with a little more effort. Finally his head turned, and he looked down at her.

**Is that you chieftess Duskwhisper?** A tickle of a sending came through to her, so weak that she could barely perceive it. She looked at him oddly. From his perch, he seemed to sigh in resignation, then he willed himself into the air and returned to the healer’s den.

"Is it because of your injuries?" She asked in worry, "Was there a head injury that I missed?"

"No chieftess," He said wanly. Was he blushing? "It would be an insult to your talents to say you could miss something so serious. The truth is that I have always been a weak sender. I’ve been this way all my life." Duskwhisper was baffled by this, but rather than continuing on the current conversation, she seized the opportunity to find out more about this stranger.

"Tell me about your life," She said settling among her furs. "We know nothing of you." Snowstreak gave her an odd look, the old passive mask coming up again.

"My life..." his hand unconsciously rose to the place at his neck where the pendant used to be. "All you need to know of my life is that you preserved it today, but for me, it is no longer worth living." He fell silent then, memories flowing through his mind. Hs thoughts were broken however by an overly excited streak of orange leathers and red-blond hair crashing into him and sending them both to the floor directly in front of Duskwhisper. The chieftess sighed.

"Let me introduce you to our resident glider, Twittersong."

"Awfully clumsy for an airwalker." Snowstreak muttered under his breath just before the air was knocked from him by the other siting up on his stomach.

"Duskwhisper look what I found!" The excited glider held up a silver pendant in the shape of outstretched wings so tat both the chieftess and stranger could see it. "I was down by the river getting a drink when this light kept flashing in my eye. At first I thought it was just the water, but it kept doing it like someone was signaling me--*oof*" Snowstreak had suddenly moved from under the prattling elf maiden as only a glider could, and snatched the pendant from her in one motion. "Hey!" Twittersong protested, but Duskwhisper held up a hand to silence her.

"Farsight..." He sighed the word holding the pendant close to his heart. "Is this what you want? Is this the place that I should be? But they are strangers, they know nothing of our way of life, nothing of the gift..."

"What’s he doing?" Twittersong whispered to the chieftess.

"I’m not really sure," was Duskwhisper’s honest response, but what ever had just happened was over now. Snowstreak turned, nodded his thanks, then flew off into the freshly fallen night.

** **

Duskwhisper honestly did not expect to see the stranger again, but the next day, he was there in the morning, a fresh kill at his feet.

"There is a cave not far from here," He said. "It will be my new home during my stay with you." with those simple words, Snowstreak set to work skinning the beast, Duskwhisper said nothing, but smiled at the new member of her tribe.

** **

TBC…