"Shush, Bendor." She put her fingers on his lips. "That's blasphemy. Some truths are known only to Elu."
Bendor didn't seem to agree, but he said nothing, probably choosing to avoid a theological argument with his companion.
A wise man.
"Hello." I turned to them. "I couldn't help but overhear your conversation. We've heard rumors about the Shedun in Eluria, but it seems to me that our media doesn't paint the full picture."
"No, it doesn't." The guy looked Codric and me over with suspicion in his eyes. "Pilgrims?"
I nodded. "My name is Alar, and this is my cousin Codric. We have a tiny bit of Elucian blood, so we decided to honor our distant Elucian ancestor and join the pilgrimage."
"I'm Bendor." He extended his hand. "And this is my sister Mira."
We all shook hands, and Codric flashed Mira one of his charming smiles.
"What else did your newspaper say about the raid?" Codric asked.
"Two nights ago, the civilian watch in one of the western villages, Marvaila, detected unusual seismic activity. Nothing too alarming at first—living in the mountains, you get used to the occasional tremor. But when the sensors detected activity at multiple points of origin, all converging on their village, they knew that something big was up."
This was far more detailed than what the Elurian media ever reported. Most Elurians didn't care about what was happening to the Elucians. After all, they had dragons on their side, so they could deal with the Shedun on their own.
Shockingly, some even sided with the monsters.
Irrational envy over the dragon pact and access to immortality for the select few was the breeding ground of hate.
"By the time the civilian watch realized what was happening, it was almost too late," Bendor continued. "The worms burst through at three locations, and the Shedun poured out like demons from the depths of hell."
"How can civilians manage to fight them off?" I asked.
I couldn't imagine Elurian civilians doing anything other than screaming and running for their lives, but by all accounts, the Elucians were made from hardier stuff.
"With everything they got," Mira said, her eyes flashing with anger. "Every Elucian is trained from childhood to defend our communities, and we all serve a minimum of four years in the Elucian Forces, with some of us serving much longer than that."
"We owe our existence to the dragons, Mira," Bendor said. "Without them, we would have perished already even if every Elucian fought to their last breath." He turned to us with a feral smile on his weathered face. "You should see the dragons at work. When they rain fire on the demons, the sky lightsup brighter than the auroras, and the Shedun screech like the vermin they are as they try to outrun the inferno."
I shuddered, torn between awe at the power of the dragons and horror at the vivid description of destruction. Beside me, Codric's face had gone pale.
Mira sighed. "Despite our best efforts to preserve and nurture the dragon population, there are still not enough of them, and they can't be everywhere at once, but there is an endless supply of Shedun. Kill one horde, and two more pop up. We drive them back, and they return, over and over again."
Codric shook his head. "The reports we get barely scratch the surface."
What we thought we knew about the situation in Elucia seemed deficient, but that was one of the many reasons I was here.
As I'd suspected, the Shedun threat was far greater than what the Elurian council was led to believe, and the Elucians were fighting a constant battle for survival. My fear was that they wouldn't hold off the hordes forever, and once Elucia fell again, the Sitorians would turn on Eluria.
The Elurian council believed in the myth that the Shedun didn't represent Sitoria, and that they would never escalate their terror attacks into a full-on war again, but the truth was that they were fully supported by the majority of the Sitorians, who filled the Shedun ranks with a never-ending supply of young men eager to die for their god.
Others believed that if the Shedun were allowed to exterminate the dragons once and for all, they would stop their never-ending attacks on Elucia, but that was another fallacy perpetrated by the ignorant who didn't bother to actually educate themselves about the Sitorians and what their clearly stated end goal was—dominion over all of Aurorys.
The dragons were simply the largest hurdle in their way.
As a heavy silence fell over our group, I glanced out the window, and the auroras suddenly seemed cold and distant. How could the Elucians live that way?
Was this land's beauty really worth such horrors?
They could leave the dragons to fight the war against the Shedun and relocate to Eluria, where they could live in peace, but the ugly truth was that the Elurian leadership was happy to aid Elucians in their never-ending fight by supplying them with weapons, so they would keep the Shedun occupied and weakened.
The Elucians might have been nearly wiped out of existence during the two Extinction Wars, but they had fought ferociously, and even though the Sitorians won, their armies had been left in tatters and incapable of marching against Eluria. By the time they'd recovered and rebuilt, so had the Elucians, and the cycle had started anew.
