'There's no rest for the wicked', or so the saying went. Annara was inclined to believe it as her head began to throb from the smoke as Lothren stopped them. How he had heard something, anything, over the horses and curses thrown at their prisoner was beyond her. In a more humorous mood, she had laughed with the other humans when somebody mused that, surely, sleeping by a mosquito-infested pond was to elves what sleeping in the middle of a lively street was for humans. It was a double-edged sword to be sure but perhaps it made the difference between life and death now... or maybe not, for now that they stopped, Annara could hear it aswell: Thunder, distant yet eerily close, a soft, oh so soft tremble that rolled through her from below.
Just like elves had a hearing that couldn't be matched by human ears, the Eretol were particularly sensitive to vibration, an acquired skill that was nurtured and refined in young years until the child could wake itself over even one footstep out of place, one of the main reasons - all racism aside - why Eretol rarely camped inside the city walls when they visited settlements like Marion Bay. As difficult as it had made it for Annara to adjust to foreign footsteps and noises at night with a group like this, she knew that sensing shifts in the sand was what allowed her people to travel through the desert as easily as they did, with no tribe lost to the dunes in human memory while Aretan caravans occasionally disappeared in the White Seas.
Lothren might have been the first to identify what it might be but Annara was certainly the first to feel that it was not coming from above ground, even though she had no idea what, other than an earthquake, could be responsible for it here. Their leader, however, seemed to be terrified by whatever it was he thought of and urged them on like never before. Could this be the threat he had warned them about, the reason they descended upon villages like Muon Pond week after week? Her stallion Skye whinnied, clearly as agitated as the other horses, and they pressed on.
They arrived at the camp to find Bolgar - the dwarf - and his fellow 'guards' mostly sleeping or eating, completely unconcerned by noise... or the absence of Alan. It didn't bode well that his horse was gone too. He couldn't have abandoned them, could he? Surely he wasn't that kind of man. Then again - what kind of king left his nation without ruler to chase skirts and join a band of mummers? Annara shook of the thought, it didn't matter now if he was king or not, even though the Lothren cried out in rage gave her the distinct feeling he cared quite a bit about Alan's title. The only thing that mattered now was to find the man who belonged to their group, who was... something to her, a friend perhaps, and to leave this godsforsaken place as quickly as possible.
But before anybody could say or do anything of note, the ground jumped up violently, so much so that Annara was almost thrown out of the saddle and Skye himself was struggling to stay upright, mortified by the ground's unnatural movement. The riders around her weren't faring much better, some horses scared to the point where they reared up or started running. The wagons shook and swayed, wood groaned, metal clanged, clay and pewterware shattered. No hand was idle now, hurrying to quench the remaining fires and pack their gear.
Not Annara, though. She turned to look at Aust and Juna, just as a few pebbles trickled down from the cliff above, surely just shaken loose by the quake. The earth's tremble was more noticeable now and doubly so to her, faint but constant between the waves, and her voice was all the more urgent for it.
"One of you can track, right?"
