DemonWars Saga Volume 1 by R. A. Salvatore

pause and ponder it, to pause and think of anything — too defeated and bedraggled to do anything except stagger out of the village, moving south along the road, then turning west at the first fork, moving toward the dying sun.

    Subconscious instinct alone guided her. Weedy Meadow was the closest village, but Pony really didn't think that the place would be any different.
    Surely all the world had fallen to ruin; surely all the people were dead, were being pecked and torn by vultures.

    Sometime later, as dusk descended, Pony's senses warned her that she was not alone. To the right, she saw a slight shiver of one small bush. It could have been a ground squirrel, the girl reasoned, but she knew in her heart that it was not.

    To the left came a titter, a tiny voice whispering softly.

    Pony kept moving straight ahead. She cursed herself for not having had the wisdom to collect a weapon before leaving Dundalis. It wouldn't matter, she quickly reminded herself, and perhaps this way, defenseless, the end would come more quickly.

    So she went on, stubbornly, looking straight ahead, ignoring any signals that she might not be alone, that goblins might be behind every tree, watching her, laughing at her, taking good measure of her, perhaps even arguing among themselves over which one would be given the pleasure of the kill — and the pleasures that might come before the kill.

    That thought nearly dropped Pony to the ground, reminded her of Elbryan, of the moments before the disaster, of the kiss . . .

    Then she cried. She walked straight ahead, kept her shoulders squared.

    But she could not deny the tears, and the guilt and the pain.

    She slept fitfully at the base of a tree, in open view right beside the road, shivering from the cold, from the nightmares that she feared would haunt her forever.

    Those dreams were mercifully gone when she awoke, and no images could she conjure of the village, of her family and her friends. All that the girl knew was that she was out on the road somehow, somewhere.

    She knew that she was in pain, physical and emotional, but the reason for the latter escaped her conscious memory.

    She didn't even know her own name.

    The giant was there, facedown in the blood and dirt, in the same place Elbryan had last seen it, just a few feet from where he had fainted. At that horrible moment, the monster had been lifting its club to squash Elbryan; now it was dead.

    And so were a dozen other goblins, scattered all about the area.

    Elbryan sat up and rubbed his face, noting the cut and dried blood on one of his hands. His thoughts careened suddenly back to Pony and the kiss at the twin pines atop the ridge. Then they came full force back to the present, through those minutes of horror — the goblins in the woods; poor Carley; the smoke from Dundalis; Jilseponie running, running for the town, screaming every step. It had all been so unreal, had all happened much too quickly. In the span of a few unbelievable minutes, Elbryan's entire world had been thrown down.

    The young man knew all that, as he sat in the dirt, staring curiously at the somehow dead giant. He knew nothing would ever be as it had been.

    He struggled to his feet and approached the fomorian tentatively, though he realized from the amount of blood and from the absolute stillness of the creature that it was certainly dead. He moved to the head and knelt, studying the many wounds.

    Puncture wounds, as from arrows, only much smaller. Elbryan recalled the humming sound; he conjured an image of buzzing bees. He found the nerve to inspect more closely, even to put his thumb on the edge of one prominent wound and push the skin back.

    "No bolt," he remarked aloud, trying to make sense of it all. Again he thought of bees — giant bees, perhaps, that stung and stung and flew away. He sat back again and began a quick count, then shook his head helplessly when he realized the giant had at least twenty such wounds on its exposed face alone and no