Young, perhaps twenty human years.His face was heavily scratched, but the marks were black lines rather than red. His flesh was white and shriveled, as if it were sinking in upon itself. The thing cried piteously at Sorhkafare and took another hesitant step.

Why would the horde not enter the forest, if they were starved enough to turn on each other?

Sorhkafare raised his knife and cut the back of his forearm. He swung his bloodied arm through the air.

"Hungry?" he shouted. "I am here!"

The sight of blood drove the man deeper into madness. He charged forward with a scream grating up his throat. Sorhkafare shifted backward, feeling blindly for smooth and solid footing.

As the pale man lunged between two aspens, he grabbed his head with a strangled choke. He turned about and cried out-but not in anguished hunger. This was a sound of fear and pain as he whirled and wobbled. The man stumbled too near one aspen, and he clawed wildly at the air, as if fending off the tree.

Sorhkafare watched in stunned confusion. A howl carried around him from within the forest.

It was like nothing Sorhkafare had ever heard-long and desperate in warning. Two of the silver-furred wolves burst through the underbrush and out of the dark, their eyes glowing like clear crystals tinted with sky blue.

The first slammed straight into the screaming man and latched its jaws around his throat, ripping as it dragged him down. The second joined in, and their howls shifted to savage snarls as they tore at their prey.

The man's scream cut off in a wet gag, but still he thrashed and clawed.

On instinct Sorhkafare ran in to help the wolves, but they kept snapping and tearing at the man's throat.

One of them shifted aside. It pinned the man's arm with teeth and paws. The other did the same, and they held him down as the first one looked up at Sorhkafare.

The wolf waited for Sorhkafare to do something-but what?

The man's throat was a dark mass shredded almost to the spine-yet still he writhed and fought to get free. Black fluids dribbled from his gaping mouth and blotted out his teeth.A mouth that either snarled or screamed with no voice.

He could not still be alive. No one could live after what these wolves had done to him… tearing at his neck as if…

Sorhkafare dropped to his knees and snatched the man's hair with his free hand. With so little sinew left on that neck, it was easy to hold the head steady. He pressed the long knife's edge down through the mess of the man's throat until it halted against bone.

In a quick shift, he released his grip on the hair and pressed on the back of the blade with all his weight.

The blade grated and then cut down through neck bones.

The pale man ceased thrashing and fell limp as a true corpse.

Sorhkafare sucked in air as he lifted his gaze to the first wolf, its muzzle stained with wet black like his own hands. He stared into its eyes as his mind emptied of all but two truths.

The forest would not allow the horde in. And if one got through, these wolves sensed it and came.

He climbed to his feet, still breathing hard, and crept back to the forest's edge to look out upon the rolling plain.

Dark forms rolled, ran, leaped, and crawled in the grass. Others barely moved, little more than quivering masses choking in the dark. Pale figures chased each other-slaughtered each other.

Sorhkafare stood watching, unable to look away. Every figure that came close enough for his night eyes to see was human.

He saw not one elf. Not one dwarf. Not even a goblin, or the hulking scaled body of a reptilian locathan, or any of the other monstrosities the enemy had sent against him.

Only humans.

He turned and stumbled back toward First Glade. The wolves paced him all the way to his people.

He found Snahacroe kneeling behind an injured human youth, bracing the boy up while Leshiara worked upon the boy's leg. In the past days, these two shared company more and more.

Leshiara closed her eyes, and a low thrum rose from her throat. She lightly traced her fingertips around the boy's deeply bruised calf, over and over, and then went silent. She opened her eyes and rebandaged the boy's leg.

When she stood up and found Sorhkafare watching her, she frowned.

"Come with me," he said.

Snahacroe looked worried and followed as well.

They walked into the center of the glade.

In the open space stood an immense tree like no other in this world.Its trunk was the size of a small citadel tower, and high overhead its branches reached out into the forest.

Sorhkafare saw where those limbs stretched into the green leaves and needles of the surrounding trees and beyond. A soft glow emanated from the tree's tawny body and branches,bare of bark but still thriving with life. Massive roots like hill ridges split the clearing's turf where they emerged from the trunk to burrow deep and far into the earth.

Sorhkafare laid a hand upon the glistening trunk of Charmun, a name that humans would translate as "Sanctuary."

"We must take a cutting from Charmun," he said to Leshiara. "Can you keep it alive over a long journey?"

She grew pale and did not answer.

"What are you planning?" Snahacroe asked, moving closer to Leshiara.

Sorhkafare looked at his one remaining commander. "The horde turns upon itself. They have nothing else left within reach to feed upon-but it does them no good. In perhaps days, there may be few enough left for us to slip away."

"No!" someone snapped sharply.

Sorhkafare knew the voice before he turned his head.

Hoil'lhan stood at the clearing's edge, and around her paced three of the strange tall wolves. All four were spattered and dripping in black fluids. All four watched him with equal intensity. Hoil'lhan stabbed the long, broad head of her spear into the earth, and Sorhkafare watched more black fluid run from its sharp edges to the grass.

"Where have you been?" he demanded.

"Where do you think?" Hoil'lhan spit out at him. "The enemy's minions range upon our very borders… and you wish to run?"

"We cannot stay here in hiding within this blighted land," Sorhkafare returned.

"I said no!" Hoil'lhan shouted, running a hand through her white, sweat-matted hair. "I will not let the enemy take what is ours! I will not leave any more that I cherish… fleeing with their screams at my back!"

"Enough," Snahacroe warned.

"It was not a request," Sorhkafare said firmly. "I am still your commander."

Hoil'lhan breathed hard, twisting her hand around the upright shaft of her spear.

"And since when do you alone speak for our people?" Leshiara said quietly, stepping toward Sorhkafare. "You do not sit in the council of First Glade, and we no longer follow the old ways of divided clans. Such decisions are the province ofmyself and the others of the council."

"There is no council left!" Sorhkafare shouted at her. "You are the only one that remains… so do you alone choose for our people, like some human monarch?"

"That is not my meaning," she snapped back. "There are too many here who need us."

Sorhkafare shook his head. "What if they are the very ones by which the Enemy can still reach us? Out beyond our forest… those dead things that move and feast… they were once humans, like those still among us."

"You do not know how this was done to them," Hoil'lhan growled. "Or if the Enemy's reach could find any who shelter here!"

Snahacroe turned, staring off through the trees, as if trying to see the forest's edge. Leshiara fell silent and closed her eyes, seeming to grow older and wearier before Sorhkafare's eyes.

But he could not relent.

"We will take our own people. Perhaps the wolves will join us as well. We will get as far from here as we can reach. We will plant our cutting from Charmun and create a haven for our people far from the Enemy's reach."