Tyrion:
Isor cursed as he ran, loudly and crudely. To be defeated by such a simple trick! And such a foul one too. He stopped to catch his breath. A skeletal rabbit -even this he could recognize- jumped at him. A swipe with the flat of his axe cracked several bones and sent it flying. Another stroke, this one with the edge, clove the whole thing it half just as it came jumping at him for another try. The rest will be coming soon, he thought. He stepped right into a tree, and vanished. In the same moment, he shifted, and walked out of another tree halfway to the other end of the forest, and gave a loud call. His hands to the ground, he heard the unearthly rattle of the skeletal animals heading towards him at his new location. They would run for a while, but not get tired, so he still had gained nothing but time. So Isor stepped into another tree and stepped out of yet another, somewhere else. He took out his ivoh, and pricked all the fingers on his right hand. Then he stuck it into the ground. "Plant and soil, ward me. Tree and earth, guard me." He spent a while, shaping the earth with gentle pressure. The forest was half dead and damaged here, but with some encouragement and Druidic magic several of the trees overhead began to grow bulbous knots that looked like the product of some disease. No vampiric corruption these, though. At his command, any tree in the vicinity would drop spheres of wood weighing six stone, and the earth was now formed as a series of small hillocks criss-crossed with stumbling roots.
He shrieked and waited for the vampires' second attack.
SKILORD:
Makiram muttered something to a subordinate, who scurried away. Then he muttered to himself. "So Aldaer escaped the purge... and my spies did not find him. He might have been dead even now, were it not for this rumor. Bans! I must find him, and he seems to be able to escape anything I throw at him." More subordinates scurried in. None of these had any idea who he was, though. To these, he was just a higher ranked subordinate of Cjaos, the one who handled all their information. He exchanged papers, spoke a few words, and paid a close eye on the thin ward stretched across the door. A minor thought-reading spell, it would have been simple enough for most wizards to make, but the effort had gone into making it twice imperceptible: No wizard could sense it, no man would know his thoughts were read. Besides, the only thing it looked for was whether any of them were close to guessing his identity, and this kept the flow of information low enough that he found it more tolerable than torturing random subordinates to death.
Somewhere else, in a mountain pass, Arla smiled to Aldaer, questioning him lightly on varying subjects, from his opinion of governments to his past. She never asked more than a few questions on any subject, though.
Aldaer blinked. The weather was good, and settling down even more, but a few fine snowflakes were still falling. One of these had just got in his eye. He shok his head, the reins, and an arm to shake off a few bothersome snowflakes, then blinked again. Neither Arla nor her horse had any snow on them.