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[Kobold Stew]

Durkik Forgeheart stood in the wooden cart, and uttered his call to arms for the third time that evening. Slinking beneath the cart, against the shadows of the wooden wheels, a small creature stirred. It looked like a large dog, but not quite – the hair was coarser, the muzzle slightly longer. In fact, it looked like a jackal, brown-grey stripes playing against the twilight and the shadows of the spokes, its eyes slate grey, casting about the crowd. When the speech was finished, the cart slowly rolled on to the next square in town, and the soft pads of the jackal’s paws trotting along, seen but unnoticed by almost everyone, save for a small child, who cooed “Ooh… puppy!”

Years ago, Galatea had learned the secret to getting by in town: if you wear a collar, people will assume you are a pet. Without a collar, you could be anything – wild, feral, certainly a threat. So Gala had a collar made, so that when she was in her jackal form she would look as she did now, as a slightly odd dog that was on its way home. She wore the collar all the time, even when she was her other self, because the collar had a power of its own, and could help her as she padded over the land, watching it. Gala had been raised in the woods that abutted the town, and indeed her childhood had been a happy one. Trade with the dwarves had been steady, and her parents affluent. But that was years ago, and when she first sensed the call, she knew that the break from her old life would hurt. It did. In the past twenty years she’d barely spoken to any other elves, and certainly she couldn’t go back, not now. Not after the wasting.

The images people have of druids differ widely – the dwarves think of the elemental lords who protect them on their cliffsides; most elves think of the shapechangers who wander the woods as their sworn protectors. Gala had left the woods, called to the stretches of barren rocky landscape that were also part of the natural world, and in need of protection. So she wasted, those many years. She starved herself, like the land starved. She had shorn herself, that she might be the desolate emptiness of the parched landscape. And her faith had been rewarded – she had been given her form. Her true form, the jackal. That was years ago, when she left the woods. To protect the barren ground that this dwarf was now saying was threatened by the orcs.

Sometimes for druids, a new form is a choice. Gala didn’t want that – she wanted it to be real. The first time she went a few months before changing back. Then she went for six years. As an elf, she had the luxury of time, and being true to her real self was crucial if she were to serve the land well. She’d been with this pack for four years, now, eating with them, even, in time, having a litter. The curious jackal who wore a collar in the wild. With the pack, she had also served the land. But when the orcs had come, the pack had been slaughtered. The cave in which they lived was close to a larger underground access, and that was reason enough to remove any predators. Her brood, her mate, all of them were now dead, except her. So, alone, she had gone back on two legs, and had gone back into town.

With the dwarves, she could drink (another thing she’d discovered many years back), but she needed to be upright for that. And now she wanted to drink. And it was sitting in an alehouse earlier this evening that she had first heard the call to arms. A few coins on the table, and suddenly the scrawny elf with the slate-grey eyes was no longer sitting by he window, but a small dog was yelping outside the open window. And now it was trotting beneath the wheels of the oxcart Durkik was using as a rostrum. The dwarf wanted a different army? He would get it… he would have the speaker for the land herself. And she would get it back from the orcs. In the name of her mate, in the name of her pups, and in the name of her pack.