Edgar stood as still as a statue as Cassima raced towards him, up the gravelly path. Cassima regretted what she was about to do, but it was the only way of getting rid of the mob that was chasing her…if only it worked…

When she was close enough, in one quick, fluid motion she grabbed Edgar's hand and jammed the bottle of truth potion into it.

"Here," she panted as she did so. "Good luck!"

"Cassima!" Edgar exclaimed, quite bewildered. "What…"

But Cassima was gone before the words left his lips. She had taken off down the path that led to the right, the one that bordered the northern cliff. As Edgar stared after her, the noise began growing uncomfortably close. He looked down the east path to see a mob of angry men stampeding towards him, led by a broad-chested, black-bearded rogue with murder in his eyes.

"Just RUN, EDGAR, RUN!" Cassima screamed, her voice echoing in the chasm between the paths.

Edgar quickly surmised what had taken place – Cassima had done something to make these men very, very angry, and apparently this bottle he was stupidly holding had a good deal to do with that. She had apparently hoped to throw them off her trail by passing the bottle to him, but unfortunately, the inevitable outcome of this was that their anger had shifted to him.

Cassima didn't need to shout at him again. Not eager to contemplate the irony of inviting her to a land in which he feared she would get into trouble only to blindly stumble into it himself, Edgar spun on his heel and took off down the left westward path.

When the mob came to the intersection several seconds later, Icarus raised a hand and motioned for all of its members to halt, which they eventually did. Icarus turned and addressed his fellow scoundrels:

"All right, you take that path," he said, indicating roughly half of the group with a sweep of his hand and pointing down the path that Edgar had just taken, "We'll take this one!"

Here he gestured to himself and the remaining half, then pointed down Cassima's path with a sickening, bristly grin.

"That little girl is mine!" he snarled.

For a few hundred yards, the path Cassima ran down was bordered by a sheer rock wall on one side and a gaping canyon on the other. Soon, however, she found herself on a path that had cliffs on either side, with numerous precariously positioned shacks built up along its sides and all manner of refuse littering the ground beneath them. Barrels, planks and various other trappings of a humble existence forced Cassima to repeatedly jump or duck as she fled Icarus and his gang.

She had hoped that giving the bottle to Edgar would have thrown them off her trail (she also hoped that Edgar had sense enough to run from them), but soon realized that she still could hear their bellows as she continued down the path. With a shiver of dread, she realized that not having the bottle of potion didn't matter now – it was her they wanted.

After another minute or two of frenzied running, Cassima had to stop. The shouts of her pursuers couldn't be heard now, but she knew that she only had a little while before they reached her, and then she would still be too weak to outdistance them. She had to find a way to slow them down.

Cassima quickly examined her immediate surroundings. There was a barrel sitting atop a nearby purple boulder that was almost half full of brownish apples. There was also a length of frayed rope lying on the ground, and a firm wooden beam stretched from one edge of the cliff to the other several feet above Cassima's head. Her mind raced. If she could get that barrel of apples to spill when Icarus and the men appeared, they would slip on the apples and most likely end up in a heap. But if she just pushed the barrel over, she would be too close to the men to risk getting caught. There had to be another way.

Cassima picked up the rope and examined the barrel. There was a knothole near its brim. Perfect. She swiftly looped the rope through it, tying it firmly to the barrel with a contrived knot that might not have impressed the ferryman on the Isle of the Crown, but she had little time to be worrying about such matters. She then picked up the loose end of the rope and threw it over the beam. She had constructed a simple pulley – when she tugged on the rope hard enough, it would upset the barrel, scattering its contents all over the road. Taking the loose end of the rope in hand, she made her way down the path, dragging the rope behind her. Since it was quite long, its slack wasn't taken up until she was almost a hundred feet away from her little trap.

Presently, she heard the sounds of the men drawing closer, and through the mist she could see their rampaging forms approaching the beam over which the rope was looped. Cassima yanked as hard as she could on the rope, and there was a satisfying thud as the barrel toppled over, and several more thuds as the men lost their footing on the rolling apples and began falling left and right. Cassima had little time to gloat over her victory, however. She had to use the time that her trap had given her, so once again she was off and running.

Oh, how did I get myself into this? Edgar thought frantically to himself as he sprinted along the narrow path, the blue bottle clutched in his hand. Scrimshaw was squeaking with discomfort and fear as he bounced along in Edgar's hood. Though the landscape around him was a blur as he ran, the prince could still see the ramshackle huts and shelters built along the sides of the path, along with the numerous twisted trees and shrubs. This was indeed the most unpleasant place in Etheria, the place where the least welcome members of society were forced to live.

Strangely, Edgar had never heard tell of this island from his parents, and they didn't strike him as the sort that would ignore such a dismal place. Since this was the future, perhaps this slum didn't exist yet in his time. He hoped that this was just another example of this less-than-perfect future he had stumbled into which wouldn't come to pass if all went well for him and Cassima.

A sharp pain in his side distracted him from his troubled thoughts. He had to rest for a moment. He came to a halt besides a large, gnarled, green tree. The path he had been running down was no longer bordered by a chasm on the right, which made running on it a little less hazardous. Still, the stitch in his side hurt too badly for Edgar to keep running. Fortunately, the maddened group of men pursuing him was out of sight and earshot. Unfortunately, unless he did something to slow them down, they could easily overtake him.

Edgar doubted that he was physically strong enough to overpower the men with magic. All the same, perhaps magic could help him slow them down if he put it to good use. He examined at the green tree. If he were more powerful, he could change it into a fierce animal that would be glad to take care of his pursuers, but something like that was quite beyond Edgar's abilities.

Then he noticed a large green tree root protruding from the soil. If it were a few inches higher, it had the potential to trip somebody who wasn't looking where he was going. Edgar knew what to do. He ducked behind a large boulder and waited until the shouts of the men chasing him had grown close. Then he quickly jumped out from behind the boulder and zapped the root, making it arch itself like a cat arching its back. He didn't stay to watch the spectacle of the man leading the mob snagging his foot on the tree root, falling over and having every other man stumble over him as well, but the heavy thumps from behind him as he ran away told him that he had bought himself a few more minutes – and he had to make every second of them count.

As he fled, he could faintly hear a man that had to be the mob leader snarling, "Ach! Get off me, you idiots! After him!"

The cliffs on the inner side of the path began to grow shorter and shorter. Soon, Cassima was running with a deep chasm to her left once more. It was much narrower than it had been when she had last seen it, however, and the cliff on the opposite side was quite close now – as was the path that wound along it, almost level with the one Cassima was on.

Streaking along this path with his cloak fluttering madly behind him was Edgar. When he noticed Cassima, he accelerated until he was even with her, waited until she was looking at him, then tossed her the bottle of truth potion.

"I think this is yours, Cassima!" he panted.

"Right," Cassima gasped. "Thanks."

There was a lot more they wanted to say to each other, but they were both too short of breath. Instead, they continued down their respective paths, toward destinations that neither of them knew.

Cassima had to stop again, several minutes after she had outdistanced Icarus's gang once more. It wouldn't be long before they caught up with her again, so she had to figure out another way of detaining them.

She stuffed the bottle into her pocket and looked around. Rock walls bordered the path again, and she was standing near a large, dilapidated wooden platform erected several feet above the path, supported by several fragile beams. It was as if someone had been attempting to construct something above the path, then gave up before it was even clear what the structure was supposed to be. The whole thing looked pretty unstable, and if Cassima could loosen one of the supporting beams, it would all come crashing down, creating a barrier that would take a long time to get past.

The beams were stronger than they appeared at first glance, however. Cassima wasn't strong enough to pull or kick them loose. Then she noticed a long metal bar lying on the ground. She bent down and lifted one end. The bar was much too heavy to carry with her, but there was only one use for it that she could think of, and that required moving it just a few feet.

Cassima hoisted the bar and swung it at one of the support beams. The bar merely rebounded off of it and the beam merely quivered from the blow. She tried striking at another beam, but this one refused to give as well. Trying desperately to remain calm, Cassima took a deep breath and smashed the bar against a third beam. This one almost snapped in two, and the platform above it began to groan. Cassima darted out of the way just in time as the mess of weather-beaten wood came tumbling down, obstructing the path with a massive tangled pile of broken planks.

Smiling triumphantly, Cassima turned and continued to make her way down the path, walking at first, but when she heard the yells of her pursuers drawing closer, she was obliged to start running again.

Edgar screeched to a halt, almost doubling over with fatigue. He had hoped that tossing the bottle to Cassima would get the men chasing him off his back, but when they had started bearing down on him again, just as furious as before, he had to run as fast as he could to temporarily escape them. The sounds of them had died away now, but they would be growing louder again soon.

He was standing on a section of the path that was barren except for a single leafy bush sprouting out of the cliff side almost at eye level.

As Edgar looked at this bush, an idea came to him. He magicked the bush into a taut position, bending it back as far as it would go. Then he ran ahead until he came to a slight bend in the path, a place where he could hide and get a good view of the bush and the men (when they showed up). Here, Edgar tensely waited for what seemed like an hour. Finally, he could see the mob racing his way. Edgar waited until the man in the lead was close enough to the bent bush, then at the last moment he released the bush, letting it snap back to its original position and smacking the leader squarely in the face. The leader halted sharply, and once again he was flattened to the earth by the men behind him.

Edgar turned and fled as he heard the leader grumbling:

"Aaagh, help me up, you buffoons! This fool had better be all the trouble he's worth!"

Ahead, the two paths began to draw closer again. They continued to do so until they met, but shortly after that point, they became two separate paths again, forming an X-shaped intersection. Edgar was the first to reach this spot, but Cassima was just moments behind him. Not wanting to waste even a second by turning, Edgar continued running straight ahead. He was now on the right side of the chasm.

Cassima took the same approach and sped straight through the crossroads, winding up on the left side. As she did, she took the bottle out of her pocket and held it out to Edgar just as they passed each other, who swiftly took it from her.

"Here!" she wheezed. "You take it!"

"Again?" Edgar cried, grasping the bottle firmly as he ran along the path, which was still running quite close to the one Cassima was on. "How much longer can we keep this up?"

"'Till we can find a place to get away from those men, of course!" Cassima replied as the chasm ahead grew wider and their paths once again began to drift apart. Cassima continued running along the left side, while Edgar did the same on the right.

What made Icarus's half of the mob choose the same path as Cassima while the other half followed Edgar's trail might have been mere coincidence, but perhaps there was something about Cassima that Icarus could sense in a beastlike fashion, and like the most dedicated hunter, he was determined to follow her until she was his.

When Cassima stopped again, it wasn't just because of her weak legs and aching lungs. There was a large hole in the road ahead, and she was just able to keep from tumbling into it. Perhaps this hole could help her slow down Icarus's gang a third time.

Leaning against the nearby cliff were several thin planks that looked quite weak and rotten. Cassima didn't long have to ponder how to put them to good use. She began carefully placing the planks over the hole, making sure that they covered it completely. Four boards were enough to completely conceal the hole. Cassima lightly stepped on one of the planks and felt it begin to crack almost immediately. If anyone ran over these planks, they would snap like straws beneath their feet.

Cassima carefully inched around the edge of her trap and continued down the path. Several seconds later, Icarus charged towards what looked like several boards resting on the ground and instantly broke through them into the shallow pit. Several of his men fell in after him as he snarled angrily to himself.

"Getting that wretched potion the first time wasn't half as hard as this," he growled.

Edgar's strength was beginning to fail him. He staggered to a stop for a third time. He looked around, but this time he couldn't see anything he could use to slow the men's pursuit of him. Unless he found some way to escape them for good, he was doomed.

Suddenly, Scrimshaw leapt out of his hood and began flapping in place directly in front of him, chattering wildly.

"Scrimshaw! What is it?" Edgar asked. The pygmy griffin merely continued to squeak frantically.

"What is it, boy? What are you trying to say?"

Scrimshaw fluttered up to a small nook high in the cliff side. He perched there for a moment, then swooped down like an eagle would swoop down on a rabbit, halting about five feet above the ground, then returning to the same nook and repeating the action.

"I don't understand." Edgar said. "What are you telling me?"

Scrimshaw only chattered again. Was he trying to ask Edgar to play with him at a time like this?

"Scrim, we have to get out of here!" Edgar shouted. "Those men will be coming any moment!"

Scrimshaw continued flapping in place with a determined, serious look on his feathered face, showing no inclination whatsoever to leave. When Edgar tried to grab him, he merely zipped out of reach. Confused by the griffin's strange behavior, Edgar stared at Scrimshaw, and Scrimshaw stared back.

"Are you saying that you want to stay here?" Edgar asked.

Scrimshaw moved his head in a gesture that was definitely a nod. Edgar nervously considered what to do. He didn't want to leave Scrimshaw here, where the men would be in a matter of seconds, but there wasn't anywhere he could hide from them either.

As he was trying to figure out the best course of action, he suddenly heard the men rapidly approaching. In the time he had spent talking to Scrimshaw, they had caught up with him. There was no way he could outdistance them now.

Scrimshaw suddenly flew up to the nook in the rock wall again. Edgar stood paralyzed with fear. He could see men approaching now, still strong and aggressive while Edgar's strength was almost gone. In a moment, they would be upon him.

Just as he was preparing to flee again, Scrimshaw suddenly swooped down from his hiding place with an ear-grating screech, his talons outspread. The leader of the mob tried to stop in time, but it was too late. Scrimshaw's tiny claws were a blur of movement, and the leader and the rest of the men tried to shield their eyes to keep them from being scratched out while trying in vain to swat the tiny griffin away. For them, Scrimshaw seemed to be everywhere at once, beating one man's face with his wings, whapping another with his tail, scratching at one with his hind claws and clawing at yet another's face with his talons. Through the clamor and the confusion, Edgar heard the mob's leader weakly say:

"Would you mind running at the front this time please, Dion?"

Edgar stared at this spectacle with a sense of awe. Scrimshaw hadn't been trying to play with him, and he wasn't remaining where he was out of sheer stubbornness. He was indicating that he was going to help save Edgar's life…and for the moment he had succeeded. In a way, Edgar felt oddly grateful to the physician in Aelous – if he hadn't given Edgar that copper, Edgar would have never bought the little creature that had just saved him.

Edgar then realized that Scrimshaw's efforts would be for naught if he kept standing here gaping at the tiny griffin attacking the men. He turned and continued running west, but his heart almost stopped after he had covered another several hundred yards.

The path skirting the cliff had come to an end. It merely dropped off into nothingness. There was nothing to his right but an unclimbable cliff, nothing to his left and ahead of him but empty space, and nothing behind him but a half-crazed hoard of men that was going to catch up with him very soon.

The road Cassima was on became more irregular and bumpy, and the vegetation became more and more abundant as well. The rock wall to her left gradually became less craggy and barren, eventually sloping off into a series of mossy foothills.

It would have been a beautiful scene if Cassima suddenly hadn't come to a dead end. She was at the end of what appeared to be a peninsula, with nowhere to hide and nowhere to run to.

She glanced wildly around, looking for some means of escape. Then she saw the opposite cliff. Like the cliff she was on, this one had tapered into a peninsula as well. Skirting its side were two paths: one went east, while the other moved west, winding up the side of the cliff. The cliff the paths were on was also some distance away, almost invisible in the mist and much too far to jump to. The right edge of the westward path seemed to have eroded away, and it was a similar story for the left edge of the eastward path.

The westward path was also at least ten feet above the eastward path, but for some distance, the level of the westward path was directly above that of the eastward path. With a shudder, Cassima realized that the eastward path had to be the path that Edgar was on – what would he do once he came to that dead end?

Maybe he couldn't get himself out of that mess, but Cassima probably could. Remembering how she had "wished herself" to another location in Chessboard Land, she stared intently at the upper path that headed west, willing herself to be there, ignoring the nearing shouts of Icarus's gang approaching her, wishing with all her might that she was standing on that path. Her pendant glowed brightly and in a heartbeat, she was there. She smiled smugly as she saw Icarus staring at her across the chasm and roaring like a wounded bull.

She presently heard a patter of feet nearby. She drew closer to the path's edge and looked down to see Edgar standing at the end of the lower path, glancing about frantically. He then looked up and saw her.

"Cassima!" he yelled breathlessly, "Throw me down something I can climb up! Hurry!"

Cassima hurriedly looked about to see what she could do to help him. She thought of throwing her scarf down to him, but she doubted whether she would be strong enough to pull him up. Then she noticed a small bush growing out of the edge of the path, but as she was about to tie the end of the scarf around it, with growing horror she realized that the bush was small, shriveled and gray. It looked more dead than alive, and if Edgar tried to climb up her scarf if it was tied to that bush, it would snap like the brittle twig it was.

Then a burst of inspiration illuminated her mind. Edgar had magic powers, which were limited, but adequate. So far, all she had seen him do was create light and descramble an encrypted message, but surely his repertoire contained more tricks than that…

"Edgar, use your magic to revive this bush!" Cassima said, pointing to the brittle shrub. "I have something to help you up with, but I need to tie it to this bush! Quick!"

Edgar quickly raised a hand and released a ball of light which struck the bush and briefly enveloped it in a bright luminous glow. Then it began to grow larger and heartier, its stem regaining its color and suppleness, its branches becoming thick with leaves. Cassima quickly knotted the end of her scarf around the stem and let the loose end fall down to Edgar, who looked at it dubiously, then began to climb it as quickly as he was able. Within moments, he had reached the path Cassima was on. He instinctively tried to untie the scarf from the bush so that the men couldn't climb up after them when they arrived, but Cassima had tied a very tight knot, and he couldn't undo it, no matter how hard he tried.

"Let me try," Cassima said, kneeling down and tugging at the knot, only to discover that even she couldn't undo it. Pulling the scarf onto the ledge wouldn't do any good, because one of the taller men would probably be able to reach it and pull it down. There was only one thing to do now. Cassima felt a pang of sadness as she looked at the frayed, stained, torn, threadbare, yellow scarf that had served her so well by being anything but a garment used to keep her warm. Then the feeling passed, and she took out her dagger and began to saw away at the rough fabric, cutting completely through her beloved scarf just as the men came to the end of the path, letting half of it fall to the path below and pulling the remaining half up onto the path she and Edgar were standing on.

When the men realized that both Cassima and Edgar had evaded them, they began muttering angrily, then blaming each other for letting them escape, then merely grumbling incoherently and shuffling back the way they had come, probably intent on drowning their failure in a mug or two of ale at Eurus' Den.

It was quite a while before Edgar and Cassima could do anything besides breathe heavily. The chase had taken a lot out of both of them. Edgar was the first to regain enough strength to speak:

"My goodness…Thank you for saving me, Cassie – Cassima. Queen Cassima," he added hastily. "Sorry. Uh…here's your bottle back."

He handed the blue bottle to Cassima, who gratefully accepted it.

"By the way, what's in it?"

"It seems to be a potion that makes the drinker realize the truth about him or herself," Cassima said. "It might be of use to me…more use than it would be for those pig-headed men, anyway."

A loud shriek suddenly rent the air, and Edgar turned to see Scrimshaw soaring his way. He extended an arm, expecting Scrimshaw to land on it like falconer's birds did, but Scrimshaw ignored the proffered appendage and dived into his usual location – the hood of Edgar's cloak.

"Edgar!" Cassima exclaimed, staring at the odd ball of fur and feathers. "What is that?"

Edgar smiled, looking over his shoulder at his tiny companion.

"He's just a little guy I found. His name is Scrimshaw."

"He looks like a griffin," Cassima said skeptically, staring quizzically at the scruffy creature.

"He is. He's just…small." Scrimshaw quickly ducked out of sight once more. "And shy."

"I see," Cassima replied, wondering what possessed Edgar to keep such a creature as a pet. "So…you say this land is called Dark Etheria?"

"Yes."

"And you say you've never even heard of this land before?"

"No, I haven't."

Cassima shrugged and surveyed their gloomy surroundings.

"I guess every land has its dark side," she remarked.

"That's for sure."

The queen cautiously examined the entrance of the black cavern in the cliff side.

"There's a cave over here. Do you want to explore it, Edgar?"

She waited for an answer, but it never came. She turned to Edgar to discover that the prince was looking at her in a slightly befuddled way that at the same time made it appear as if he was trying not to laugh. He met her eyes and a wide grin split his face.

"I…I forgot to compliment you on your new wardrobe," he said.

Cassima glared sharply at Edgar, but her cheeks grew hot just the same. Her new clothing was causing her dignity to become quite compromised. In her anger, she didn't even contemplate the irony of how the way Edgar was behaving now was just the way that Cassima wished he could be when they met at the pool in Tamir the previous day. Apparently, she hadn't anticipated the possibility of her being the subject of his jokes.

"Very funny, Edgar," she said coolly, glancing down at her now less than pristine attire before she could stop herself. "At least this doesn't inhibit me from running faster than a mob of drunken scoundrels."

"Right," Edgar replied, sensing the hostility in the queen's voice and becoming serious again. "Cassima, do you have any idea why we keep running into each other like this?"

"Not really. The only reason I can think of is the fact that we have two halves of the same pendant. Maybe it's fate. I don't know."

"Sounds logical to me," Edgar said. "Oh, by the way, Cassima, you said that you were going to visit the Land of the Green Isles the last time we met, didn't you?"

"Yes, and I did. But I arrived there in…in the future."

The mention of the future reminded Edgar of the future they were currently in…a future in which he and Cassima never returned to their homelands. He tried not to let his anxiety regarding this show. Ironically again, Cassima was trying to conceal her feelings for the same reason.

"Weird. Do you think I should go there to look for Shadrack, Cassima?"

"Why not?" Cassima said in an almost carefree manner. "I doubt you will end up there at the same time I did, but there's certainly no reason for you to avoid the Isles."

"Could you please describe it for me?" Edgar asked, closing his eyes as he did so.

"Of course. It's a chain of at least five islands, the southernmost one is where I was born. There is a large one near the north that is one colossal mountain, with a cave near its summit. Towards the southwest is an island shrouded in mists that appears only to the eyes of those fated to set foot upon it. There is a forested island to the east, a comma-shaped island to the west, and…"

Edgar had faded away almost completely by this time. Cassima paused and gazed at his vanishing form.

"Good luck, Edgar," she whispered as the light surrounding him reached its brightest and winked out, taking him with it.

---

Choose your path: