Chapter Three (2)

                                    

                                          
    "He will see you now." She told him, gesturing for him to enter. 
                          
    Iancu pushed past her and went into the hut, as soon as he saw Muraco he dropped to one knee with his head bent down low. Oana quietly moved around him to stand at the side of the hut.
                          
    "Gratitude for granting me an audience." He said, genuinely sounding full of appreciation.
                          
    Oana watched her father's reactions towards the giant closely.
                          
    "You are most welcome. It is not often we receive unexpected guests in Caelia. Tell me your name."
                          
    "Iancu." The giant answered and Oana was surprised that he hadn't graced her father with the title as well as his name as he had done when she had asked him before. 
                          
    Iancu raised his head but stayed down on his knee. She wasn't sure whether this was because her father was sat down as well or because he just didn't want to stand which would have resulted in him having to twist his neck again because the arch of the tree wasn't high enough to let him stand up properly.
                          
    "My child tells me you have travelled far," Muraco glanced at Oana and then back to Iancu. "How far have you travelled from?"
                          
    "I am from across the ocean, from a place called Plinmur."
                          
    "Ah," Muraco breathed, as if he now understood all, when in fact Oana knew that he already knew the answers to his questions in the first place. "You are of the krynn."
                          
    "I am."
                          
    "And why have you come so far to speak to an oreiad like myself?"
                          
    Oana noticed a change in Muraco's being, he was more on edge and maybe even a touch resentful. Oana's feelings hadn't been entirely wrong, her father felt it too. 
                          
    Iancu glanced towards her, she returned his gaze and he took a deep breath in, relieved somehow that there was no change within herself.
                          
    "I have been sent by my Tall Chief Nodin. He asked me to warn you of the plague that has shadowed our lands, our people. We do not know where it came from, only that it is free in Plinmur, killing and destroying all in its path. I was sent to warn you, to urge you to prepare before it spread...but it seems that I am too late."
                          
    "I have seen no plague in Caelia, heard nothing of the sort in Rai'lun."
                          
    "Maybe you haven't personally yet, but others have." This time Iancu purposefully directed his gaze to Oana, knowing Muraco would follow.
                          
    "Oana, child, do you know something of what the krynn speaks of?"
                          
    Oana took a moment to rearrange her words. "On duty, before I met Iancu, a deva came to me upon desperate wings. She led me to a young griffon with a sickness because her kiss had no healing effect. I noticed that it bore the same symptoms of poison, but it wasn't from anything in Rai'lun and so I took a risk and countered the sickness with prowler poison. The sickness was defeated inside the creatures body and he is still healing as we speak. I cannot say for sure whether or not it is the darkness he speaks of, but it could be possible as he recognised it so."
                          
    As always Muraco listened wholly to the words of his child, never interrupting until she had finished and then taking his time and re-listened to them over and over again. Oana knew that the fact that the deva's kiss couldn't heal the griffon would have been weighing on his mind the most, like a rock being thrown into the Vast Blue. Trying to come up with reasonable explanations, even though there were none in existence. Nothing of nature was immune to the kiss of a deva, nothing, which had to have meant that the sickness was not of nature. Oana just dreaded to think just where its origins lay.