Geoff stood up straight again and pointed around the corner. “Are you going to help the girl or not? She sounds like she is in serious trouble.”

Still dumbstruck and without giving much thought to how I was going to help her I nodded and strode to the corner. I took a careful look the way I’d seen the strangers go as I had been walking along the street.

“Go on then, don’t just stand there, knock-kneed watching what’s happening. She needs your help. I know it’s me who would normally leap into the fray but seriously, look at me.” Geoff held out both arms and aimed his unseeing eye sockets down his body. “I’d love to go and beat the crap out of whoever’s hurting her but somehow, I just don’t see it. Do you?”

I glanced over at him, considered what he’d said, then shook my head.

“So. Come on, get moving before it’s too late.”

I looked again and in front of a church a hundred yards along the road was a small rectangular grassy area. I could see two shapes battling with each other, rolling around, kicking up dust. The bigger of the two had just managed to subdue the smaller and as I moved from the corner I could see he had his hands on her clothes and with a rapid movement pulled his arms back, ripping open the upper clothing of what was then evidently a young, slim woman.

Now I am no prude, a roll in the hay is something I have plenty of time for and always enjoyed the experience but this just didn’t look right. This was no mutual pact of love. I broke into a run as best I could with my backpack on. It was more of a slow jog and a noisy one too, the sound of the motley collection of pans I’d put together rattling and clanging in time to my steps, but it took me nearer and neither of the two people seemed to notice.

“Hey. You.” I tried to shout but it came out as a rasping croak. I coughed at the effort, even while I kept jogging. I was closer now, fifty feet away when I realised the man, who now looked bloody enormous, leather clad and with bulging biceps, was pawing at the girl’s clothing further down her body with one hand, while pinning her hands with his other great mitt.

He was evidently looking for carnal satisfaction at her unwilling expense. Now call me brave, or call me an idiot but there was no way I was going to let it happen. It’s not right no matter how desperate you are. I should know.

“Hey, you.” I shouted again. “You can’t do that.” Twenty feet away now, I slowed to a walk. This time, they both noticed.

The woman who was trapped turned her head toward me, fixing me with an intense, violet- eyed gaze the like of which I had never seen before. Her silver hair was splayed out wildly across the grass beneath her and she looked defeated. The struggling had stopped and those eyes, those beautiful eyes held nothing but resignation when she first turned them on me but seeing me, something else began to shine.

“I do what I like, midget.” The man’s coarse voice, full of desire and victory, spread like a foul stench through the early evening air.

“Fucking hit him.”

I looked over my shoulder to see Geoff, clattering, bouncing around like a boxer, jabbing the air in front of him, dropping a shoulder in a feint then quarter-turning and jabbing again.

In the moment, I couldn’t think of a famous boxer to compare him unfavourably with so I just shook my head and called him a twat.

“Who are you talking to, midget? Your imaginary friend? Are you fucking gaga?” The man turned to look at me again with a wild grin but his roaming hand still tried to gain purchase on the woman’s clothes.

See, now I haven’t got a short temper but certain things get my goat. A bully is one so he scored there. It took six months of constant taunting and pushing but Derek Munton finally tipped me over the edge when I was eleven.

He ended up slinking away with a broken nose and a bloodstained shirt which earned me a three-day suspension from school much to the tearful chagrin of my mother and the outwardly angry, but as he told me later, secretly proud father. He knew. He understood what it was like. It was also pretty much the last time I saw him.

I didn’t know this until then but it turns out someone impugning the state of my mental health also did the trick. Who would have thought?

I dropped my pack onto the ground behind me with a crash.

“What are you going to do, midget? You going to beat me up and save the little Elf bitch? You the hero, are you?”

“Yep,” I said. I put my hands on my hips in what I hoped looked like a confident stance.

The man on the ground laughed at me.

Geoff said. “You look so camp.” Then he laughed too. I tried to ignore him but took my hands away anyway and folded my arms in front of me.

“You can laugh all you want but you are going to leave this . . .” I hesitated, wondering what the politically correct term for a female person was in these circumstances, “. . . her alone.”

“And how do you propose to stop me, midget. You going to hit me with one of your saucepans?” His hand had stopped roaming.

“No. I’m telling you to get off her or I will kill you.” Where the hell that came from I have no idea. The last person I’d hurt physically was Derek Munton with a right hook to stop him taking the piss. None of the other bullies at school came near me afterwards.

The man shifted himself onto his knees, straddling the woman, pushed his face right up to her cheek and quietly said. “Stay right there, bitch. I’ll be back for you in a minute.” Then trailed his long slimy tongue across the soft skin of her face. She flinched but kept her gaze fixed on me. The man then pushed himself slowly to his feet which was when I nearly crapped myself. I mean I knew he was big just by looking at him on the ground but as he drew himself up to full height I started to feel like I was shrinking. He was fucking huge and I wished, right then, I had a gun. I didn’t. All I had was a me.

Five-eight.

Undernourished.

Shit scared.

Trembling.

The man turned to face me. He looked even bigger when he faced me, not only did he have a height advantage of a foot or more but he was built like the proverbial brick outhouse. Twice as broad across the shoulders as me and heavily muscled. Muscles, I realised as I looked at him, he was going to use to pulverise me.

“Fucking hit him, give him the old one two, duck and weave, come on. Hit him.” Geoff was making sharp breathing sounds like boxers make. I’m not sure how with no internal organs or lips to purse but there you go. I tried to ignore him but couldn’t help glancing to where he was shadow boxing in my peripheral vision.

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As I looked back a trace of confusion fleetingly crossed the man’s face and for just a moment his gaze flickered to where I had glanced. It was the one opportunity I had to act, to get in the first blow and win the day and the undying gratitude of the woman I rescued. OK so sue me I’m an old romantic.

So, I did it.

I ran.

Now, it sounds bad but to be fair to me I did run toward him rather than away. I dodged to one side and hit him with a good old-fashioned shoulder charge. It was like running into the side of a bus but it was enough to just unbalance him enough so the doughboy of a punch he flung at me sailed straight over my head. Once I was past him I stopped, grabbed the woman’s hand, pulled her to her feet—she was as light as a feather—and as fast as I could, holding tight to her I ran away dragging her along beside me.

It took three turns and five minutes hiding behind a dumpster down a back alley before I got enough breath back to speak and enough confidence that we had lost the man lumbering behind us.

“You err, you might want to cover … you know.” I nodded in the direction of her breasts, trying my level best not to look any more than was absolutely, strictly necessary.

She looked down. “Cover what?” She looked back at me, her silver eyebrows scrunched in innocent puzzlement.

“You know.” I nodded a couple more times, then lifted my hand, looked away, and pointed. “Them.”

“Does the sight of them offend your eyes, half-elf?”

“God no,” I said, keeping my eyes locked on hers. They were awesome. So were her eyes.

“Then why should I cover up? It is simply nature’s way.”

“Well. Because,” I could feel a tingling where I had no right to feel such a thing, “it’s cold and you don’t want to make yourself ill.”

“I don’t understand this word.”

“Which one? There were several.”

“This ‘ill’. It sounds foreign to my ear and yet you, a half-elf, deliver it like it is a common word in our language. What does it mean?”

“It means sick,” she still looked confused, “poorly, unwell, errm,” I couldn’t think of any more synonyms, “surely you must have been sick?”

“Only when I have eaten a dwarf’s dinner,” she smiled wistfully, “and it went straight back in the pot.”

“But you have to have been unwell. You know, not feeling great, shivers and shakes, aching muscles, fever.”

“Oh, you think I will catch a fever, you should have said from the beginning. Then I could have said you sound like an interfering old woman; or my mother which is one and the same thing, half-elf. Elves don’t become ill,” she pronounced the word ‘ell’.

“No, it’s ill.”

“Eel.”

“No ill, like hill or mill.”

“I am sorry half-elf, I don’t speak in the common tongue very much now so if my speech is not up to itch, then you have my most humble apologies.” She mumbled something else but the look on her face didn’t seem to be apologetic. Apoplectic perhaps but not apologetic.

“That’s OK. I’m sorry I didn’t realise you were foreign.” I spoke a little louder and slower. “Your English is very good.”

“Why are you shouting, and speaking to me like I am a child?”

“Sorry. It’s what we do when faced with a foreigner.”

“What, you talk to their chest instead of looking them in the eye?”

I hadn’t realised my gaze had dropped and as I quickly looked back up I could feel myself blushing and could also see a mischievous glint in those violet eyes. The corners of her mouth turned up into a half-smile.

I could hear Geoff laughing behind me so I pretended to scratch my back but flipped him the bird instead.

“Oh, that’s nice. Just because you got caught out ogling her. Why don’t you ask her name?” Geoff said.

“Sorry,” I said. “Maybe you could cover up? Please.”

“Very well, half-elf. I will cover up lest your face should turn more beetroot than it already is.”

I looked away until she had finished rustling her clothes.

“What happened back there? Who was the man?”

She hocked and spat on the floor. “He was no man. There are no men now. It was Cedric, the troll who calls this area his home.”

“A troll? Like someone who disrupts stuff on the web?”

“What is this web of which you speak? I know of only webs spun by spiders and no web I know of could hold Cedric.”

“You don’t know what the web is? The internet?” She shook her head, the ‘just about to explode’ look back on her face. “But you said this Cedric nutter was a troll?”

“Yes, a field troll.”

“You’re losing me now, trolls are just mythology, aren’t they? And,” something about what she had said suddenly became clearer, “you keep saying you’re an elf and I’m a half-elf.”

“It is true. I am elven and you are half-elven.”

“What do you mean, you are Elven?”

“I am one of the Elven folk who have lived in this land since time made the first rising of the sun. I know not where you hail from but, I see you are half-elven.”

I had no clue what she was talking about. She didn’t look like anything elf-like I’d ever seen in the movies or read in my favourite fantasy books. They are supposed to be all pale and ethereal. This girl had beautifully tanned skin, platinum hair and a ripper body as far as I could see. Or had seen. There was nothing elf-like about her and she didn’t even have pointy ears. Every picture of an elf I’d ever seen was nothing like her.

“Hang on a minute. You said you see I am a half-elf. What do you mean? I’m just a man, a bloke, you know, human.”

“There are no purebred humans anymore.”

“I beg your pardon.”

She spoke loudly and slowly, I suppose I deserved it. “There are no purebred humans anymore.” The mischievous look was back on her face again. I noticed she had dimples in her cheeks when she smiled anything more than a gentle smile.

“Yeah, OK, I’ll give you that one,” I couldn’t help but smile myself, “but what do you mean there are no more purebred humans. I’m human, where are the rest? What happened.”

“We don’t know for sure. It is what we are trying to find out but to succeed we need to find Vulexon.”

“Who is we, and who the hell is Vulexon?”

“We are the emissaries of the Elder Races of Dunrealm and Vulexon is the last remaining wizard of the Dunrealm.”

“Now you’re talking gibberish. Wizards. Elves. Trolls. And you still haven’t explained how I am here and I am all man.”

“Oh, yes.” Her eyes appraised me from top to toe. I blushed again. “I can see that.” She bit her bottom lip, then licked her top lip slowly with the tip of her pink tongue.

“I mean I’m a man, of mankind. Why am I here?” I tried to ignore the blatant flirting.

“Because you are half-elf. I can see it in you and in your aura. Besides only half-bloods survived and, so far, you are only the second we have found on our journey.”

I stopped to ponder everything she had said. It all sounded utterly crazy and yet she was totally convincing. I decided in the end she must either be a complete loon or she was telling the truth.

“Where are the rest of these emissaries? If they are real and not some kind of smartarse illusion I might even start to believe you.” I thought it was a good plan. Calling her bluff.

“I’ll take you to them. Come, let us go before Cedric picks up our scent and follows.” OK, so no bluff.

We both stood and for a moment as she stood near me I lost myself in those violet eyes

“What is your name?” My voice was breathless and hushed.

“I am Zinrel in the common tongue. My friends and lovers call me Zin. And you? What is your name?”

I thought about it for a few moments. I hadn’t even thought about using my name in weeks and right then I couldn’t remember exactly what it was so I stuck with the familiar.

“I am The Wanderer.”

“And what do your friends and lovers call you.”

“Dickhead.” Geoff’s dulcet tones echoed in the narrow space. “We call him Dickhead, love. Oh, bugger, she can’t hear me I forgot.”

I did my best to ignore his idiocy.

“I have no friends by the sound of what you say, as for lovers? Well let’s just say it’s been a while.” I tried to smile but got the feeling it didn’t come over as humourous, rather more pathetic given the look of sadness in her eyes.

I’m sure I heard her say something else but the gruff voice of Cedric from along the street drowned it out.

“We should go.” I said.

“Follow me. I will take you to my group. They may be able to explain better than I.”

“I can smell you Elf bitch, I know you’re here somewhere.” Cedric bellowed from behind us again as we set off at a jog. Zinrel was ahead leading the way and in truth I didn’t mind, the view from the back was almost as good as it was from the front. She smiled coyly when she glanced over her shoulder and caught me staring.

“Like what you see half-elf?”

Geoff laughed. “Busted again.”

Mentally I told him to shove it but on the outside, I kept quiet and kept jogging.