\"I told you, No cheatin\'!\" the orc screamed as he threw the table around. He was obviously annoyed over Terr\'s flow in the card game tonight. He looked about wildly, as if expecting the other players to rise and grab a weapon against the rule breaker. No one moved an inch, except for turning their heads and a few raised eyebrows, to those who knew Durn this was just his average behaviour. With a grin Terr gathered the silver on the table into a neat pile in front of him.
\"There, there Durn. No reason to get violent now just because lady luck sits in my lap tonight and not yours.\" This only infuriated the orc even more, it seemed, and with a grunt he simply lifted the whole table straight up and threw it across the room, which finally gave him a reaction from the others, who knocked over their chairs in the attempt to back off a few feet. No one of them was exactly armed for combat, except for the orc with his crescent axe hanging in a leather strap by the waist and the wood elf, known as Deltariel, who always seemed to be able to pick out daggers from thin air. He was currently twirling one in his left hand, his right hands finger twitching slightly as if wanting to do the same thing, but Durn didn\'t even notice.
\"I might be an Orc, but dat dun mean me stupid! You is using some kind o\' magic \'ere. You STINK of magic, human!\" this was clearly not Durns normal phrase to utter because the other players eyes widened slightly and their heads turned against Terr.
\"You can\'t be serious, Durn? Magic? On a human? That\'s ridiculous!\" a purple haired shadow elf burst out.
\"Even if he IS cheating, which wouldn\'t surprise me, him being a human and all, you still can\'t go around and trash the room because you lost the game a few times.\" said the tall, cautious owner of the house, a Gorron with skin as gray as ash.
Being the only human in the immediate surroundings, Terr was getting used to the prejudices, but the fact that orcs can smell magic had actually not crossed his mind this evening. His mind was getting slow and dull from all the liquor and gambling the last couple of days. He was, of course, not using magic for something as simple as predicting a game of King\'s Knights, that would be a waste of energy and an unnecessary risk. Keeping his gem open to the void started to seem like a good idea right now that the orc was getting violent. He sighed heavily and decided that the time had probably come for him to get off his ass and continue his journey north; he\'d stayed here too long already.
\"Dere it is again! De smells of magic... it hurts meh head to smell it so close! I gonna kill you, magic wielder!\" The living room was pretty big, but so full of things that the orc didn\'t have much space to move his wide arms in, yet somehow he managed to equip his axe and swing it from below straight against Terr\'s throat. Caught by surprise and still sitting on the chair, Terr flung himself backwards, away from the orc and fell over on the floor. Deltariel was quick with his knives but somehow Durn managed to be quicker and grabbed the elf\'s arm with his right hand, the dagger just an inch away from his blazing, hazel eyes. He twisted it around violently, causing Deltariel to make an acrobatic flip and land on his back. \"Dis is not of your business ELF. Get out of my battle or I\'ll kill you too!\" The others had backed off into the nearby kitchen but didn\'t lose the scene with their eyes. Durn turned against Terr, who was with increasing frustration trying to get up from the dirty floor. \"Get up, magic wielder! I wants to see what you can do! Can you turn me into stone? Set de house on fire!?\" Durn closed in on Terr, his steps echoing the closing of every sentence.
The fall to the floor had knocked some air out of Terr\'s lungs and he had lost the little mental grip he had of his gemstone and the void. He was furiously trying to regain concentration and connect but the dust he breathed in on the floor and the adrenaline in his veins made it a whole lot more difficult. The fact that he had seven foot, infuriated, axe-carrying orc coming against him didn\'t make things easier but it really didn\'t scare him either. What scared him was the sudden loss of control. He had always been able to connect without any problems, even during tight situations, but the weakness he had experienced over the last couple of months was now bigger than ever. To even think about losing the ability to channel at all almost made him weep on the spot. Then his obsidian gem awoke.
\"What ever would you do without me....?\" came its thoughts hazily. Terr screamed back in his mind \"I don\'t know and I\'m sorry for ever bonding with you! Now help me out here!\" Within milliseconds he could feel the void opening to him, letting him in, no, pulling him in and he let out a relieved sigh. Every splinter in the floor below him felt as a part of his own body, as well as every muscle and heartbeat in the orc and everyone else. He was the air they breathed, the fire that crackled in the fireplace and the fly that was just about to be eaten by a spider in the far away corner of the ceiling. Durn swung his axe.
What happened next is a story that lived on in the village for generations, in hundreds of different variations. The tall Gorron and owner of the house claimed that Durn must\'ve slipped on his own weapon and hit himself in the chest or something. That story was only believable until they realised that the owner of the house had gone half-blind from the incident and had gotten a piece of a broken axe stuck inside the back of his head, which in turn made him hallucinate and live in a lucid dream his last couple of days, before dying from the wound. The purple haired shadow elf that was, more or less, ok, explained that the human actually was a dragonmorph and that he transformed in that exact moment, flew straight through the roof and threw an exploding spell on the house. The gibbering, poor elf never stopped seeing dragons wherever he went and was eventually eaten by a real one that he thought was just another figment of his imagination. The wood elf was never heard from or even found in the ruins of the living room, neither was the so-called \"dragonmorphicall, gem carrying, battle mage\". The third story that exited the house was never exactly told, but the remnants of Durn was found five hundred feet north of the house with a large hole in his chest and most of his bones twisted in unnatural angles.


\"By Devoto himself, you KNOW I didn\'t connect with purpose back there, Deltariel!\" - Terr growled and paced on through the rocky landscape. The lean wood elf laughed out loud and smirked under his hood.
\"Terr, what you are saying is simply impossible. Rocks don\'t have minds of their own, not even the gemstones. It\'s like saying that the sky is green or that fish fly. It doesn\'t happen.\" A few swift jumps took him some steps ahead of Terr and up to a higher point from which he could see the valley they had just passed through. \"Either you connected purposefully or someone else connected you.\" he said slowly as if talking to someone a little thick.
\"I... can\'t explain it really... you don\'t know what it feels like since you don\'t have the magic connection that I do.\" Terr\'s voice trailed off as he thought about how to put his next words. \"Imagine meeting someone from a different tribes of elves. If you are trained in their language you\'ll have no problem of communicating and can trade information freely. If you, on the other hand, do not know the language of that tribe you\'ll need a translator, which is how a Binder works. He \'translates\' the magic from the gemstone or artifact to you so that you can use it. It is misleading to say that he\'s the one connecting you since being connected requires you to have your mind set to it.\" He sighed heavily and avoided a dead stick poking out from a dried out tree. \"I have less knowledge than you about the gemstones, or any rocks for that matter, but I know what it feels like when a Binder translates magic from an artifact to you. This was something else...\" the doubt in his voice made it sound like he had trouble believing in it himself.
Deltariel looked at him doubtfully but dropped the subject by shaking his head slowly and making a powerless gesture. \"At least it got us both out of there alive.\" He heard Terr mutter something more about losing control and not being able to help it, but he ignored it all and focused on the journey ahead. Since leaving the village, where they had paused for a few weeks, they had finally decided to move out of the deep valley and travel into the northern mountains. From here the terrain was going to become a little tougher, but they were hoping to find some traces of what they were looking for up here. Dwarves, nowadays only stories and myths as old as those about Devoto, they were said to have been something in between a human and a pixie in size, only slightly bulkier and a hell of a lot better at weaponry and engineering. If they could only find some ruins, a fragment of a piece of a clue to where they went or why they disappeared, then maybe they could understand more of the world they lived in. He took another jump and froze on top of the next rock.
\"Deltariel, what\'s up? You look a little...\" Terr\'s didn\'t finish the sentence. He didn\'t need to. In front of them lay the remnants of a statue, only the head could be distinguished clearly since the body seemed to have been torn into pieces. It lay there looking straight at them, eyes the size of a carriage, a crown with what would have been a circle of axes and the emblem with the Cog and the hatchet. On top of the stone head crouched a short stout man with a long braided beard and two revolvers aimed at the ones in front of him.
\"Be quick or be dead...\" he said simply, pulling back the two hammers with a click that echoed in the passage. “I don’t like repeating myself so if you’d please just state why you are here so I can ignore that and we can all walk out of this passage alive.”