From the shadows, just a few paces away from where Arty and Jan's group crouched, the fourty-something man lingered, cloaked in a hood and mask.
He stayed perfectly still. His body pressed low against the brush, his presence cloaked by years of practiced stealth and his spell.
Beneath the fabric that concealed his face a smirk curved across his lips. The sight of the supposedly brave adventurers huddling beneath bushes with their hair whipped by the wyvern's wing-gusts, was enough to amuse him.
Inside his pouch, carefully tucked away, was the spent scroll. Its runes that once brilliant now dulled to ash and silence. That one piece of parchment had summoned the very wyvern that now circling above, its piercing cry shaking the leaves loose from their branches.
The assassin had no more use for the scroll, and yet he kept it hidden close, as though some fragment of its power lingered.
