Teffy and the Golden Spoon

The gnome stood still, waiting for his enemy to show himself again. A few feet higher on the mountain top, the shadowy figure watched her victim. She knew that he hadn’t seen her hiding place. She smiled behind her sinister mask. As a gust of wind flurried across the mountain top, the ninja leapt down and dived into the gnome, again. This time, Benstronian blocked her attack. The ninja landed on the ground with stealth and grace. She held herself above the snow on just the tips of her fingers and the tops of her toes. Before the gnome could try to identify his enemy, she stroke again. Benstronian held his arms out in front of him and defended himself from her flying attack. Most of the ninja’s blows flew right over Benstronian’s short head since there was such a significant height difference between the two opponents. The powdery snow shimmered around their feet and burst into frozen clouds as they scrambled through it. The ninja kicked Benstronian in the face, knocking him to the ground, but when she reached for her katana, the gnome hurled a hard snowball at her head. She stumbled backward, quickly regaining her footing. She stepped toward Benstronian, but he kicked his leg out, whirled around in a circle, and knocked the ninja clean off her feet. He jumped through the air, pulling out one of his curved daggers as he flew, and landed by the ninja’s head. Breathing heavily, he held the blade to the ninja’s covered neck. Benstronian growled as he tore off the ninja’s mask. The moment he did, he recognized her foreign face. “Lakisha?” He shrieked, astonished to see that it was she. He had thought that Lakisha was dead. The wind howled through Benstronian’s pale-gold beard, causing clusters of snowflakes to stick onto his bristled facial hair. “How did you find me here? How did you survive? And why in Calda are you attacking me?” he questioned, brushing some nipping snow off the tips of his pointy ears with his left hand. Lakisha chuckled, her laugh interrupted by harsh breathing. “I just trying to scare you,” she lied, “but you better trained than I, Master. I yield.” The ninja’s accent was strange and her sentences were often difficult to understand. Benstronian hesitantly removed his blade from Lakisha’s neck and stepped back as she rose to her feet. He still couldn’t believe who he was looking at. He bent his neck to look up into her face; she was short for a human, but still far taller than a gnome. She was at least two-and-a-half times taller than Benstronian was. She put her hands together and bowed to the gnome. “How did you find me? How are you still alive?” Benstronian repeated. “I’m highly trained ninja; escaping mountain when they attacked was not hard thing.” Lakisha answered, amused with her own skills. She thought briefly on how a certain gnome, Teffy, led an army of magical creatures to overthrow her. The light brown skin on Lakisha’s cheeks began to turn a blushing red because of the unkindly cold wind. Her long braid of black hair spun and dangled down her spine. “I saw you coming here when I was come back from Castle Artinus. Then I hear from centaur that battle was lost, so I decide to follow you.” “Well you shouldn’t have—it’s terribly rude.” Benstronian turned his back to Lakisha and started to walk away again, for that was what he was doing before the ninja intercepted him. As he shuffled his booted feet through the snow he pondered the events of the past few days, still shocked that his mighty master had failed. “So you want little valley?” Lakisha asked, stopping the gnome, though she knew the answer. Bits of frost and sparkles of snowflakes clung to her black garbs of clothing, which flapped wildly in the blizzard wind. Benstronian turned around again and looked up into her face, which was once again hidden behind her ghostly mask. The valley of which Lakisha spoke lay beneath the mountains behind her; it had once been Benstronian’s home, but he abandoned it and blamed his fellow gnomes for exiling him. “I want as much as I can get, but how do you know that?” he inquired, staring into Lakisha’s deep-brown eyes. “I have ears; I listen to you shout,” she replied, with a smirk in her tone. Benstronian rubbed his tiny hands together; his fingerless gloves didn’t do much to protect them from the relentless cold. He thought of how, just minutes ago, he had yelled threats pointlessly down into the valley; he had assumed that nobody aside from him had been around to hear it. He felt slightly humiliated to know that somebody actually had. Lakisha took two steps toward Benstronian. “I want something that belong to me, too. I help you get what you want, if you help me.” Benstronian raised an eyebrow at Lakisha; though they were once on the same side just a week before, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to trust her. He knew how evil people were—he knew of their selfishness and thirst for power—and he had seen it in Lakisha’s character many times before. “And what do you want?” “Same as you… I want my old home,” she told him. “And that’s it?” Lakisha nodded. “It generous offer from me, since this place was on the map of my territory that Artinus would have granted me.” She turned her head to look into the valley. Before Artinus and his army were defeated, he had promised Lakisha a certain amount of territory as a reward for her services. “You don’t want this anymore though, right?” Benstronian said. “If we go in this together, I don’t want you laying so much as a toe hair of interest in this place.” “I won’t,” Lakisha promised. “Who want this place when they could have a place so much better?” Benstronian scratched at his bulgy mustache. He knew the place which Lakisha wanted—the Eastern Kingdoms. He’d been there before and wasn’t very fond of it; he pondered on whether or not he would lose anything of value to him by agreeing to Lakisha’s proposal. After a long moment of standing in the blistering-cold mountain wind in silence, Benstronian asked, “And how do you plan to help me?” Lakisha threw her head back and laughed. “I have my ways, Master.”