The young, jug-eared guard Marley swallowed but stepped forward. Rainer drew his sword and took the rear as Krailash pushed his way through the jungle. At nearly seven feet tall, and weighing three hundred pounds, Krailash was not the largest or strongest thing in the jungle, but he was far from the smallest or weakest. After spending so many years on the caravan route, he knew the likeliest dangers well, and broke his trail with confidence, sweeping aside branches and vines with his axe. He paused whenever the child cried out, adjusting his direction as necessary. Sound carried strangely in the jungle, bouncing off the towering trees and occasional overgrown ruins of old halfling settlements and yuan-ti temples.

The wall of green parted before his axe, and a clearing was revealed: a broad courtyard of once neatly-jointed stones, long since jostled out of true by the slow motions of the earth and the growth of tree roots underneath. A squalling, naked child with skin the rich brown of new leather lay in the shadow of a pillar. The stone was carved with the likeness of some extinct jungle beast, eroded into a shape of vague menace by the weather of centuries. Fresh blood spotted the stones nearby, and there were other signs of recent violence: broken bits of weaponry, shreds of torn cloth, a few teeth scattered on cobblestones.

The child was naked, tipped on its back, limbs waving like an overturned turtle. Female. Krailash had always found the sight of human infants vaguely alarming. They were so helpless and needy-unlike dragonborn, who could walk and feed soon after emerging from the shell. They became self-sufficient in a few years. When Krailash’s shadow fell across the girl child, shielding her from the sun, she quieted, and gazed up at him with wide eyes the same rich green as terazul leaves. If she found the sight of a seven-foot-tall rust-scaled humanoid dragon frightening, it didn’t show-but for a child so young, everything was new, and most things were probably more interesting than frightening.