Chapter Forty-Six: Terra Firma

The Engine of Change, that great beast of hybrid magic and mechanical design, had somehow, however impossibly, transported me back to Earth. It had transported me back to Earth, smack-dab in the middle of a pitched battle in the middle of a magical storm. Men scrambled through the trenches behind me, fear on their faces, some of them looking to the blue and violet tears through the fabric of the sky with frantic eyes, pointing and shouting. With a start, I realized that they weren't fighting against another army… or at least not only against another army. As I watched, a purple seam split through the sky and several dozen small figures toppled out.

"Ceci est pire que ce qu'elle a jamais été!", a man near me yelled - This is worse than it's ever been.

"Il ne cesse de se aggraver.", his sergeant shouted back - It just keeps getting worse.

I could understand French a bit from my time in France, though not too well. Normally, I would have had my 'divine sight' spell, which worked just as well for spoken language as it did for reading strange tongues, but it wasn't working. At least it wasn't working well. I had to push much more mana into the spell and, even then, it felt like a weakened version of itself, like I wasn't quite getting all the French being spoken.

Whatever had fallen out of the seam, they were coming closer, loping like great, pale beasts. Actually, that's exactly what they were - huge, pale ape-things from the Outer Realms, each of them twice the size of a silverback gorilla and, apparently, a lot more resistant to rifle bullets. Some larger emplacements managed to take some of the beasts out before they reached the trenches, but they'd dropped right on the side of the trench lines. The magical storms did not respect trench warfare protocols. The man who'd pulled me back to the lines was too busy paying attention to the huge, angry apes just now lumbering into the trench lines to pay me much heed, so I saw myself to the nearby artillery emplacement, with every intention of seeing whether I could limber it enough to aim at the ape things currently wading through trenches of terrified, fleeing soldiers. Not likely… they were close to thirty degrees off from the cannon's aim.

Just then, another magical tear, an ugly vermillion rent in the fabric of reality, formed not fifty feet from me, and not too far from the barrel of the artillery cannon. Convenient, n'est-ce pas? For a split second, I saw the great, grinning, skeletal face of the Engine of Change, its eyes glowing to take another shot at me. Who knows where I'd end up this time… needless to say, I didn't hesitate to pull the lever. With a massive, ear-ringing boom, the cannon fired right up into the storm, right into the damn thing's face, and it sent a chain reaction through the pulsing magical storms, winking them out one-by-one until only a little residual crackling was to be felt.

There was still gunfire to my right, where the pale ape-things had just about been dealt with. They'd only managed to wade through about fifteen yards of trench, but they'd probably killed twenty men in that time, and injured just as many. As the last one staggered and collapsed, half a dozen men ran up and skewered it through the eyes with bayonets. Apparently, this wasn't the first time they'd dealt with the things.

"Hey!" one of them shouted at me. He'd just noticed the blue-haired new girl mucking about with the cannon.

Strong arms gripped me, and I reflexively threw the man off of me and into the trench just beyond. When two more leveled their rifles at me, I raised my hands in surrender.

"Ne tirez pas!" - don't shoot!

"Who the hell is she?" one of them asked.

"No idea… she just showed up…" another said.

"Is that really her hair?"

"She's bloody beautiful, friend."

I found myself escorted away from the front lines which, I suppose, I should have been grateful for. But on the forefront of my mind was that, while I was stuck back on the front in France, my friends were in the middle of the Outer Realms taking on a massive, reality-bending monstrosity, and there was nothing I could do to help them. And, on top of that, being on Earth just felt wrong.

Once you've practiced enough fae magic, sensing your connection with the realms and with the Goddess Gaia becomes second nature. She's like a font of creation and power that suffuses all of the fae realms and, even though her influence wanes beyond our realms, it can still be felt strongly anywhere in Alfheim, even deep in the Outer Realms. You come to rely upon it, like the reassuring hush of rain on a summer night, and I found that I hated being without it. I could still feel Gaia, but her energy was a mere trickle compared to what had been on Alfheim… no wonder my magic didn't seem to work right: I was operating at five percent power! That also explained why my wings didn't quite disappear and I couldn't seem to fly: a human-sized thing with big, jeweled dragonfly/butterfly wings is not fit for flight, and there's no non-magical way for those wings to disappear. I still had some magic, so they became more akin to a little diaphanous cape, but I still felt very vulnerable with them out like that.

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"What are those?" My escort made to touch my wings.

"Hands. Off." I shot him my best regal look.

"Ah… yes, mademoiselle."

+++++

They took me to a farmhouse that had seen better days - it had been near a back-and-forth war with between the Allied and Central powers for many months, at which point the supernatural creatures of the Outer Realms had been added to the mix. Frankly, it was amazing that the place was still standing. One of the captains had set it up as a back-lines command post, and now it was milling with officers and messengers.

We crunched along an old gravel path, the sky a deepening gray above us as the sun began to set, guns occasionally cracking in the distance, though the fire was no more than sporadic now that the magical storm was over and monsters had stopped falling out of the sky. When Nargillis had started transporting armies into Alfheim, I'd assumed it was a one-way exchange and had frankly wondered at why so many Earth troops seemed willing to fight in a strange and magical world for what only amounted to decent pay. It turns out they'd been fighting venomous monkeys, huge pale apes, spore-infected zombies, and worse for months now. And, when they weren't fighting those, they were still fighting the regular war, which had ground to another stalemate after the magical storms stalled the summer offensive.

"Where are you from?" my escort asked - a French lieutenant with a pencil mustache and weary eyes.

I almost said Nebraska. But I certainly didn't look Nebraskan at the moment, nor did I really feel that way anymore. I missed the feeling of Gaia's magic pulsing through my soul, and I wondered whether that meant my soul was a fae soul in a fae body now instead of a human summoned into Laeanna's body, as I had once been.

"I'm from Vernal," I said eventually. "It's a queendom from beyond the magical storms. I am Princess Laeanna of the Fae, the Storm Maiden, Liberator of Autumnal, Crown Princess of Vernal, and Consort to Crown Prince Calivar of the Estival and Lady Meliswe of the Blue Fern Valley."

"So… Laeanna from Vernal?"

"Yes, that's right," I said.

"Emil Dupuis from Toulouse. Care for some tea while one of the boys fetches the captain?"

"Have you got coffee?"

"Coffee coming right up." He flashed his best winning smile. Sorry, friend, but Meliswe and Calivar are enough for little ol' me… but I had to get back to them first.

While we waited for Captain Blanchard, Dupuis told me a bit about what had happened - though, mostly, he wanted to learn about Alfheim. After all, tens of thousands of soldiers had disappeared into the magical storms, so there was quite a bit of speculation over what was actually happening with them. He didn't quite believe that I wasn't a human when I showed him my ears, though unfurling my wings and beating them a few times certainly did it… though I also damaged the hanging lantern on the cottage roof. Back in the fae realms, we usually build ceilings to around nine feet so all but the largest fae can deploy their wings without scraping the floor or ceiling. Meanwhile, on Earth, where ceilings are usually a lot lower, things had been very strange since the storms started.

"At first we thought it was some new German weapon that they were using out of desperation, since we pushed all the way through the Netherlands and to Dusseldorf. But the storms were hitting them just as much as they were hitting us, and sometimes our men would see the lights flickering over the German trenches, and then there'd be nobody there the next morning. Sometimes, the enemy will do that during retreat, but we think they were just disappearing. Then the beasts started coming not long after… those white devils… that's what we call the apes… they're not nearly the worst of the lot. Have you got much like that in Vernal?"

I laughed. "Thank Gaia, no. Those come from a wild and cursed place called the Outer Realms. In Vernal, I think the most dangerous animals that aren't people are wolves… and, actually, they've been tamed over the millennia. They'll tear a deer to bits and then offer pieces to travelers if they've got leftovers."

"That's very… thoughtful… of them…"

The captain arrived shortly after, grumbling about being interrupted during supper but soon changing his tune when he saw me. As I've no doubt mentioned, I am considered exceedingly fair among the fae, and the average fae woman is considered fair by most human standards (unless you are into lots of curves, in which case you will likely be unimpressed). The captain smiled dreamily and hummed yes and no as I asked him questions - though I'm pretty sure he was supposed to be questioning me.

"Listen… Captain Blanchard, I've been warring with the man behind these magical storms on and off for a few months now. I helped to kill him earlier in the day, but not before he managed to awaken an ancient evil beast… and I fear it will make things much, much worse. It will destroy my world and the chaotic energies will likely invade Earth far worse than they've done so far, and it might never stop. "

The captain smiled dreamily. "Hmm? Oh, yes," he said, and then frowned a bit. "Oh… that sounds quite bad. Quite, quite bad."

"It is. But I might be able to stop it if I can get back to Alfheim. I'll just need to get inside one of the warps, and I should be able to yank myself through since I've got a higher arcane affinity to Alfheim than I've got here."

"I won't pretend to know what any of that means, princess, but I don't see what we've got to lose. But how will you get through a storm? We never know when they're going to strike, and most of the time when they do, they're a hundred meters up."