“No,” said Greta. “I already told you, I’m not dying without seeing the sun.”

“I know, but you could have longer to spend in the sun if you went into the necklace for a bit.”

“No,” she said. “Not a chance. I’m not so desperate that I need to try to extend my life.”

“It’s not extending your life,” said Elise. “It’s just extending the amount of time you’ll get to spend under the sun.”

“No,” said Greta. “I’m not going in. I’m going to live the rest of my life normally, thank you very much.”

“Teacher, please.”

“No,” said Greta. “And that’s that. I’m not going in there.”

“Mom, why not?” asked Kristofer. “If you did, you’d blink, and when you opened your eyes, you’d be under the sun.”

“I don’t care,” said Greta.

“Mom, please.”

“Not you too. I already said I’m not going in, and there’s nothing you can do to make me.”

Should I just knock her out and put her in? thought Elise.

No! She replied to herself. What is wrong with me today?

On top of that being rude, that could also be deadly. She was so feeble that there was probably no way to knock her out that wouldn’t shorten her lifespan, or even directly kill her. She could put her to sleep with {Fairy Dust} again, but she doubted that would count toward the unconscious requirement.

“Why don’t you want to go in?” asked Elise.

“Because I don’t. Do I need to explain them to you?”

“I’d like you to,” said Elise. “I want to be able to convince you to go in.”

“Well, you can’t,” said Greta. “Maybe I’m just being a stubborn old bat, but I want to see the surface on my own, without any fancy ancient relics helping me. Don’t bother trying to convince me otherwise. It won’t work.”

“But-” started Elise. “Nevermind.”

“Good,” said Greta. “Was that all? If you don’t mind, I’m going to go back to bed.”

“I’m going to try to convince you again tomorrow,” said Elise. “And the day after that.”

“As will I,” said Kristofer.

“I think it’s a good idea too,” added the healer.

Greta grinned. “Good luck then. Now go away.”

She laid back down on her pillow and closed her eyes. Elise was pretty sure she wasn’t asleep just yet, but she got the message. She left the room, and made the long, lonely journey back to the drow cave. She got about halfway down the tunnel still in her dwarf form before realizing she had to change back. The drow would never hurt her, but it still wasn’t a good idea to go into their cave looking like a dwarf.

She looked down at Astrid’s Star, wondering what she should do about it. Would it become part of the transformation like the clothes did? If so, was there a way she could differentiate it to keep it on her at all times? As Hallbjorn had promised, it was something that she could use, even without hands, so it would be nice if she could use it whenever she wanted. She wondered if she should take it off so she could put it on her base form to be sure she could use it then, or if to transform while still wearing it and see what happened.

Ultimately, she decided to transform while wearing it. In the worst case scenario, she would have to wait until the cooldown wore off to access it again, and it was night, so she would be going to sleep anyway. She deactivated {Lesser Transformation}, morphing back into her changeling form, and was pleased to find that the necklace was still there. Whether that was because it was an accessory rather than clothes, or because it was an item that didn’t play well with the System, she didn’t know, but it was a nice feature.

After a night of relatively good sleep, she spent the next morning socializing with the drow in her drow form. It was a little difficult, since no matter how many times she told them not to, most of them couldn’t help but treat her with reverence as a fey. She was forming good relationships with them, but at this point, she couldn’t really call any of them but Naomi “friends.”

Around lunchtime, she was too exhausted to be around people any longer, so she went out into the forest again. She flew around for a bit, then realized that she couldn’t actually do any more hunting, and by this point, she knew the entire cavern well enough that there wasn’t anything interesting left to see. She could just train her skills and do mana meditation, but she felt too restless to do that for very long.

I could go to the surface

She looked up toward the Mother Tree and pondered the idea. That would probably be more interesting than staying down there. She wouldn’t be able to go too far, since she wanted to stay near the dwarves and drow at least until the dwarves reached the surface, but she could do a bit of aerial exploration. While she had spent her first two weeks in the forest above, she couldn’t really say she knew it well, since she spent most of her time either running and hiding, or living in the cabin.

The biggest problem with that plan was the warg. Freddy said that he would make sure it didn’t cause any problems, but if it ran into her alone and unprotected, would it really just let her go? Probably not. She would have to stay high in the air, and if it decided to wait at the entrance to the drow cavern…

Actually, that would be fine.

Even if it camped out at the main entrance, she could always go back through one of the entrances to the wyrm tunnels. The only real danger was if it was waiting for her as she left the drow caves, but what were the odds of that? Now that she had thought that, much higher, but even if she had jinxed herself, she could just wait until it left, or turn around and go back out the wyrm tunnels. Either way, as long as she was careful, there was very little danger.

With her mind made up, she flew up to the top of the tree and into the tunnel leading outside. The ground was still stained with Emilia’s blood, but Elise did her best to ignore it. It had been long enough that it was dry and barely smelled. At the exit to the tunnel, she waited a few minutes to make sure the warg wasn’t there. She heard a few things moving around, but none of them large enough to be the beast, and the air was pleasant and warm, so she took that as a good sign and flew out.

Once again, after so long underground, the sun was almost blinding. She flew into it anyway, getting a few hundred feet in the air before she let herself stop so her eyes could adjust. When they did, she was a bit awed at the view. She had noticed it in passing while flying with Emilia, but now that she had the leisure to stop and look around by herself, she was surprised at how big the forest seemed. For as far as she could see in any direction, there was nothing but a sea of dark green tree tops, interrupted occasionally by small rocky mountains or narrow rivers.

She didn’t recognize any of the landmarks, and she struggled to combine her mental map of the underground caves with what she was seeing. Somewhere a few miles to the west was where the dwarves’ tunnel would end. Far to the north would be the insect-filled caves that she had encountered while exploring the wyrm tunnels. The underground lake would be southwest of her current location. That meant that the wyrm tunnel’s main chamber would be just a bit west of her, and the entrance to it on the hill overlooking the cabin would be…

Her eyes locked onto the familiar tree atop the hill, and she hesitated in the air. Just on the other side of that hill, she would be able to see the cabin. But did she want to see the cabin? Not particularly, but she felt she needed to. She had accepted their deaths, but seeing the cabin again with her own two eyes might provide at least a small measure of closure. There was also the dream she had while staying with the dwarves. Did the warg really eat the bodies? It had seemed so vivid, and after her experiences with Titania, she wasn’t so quick to dismiss it as a regular nightmare as she had been before.

I need to see it, she decided.

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

She took a deep breath to steel herself, then flew toward the hill. The cabin came into view a few moments later, and it was… mundane. The wall was still blown out, but other than that, it just looked like an abandoned cabin. The plants in the garden were overgrown, and grass had started to creep in on the path leading up to the front door. The windows were all intact, but dusty, and despite the damage to the one side, the rest of the cabin looked to be in good repair.

As she got closer, nothing really jumped out at her as strange, and after a few moments, she decided that in and of itself was strange. If someone had come back, they would have changed something, right? Maybe they would have put up a sign, warning of the dangers of the area, or if looters had come by, they might have left the door open or broken a window or two. However, nothing had changed.

She flew around to the destroyed side, and when she saw what was within, her heart sank. The interior was clearly untouched. There was a thick layer of dust covering everything, and there were splinters and broken pieces of the log wall scattered all over the ground, and there were two skeletons on the ground. Both were lying in the middle of the open sitting room, face up. That was not where they had died. They had the same obvious injuries from the warg’s attacks, and some additional broken ribs.

Elise stared at them for a few seconds, then went back outside and sat down behind a tree so she couldn’t see the cabin. The dream was real. The warg ate Sylvanna and Corwin. She had expected as much, but seeing their skeletons with their rib cages in pieces was too much.

Context for those who haven't read the dev edits: I included a scene where Elise has a nightmare of Walter after she tricked him off the cliff where he goes back to the cabin and eats Sylvanna and Corwin.

Why are they still there? she thought.

The cabin looked untouched, and the skeletons were still where the warg had left them. That meant no one had been to the cabin since the incident. But why? The cabin was a bit remote, but surely someone should have come to check on them? If not of their own volition, then at least Nick or Sophie would have requested it. Did someone come, only to end up meeting the same fate before they could reach the cabin? Or was no one sent at all?

Why would no one have been sent? It didn’t make sense. The city that Elise and Emilia had previously teleported out of wasn’t that far. A monster as powerful as the warg living so close would surely warrant at least some countermeasures. The fact that no one had been sent meant that no one knew and if no one knew, that meant that the survivors hadn’t told anyone.

Calm down, she told herself. There are plenty of reasons for no one to come.

Elise had no idea how the teleportation scroll worked or where it sent them. It could have sent them to the other side of the continent. It could have sent them to a different continent. She had no idea why Corwin would have had something like that with him, but even if they were relatively close by, there were still other reasons.

The most likely option was that they told someone, and it had simply been deemed too dangerous to enter the forest. She was sure there were magical ways of viewing the cabin. Maybe they had just done that to verify the situation, and then decided to leave it alone until someone strong enough to face the warg was available to handle things. Yes, that was probably what happened. Nick, Sophie, and Bianca were no doubt safe and sound in Jelor by this time. Grieving, perhaps, but safe.

Elise hopped out from behind her tree and looked back at the cabin. If no one had come yet, there probably wouldn’t be anyone coming. Who knew when the bodies would be able to be retrieved?

I have Astrid’s Star now.

Elise’s stomach churned, but she knew what she had to do. In the worst case scenario, someone was already on their way, and they would be disappointed, but while it would be a temporary mystery, Elise would deliver the bodies appropriately as soon as possible. Plus, it was better that they were with her than with someone else. In the case of the worst, she would at least be able to give them a proper burial herself.

But the worst won’t happen.

She flew back into the cabin and hovered over the bodies. How was she going to get them into the necklace? It said all she had to do was touch them, but that was only if they were something she could carry, and as a rabbit, she couldn’t carry much. She didn’t want to be pulling them into the necklace one bone at a time. She could wait until the cooldown on her shapeshifting wore off, and she could transform into a giant or something to do it, but she had used almost the full duration that morning. It would be past sundown before she could do that.

How did it determine how much she could carry? Did it only apply to things she could physically move? Or was it just her theoretical carry weight? If it was theoretical, it might be possible to get the whole skeleton, even as a rabbit. Her Strength was in the triple digits now.

She lowered herself down right above the smaller of the two, and paused. They had looked picked clean from a distance, but now that she was closer, she could see that there were still bits of flesh attached to the bones here and there, and there were ants crawling all over them. Living creatures couldn’t enter the necklace, but rotting flesh could, and that was where she planned on keeping her clothes.

Am I really worrying about clothes right now?

She cursed herself, then lowered herself the rest of the way until her front paw was barely touching the skull. A moment later, the entire skeleton vanished, including the fragments of rib that had been on the ground beneath. The ants that had been crawling on it, and apparently living in it all fell to the ground with an almost inaudible clatter. Elise resisted the urge to gag, then moved over to the other skeleton and did the same thing.

Elise peeked inside to see what had become of them, and noticed something she hadn’t noticed before. None of the items in the necklace were actually touching each other. Even the apparent pile of gold had little spaces between each coin. She first felt relieved, then chided herself for feeling relieved about something so superficial.

With that taken care of, Elise decided to have a look around the rest of the cabin. Everything that hadn’t been knocked over by shrapnel was still in its place. The kitchen sink still had a few dirty dishes in it, though they were now covered with mold, rather than food bits. In Sophie’s room, the last book they had been reading was still out on her desk, and there were still dirty clothes shoved in a ball under the bed. Elise grabbed the book from the desk, and a few more of Sophie’s favorites from the shelf.

There were other things left in the other rooms that she would have liked to take, but between the skeletons, the books, and the other things that Hallbjorn had given her, she was worried she wasn’t going to have room for Greta. She was already probably pushing its limits, but Hallbjorn had said it went by volume, so she hoped the skeletons weren’t actually taking up that much space.

She went one final round to see if anything else stood out, then went back outside. The cabin had indeed brought back bad memories, but somehow, they weren’t affecting her that much. Her mood was spoiled, but not so much that she wanted to do nothing for the rest of the day like she did back when it first happened. It was still early afternoon, and she had hours until she wanted to be back underground to visit Greta.

She flew high up into the sky again so that she could have a good vantage point, then picked a direction and started moving. She didn’t quite remember where the main tunnel above the Mother Tree was, but she knew where both the wyrm tunnel entrances were, so if she got lost, she could just go to one of them.

After about 15 minutes, the edge of the forest came into view, and beyond it, she saw a somewhat familiar river. She vaguely recalled seeing such a river while flying with Emilia, so she steered toward it, and by the time she was over the water, she could see the walls of the city in the distance.

Satisfied that she now knew she could find her way there again, she turned around and picked a different direction to fly in. This time, she didn't quite make it to the edge of the forest because something else caught her eye. The forest was quite hilly, with a few rocky mountains jutting out, but one jutted out a bit more than the rest. It seemed to be summer, based on the heat, but there was a thick layer of snow covering one side of the mountain. There was really only one thing that could have caused that

She approached cautiously, stopping still a thousand feet away to be safe. At the base of the mountain was a small cave, and though she couldn’t be sure, she thought she saw something inside it. She didn’t dare get any closer, but there was no doubt whose lair she had spotted. She filed that information away for later as well. Knowing where it lived would make her job easier in the future.

She flew around the forest taking notes of other points of interest until the sun started to get a bit too close to the horizon. She didn’t end up finding the main entrance to the drow cavern, so she made do with the wyrm tunnel atop the hill overlooking the cabin. Her entrance had collapsed since she left, but the dirt was still relatively soft, and the tunnel itself was intact, so she was able to make it inside without issue.

When she got back, she checked in briefly with the drow, then flew over to the dwarves to visit Greta. The city was still recovering from the night before, and there were still tables and plates and bits of food out on the streets. There was a small crew of workers cleaning up the mess, but from what Elise could hear, most of the dwarves were inside their homes nursing hangovers.

Greta didn’t wake for long, and when she did, their conversation went much the same as it had the previous day. She had no interest in going inside Astrid’s Star. She had accepted her fate, and she was going to live on her own until she made it to the surface. After ending that topic, they moved on to a bit of small talk as Elise told the old woman more about the surface until Greta got too sleepy to go on.

The next three days passed in almost exactly the same way. Elise spent the morning with the drow, the afternoon exploring, dinner with Greta and the other dwarves, and then the evenings were reserved for training her skills.

During that time, the dwarves made steady progress on both the tunnel excavation, and the packing so they could leave as quickly and efficiently as possible once the tunnel was complete. The Mother Tree finished its recovery from the poison, letting Salome get back to her usual level of activity, and with that, the last of Emilia’s shadow hanging over the tribe vanished. She was not forgotten, but with the tree and the queen healthy, the constant reminders were gone.

Elise continued her preparations to leave the caves, getting a spare change of clothes from both the drow and the dwarves, as well as some travel rations. Her level didn’t go up, but the training of her skills in the evenings wasn’t for nothing. Progress had slowed significantly since most of her skills passed level 30, but it never stopped.

On the fourth day, she did her normal routine once more. However, when she returned to the dwarves, Greta’s condition had changed for the worse.