Elise was in her classroom again, this time alone. The windows showed nothing but blackness outside, and all the lights were off save for the safety light above the door and the tiny red LED on the smoke detector. The air was stale and static, and all around, there was nothing but silence.
She was still a rabbit, unfortunately. She had been human in a few of her Earth dreams, but not this one, which was frustrating. She couldn’t use her skills properly in her dreams either, which meant she wouldn’t be opening any doors or windows, and she wouldn’t be picking up anything bigger than a pencil.
She glanced around one final time, then looked back at the desk she was sitting on and nearly leapt into the air. She knew that the desk had nothing on it before, but now it had a phone. Her phone. She recognized the worn edges of her white plastic case. She recognized the crack in the corner of the screen protector that she had been putting off replacing.
Well, it’s my own dream, after all, she thought. Of course it would have my things in it.
But even then, it was still unsettling. Dreams weren’t supposed to be like this. They weren’t supposed to be so detailed, and she wasn’t supposed to be so lucid. Even in her most vivid nightmares, there was never anything as realistic as this. It was like she was actually back on Earth.
While she was staring, she nearly jumped again when it vibrated and the screen lit up. She crept toward it carefully, to see what was going on. It was a text message, and it only had two words: “Behind you.”
“Boo!”
This time Elise did jump. From her desk, she jumped over the two rows in front of her, crashing into the back of a chair and hitting the ground. While she was in the air, she looked back and saw that Titania, the golden woman was standing right behind where she just was. She wasn’t laughing, but her lips were curled upward, and her eyes carried more than a hint of mirth.
“Y-you’re Titania,” said Elise, getting back to her feet.
“Yes,” she said.
“What are you doing here? What do you want with me? Why do I have this rune of fate?”
She smiled mysteriously. “It’s time to wake up.”
“What do you-?”
“-mean?”
Once again, Elise woke up before she could finish her sentence.
It was the middle of the night, and all around, it was completely dark. She was so distracted by the dream that she didn’t even notice that anything was unusual immediately. When she did, her stress levels started to climb.
It wasn’t supposed to be this dark. The light from the fruits of the Mother Tree never fully disappeared. Even in the latest hours of night, they still emitted a soft glow. They were never dark like they were now, nor were they lukewarm. Something was wrong.
The only light now was from her wings, and even with her night vision, they weren’t enough to see the cavern. They were barely enough to get a glimpse of the trees on the edge of the clearing around Mother Tree’s base.
Nearby, she could hear hushed voices, and when she emerged from her alcove, she saw their source. A small group of drow had woken up from their sleep and were talking amongst each other. No one was panicking yet, but there was a tension in the air, and Elise could tell that it wouldn’t be long before someone did.
“Lady Elise,” said one of them. “What’s happening?”
“I don’t know,” she replied. “Don’t panic. I’ll find out.”
She flew toward the center of the tree, and the whole way there, something felt off. It wasn’t until she was almost to the central flower that she realized what it was. The mana wasn’t moving. Normally the mana around the center of the Mother Tree was dense and constantly flowing like it was being blown by an intangible wind, but now, it was completely still. It almost felt cold.
When she got to the center, Salome was still asleep on her flower, and Emilia was floating above her with a serious expression on her face. Jean was flying around in circles overhead looking extremely panicked.
“Elise!” said Jean, flying up to here. “You’re here! This is bad! This is really bad!”
“What’s going on?”
“They poisoned the Mother Tree!”
“What?”
“Just as he said,” said Emilia. “The Mother Tree has been poisoned. A metal-based poison. The work of the dwarves.”
“What? But-! That’s-!” sputtered Elise.
“The evidence is undeniable,” continued Emilia. “And it’s been happening for a while. The tree has been fighting it off for almost a month now. It failed and had to go into hibernation.” She looked down at Salome. “Her life force is tied to it. She won’t wake up until the tree is cured.”
“The dwarves wouldn’t do that!” said Elise.
“Are you implying that it was the drow who poisoned the Mother Tree?”
“No! But why would the dwarves do this? They’re digging to the surface! It’s peaceful! They wouldn’t ruin it by doing something stupid like this! It doesn’t make sense!”
“You are making the mistake of assuming that all the dwarves are rational. Maybe you’re right. Maybe the leaders of the dwarves are maintaining the peace, and focusing their efforts solely on leaving the tunnels. You’re young, but I know you’re not naive enough to believe that the dwarves were all of one mind about that.”
“But how? How did they poison the tree? The scouts have been guarding the entire cave!”
“The drow aren’t the only ones who can dig tunnels. The dwarves have had this planned for a long time. We’ve located the tunnel they used to dig under the roots and feed the poison in. We even captured some of the ones doing it. Would you like to see them?”
No, thought Elise.
“Yes.”
“Follow me.”
Emilia led her out the back side of the Mother Tree and about fifty feet away from the nearest root, a huge, circular hole had been dug with dirt stairs leading down into it. They floated down into it, and at the bottom, the hole intersected a tunnel that wound off into the darkness in one direction, and led to one of the Mother Tree’s roots in the other. At the bottom, two dwarves were on their knees, tied up by thick vines and guarded by half a dozen drow. Elise’s heart felt like it was twisting into a knot when she realized that she recognized both of them.
It was the father and son who had stopped her wagon on her first attempt to get out of the dwarven city. Their faces were beaten and bloody, but she could still tell who they were.
“I knew it, you fucking traitor,” said the older dwarf when he saw Elise. “You were working with them.”
“I wasn’t!” said Elise.
He laughed, and the laughter morphed into a bloody cough. “Fuck. You.”
The son didn’t speak, but the look he gave her was, if anything, worse than his father’s words. The utter hatred in the young man’s gaze was hard to bear. She was certain that if he wasn’t restrained, he would be attacking her.
“Why?” she said. “Why did you do this? You could have gotten out of the tunnels without ever having to see a drow again.”
“Your ghouls killed my wife. My sister. My eldest son. My mother.” He gave her a bloody smile. “I’m just returnin’ the favor.”
“But-!” Elise started.
“They’re long past reason,” said Emilia. “You’re wasting your time.”
Elise wanted to protest, but she knew the older fey was right. There was nothing she could say that would improve the situation. Just as she was about to turn away, there was a flash of mana, and the two dwarves fell forward, their heads bouncing in opposite directions before rolling back to meet in the middle. The boy’s head was facing up at them, and his eyes were still open. Elise could have sworn he was still looking at her.
“Wh-what did you do?”
She looked at Emilia, who had her hand outstretched toward them.
“Justice,” she said. “They got what they deserved.”
Looking into her eyes, Elise could see that Emilia was beyond reason too. Her expression was calm, and her demeanor relaxed, but the mana around her was vibrating, a sign of the rage boiling beneath the surface.
“Where’s Naomi?” asked Elise, suddenly remembering. “She should be here.”
“She was,” said Emilia. “I’ve already sent her out on a mission. A counter-strike.”
“What!? Why would you do that?! You already stopped the poison! You killed the poisoners!”
“The poison can’t be stopped so easily,” said Emilia. “The tree will fight it off. Eventually. Perhaps in thirty years, it will be back to what it was. But Salome will be long dead by then. She is little more than a breathing corpse. It’s only fair.”
“This isn’t fair!” exclaimed Elise. “You’re starting a war! You’ve just started a war!”
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Naomi wouldn’t have agreed to this, Elise realized. Not without telling me first. Where did she actually go?
“I didn’t start this war,” said Emilia. “This was always going to happen. Everything is as Fate wills.”
“Fuck that!” said Elise. “I’m going to stop them!”
“It’s too late,” said Emilia. “Naomi has been gone for an hour. The dwarven king will never wake again.”
“I’m going to save him!”
“You can try, but there’s no point.”
“I’m going to stop this war.”
Emilia sighed. “Fine. Go. You will realize how pointless it is on your own.”
Elise turned and flew away without another word.
----------------------------------------
389 years ago.
It had been four years since the dwarves entered the caverns, and three since they had met the drow. It had taken a while, but they had finally started to settle into their new way of life. Some of the dwarves wanted to return to the surface for revenge now that they had rested and recovered, but they were outnumbered by the reasonable ones, fortunately. If they had the power to get revenge, they wouldn’t have needed to flee in the first place.
Getting used to a diet made primarily of mushrooms and only supplemented by meat was tough, but bearable. Surviving without any form of alcohol, however, was much more difficult. Their store of beer had run out before they even found the drow, and upon learning that the drow didn’t even know what alcohol was, some of the dwarves wanted to dig back to the surface right then. Thankfully, in the past few months, Bjorn the brewer’s experiments with mushroom-based grog had been getting more drinkable by the day. Salvation was on the horizon, and the dwarves couldn’t wait.
Possibly the most excited of all was the Royal Historian Hadri. Historians weren’t in much demand nowadays, and his only other skill was his ability to outdrink anyone, even on an empty stomach. It had been a painful experience, going from one of the more important dwarves to barely more than dead weight. None of his skills were suitable for cavern exploration, and all his stat points were in Wisdom and Intelligence, so he didn’t make a good pack mule like the lower class laborers. It was a miracle he had even managed to convince anyone to help him carry his books. Most of his personal library was still back in Albionia, but he had saved the most important ones, and they were now stored in his new wooden hut.
It wasn’t the edifice he would have preferred to live in, but it was better than nothing, and he was satisfied with it.
Or so he told others.
In truth, it was probably a good thing that there was no alcohol, or he would have been drowning in it. His fall from grace was anything but pleasant, and at his age, handling that among all the other sudden life changes was almost too much. Sometimes, he found himself half-wishing that he had just stayed behind and been enslaved with the others. Being overworked by a cruel human master was almost preferable to his descent into irrelevance.
Those thoughts had been getting rarer and rarer lately though. After years of having nothing to do, and nothing wanting to do with him, he had finally found a new purpose in the form of a young Sprite.
The drow named her Emilia. She was about five inches tall, and looked like a green-haired elf. If she didn’t move, Hadri would have thought she was a well-crafted doll. She had been found running for her life in the deep caves three months prior, and ever since, had been struggling to fit into her new, peaceful life. There were a few other young fey for her to play with, but she hadn’t quite found her place with them.
Hadri came to know her when her caretaker, Haley, asked him to teach Emilia about history, because she had shown interest in it, and Haley didn’t know enough. Hadri accepted without hesitation. He would have had to be crazy to turn down an offer for work after wasting away for so long.
At first, he was happy just to have someone to talk to, and to have something to do with all the knowledge locked in his head, but as they spent more time together, it grew into something more.
Emilia was beyond precocious. She had a perfect memory, and an incredible ability to find patterns and connections. What started as simple tutoring had turned into mentorship, and what started as a selfish desire for purpose became a selfless desire to see the young fey grow.
“Mr. Hadri, why did Asbjorn attack the dragon?” asked Emilia.
“Well, he wanted to expand his territory,” said Hadri.
“But didn’t he know how powerful dragons were?”
“He had some idea,” said Hadri, nodding. “But there is a reason he is known as ‘the Unwise’. He believed that it wouldn’t matter.”
“But why?”
“It’s impossible to know exactly what was going on in his mind, but it’s also important to try to put ourselves in his shoes, so that we can understand exactly what happened. I want you to close your eyes and imagine that you’re Asbjorn the Unwise.”
“Okay,” she said, squeezing her eyes shut.
Hadri took a moment to appreciate her earnestness before he continued. She had arrived three hours earlier, and from the moment she arrived, she was single-mindedly focused on learning as much as she possibly could. In all his years, he had never had a student so dedicated.
It was actually a little concerning. Emilia didn’t know how long it had been since she spawned, but Haley estimated that she couldn’t be more than a year old. Fey were different from dwarves, since they spawned with fully-formed brains, and knew how to maneuver their bodies from the very beginning, but still, a one-year old should have been playing and making friends, not spending her days with an old fart, learning about history.
“Are you imagining yourself as Asbjorn?” he asked with a smile.
“Yes,” she replied with a serious nod.
“Good job. Now, let’s go through the context. It’s always good to look at context. In the years leading up to Asbjorn’s unfortunate end, Dokkalfhheimr was prospering more than ever before. We were the leaders in the mineral industry, producing as many precious metals and stones as the rest of the continent combined.
“However, the Golden Maw, Dokkalfheimr’s most prosperous gold mine, was starting to run dry. On top of that, Asbjorn’s policies had been less than ideal, and the dwarven economy was struggling more than it should have been. Asbjorn knew he wasn’t doing a good job as king, so he got desperate, and started looking for ways to recover his kingdom’s finances, and turned his attention deep into the mountains where the dragon resided.”
“I don’t understand,” said Emilia. “Why would attacking a dragon make money?”
“Well, there are a few reasons,” said Hadri. “First, there’s the dragon hoard. Dragons almost always have a massive amount of wealth stored in their homes. However, even the biggest of dragon hoards wasn’t a match for Dokkalfheimr’s average income at the time. The dragon’s parts could be sold for a lot as well, but still, not enough. The real reason was land. Do you remember what I’ve told you about land and wealth?”
“‘Land is the most reliable form of wealth,’” Emilia recited.
“Precisely! The dragon’s hoard and parts might not have made up for the kingdom’s deficit, but the land would. The dragon had marked seven entire mountains as its territory. And on top of being a lot of land, that land was all located in the same mountain range that the Golden Maw was in, so there was a good chance that they could find another gold vein just as big there. Does that all make sense?”
“Yes,” she said. “But I still don’t understand why he attacked the dragon. Even if it had a lot of land, it was still a dragon.”
“I was just about to get to that,” said Hadri. “While we know now that dragons aren’t something that we mortals can defeat, that wasn’t such a sure thing when Asbjorn was alive. Of course, people still knew that dragons were strong, but not a century before, a lone human mage managed to fight an Elder dragon to the brink of death. Some people, including Asbjorn and no small portion of his advisors, believed that the legends surrounding them were exaggerated. It’s not unheard of for those who lose battles to describe their opponents as stronger than they actually were to make the defeat less embarrassing.
“On top of that, the dragon they attacked was very young, in dragon terms. It was barely more than a century old, and it hadn’t made a name for itself anywhere. Do you remember how long dragons live?”
“Up to 2000 years,” said Emilia immediately.
“Exactly,” said Hadri. “So a 100 year old dragon is essentially an infant. Or at least, that’s what Asbjorn thought. The Dokkalfheimr military at the time was also hailed as one of the best in the world, and he believed it would be doable.
“To his credit, he might not have been entirely wrong. I can’t say the records are reliable, but there are enough different accounts of the battle that I can say with reasonable confidence that it was not a hopeless fight. The dwarves had a few 7th tier warriors, and even an 8th tier at their disposal, and the dragon was young and inexperienced. If they fought ten times, the dwarves might have won five of them. However, that time was not one of the five. Although the dragon was injured, the dwarven army was wiped out, and soon, so was the kingdom. Most of the dwarves’ greatest warriors perished in the first battle, and with no one left who could oppose it, the dragon went on a rampage, and the rest is history.”
Emilia opened her eyes. “I think I understand now.”
Hadri flashed her a wide grin. “That’s great! Did putting yourself in his shoes help?”
“Yes.”
“Remember, if you want to understand why people do things, you need to put yourself in their position, and try to think like them. It’s always easy to tell that a decision was bad when you look back on it, but in the moment, it’s not always so obvious. That’s why it’s important to try to find out what the context was, and try to figure out what information people did and didn’t have before you judge their decisions.
“However, I don’t want you to walk away from this thinking that Asbjorn’s decision was a good one. He still underestimated the dragon. He still ignored the tales of their power, and he still ignored the advisors who told him it was a bad idea, and because of that, his kingdom was decimated, and his people were forced to flee.”
“Okay.”
Hadri looked at her for a few seconds, then sighed and stood up. “Are you hungry, Emilia?”
“A little,” she said.
“Then why don’t we stop here for now and go get some lunch?”
She frowned. It was one of the few expressions she ever made. Most of the time, her face was stony, and unchanging, no matter what was happening around her. Hadri had noticed this when they first met, and was worried that she was suppressing her emotions due to trauma, so he tried to encourage her whenever she displayed anything more than neutrality.
“Or not,” he said. “We can continue if you’d like.”
“I want to continue,” she said.
“Is there something else you wanted to-?”
He cut off when he heard another voice in the distance. A moment later, it was closer, and he could hear what it was saying.
“Eeeemiiiliiiaaaa!”
A few seconds later, another Sprite zipped into the hut through the uncovered window.
“Emmy!” it said. “Oh, hi Mr. Hadri.”
“Hello, Lyra,” said Hadri, beaming. “Have you come to learn about history too?”
“No, I came to see if Emilia wanted to come play at the mushroom grove with me!”
“Emilia?” said Hadri, looking over at her.
Emilia was frowning again. This time though, Hadri didn’t cave in. It was important for her to express her emotions and desires, but she was also a child. What she desired wasn’t always what was best for her. It was more important that she make friends than continue learning history like she wanted to. He nodded at her in encouragement and her frown deepened.
“Okay,” she said eventually.
“Yay!” said Lyra. “Let’s go! The mushrooms are perfect right now! Let’s go let’s go let’s go!”
Emilia stood up and enabled her wings, floating up into the air.
“We can continue when you get back,” said Hadri. “Go and have fun with your friend.”
“Okay.”
The two sprites flew out the window and Hadri could hear Lyra’s excited chatter in the distance for a few seconds after they left. He stayed where he was for a bit longer, then decided it was time for lunch. He had wanted to eat with Emilia, but Lyra would have her busy for hours, and if they were going to the mushroom farm, they would have plenty of food. He needed to eat on his own before she got back so they could pick up where they left off.
The dining hall was located near a Spirit Tree that the drow called the Sister Tree. It was much smaller than the Mother Tree, which Hadri had only seen three times, but it was no less wondrous. It was like nothing he had ever seen before, but being near it felt like being home. It exuded a soft, pleasant mana that he could feel, even without {Mana Sense}.
He got a wooden bowl full of mushroom and purple beef stew from a husband-wife duo of drow who had taken it upon themselves to help the dwarves become self-sufficient. He sat at an empty table made of stone sprouting from the ground, then returned the bowl before walking back to his hut.
On the way back, a drow scout dashed past him, almost knocking him over, and continued on without an apology. Hadri was annoyed, but not enough to do anything about it, so he turned to continue on his way, only to be greeted by the sight of another rushing scout. He turned the direction she ran to see where she was headed, and in the distance, so far away he could barely see it, there was a commotion forming at the edge of the clearing around the Sister Tree.
He hesitated a moment, then turned to follow them. Emilia would not be back for a while, and it had been so long since anything interesting happened. By the time he arrived, the crowd was thirty strong and growing, and he had to circle around and worm his way through to see what was happening. What he saw made him falter.
It was Emilia in tears. Lyra was nowhere to be seen.