Cressia did not expect to dream later on that evening. Among the other races, it was a common belief among the other races that elves did not dream, that their minds simply faded into nothingness as they slumbered after long nights partying and playing the lyre, but this was not true at all.
Elves did dream, but it was such a rare experience that one could count the score on one hand for most of their lives. For many elves dreams doubled as premonitions of what was to come, or showing the path to take when lost in life’s many crossroads.
For Cressia, it had only came after a harrowing experience when it felt her life was falling apart. She did not understand why it was so, but it had been the one constant as she moved from one dream to another decades apart.
The first came after her parents mud hut had been burnt down by the trailing flame whisk of an unsupervised Magi. Magic, much likes dreams, were rare among the elves, but it was not something they were entirely deprived of. It had happened so long ago that Cressia felt it was in contention for being her first memory, along with a sharp fall off a stool or pressing herself deeply against her mother’s chest.
The Magi who’d done it was around Cressia’s age, only four and some middling months, and someone who’d played with Cressia and recited the long drawn out elven pledges they’d been forced to learn.
The damage was so great that it couldn’t have been simply brushed aside, or leave the child under the tutelage of the Clan’s solitary keeper. The child had to be given away to the Hierophants, powerful Magi was dreamt up the words and wisdom that governed Conclave Lore. She was placed in the confines of a solitary cell until one of them had arrived to collect her.
Cressia’s mind had begun to wander that late evening once she heard the news. Even after seeing all her possessions smouldering into ash she still felt a care for her troubled Magi friend, locked away from the others until the first of the morning dew had settled.
The dream had been vacant at first, and then she found herself convincing the elders that the Magi friend was innocent, and that did not deserve to be expelled or cast aside because of one mishap. Nor did she deserve to be sent away to the Hierophants, with their cruel morbid practices that shattered and rebuilt a person into the personal scourge of the Conclave.
It was not to be. Her mother had awakened her, and asked if she would like to see her friend off. The Hierophant was already beginning to disembark, and the usual stern mother had dissipated away just like her dream, because even she could not send a child to be among those dark, delirious elves.
For a few middling moments, spent pacing around and promises that they would play hopscotch again, Cressia said her goodbyes, versed in her mother’s knowledge that she would never see her again.
The second had come when she was only 14, and already in the middle of the trials and tribulations of adolescence. She was already dead set on leaving the Conclave behind to learn fencing, but there was still a few more stringent years of national service before she could even hope of slipping away. That meant teaching rudimentary survival skills for the next group of elven children, more specifically how to handle a bow and an arrow together.
Working at the target practice did not improve her own fortunes with a bow, but Cressia discovered she had a natural liking for children, and could even stand their company when not overhearing silly jokes about her bob-length hair or toothy smile.
She’d been paired with a boy a few years older than her to lead the children through this rite of passage. His name was Thrace, a gifted hunter, with the tanned bark skin of someone who’d spent far too much time in the meadows and the sun.
Cressia was smitten, and soon found herself getting lost in a haze for the several weeks they worked together. She did not want him to leave her life she was recalled from Bow duty to work once again with potted plants, so, at the end, she’d asked him out, only for her to be derided by him as an ugly cow who he never wanted to want to see again.
She felt she’d been left in the cold, already reassembling her broken heart as Thrace walked away to meet up with smiling friends hidden behind distant bushes. She ran away to find the warmth of the shade under a great oak tree, cried for sometime, and then spent the afternoon in a different kind of haze. She let herself linger in the dream world for a second time, and allowed herself to dictate the man whom she wanted to fall in love with, and someone whose one talent in life was pining over different bow models.
There was laughter and much joy and a large wedding that ended with her being heaped praises by everyone in attendance, before she was bridal carried off into the sunset by her new and perfect husband.
Then she woke up, and saw her mother’s dark squat figure waiting upon her until she finished. They did not speak as she came with her back to the Mud Hut, but Cressia felt her mother’s stiff demeanour had once again been shattered when she heard the news of her humiliation. Sympathy was passed, though not through words, but letting her take the night off from the catalogue of chores she was meant to do.
The third was to come after an evening spent in the great dining hall of the royal Zantzar palace. After spending an afternoon arguing over wallpaper colours, Alvin had invited her along for dinner, their first meal together as friends.
It was all happening quite rapidly, this friendship, and Cressia wondered if Alvin even had other friends at all. If it was so, she did not mind if he didn’t.
In fact, it had been some time since she herself had a friend that was of the same age as her. Letters to her Conclave friends had slowed down and were often sparse, and the borough children were pleasant, but not at all an intellectual match for someone within her own age bracket.
Now, after years of yearning for similar company, she’d found herself sitting across from the Zantzar Prince, digging deep into her Venison sandwich. The portion sizes were appalling, even for someone who’d once lived off petite rations like her, and she’d already asked for third helpings to sate her ever growing hunger.
“You really like Venison huh?” He murmured, watching her gobble down her another meal with several gallons of milk. It was made with plain seeded bread, stuffed with large slices of venison, tomatoes and lettuce, and spread with a strange elvish condiment known as “Mayonnaise.”
Alvin had tried it once Cressia had forced him to open his mouth wide like a child, but the strong, creamy taste was far too much for him. He sworn off it right there and then, and was content to dabble in his strange afternoon meal of Ostrich egg omelettes and toast soldiers.
“I do,” Cressia replied, “But I cannot see the strange appeal of Ostrich omelettes.”
Alvin dug the fork deep into the contours of the egg white. “What’s so strange about it?”
“You ride them into battle, and then you feast upon their young when it’s time for dinner.”
He could only eye her sharply from across the table. In the day and a half they’d spent together, he was confident that she wasn’t a daft girl at all. This was just another trick to rile him up, much like she’d did in the Old Temple as they’d picked out floorboards and
What wasn’t a trick was when Cressia began to choke on the the hardened crust of old seeded bread, all that had been left in the pantry after she devoured the flat slices
Alvin rushed from one end of the room to the other and muttered all sorts of curses and threats of hanging for the kitchen staff for allowing her to to harms way.
Cressia’s face was as blue as the evening’s special of puffer fish by the time he’d gotten to her, and she was only able to regain her breath after he delivered a large thudding slap on her back to remove a mouldy old piece of Venison steak, who’d been the real culprit of her sudden palpitations.
It made Alvin squeamish to feel, almost as though he were striking a woman down at her lowest, but Cressia started muttering too all sorts of blessings and praises for the budding King to be and would he be so kind as throw whatever Servant allowed that venison on dinner plate in the darkest cellar he could find?
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It was then Alvin decided, after Cressia was on death’s door, that the time was right to show her the research he’d gathered up while in the library last night.
“Would you care to study this for me?” He asked slyly, “I know it’s not apart of our contract, but I would love for an elf’s eyes to gaze over it.”
She’d never seen such a collection of kooky ideas as she rummaged through the pages later on at her desk. Her hands moved through them, taking in whatever this former PhD student had to say about Spirals and Spirits and the tenuous connection between both of them and that elves, who lurked in the pages as shadowy figures, played the role of the master manipulator, and were behind just about every bad thing that has ever happened to the Human Kingdoms.
She did not need the confirmation to know this project had been written almost 10 decades ago. Life was dull for humans back then, peaceful, but incredibly dull, and there had been a resurgence of interest in elvish culture for a time. Whoever had written this probably had a quite dull existence on her hands, and wanted to create a new hive of villainy for humans to hate now that they weren’t colliding with each other.
Even as her rationalistic elf senses told to quit while she was ahead, there was something about the mad ramblings of an academic that made her lacquered fingertips go on turning the pages.
The words were dark and delirious, yes, and filled with much antipathy for elves, but Cressia could see some old folk beliefs that the elves had been reflected right back at her as she read.
Rancid and far fetched beliefs, yes, but ones the elves themselves had come up with, such as the divinity of the Great Spiral, the universal elven symbol.
To trace the Spiral - that was the first task any elven child was to do at the start of her life. Cressia had done it long before she could write, and long before she could even speak. And no matter how hard she tried, the great Spiral she drew always came out as fuzzy or jagged and not at all like anything someone would consider to be a spiral.
This was not limited to Cressia, or her lack of artistic ability. Every elf who tried to draw the great Spiral always came out with a mess for one, unable to replicate the smoothness the other races could draw it with.
The great Spiral brooch the borough girls had drawn for was also fuzzy, but that was not because of her childlike handwriting. It was because they were copying from the Elven Conclave flags they’d seen outside other Elven homes in the capital, and it too fell short of anything the girls could drawn in their own time.
Cressia could even remember herself as a child wasting away so many pieces of paper in her attempts that she'd gone into her mother's personal quarters and started to scrawl through whatever she could find. It had not worked at all for her, not did her defence that she was only trying to get better at her drawing skills help her get away from a long thrashing lecture.
She would try one more time to trace a Spiral. The spirits in Alvin’s research were, as he had told her, drawn as grey spirals, far removed from the green and yellow colours of Elven spirals, but spirals nonetheless.
She reached for an ink pen, and began to try once more to draw it, and there was much more frustration and cursing as she couldn’t find herself replicating the perfect form of the spirits. Her hands had taking on a mind of it’s own, and suddenly she was left with a zig zag mess all over her notebook.
Cressia’s antennae was beginning to prickle. Elven history had always been murky, and she wondered if there was some true in the idea that spirits and spirals might be interlinked in the most unusual of ways. What would that mean for elves too, if their great Spiral was simply the calling card for spirits that seemingly lurked under every nook and cranny of Mylea?
Her mind was beginning to darken, and soon she felt exhausted from all this dark dismal thinking of what revelations were to come when she began to annotate another chapter.
“Alvin,” she mused quietly to herself, “Your great big book of spirits can wait for another evening.”
Spirals, spirits - the words coalesced into a undecipherable collection of words as she found herself collapsing deep within the sheets of her softly pillowed bed, already eager for the start of a new day, and unusually fond of the thought of spending more time with Prince Alvin.
Her mother, a deeply committed Conclave women, would be horrified to know of the direction her daughter’s life had taken the moment she was out of her grasp.
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She suddenly felt herself being submerged. It had always started like this when they dreamt, for her and the other elves who’d been allowed to explore and go through the deep recesses of the Dream World. It was dark submergence, drifting into worlds that could never make up it’s mind if it aligned with the light or the dark, and only found contentment once it settled on a shadowy light to take an elf to a new realm.
Neither of her parents had ever dreamed, so Cressia had to make due with second hand accounts of what friends and acquaintances had shared with her. Sharing dreams was to elves as sharing secrets was to humans, the good, the bad and the utterly downright hideous ones. To confide in someone about something so personal was a sure sign of trust, and lips had always been sewn, even if a few dreams she’d heard had changed her opinion of people, and not always for the better.
The end of Cressia’s submergence came, and suddenly she found herself in a new vivid place, far away from the troubles of Conclave living, or the royal pains she’d been forced to keep up with.
This time it wasn’t her imaginary wedding or reuniting with an old friend, rather she was by herself in the middle of a forest. A deeply wooded forest, and her feet were at the end of a round entrance, and her nose already filled with a foul stench of of something dreadful happening not too far away.
She looked down, and found herself cloistered in a uniform of deep reds and dabbles of black buttons here and there.
The Zantzar royal uniform.
She’d returned to active service, and had only taken a brief excursion into the Dream World to do so. But as Cressia eyelids trailed, she noticed that she wasn’t wearing tights.
Cressia did not like tights as a matter of fact, but neither did she like much older military men acting lecherous around her and her slim legs that were shown off as part of the Zantzar uniform.
It had only been in her 2nd year of service when women soldiers were allowed to wear tights, and Cressia had not once gone without them since. She wanted to be judged on her own merits as a person, and let her work within the military speak for herself.
Being without tights was not like her, nor was the strand of hazelnut brown hair that crossed her eyes as she shook her head, nor was the absence of the swish swash sound her elven ears would make as the flapped in the wind.
She was in the body of someone else. Someone who was not even an elf, but human.
She started to move, and then felt the thick vine of rope tied sharply around her knees, her chest and behind her back,
She was heavily bound in all sorts of intricate ways that Cressia wondered she might be the centrepiece in some obscure Bondage roadshow.
This wasn’t correcting a miscarriage of justice, or retreating into a happily ever after. Cressia, long before she had even felt the Orcs faint from behind her her, realised that she was here to relive a nightmare!
“Gummon,” It’s hoarse grunt leaving her trembling to the edge of her bones, “Let’s go and see the rest of you.”
Let’s go and see the rest of you.
Her antennae was startling to prickle once more as it yanked on the end of her ponytail, dragging deeper into the shallow path. She did not, as a matter of principle, like to dread, but Cressia was already bracing herself to discover the mess of the Zantzar Blades for her to see.
Orcs were such vicious creatures, it was true. Even Cressia, someone who prided herself in being open minded, could not recall once having a good encounter with any of them.
Tensions as they were, Zantzar only had a small amount living within the nation, but every else Cressia had travelled she found they were unable to coexist with the humans. They’d filled themselves in the old elven ghettos once elves departed back to the Conclave, and from there troubles were always about to begin.
Pendaline had such a problem with Orc pickpockets, for example, that visitors in many areas of the Artisan Quarters were advised not valuables with them to barter with at the stalls. Cressia herself had nearly falling victim to one, in it weren’t for the short sabre she’d disguised under the guise of an Umbrella to beat off the rain. Which, in any case, had proven itself by beaten off such a green skinned, sabre toothed thief like a Pendaline Orc.
She felt like the prey belonging to a strong willed boar being dragged along like this, tussled up and bound as they moved closer to a large pit that echoed within the middle of the Orc camp. There were countless of these pig faced bastards, feasting on the burnt out husk or rib of a human Zantzar Blade. She would not look on their flesh, but she could not pretend as though she had thought there fate was anything else.
She felt as though she were being salivated all over again as the went through the Tribe. Orcs gazed hungrily, not willing to glance away from the curvaceous body Cressia had inherited from her human host. In death her body would provide enough sustenance for an Orc to live off for the next few days. Her mind, which had forever shied away from the stigmas, allowed herself to accept the darker reality of Orcs as she neared her death.
An idealist and her life are easily parted, not least of all when being hoisted above the shoulders by the Orc who’d dragged her along to be thrown into the Inferno crafted from red coal and body bits.
Then she saw it, behind the towering flames and before her demise, several blue Orbs from which the flames were beginning to give rise. She sensed, not with her antennae, but with her soul, that these were Spirits trapped together at the behest of the Orcs.
Then she felt herself going limp, the world spinning and then a sudden crash into a swirling cascade of fire that had enveloped the skin and bones of the Zantzar Blades who’d come before her, as it did to her.
She stirred, and let her eyes open and discovered it was still only moonlight dark outside. She wanted to prance outside the confines of her velvet sheets, but stayed shut, and prayed a silent offering for elven Gods on behalf of the Zantzar Blades. She would let their sacrifice go unturned, not when the Orcs hungered in the Zantzar forest, eager to devour the world and leave it in the darkness they'd brought with them to Mylea.