Bells jingled when Eli opened a hide curtain halfway up the wall of the third chamber. He stepped into a room so bright that his eyes burned. Then, through his spark, he realized that the 'brilliant light' was merely a handful of glowstones. He'd lived so long in darkness that even a faint glow brought tears to his eyes.

An empty table stood in the center of the room, with a bed to one side, near a basin full of water. Another curtain draped a doorway in front of him but without a clister to fight he didn't know what to do. So he just stood there , naked and bloody, with a stone club in each hand--until he heard footsteps approaching.

"I'm coming, I'm coming!" a voice called through the curtain.

"Uh," Eli said.

A troll pushed into the room. A big male with broad shoulders and a round belly and a cracked horn. He was carrying a burlap sack in and a tray heaped with chunks of roasted meat.

"You did it! Well done, Five! We never doubted you, did we, Syrup?" The troll looked behind himself and seemed surprised that he was alone. "She'll be along in a moment. We were sleeping, I barely heard the bells. I didn't even heat up the meat, but you must be so hungry! Oh! I bought human-sized clothes, too--after you wash--you're a bit of a mess, look at you, I'm so proud!"

"Nice to meet you, too," Eli said.

The troll's laugh sounded like a jolly boulder. "I'm sorry! Am I talking too much? I'm excited. I'm Clay-Watches, my wife is--"

"Syrup?"

"Oh, no! No, no, that's my pet name for her. She's Rivulet-Abides. We're your caveparents now."

"Uh. I don't even know what to ask."

"Ask nothing!" The troll hustled Eli toward the basin. "Let's clean you up first. You can put your clubs down. There you go. Now pop in the water like a good pup, we'll give you a scrub. Here, this is aromatic salts, good for your hide, well, you don't have a hide, do you? Your ... pelt? Skin! Your skin, and how under earth did you defeat three clisters, small as you are, and softer than a worm's belly?"

"Stop nattering, Clay," another troll said from the doorway. "You're more of a trial than the rite. Growling at that poor malformed child."

"I'm being friendly!" he told her, then appealed to Eli as he splashed another bucket of water at him. "Tell her I'm being friendly. Do you see the disrespect? My wife positively torments me. Five, this is Rivulet-Abides. Rivulet, look at our fourth child."

Her middle eye seemed to scowl at Eli. "Just looks like another broken heart to me."

"And another mouth to feed!" Clay said, cheerily. "Bring the tray, Syrup. Look how skinny."

Clay fussed over Eli, washing him then feeding him in the bath, while Rivulet grumbled and complained--and helped. When they considered him sufficiently clean they showed him the contents of the sack: scraps of human-sized clothing, most torn and bloodstained.

He found a pair of fairly clean woolen breeches, though, meant to be worn under armor, and a thigh-length quilted gambeson with a laced front. As he dressed, he realized that his nakedness hadn't embarrassed him in the slightest. He still felt like the same person, the same Eli, but he wasn't.

He'd changed, and the change went deeper than having trollbood and a magespark. He'd changed on the inside. When Mist-Beneath dragged him back from the brink of death, turned him into something not-quite-human, that'd been an earthquake in his soul. Living in the dark, battling lizard-monsters, hadn't exactly been the kind of thing that left you unchanged, either.

But neither of those explained how he felt now. The biggest change had happened in the dungeon of the Keep. Where his own people had betrayed him, broken him, and for what? For doing his job? For finding legal documents? For money or just a passing whim.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

In the Keep, he'd been stripped naked to his soul. He'd begged and wept for mercy. So yeah, he'd never care about bodily nakedness again.

Still, he liked the warmth of the clothes. Though not as much as he liked the taste of the meat. He ate his way through the entire tray while Clay chatted at him: "... will live with us, you and your new brother and sisters, while Mist-Beneath ... well! Who knows what she plans? But I trust her, we all do--"

"The old cave-bat," Rivulet grumbled. "Playing games with the Dreamers. Putting a troll heart in a human chest."

"We all trust her," Clay repeated to Eli, "and if she says you're our best hope for survival, then you are. Especially now that you didn't, uh, die. Which will shock a fair few folk around the caverns, I can tell you that!"

"I'm a little surprised myself," Eli told him.

Clay put his paw on Eli's forearm. "You're a full-born troll now. Small and smooth, but you're one of us. I'm proud of every young troll who is secondborn--"

"Now matter how long it took," Rivulet grumped.

"--but I'm even more proud of you, Five. Look at you! Look at you. Without any of our natural advantages, you walked through that door, strong, upright, on your own two feet. There aren't many humans who could do that."

"How long did it take?" he asked. "Mist-Beneath said it takes two or three days at the outside. I must've been in there eight or nine."

"Well, well ..." Clay chuckled. "No reason to worry about that. Here, finish another bowl. Then sleep, and when you wake we'll celebrate your birth. And then, of course, Mist-Beneath will want to speak with you, but not until after the feast!"

"You were in the chambers for two weeks," Rivulet told Eli. "Everyone gave you up as dead except my fool of a man and the little ones. Lapis-Glimmering--you know her as Fleck--she vowed you'd survive, and Lichen and Yellow ... well, she made them agree. They've been waiting for you all this time."

"Yellow waited?"

"She's your sister now," Clay told him, then explained the young trolls' new names--Lapis-Glimmering, Breath-of-Moss, Dark-Water-Ripples. "But you're their brother, so you can keep calling them their child-names."

"Good," Eli said.

"I wanted to name you Claws-of-Stone," Clay said. "And Syrup suggested Softness-that-Kills--"

"If you lived," Rivulet said. "Which I still don't hardly believe."

"--but Mist-Beneath asked for the naming honor and we agreed."

"Well, she came up with 'Five,' so clearly she has a knack for names," Eli said.

Clay rumbled his rocky laugh. "Now get to bed. You're tired."

"Not really."

"You will be once the herbs kick in."

"The herbs?"

"In the meat. Mist-Beneath says they'll help you Dream."

Eli heard the emphasis on the final word. Dream. As in, commune with the Dreamers. Which alarmed him. He'd never treated the gods--the Dreamers, the Chained Angel, the old ones--with more than casual respect.

He was starting to feel woozy, though, so he lay on the bed. "So first you toss me in a hole with lizards, now you drug me?"

Clay draped a blanket over him. "Of course. You're one of us now."

"That's a comfort," he said, and closed his eyes.

He watched through the spark as Clay tucked the blanket around him, a gentle smile on his brutal face. Rivulet didn't smile, but her habitual scowl struck Eli as almost ... fond. She hummed a lullaby while Clay tidied the room and sleep seeped around the fringes of Eli's awareness.

As he drifted off, the spark heard Clay say, "Mist is putting a lot of weight on such narrow shoulders."

"She's desperate," Rivulet told him. "We're all desperate and this man, this ... softskin troll is our only chance to survive."

Then sleep took Elishiv and he dreamed.

Maybe he Dreamed.

He imagined the beautiful, ancient, sorrowful faces of the Eld. While the elder race hadn't been seen in public in ten generations, paintings and tapestries showed them as slender, delicate humanoids with onyx skin and blue eyes. Many of the Eld had fought beside the humans in the war against the Celestials. Some of them had even stayed with the humans as the Celestial armies drove the survivors into the valley, to slaughter them once and for all. Those remaining Eld had joined hands with the Chained Angel to raise the Ward that saved the human race--and that still protected the valley from the enemy that hungered outside.

But the same Ward that protected the valley trapped the Eld.

They couldn't depart, in the manner of their people, to their afterlife among the stars. Instead, they fell into wakeless sleep. They became living statues, unable to rouse, guarded by generations of human acolytes. They still occasionally guided humans, communicating through dreams from their sleeping minds. They spoke most clearly to the clergy of the Somnolent Order, but they occasionally whispered in the dreams of the humblest maid or woodcutter.

In his sleep, Eli imagined the faces of the Eld. He imagined them begging for his help. Slumbering defenseless in their shrines, pleading for salvation. He didn't know how to save them, though. He imagined a threat, a terrible remorseless power, stalking closer to them. He imagined a shadowy figure laying a milky blade to the throat of an Eld with polished golden disks in her hair and he imagined he needed to warn her, to wake her, to alert the guards--but he couldn't make a sound.

As he watched the figure bend over the Eld's sleeping form ... he imagined catching a glimpse of the figure's face in one of the polished golden disks.

And he imagined that the shadowy killer, the remorseless threat, was him. He was murdering the Eld, drawing the blade across her throat--