The remainder of the trip to the Vagrant Dunes was as simple as seafaring could be. A couple of pirates – oh, sorry, sea scavengers — attempted to board and pillage them, but Momo was able to scare them off with enough spirited arm-waving and the [Yar Har Har] spell from her tricorn. Unfortunately, minor misstep, she forgot to warn the crew the first time she used the skill. Several of the children were left temporarily deaf for several days, causing Gita to chase Momo around the deck with a spatula for an hour.

“Why does it look like someone branded you with a cooking utensil?” Kasula asked when Momo strolled into her cabin later that night, a habit which had become routine for them. Of all the people on the ship, Momo found the elf the easiest to talk to. Of course, on a ship containing a pickpocketing lemur, a perpetually angry orc, and a bard that had the vocal chords of someone recovering from tonsil surgery, that wasn’t saying much.

As Momo explained the ordeal that led to the spatula-shaped burn mark on her arm, a gleeful, utterly amused smile grew on Kasula’s face.

“Don’t look so happy about it,” Momo grumbled. “It hurts really bad.”

“Sure it does,” Kasula said, giggling. “I like it, though. Maybe consider getting it tattooed?”

Momo glared at her.

“Fine. Be that way,” Kasula said, turning away from Momo to grab something off the shelf. The room was dark and dusky, the single porthole off the side wall letting in only a sliver of moonlight. Kasula’s three wax candles helped the situation, painting faint stripes of shivering yellow over the elf’s face.

Momo’s hands curled around her chair’s armrests. She felt suddenly, unexplainably nervous. Despite visiting with Kasula almost everyday, Momo rarely paused to really look at her. The moonlight did something to bring out the elf’s stark features: highlighted the jagged ridge of her nose, played along the rocky curves of her mouth. Momo had never really had a chance to study the woman, but seeing her like this, she could understand why she had been recruited for that elf fashion magazine. She was striking.

“Quit staring,” Kasula teased, giving Momo a sly smile. “Unless you’re prepared to do something about it.”

Blatantly caught, Momo gripped the chair so hard her knuckles turned white.

“I – sorry. Was just daydreaming,” Momo lied. “Lots on my mind.”

“Lots on mine, too,” Kasula said, raising an eyebrow playfully. Seeing Momo turn even paler, she opted for mercy. “Relax, Coco. Honestly, I’m just flattered. Traveling with the lot I travel with, doing the work I do… I don’t feel pretty too often anymore. It’s nice to be appreciated.”

Momo froze, all of her embarrassment immediately being channeled into disbelief. Kasula sat back down in the chair and studied her nails. The elf was usually the type to fill a silence, but not this time. As superfluous as the admission seemed, it was clearly weighing on her.

“What are you even talking about? You’re so pretty,” Momo said quietly, and it still felt like a confession. But seeing the way Kasula lit up to hear it, Momo didn’t mind. “Aren’t you a literal former runway model?”

Kasula chuckled. “Thank you, but Elf La Mode isn’t runway, darling. It’s minor leagues. For an elf woman of my background, being the face of a cover shoot by age sixteen isn’t a feat – it’s an expectation. The fact that I decided to become a Spellsword instead of a professional Paragon is the very reason I ended up here.”

Momo tilted her head, confused. “A paragon?

“Ah, sorry. It’s an elvish concept,” Kasula said, then pursed her lips. “Hm. How to explain… exactly how familiar are you with elf society?”

“I know you guys have pointy ears and live really long lives,” Momo said, racking her brain. She had encountered very few elves in Alois, and those that she did encounter tended to keep to themselves. Kasula was a noted exception. “But now that I think of it, I have no idea how long. Like two hundred years?”

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Kasula laughed, knocking her knuckles on the table. “Oh, Momo, you’re funny. Try two thousand years. The oldest among us have been here since the beginning of the Class System.”

“What?”

“Yeah. It’s a blessing and a curse. Literally and figuratively. The goddess Guinevere gave it to our species after the Elder Elf Morsul made a mockery of her. Morsul, the asshat bard that he was, basically held a huge eff-you Guinevere party, then promptly died the next day. Since Morgana oversees the realm of the dead, there was nothing Guinevere could do to punish him in the afterlife. So she settled for punishing every other elf forever. By delaying our deaths, it gives her an unlimited timespan to torture us. Isn’t that nice?”

“Wow,” Momo said, speechless. “That’s… yeah.”

“Yeah," Kasula said. Her focus turned towards the small, half-cracked mirror hanging on the wall. It presented her with a jagged, imperfect version of her reflection. "So, the question arose amongst our people: what the hell do you do with your life when you never die? Some tried out meditation, a bunch of priestesses swore off mortal possessions and proselytized about reaching inner peace or whatever. But all the elves who signed up for that lifestyle ended up kind of gross – as it goes when you swear off toothbrushes and live in the woods – so elfish society at large eventually settled on a very different path to enlightenment.”

Kasula then looked to Momo, expecting her to put the pieces together.

“...Drugs?” Momo guessed, not confident in the least.

Kasula laughed again. “No. Gods, no. You’re thinking of the draguls. No, after living for hundreds of years, sizing up reality and life for all that it is, the elves realized that what mattered most wasn’t who you are or what you cared about – what mattered most was clothes. Aesthetics. Life lasts forever, but beauty. That is fleeting. So the Elder Elves invented what we call the Paragons. At the very top of the Paragons are the Beau Idéal. Supermodels, in your vernacular. But way more murdery.”

Momo stared at her in disbelief. For all the times she had pondered the meaning of life, she would have never guessed that the answer was the Met Gala.

“So your society is led by… fashion influencers?” she asked, feeling the need to clarify.

“Yeah,” Kasula said, shrugging. “Starting to understand why I left?”

—

As they neared the coast of the Vagrant Dunes, the mist turned from muggy vapor to thick, impenetrable clouds of dust. Kami had warned her of this. It was something called the Sand Cyclone, a protective shell around the port city of Karahtan, capital of the Vagrant Dunes. The sand storm wasn’t powerful enough to rip into the ship, but it was incredibly blinding. The children had to start wearing blindfolds as they worked the sails.

All the children except for Roggy, the appointed lookout. He had a pair of magical binoculars gifted to him by his thief father. They didn’t let him see much, but Kami assured her that they'd come in handy once they got close. So Momo let him sit at the lookout point with Dusk, just as long as he didn’t mind the cat’s permanent undead stench.

“I spy something with my little eye,” Roggy said, peering through his mini-binoculars. “And it’s full a’ rocks, sand, and… dead bodies?”

Momo, who had been busy feeding Dusk her daily allotment of rotting tuna, looked up towards the child. She could barely see his silhouette through the overwhelming dust.

“Are you serious?” she asked. “Can you hand me those?”

“But these are my binoculars. Daddy bought ‘em for me.”

Bought is one way to phrase looting some royal’s vaults, she thought.

“I promise you can have them back after,” Momo said, making a gimme gesture with her hand.

“Pinky promise?”

“Full-hand promise,” Momo said. Roggy looked suspicious, but after a firm handshake, he handed them over.

As she laid the spectacles over her face, Momo’s mouth fell open. The binoculars revealed a bare, sandy coastline just a few miles off. It looked nothing like the capital that Momo had been envisioning – something with tall, imposing structures made of sand and adobe. Instead, she was looking at a quaint desert hamlet, with shallow, rotting buildings badly in need of repair. Sitting below the buildings were bodies. Dozens of them. Lifeless and unmoving.

“Goddamnit, Ribeye,” Momo groaned.

—

“This is not Karahtan,” Ribeye remarked as they docked onto the shore. The children stayed aboard with Gita, while the rest of the crew, Vivienne included, disembarked onto the sandy coastline. The sand was hot like lava, the sun bathing everything in sight like a severe spotlight.

“No shit it’s not Karahtan,” Kasula said, rolling her eyes. “This is… I don’t even know where this is. Kami, what does your map say?”

The lemur unfurled his scroll and sniffed. After a few long seconds, he cleared his throat.

“I have… not the faintest clue.”

“Great,” Momo mumbled. She turned to glare at Ribeye. “But I thought we were on course?”

“We were,” Ribeye grunted. “But we must have slipped up right at the end. Blasted cyclone messed with our measurements.”

Vivienne, who had remained as silent as a sleeping rabbit throughout the entire voyage, pushed past them and towards the village. She stopped when she reached the first body, the paralyzed corpse of a middle-aged butcher. She kneeled, removed the cleaver protruding from his chest, and dragged her thumb across the surface of it.

She sighed.

“I know where we are.”