I looked around the cave and took in the elves. All of them were wearing the same composite leather armor that I had been when I arrived. All of them were armed with a spear, and most of them had bows. I’d insisted on this equipment in case I wound up calling them into danger, but for now we were safe.
“I want everyone to be quiet while I speak for a few moments,” I said, making my voice reverberate through the cave. “First, If any of you are injured, or feel ill, or feel that something is off after making the journey, speak up and see the healers immediately. I don’t expect that the warp spell worked any differently than it should have, but for now I want to be sure. Is anybody hurt?”
I paused, and nobody answered. Still, I saw motion in the crowd around—and then Mishlo, the head healer, stepped forward. He was a short, frail-looking man with a long braid of brown hair, and he was wearing the same set of composite leather armor that I’d arrived in. He put both his hands together, palms facing up, and held them out to me.
I gave him one of my hands, and he wordlessly began to heal me, patching up the last of my scrapes and bruises and banishing all trace of exhaustion. While he did this he produced a cloth, wetted it with water that he condensed out of the air, and gave it to me to wipe the blood and grime from my face.
I smiled and nodded to him once I’d done this, then carried on addressing everyone else. “You can all remove your helmets, we’re safe now. I also want each of you to check and be sure that the spell has functioned as intended. You should all have retained your classes, but be level 0. You’ll have your granted power and nothing else. Check to be sure this is true. While you all do that—Hassina, come here.”
High Priest Hasina stepped forward, removing her helmet to reveal a long sweep of untidy white hair. I held my hands out, both together with my palms facing up. Hassina placed one of her hands in mine, and I clasped it, then gave her everything I’d gathered:
- 267 201 Essence!
- 11 [Animal 1 / Body 1]
- 2 [Body 1 / Mammal 1]
- 3 [Body 1 / Wild 1]
- 3 [Insect 1 / Missile 1]
- 19 [Bird 1 / Body 1 / Wild 1]
- 18 [Fungus 1 / Life 1 / Mana 1]
- 4 [Life 1 / Mana 1 / Wild 1]
- 6 [Animal 1 / Surge 1 / Water 1]
- 12 [Armor 1 / Body 1 / Insect 1]
- 2 [Animal 1 / Body 1 / Water 1]
Her eyes widened for a moment, and then she shot me a wry look. A moment later, she gave something back.
+ [Lightning 3]!
I’d known she would, of course. But as the High Priest, it would be Hassina’s job to manage essence and keys. I had the prerogative to take what I needed in the field, but in the course of normal operations, everything would move through her—not that she’d refuse any of my orders in our current situation.
“Give some [Wild] keys to Luthiel, please,” I said. “And some essence to get him to level 10.”
The briefest flicker of surprise flashed across Hasina’s face, but she moved to do as I’d asked a moment later.
I looked into the crowd and found Luthiel, the ex-archmage of Tel Telana, the capital of Aranar. He was a tall elf, only a half-foot shorter than I was, and his long hair was a frosty white-blue color. He was standing next to his wife Seriana—the new archmage. “I’m as certain as I can be that we’re safe here,” I said. “But I want you to keep watch while I explain—you already know everything I’m going to say anyway.”
Luthiel was one of the firstborn, like me. We were the only two in the colony, and only the two of us had [Sable Grace 20]. Combined with one of the [*Arcane 5] cores from his class, the [Wild] keys would make skills to help him extend his gaze and spot any predators that came upon us while I spoke.
Choosing one of the seers to keep watch would have been more effective—their [*Sight] cores formed abilities that gave much better bonuses to extending one’s gaze. But Luthiel had higher [Focus] from [Sable Grace], and he was [Arcane Champion], with a granted power similar to my own [Primeval Power 30]. His [Arcane Resonance] increased the effect of his [Focus], which gave him an overall lengthier gaze than even the seers.
I heard some murmuring as Hassina gave him the keys, whispers that were so quiet that even I couldn’t make them out. I could guess at what was being said, however, by their unpleasant tenor.
Luthiel was a traitor now, after all.
And he was still awaiting judgment for what he’d done.
But then, so was I. I’d insisted on utmost secrecy when I led them here, giving them very little to go on. Now that I had brought my people across the cosmos to a place they couldn’t return from, I had much explaining to do.
I waited a moment, then continued. “Now,” I began. “As you all know, I’ve asked more from you than anyone could have a right to ask. I’ve kept many secrets, and I’ve made vague promises of miracles to come. Most of all, I’ve traded away the greatest treasures that our people have ever possessed—the last two manahearts.”
I looked around at their attentive faces, then at Luthiel, who sat gazing into the distance. As champions, he and I had each wielded one of the manahearts, but they hadn’t really belonged to us. They’d belonged to all the elves, and only by a two-thirds majority vote had I been allowed to trade them away for my purposes.
“I told you that I wanted you to come on a journey with me, and that we would not return for centuries at least. I promised you all that once you knew the whole truth of what I intended, you would agree that I had done the right thing. Well, now it is time for me to tell all—and when I’ve finished, it will be time for you to judge me.”
I drew in a deep breath, looking around at their attentive faces and thinking on how best to explain myself, then looked up at the ceiling of the cavern and decided where I would begin.
“I traded the manahearts to Kalak, King of Crossroads, the god of trade and travel.”
I let this revelation pass through them, but spoke again before their whisperings could grow too loud. “I traded the manahearts for two things,” I announced. “The first was passage here—and that is where I will begin: where, exactly, is here?”
I reached out with my [Frost Magick], conjuring a pure, clear sheet of ice that stretched across the roof of the cavern and was anchored to the walls. Then I began to scratch markings into it, scraping away little flurries of frost that sprinkled down on me as I drew a familiar shape.
While I drew upon the ice, I spoke. “I’ll ask most of you to have patience with my explanation,” I said. “There are children among us, and so I won’t be brief. I want all of you to understand what I’ve done.”
I didn’t look over at the crowd of children as I spoke. I didn’t want to see them. Elf-children were rare: when the wild elves of Aranar had children, they almost always chose to move and raise them beneath the boughs of Ellistara, the nurturing tree, so that their young ones could grow up alongside other elves their own age.
But Ellistara was far from Tel Telana. When the Doom of Aranar had come, the inhabitants of Ellistara—the children and their parents—had only survived because of the intervention of my husband, Alcuon.
Alcuon had ensured that all of them had made it out, but the spell he’d used had been one of sacrifice. The act had cost him his life.
A worthwhile trade. And one that made me never want to have to look at any of those children again in my life.
I sighed and tried to focus on the task at hand as I finished my makeshift, ice-writ map. It was a long, curved line, thick at first but thinning as many more, smaller lines split away from it, some of them splitting again. Everywhere these small lines ended, I drew a circle—a realm.
“No doubt you all recognize the River of Realms,” I began, gesturing to the map. “It is the conduit which brings essence from its divine source to the many realms we know. The Divine Wind pushes the essence along the course of the river, whose many forks siphon essence into the River’s distributaries, all of which end at the phase points of the many realms. Once the essence reaches such a point, it phases to the world in question and is distributed evenly across that realm’s living creatures.”
As I spoke, I traced a path from the thickest part of the river that I’d drawn to the circle that represented the most populous realm in the cosmos, Thanaxes.
Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.
There I lingered, and I had no doubt that everyone present knew why. The closest world to Thanaxes had been Aranar, our home—we had shared a two-pronged distributary. But I hadn’t drawn Aranar.
Aranar was gone.
“To understand how we were brought here, you must understand the nature of the River,” I continued. “In the River, essence isn’t instantaneously absorbed by life—in fact, loose essence can’t be absorbed. It acts more like a fluid substance, hence why the Divine Wind can push it along its path at all. The further one travels up the River, the stronger the current created by the Divine Wind becomes. What’s more, the essence we absorb and hold as we gain levels and keys is also pushed by the Divine Wind, albeit not as forcefully. All of this means that traveling up the River, against the Wind, is difficult. Past a certain point, it becomes impossible. And that point… is here.”
I drew a thick bar through the beginnings of the River on the map I’d made in the ice. “Nobody knows what’s past this point, because nobody has ever gone past it. Even without considering the Divine Wind, it is dangerous: the aether whales are more numerous, more aggressive, and of greater size the further one travels up the River.”
I gestured toward Thanaxes again. “The further up the River of Realms and the closer a realm is to the point of no return, the more essence it receives from the River. Thanaxes is close, and so it prospers. So many things come easier to those of high level who have essence to spare—agriculture, medicine, construction, exploration and discovery. A bountiful realm is a great gift indeed. Now see:”
I reached out into the ice and began to draw again, extending the River of Realms back past the line of no return. Slowly, I drew until I had almost doubled the length of the River, then stopped, drew another distributary, and marked another world. As I did this, I heard murmurs of disbelief around me, growing louder as the River grew longer.
“We are here,” I said. “Far, far past the point of no return.”
I waited as this sank in, a steady murmur of sound rising around me as the people spoke amongst themselves. But after a while, I raised a hand, waited for them to quiet, and spoke again.
“And so you see,” I said. “When I promised that we wouldn’t be returning for centuries at least, I told the truth. We don’t know how to build a craft that could take us safely to Thanaxes, let alone one that could return here by traveling against the force of the Divine Wind. For a long time, this world will be the only world we know.”
Again I waited and let my words settle on the gathered elves, their murmurs building around me. It was one thing for them to believe that they wouldn’t be going home, but now they knew the seemingly insurmountable obstacle that made it so.
“As for the spell that brought us here,” I said. “I know many of you are more knowledgeable on the subject of warp magic than I am, and so I apologize for the simplistic explanation I will give. But when you send someone from realm to realm via warp spell, you send them as a sort of magical parcel, one that moves so fast that its speed is functionally instantaneous. And whether it travels against the current or with it, this parcel is degraded by the Divine Wind. Enough degradation and the spell scatters, destroying whatever it contains. The more essence the parcel contains, the greater the degradation—hence why it’s easier to send those of low level via warp magic than those of a high level.”
I traced the line along the River that ran from Thanaxes, where we’d left, to where we were now, creating another small shower of glittering frost.
“In order to travel this far, we had to be stripped of almost all our essence. And even stripped of all our keys, pared back to first level, a warp spell to bring all of us across this great distance was far, far beyond the abilities of even the most powerful mage or council of mages. Thus, I asked Lord Kalak, King of Crossroads, God of Trade of Travel. As a god, the spell was well within his abilities.”
Again I paused to let them take it in. I imagined that at least some of them were confused, or even angry: I had traded our people’s priceless artifacts for a teleportation spell, after all.
“Now, I must clarify something: this distance we have traveled is not the limit of Kalak’s abilities, but rather the limit of the value I traded him. I could have asked that he let us keep our essence, but this would have meant traveling a much shorter distance, barely making it past the point of no return. But this was not suitable to my ends—which brings us to the second part of our bargain.”
Would they forgive me when they found out what I’d been trying to buy? There was only one way to find out.
“If all of you query the Verse for details regarding your species, you will see that something has changed—none of us can currently conceive.”
I did as I’d asked them to in the same moment.
?—Your Species:
[Elf]
Your sight and hearing are supernaturally enhanced.
Your agility and grace has been supernaturally enhanced.
You have the capacity for further supernatural enhancement.
You are immortal. You will not age after reaching maturity.
Your reproduction has a supernatural component:
Slowly, you will produce an [Elvish Gift of Life]. To conceive a child, you must mate with another elf who possesses an [Elvish Gift of Life]. Both gifts will be expended when you conceive.
You can give an [Elvish Gift of Life] to another elf who does not have one. Holding one such gift halts the production of another.
You have produced 41% of an [Elvish Gift of Life]. You will never complete this process.
Gasps of shock began to fill the cave around us, but the Verse had told me what I’d expected. Normally, it took just over 160 years to make an [Elvish Gift of Life].
“What is the meaning of this?” a man asked, standing. It was Larash, one of my berserkers. “I had a gift!” he said. “It was complete! Now I have eight-tenths of one—and it will never be complete?”
“Sit down, Larash,” I said.
He sat.
“I will explain,” I continued. “We pay a price for our immortality,” I said. “Creating another immortal takes an excruciating length of time—160 years. As you all well know.”
If it was possible to get their attention more than I had, I had done it. The cave became completely silent, and the elves around me looked raptly on. They could guess where this was going.
I’d promised them a miracle before I’d left, after all.
“If you look, you can see another new sentence when the Verse describes our species. ‘You have the capacity for further supernatural enhancement’. That is what the Verse tells me; I assume you all can see some similar phrase. I had Kalak change us when he warped us to this place,” I said. “160 years is what it takes to foster the magic that makes a new immortal with enhanced senses and grace. It should take almost 200 years to foster the magic that makes an elf with this one, added quality—and yet that quality itself is eating up the innate magic that normally goes toward our [Elvish Gift of Life].”
I rolled my shoulders, looking up at the ice map above me for a moment. “I can finish it,” I said. “I can bestow further supernatural power upon us, now that Kalak has added the capacity for it. I’ll need a kingdom’s wealth in essence and cores, but I can do it.”
I looked back down at my people. Swept my gaze slowly over them. I could see the hope in their eyes.
“And when I do,” I said. “We will not only be more powerful than we ever have been, but we will foster a new [Elvish Gift of Life] in less time than the eleven months it takes to carry a baby to term.”
Gasps spread through them like a long sigh. A few hands came up to cover mouths. Some laughed, and some cried out. Soon I was raising my hand to silence them yet again—though I had to wait a long while before it was quiet enough that I could speak.
Now my voice was slow, haggard. “Most of you know that my husband, Alcuon, died in the Doom.” I held my gaze steady, avoiding a glance toward the children of Ellistara. “This was our dream. I… we….”
I let out a long sigh. “I have lost two worlds, now,” I said. “Two husbands. Three children. All my children… and the elves….”
I froze for a moment. It wasn’t supposed to be like this—my speech should culminate in triumph, not despair. But memory was depthless, and my thoughts were dragging me down like an anchor.
“There are perhaps fewer than thirty thousand of us left across the cosmos,” I said, my voice quiet.
Dead silence filled the cave again. Two months ago there had been almost three million of us. And almost all of them had been on Aranar.
Ninety-nine percent.
In my mind’s eye I saw a wall of black smoke that was as tall as the sky, streaked with red flames that boiled beneath its surface….
“I asked Kalak what it would cost to lay the foundations of power, to complete only those parts of the ritual that I knew I could not, and then to send us to a primeval world as far away as the remainder of the two manahearts I traded him could buy,” I said, voice rising again. “This plan has long been in the making. Alcuon and I were trying to find some other way to pay this cost than the manahearts, to take only colonists who had trained to come here. But now—now I act in desperation because we are desperate.” I looked at the elves before me, willing them to understand. “We are desperate and bereaved and shattered and angry and lost,” I said, my voice becoming an impassioned cadence. “And there must be a way forward.”
I saw heads nodding around me. I saw many faces streaked with tears. And I also saw that many elves were still, and regarded me with inscrutable faces.
“This world,” I said, “Is so far from our old part of the cosmos that divination magic could never hope to reach us. And even if it did, the primeval mana in the air would scatter it and render it useless. And because I kept so much of this plan a secret from you, nobody knows we’re here—and no one will. If the Doom of Aranar came because someone wished to destroy us, then we are as safe from them here as I can possibly make us.”
I looked around at all of them. “What’s more, this world is steeped in essence. It has power that I need to complete my ritual, power beyond any that our people have ever known. On this world we can be safe, prosperous, and numerous. I traded our manahearts and kept our secrets for this end—that we thrive, here, in a way that no other denizens of the known cosmos ever have.”
I held my hands out, bloodied palms facing them. “Now you know all,” I said. “Why I traded the manahearts, why I asked you to come without telling you my purpose, and finally the nature of the miracle that I promised you. And so once again I must ask what I asked you on Thanaxes. Will you still follow me?”
The first to stand was Archmage Seriana.
“I will follow you!” she cried, voice resounding through the cave.
Very quickly the rest of the elves were standing, echoing her cry, until the roar of their voices filled the cave around me. Suddenly they were surging forward, touching me and saying prayers, grabbing my hands and thanking me.
I still had them.
And why not? I was Aziriel, mightiest among the elves. I was one of the firstborn, winner of a thousand battles, she was trusted to lead them to peace through victory, a figure who stretched far, far back into legend.
Idolatry and hope formed a dangerously strong alloy. I knew because I’d taken advantage of it before.
And it was time to get to work.