The election came two days after our incursion against the lightning-bugs. Seriana approached me and asked in clear terms—clearer than I was used to from a high elf—that I get the rest of the military out of the council now that the worst of the danger had passed. Since I’d asked her to come and tell me whatever she thought would help us stay unified, I assented.
And so the existing councillors met and decided that we’d collectively put forward a voting slate: typical to the normal order of things, Seriana, Hassina and I would each have one of our own subordinates on the council. Mine would be Archdruid Mirio, Hassina’s would be Grand Shaper Galeena, and Seriana’s would be Master Enchanter Fireesha.
There were grumblings about Mirio. Mirio had always been meant for a position of authority—but in a hundred years or so. Vashala, a more senior druid who had also been at Ellistara when the Doom had come, was older and more familiar with politics and command than Mirio. He had no interest in the job, but this didn’t stop a few elves from speaking in his favor.
Still more of them pushed for Zirilla instead of Mirio. She was a sea elf, after all, and would be the second on the council alongside Seriana—given that their numbers had been utterly destroyed by the Doom, many saw this as a plus. And if she would only follow my orders and vote how I decreed, what of it? Wouldn’t Mirio, young and untried, have to do the same?
And so when the votes were cast, he was the only anomaly—the other five of us took almost every vote, but with Mirio there was a fork: some voted Zirilla and a few others Vashala. Not enough to appoint them, but it was a clear sign that he even on the word of the rest of us, even with all their authorities in agreement, the elves had a hard time accepting their new archdruid.
Fireesha finished enchanting Palefang’s teeth shortly after the election. She had threaded them in a circle around the fur mantle at the top of my cloak with the two most prominent teeth, the canines, facing front. The teeth were huge, of course—a normal-sized great cat’s canines could be the length of my fingers, and Palefang’s teeth were twice that. A large number of the teeth, including one of the canines, had been broken when I’d yanked my spear out of Palefang’s mouth, and these were all set on one side, helping to create the asymmetry that she’d used to make them take on a [Fray 3] skill key—along with [Plural 3] and [Mana 3].
They didn’t just look nice on my mantle, either—they were quite something to behold with the Verse, as well:
[Aziriel’s Pale Fangs]
Binding this item has granted you the [Devouring Forked Lightning 17] skill.
These teeth have been been enchanted to stay unnaturally white as well as to repel filth and clean easily. If damaged, they can be repaired with healing magic.
[Devouring Forked Lightning 17]
Components: [*Primeval 5] + [*Lightning 3] + [Fray 3] + [Mana 3] + [Plural 3]
+ 54% [Lightning] Efficiency. Efficiency refunds a portion of the mana spent on skills.
You can ignite airborne mana within your claim to create lightning. Lightning transfers the power of all mana it ignites into its endpoint, which then jumps to the densest source of mana it can reach.
If your line of mana splits into multiple paths to travel through, you may choose how the power of the ignited mana will be distributed.
Your lightning interferes with and destroys spells and enchantments, igniting the mana that composes them.
As far as increases to power went, it was about as big a leap in strength as I’d made since getting [Lightning Magick] itself, which felt fitting.
[Fray], also called [Chaos], was an aspect that tended to build either spell-rending or attribute-reducing skills. In the case of lightning, it made the magic adept at tearing through the structured component of spells whose mana had already been arranged and focused, building on lightning’s natural tendency to ignite free mana.
Magic that increased strength, magic that shielded a creature, magic that conjured entities such as frost walls or animal spirits—all these were now all prey for my lightning. If I cast a bolt fast enough, I could wholly counter any spell which took the form of a magical projectile—something mages often used to throw spells into the magical claim of others.
But the strongest addition was the fork—now I would be able to reach out with many fingers and choose which one to strike through, ensuring that my bolts would hit the vital areas of fast foes while also being able to strike multiple enemies at once.
Fireesha had been very much pleased, almost giddy, when she’d presented me with the fangs, and it was easy to see why. How strong an enchantment an object could bear depended on two things: its own nature and history and the skill of the enchanter. And [Fray] was naturally hard to have adhere to anything, just as [Weave] was easy—it was their natures.
The fangs were evidence of Fireesha’s extraordinary skill, and I took many opportunities to boast of what she’d done. It wasn’t just idle pride, but one of many deliberate efforts I made to boost morale.
This was because Fireesha’s skill was no strange thing among elves: all species of the cosmos came to the immortals for teachings, and taught us what they themselves knew as they learned. From her old place in the Sable Tower, our Master Enchanter had been at the center of a locus of shared knowledge in the arcane arts. Her skills would not fail us.
And so I boasted of her because hers was a story that repeated itself among our people many times as we worked to establish the colony.
Our buildings were sturdy and efficient, made with fitted bricks of basalt that were fractured from the stone by earthmovers who were swift and skilled. The iron that we drew from the bog below the mists was quickly purified and, together with materials we’d reduced out of the trees we’d felled, smelted in deep-cut furnaces that were tended by our firedancers to make high-quality steel. The mages lined our mana wells with magically fused obsidian within a week, doubling their capacity, then carved the runes for what seemed like an encyclopedia’s worth of spells into an avenue of smooth, polished stone that they set along the perimeter. The wildhearts made ready for the event of an attack with long lines of fused quartz inscribed with runes that would channel the power of their minds into a deadly psychic assault. The weavers, once they had skill keys to enable their own craft, bestowed their copious attribute bonuses on our working earthmovers to hasten the excavation—but made ready to shift their spells to our fighters if need be. And our hunting parties brought home greater and greater bounties—our elementalists not only knew how to skillfully cast the [Lightning Magick] we now furnished them with, but were surrounded by warriors who knew how to work together in exploiting the power that it offered, baiting creatures and dancing backward to draw them into mighty bolts.
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In the colony, I moved from task to task, doing whatever was needed—whether it was carving out ditches or lecturing our spellcasters on some of the most sophisticated magical techniques ever conceived. No matter what I was doing, I was sure to draw the attention of my people to the deep well of competence that surrounded them, knowing that it would lighten their hearts to really pay attention to just how much skill and knowledge we’d brought with us to this new world.
Entire ages worth of power lay at our fingertips—ancient power that would shape the untamed might of this new world, forming a mighty alloy that would make us strong and keep us safe.
The wildhearts would be the last piece to fall into place, but also make the greatest difference. Even now, they were crucial: once skill keys were more abundant, more of them began building the expensive set of skills that allowed them to follow after Mirio in flying a conjured bird or broadwing.
Once we had a few of them in the air, they carried some of our more skilled keyshapers. They flew them around with escorts so that they could strip the aspect out of the mountains around us, forming these into skill keys.
Only a few days of a few keyshapers doing this had to pass before the numbers we were deploying had quadrupled: they simply harvested some skill keys so fast that our hunters couldn’t compete. [Earth] was fasted: a shaper would fly to a location, land, and spend a minute or two stripping a small amount of the aspect and spending 500 essence to create an [Earth 1], then fly a few hundred meters in another direction to do it again.
But it was hardly the only key to become abundant: [Light] could be gathered from the mists, [Wild] and its subtypes from the forests and swamps, with the latter also providing [Water]. We were still limited by our lack of [Air] skill keys, but not in all things: our building and excavation speed rose dramatically after only a few days.
I would watch the spectral mounts of our airborne wildhearts with a deep sense of anticipation, and I knew I wasn’t the only one. The potential in taming some of the wildlife around us was almost inconceivable. Just considering some of the wildlife we’d seen in our relatively short time exploring was enough to make me smile.
The wyverns were perhaps most enticing… armored flyers with [Air Magick] to help propel their flight. But the only way to safety yoke them in the long-term was to raise them as companions from birth. The beasts were wild, and only psychic conditioning from the moment they hatched would serve for animals that were to be kept around elves with no [Wild Bond] of their own.
It would be that way with many creatures. Insects, simpleminded as they were, would be easiest to bring under our control, but even that would take time and care.
Once done, however, our capabilities would increase dramatically: building, exploring, researching, protecting ourselves… everything.
Our hunters, reinforced with [Water] skills, took to plumbing the depths in the swamps below us in the second week, and soon afterward found a species of legged serpents who were the source of the [Decay Magick] I’d seen used. With [Change] and [Death] skill keys, we supplied our druids and necromancers with their own [Decay Magick] skills. Soon they were following along with our hunting parties, stripping the flesh from their kills rather than leaving an endless supply of decaying carcasses behind them.
They returned with the skulls. The bones, too, sometimes—Ranival needed to fill his deadvault. But mostly they brought just skulls: the skull of a hunting predator who possessed [Wild Bond] in life bore the aspect that it had accrued; it could bear potent [Wild] enchantments. We needed a powerful enchantment to hide our psychic presence from passing creatures: hence we needed a foundation of many, many skulls.
To the wild elves it all made perfect sense. But even after it had been explained to the high elves, they still had a habit of looking over at our growing skull-piles with uncomfortable glances—insensible, given that plenty of them were telepaths themselves.
We hunted behemoths, too—there were three more of them in the first month, all found by Mirio through his combined [Behemoth Sight] and [Behemoth Bond] skills. One was one of the missile-throwing grazers that occupied the low slopes of the mountains. Another was one of the six-legged frog-like creatures that hunted and scavenged in the swamps. The last was simply a gigantic spider.
We hunted them for their strong keys, for their essence, and for the security of knowing that our hunters would not be stalked by gigantic predators. The fighting, however, was not noteworthy: we were strong enough now that a single creature with a beast’s intelligence was not a significant threat. In each case, Zirilla and I, with Mirio’s psychic assistance, led the beasts back into tailor-made spell trap overseen by Luthiel along with several accompanying mages and elementalists.
They gave a good sign of our growing power: we had gotten too strong for the rote behemoths of this world to seriously threaten us. That would take creatures of intelligence, creatures with powers unknown to us, or elementals.
Apart from the hunts, I kept my distance from Luthiel. In this, I was not alone. The former archmage was at a level of remove from seemingly everyone, trapped as if behind panes of clear glass. Every conversation he had was curt. Every interaction, a transaction. Elves avoided association with him as if fearful they could be tainted with his corruption: only the highest-ranked of us relayed orders to him, and then only because we needed to.
I bore the criticisms from others, mostly Hassina, that my decision had been unwise. She thought I was giving him some kind of reprieve on account of his being my brother, but she couldn’t see that in reality, I was torturing him: every moment that passed where he provided for us but could not wholly be a part of us was a reminder of what he’d squandered.
And sometimes I would look at him and think: oh Luthiel, my brother, look at what you’ve thrown away….
Not that this was my intention, of course. I wanted to keep him around because he was useful, that was all.
Time marched on and we grew stronger by the day. But for all our successes, the coming trial of the concert loomed. Hassina’s stress was obvious to anyone who spoke with her: she toiled with her orchestra for twelve or more hours a day, sought Zirilla and I constantly for advice on how their music should be written. Practically every profession was consulted on what instruments could be made in the short time available to us. Spells to manage the air temperature and density on the frozen summit had to be composed, and the stone needed to be cut and shaped into a form with favorable acoustics.
Seriana was almost equally hard-pressed organizing the emergency plan in case the elementals should turn hostile: an escape route had to be cut from the center of the mountain, a path into the deep stone where even a storm lord would not pursue. A spell of binding—one that would hold Akkakesh for as many seconds as we needed to retreat below ground—needed to be composed, and the mana to cast it needed to be at the ready.
All in all, everyone was busy—and as I’d planned, our constant toil kept us from the lull that would allow grief to seep in. Not that there weren’t tearful outburst, or episodes of ennui: everyone bore the burden of memory. But all things considered, we bore it well.
As the days passed, I could only find so much peace. So much relied on the cooperation of the skies that I wouldn’t find peace until I knew they would supply us with [Air] skill keys. And so I waited: we had a month remaining to us, and then we had only weeks, and then only days… then, at long last, the day came.
It was time to play for Lord Akkakesh.