Mirio rubbed at the back of his neck. “Lux Irovex?”

“Subjugate and tame a behemoth,” I repeated.

“I…” Mirio blanched, then seemed to gather his composure. “I rarely question your judgement, Lux—”

“You never question my judgement, archdruid,” I said wryly.

He seemed to deflate. “What—why?”

“Politics is a subtle game,” I said. Then added: “usually. It’s a complicated one, too—every time you think you know the rules, someone shows up and rewrites them. I’ve never been the best at it, personally. But I think I’ve learned a few things in all my time leading elves, and one is that if you show up one day riding on the back of a behemoth, people become less likely to question your competence.”

Mirio frowned. “But we don’t need a behemoth right now,” he said, looking down and away from me. “The mana vines—”

“The vines can wait. The wildhearts are too important for the colony, going forward. If every time you start giving orders we get keyshapers standing against you, we’re going to be wasting time and energy dealing with pushback.”

“But… it’s just…” Mirio sighed and rubbed the back of one hand. “It’s not useful. The best choice for me would be a female wyvern, from what we’ve seen so far. Not a fast fighter—I don’t have the [Air Magick] for aerial fighting. But really more of a beast of burden. Wyverns have no problem with scavenging—with the right psychic affectations we could have her haul some of hunters’ kills back home. The decay mages would convert them into good soil, and we could plant plenty of vines.”

“There you have it,” I said. “The wyvern could be a big help.”

“Once we find one,” Mirio said. “And once I’ve gotten the skills and spent the time to tame her. Are you sure I need to do this?”

“Yes.”

“It’s just such a waste, though,” said Mirio. “This can’t really be politics? We take the course of action that’s not ideal just to stabilize our power?”

“Yes,” I said. “Until it really matters. When it really matters, we put all the influence we’ve accrued to good use. I know it’s stupid, Mirio. I know it’s hard to believe. But if you coat this whole cliffside in mana-rich vines, it won’t do nearly as much for your reputation as if you appear one day on the back of some lumbering winged beast that makes all of them feel a little safer.”

Mirio sighed again. “We don’t exactly have a selection of behemoths on hand.”

“This is a long-term goal,” I said. “You’ll find something that suits you as the days go by.”

“And you?” he asked.

I laughed. “When the time comes? I’ll likely go after a wyvern myself. Male, naturally—something fast and clever, something to dominate the skies. But that’s a long way out. For now, tell me how the vines are coming along.”

Mirio’s face lit up, and for another thirty minutes he gave me an account of everything they’d learned since starting the project. Many of the vines seemed to prefer the mists, and as I’d already seen they cultivated small batches of mana that other creatures would take, inadvertently spreading their seeds and pollen as they did so.

Because they already predisposed toward gathering mana, Mirio was working on psychically yoking many of them so that they could undergo some controlled levelling and skill selection.

Plants rarely levelled. The only essence they typically accrued was that which filtered down to all life via the River of Realms—and while their high volume meant that they gathered more essence than other creatures, they mostly spent that essence fueling the [Life Magick] that they used to grow quickly and heal the damage that came from being constantly feasted upon by insects and herbivores.

But they didn’t need to level, not much: if Mirio could cultivate a thousand separate vine growths in the same location, each of them level 10 and each of them with nothing but [Source]-granting skills, they’d fill their mana and then leak mana out into the air around them—mana that our elves could freely take.

With the right enchantments and materials to channel the mana toward us, we could surround our settlement in mana gardens and then live in air that was rich with mana… even richer than that which we currently used to power our building projects.

Unfortunately, it was unlikely that any of this could be done in the timeframe that we best needed it—before the excavation was done. Vines needed time to grow, and demanding that they go against partly their nature and acquire an abundance of mana skills in lieu of [Life] ones, then keep those skills, was a problem that would take time to solve.

Still, I was glad to hear news of progress as we walked back to the settlement proper. I left him to seek out Seriana—she was overseeing the production of some of our concrete next to the new keep.

She saw me, nodded to show she knew I was waiting, then returned to the conversation she was currently having with several other mages.

As I waited, I approached a large stone container filled with tiny, glittering black rocks. I reached into it to grab a handful, then let them fall from my palm.

Most of the filler for our concrete was rock and sand that we’d either crushed from the basalt around us or gathered from the nearby riverbed. But these stones we had taken the time to produce specially.

They were obsidian, mostly of uniform size. There was something about certain materials, such as obsidian and glass, that gave them strange interaction with mana and magic. These tiny stones were a crucial component of the enchantment that would make our concrete immune to any use of [Earth Magick]—a crucial element of the settlement’s safety that Seriana saw fit to oversee herself. Attacks that came from beneath the earth were the hardest to defend from, by far.

Seriana joined me. “You need something from me?”

“If you have the time,” I said. “I’d like to speak with you in the archive chamber.”

“Certainly,” she said, nodding. I thought I sensed some faint eagerness in the way she fell in step beside me as we moved for the temporary keep—mages always like a trip to the archive chamber.

We spoke a little about the construction of the new, permanent keep as we walked together toward the old one—it was two-thirds finished, now, a raw-looking, imposing structure that had begun to rise behind us. It would big enough to hold all of us, and well-fortified with walls, ramparts, a moat and waterworks: once it was done, we’d be free to commit to building the rest of the settlement.

But for now we were still staying in the old keep, one made of massive blocks of stone. It was strange to think of a building that hadn’t stood for two months as the old keep, but things were moving fast indeed, here at the start of the settlement.

The archive had its own large, round chamber in the keep, one that lay near the heart of the fortification—it was, after all, the only thing we’d brought with us that was worth more than elven lives.

It was the densest set of objects we’d taken with us on our journey, the archive. It was composed of three sturdy, rectangular wooden frames, each holding twelve smaller compartments that could be removed like drawers.

Those compartments held writings of all kinds, each meticulously transcribed on uniform sheets of paper and then shrunk so small that an entire shelf of books could be made to fit in the palm of my hand.

The result was that almost the whole Great Library of Tel Telana—the wisdom of the Sable Tower—was contained within the three wooden casques before me. History, music, theater, spells, tales, schematics… memory itself had come with us to the new world.

Some of the most trusted elves, those elves whose qualities were known, had the honorable role of managing the archive. One couldn’t touch or move the ultra-thin pages containing their miniscule, illegible script without breaking them—magic was required to find the information needed, enlarge it so that it was readable, then carefully burn its contents onto the rough-textured paper that we’d made since arriving.

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I took a sheaf of notes from one of the shelves—all the pages detailing my ritual—then led Seriana to a private room that contained only a small table and three chairs. We sat.

“I didn’t want to put this on your mind until I knew that the ritual was close at hand, but with the [Air] in our possession, that seems to be the case,” I said, flipping through the pages before me to make sure they were in order, then sliding them across the table toward her. “I have some things I’d like you to attend to. Fortunately, Alcuon and I were just waiting for Hashephel to create a third manaheart before all this—the magical legwork is mostly done.”

“I’ll be following good instructions,” Seriana said, looking down at the pages.

“Precisely,” I said. “But not to assist me.”

She looked up at me, raised her eyebrows. “Oh?”

“No,” I said. “The thing is, we don’t know how to do what Lord Kalak did when he laid the foundations for my ritual. No one does.”

“He altered the magic that undergirds our very species,” said Seriana. “Made it open to new power. I’ve heard of individuals being given potent boons that permanently make them stronger—but nothing that passes from parent to child, as you say this will.”

“Alcuon had theories,” I said, sifting through the pages before me and then passing some to Seriana. “We’d worked this out. It’s… well, it’s hard to explain. Or perhaps easy: imagine you want to determine the shape of a glass, but the only thing you can see is water.”

“So you fill the glass with water and see what shape it—” Seriana cut off. She looked up at me sharply.

“Of course we can see more than water,” I said. “Alcuon had extensive notes on what an elf looked like, magically speaking, before Lord Kalak’s adjustments. We have a chance to make similar records now that Kalak has changed our nature. And in the moments that I complete his spell….”

“The third circle,” Seriana whispered, her eyes rapidly scanning the pages I’d put in front of her. “Hassina’s circle….”

“It’s for you,” I said. I nodded down at the pages. “For this. Alcuon had a plan.”

“Record everything,” she said. “Everything. Every minute magical detail—every change.”

“And perhaps, in the wake of the ritual, having gathered as much data as it is possible to gather, we can learn something from this spell that was cast by a god.”

“Even if we can’t replicate Kalak’s magic because we don’t have access to the same powers, tools, or means of focus… we might determine what we lack. Like determining the existence of a celestial body you can’t see by measuring the tugs and pulls it makes on one you can. This could be a great step forward.”

I smiled, my voice brimming with open pride. “Alcuon’s notes are quite robust.”

“Yes, yes, he was always like this,” Seriana said fondly, as if the notes before her were a particularly fun joke he’d told. “He was….” she raised her head to look at me, the eagerness on her face slowly giving way to sympathy. “He was brilliant, Aziriel.”

“I know.”

“If he’d left us none of this, his contributions and inventions are so numerous that his name will still be recited by our schoolchildren and apprentices for ages illimitable.”

I sighed. “I know.”

“I’m sorry, Aziriel. I don’t mean to draw you down into grief.”

“I know,” I said. “But I’m already there, or part-there. I think… I worry….”

I paused, a hard feeling entering my stomach as I looked at the pages in Seriana’s hands. “I worry that it’s not just easier for me now because of my training, my resonance. That ritual is what he left me, and as long as I have it before me I won’t miss him the way that I should.”

“I know that much goes unsaid between us,” said Seriana. “We’ve never had close ties, even if we are in some sense family. Our places have set us at odds… perhaps now more than ever. But if you should need anyone to talk to, I am here.”

I sighed again, resting my head in one palm. It was comfort to hear. Seriana was one of only a few elves who had been around for almost all my life, along with Zirilla and Luthiel.

“Thank you,” I said softly. “These long lives of ours have never taught me how to do this, Seriana. He told me before he went that everything we could say had been said already; we were filled each other up with so much of ourselves that I would keep as much of him as love could hold. It’s as good a goodbye as has ever been said, at least to me… but of course it’s not enough.”

I thought of something as I finished speaking and laughed. Seriana cocked her head in confusion, and I smiled up at her. “I was thinking of humans. You know how it was the first time we met humans—thinking ourselves so superior, then getting shown up at every turn.”

“Well,” said Seriana. “I should like to think it wasn’t as bad as that.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“It was still bad,” she said, smiling faintly. “But it wasn’t every turn.”

“The ones I liked best were the children,” I said, remembering. “And there were two—Mirika and Dale—who I trained from the age of five and six. I taught them how to use a bow, how to hold a fighting stance, how to breathe… and in time I watched them fall in love. It took—gods, it took them four years to finally figure it out, to stop going for one another’s throats long enough to see what was so obvious. But when they did….”

“I remember,” Seriana said, her smile deepening. “The wedding on the river between two willows. A hundred floating paper flowers, each carrying a candle.” She laughed. “And the first they did wasn’t kiss, but catch that whiskered fish.”

I grinned. Human traditions were quite something.

“Time did what it does and took everything it gave,” I said, my voice turner darker, fainter. “And in the final years I watched Mirika walk along that very same riverside each morning—alone.”

I heard my voice grow fainter as I got lost in memory. “Meanwhile I was training new sets of children, going to new weddings. And I never could figure it out—why didn’t she despise me? Mirika, who was all teeth and fire, who’d always found every battle she didn’t need to fight and fought it… she loved me like a mother until the end. Until her bent, withered end. She knew I’d watch their daughters die, and their grandchildren too… and I don’t think she ever felt one single mote of resentment.”

I paused for a while—a long, almost unnatural silence. I knew my expression had become somber, grave. “It whispers to them, I think.”

“Death,” said Seriana. If she thought what I’d said was strange, there was no trace of it in her voice—she sounded as detached and curious as ever.

“It speaks to them with their bodies. Through pain and weakness, it forces them to make peace when they’re still so young. So painfully, unthinkably young. As we bear memory, they face death. They face it, and they listen to it as it tells them truths about this cosmos that we in our immortality can never easily hear.”

I looked up at Seriana. Something had given way, and her typically flawless composure had worn thin—her eyes were faded, lost in memory.

Something we had in common, that.

“Live enough time and time ends or you do,” I said. “Mirika’s lonely walks beside that river were inevitable, but death had made her a promise. She knew without a shadow of a doubt that her days were counting down, that those walks along the river where they’d wed were finite, that she’d be leaving… and soon.”

“And she knew other things, I think.” My voice was a haunted whisper as I began to think of my first husband. “She knew that Finuel or I would bury the other… and then look out on an eternity, no promise of death ahead. She knew that without age to take us, we’d more than likely have to bury some of our babies, too—an entire race that waits centuries to have children who die before they do.” I was staring at the grain in the table-leg, lost. “She knew,” I whispered again. “She knew, and she pitied me.”

Slowly, I shook my head, disbelieving even my memories. “She joked about it constantly. ‘You’re too old to be lifting that by yourself, Aziriel. Let me help you.’ In my pride I thought she was saying it to alleviate the burden that age had placed on her. But really, her jokes were to help me feel the age that time, in her eyes, had denied me.”

I looked up—and to my shock and horror, I saw tears glistening in Seriana’s eyes, her mouth open with silent sobs. “I’m sorry,” she blurted out.

“Seri?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, louder. Her hand came up to cover her mouth.

And then I realized. I’d been so caught up in memory that I’d failed to see it—Luthiel’s trial was coming. She might very well lose her husband, soon. And she and Luthiel had been together since before even Finuel and I had been married.

I stretched my arms out toward her. “Come here, Seri.”

For a moment she sat, frozen—and then she wailed, and moved to fall into my arms. “Gods, I’m so afraid,” she said. “I’m not strong like you are, Azi—I can’t—I don’t want to—”

“I know.”

“I need him. I need him….”

“I know,” I said, stroking the back of her head where it was pressed into my shoulder. “I know.”

“Don’t let it be forever!” she said, emotion wrenching at her voice, her whole body shuddering against me. “I know that for me to ask—”

“Shush,” I said, harshly enough that she obeyed. Gently, I pulled away from her, taking her face in my hands. “Now you listen to me, Seriana, and then you speak no more of this.”

I spoke steadily, standing tall so that she had to look up at me to keep eye contact.

“I am Lux Irovex of the firstborn, she who brings peace through victory, and only elves as old as we are know what it is when I put forth my power in full. My hand will close as much as it needs to—and the fullness of my grasp is a fist.”

Seriana’s breathing stilled, and a calm awe entered her face I spoke. My own myth would give her the hope she needed.

“Luthiel will be punished,” I said. “But it’s me that you have to fear, not anyone else. And I swear this to you upon the mountain of dead that I’ve climbed to safeguard our people: I will not let her take him away.”