Mirio did as I asked, shifting me to the forefront of our psychic collective so that I was in direct contact with this new creature.

I felt its mind on my own a moment later, and what I saw wasn’t promising—they were as different from me as anything I’d ever met, moreso even than most elementals.

They didn’t have anything that felt like the singular focus that eyes and ears gave one when they centered one object in the visual field or picked one sound out of a room to pay attention to. Instead their mind felt like a high-pressure container, something that pushed outward in every direction. They felt like someone that had every thought it was possible to have—as long as those thoughts accorded with their nature.

But now that I was in direct contact with the creature, I got some inkling of that nature—and I didn’t like what I sensed. They felt highly intelligent, antisocial, and consumptive. They had an enormous amount of psychic power at their disposal, a pressure that bore down on me not because I was being attacked, but because contact with them naturally meant coming under that power. They weren’t used to communicating with anything as an equal; they subjugated and destroyed.

No violence, they said. Peace.

From my point of view, it was the best possible thing for them to say. It was also hard to believe: peace, with something that inherently viewed our children as cattle to be taken? We’d see.

Withdraw yourself from our territory, I told it. Those creatures who burrow beneath us, toward us, must abandon their tunneling. Do this and then we’ll talk about what you must offer us in recompense.

Recompense? It was hard to tell what emotions, if any, it felt as it echoed the word back to me. But our psychic connection would make clear my meaning, and so its repeating of the word was rhetorical.

You have attacked elves, I said. Then, because I didn’t want them to understand that the children were both the weakest and most valuable elves, I added: weak elves, to be sure. But elves nonetheless. You must have seen them to be creatures of understanding in the moments you made contact, and yet still you tried us again and again, attempting to seize the weakest of us for your own purposes.

They sent me back a simple concept, something that to their mind might have been just one word: Cattle. Slaves. Bodies. Mine. Mine; my intent was to take them.

I withheld any particular emotional reaction, wishing to give this creature as little information about me as possible. Still, it was interesting to me that despite their apparent intelligence, they didn’t understand that confessing you wanted to either kill or mentally enslave someone’s children was going to offend.

You owe us recompense, I said. Your actions cannot be ignored. You harmed the weak ones when you tried to seize them, and trying to seize them was an act that set you against all of us. We have not threatened you, and nor shall we if you recede from our territory. But tell me: why do you set yourself against us, when there is no need for it, no benefit? What do you want, here?

The hostile pressure on my mind seemed to waver and oscillate, but whatever the creature was trying to express was lost on me, interpreted as nothing but a series of painful vibrations against my mind.

I have watched long, they said. You creatures fascinate me. I have seen you build and grow in ways which I have not seen before. Your nest is potent. Its make is unlike anything I have seen.

Again the wavering pain and discomfort assailed me. I will add these skills to myself, they said. I must have you. Cattle. Slaves. Bodies. Mine.

I gritted my teeth against a surge of frustration. If I understood them correctly, building the keep was what had gotten us attacked. More than that, they’d been watching us for some time, and at least with some measure of magical claim: it sounded as if somehow they knew that our concrete was magically reinforced.

I will not give you what you desire, I told them. No slaves. No bodies. Such an act is against all possibility for peace between us, and that is what I desire. Peace.

Peace, they said. But peace for exchange: give me other elves. Five dozen females, one dozen males.

Again I had to withhold the surge of disgusted anger that I felt at this request from showing in our psychic bond. You cannot have a single elf, I told them. Each elf is equal in value to you, and is never to be traded. Do you understand me?

Again I sensed what must have been emotion from the creature, but it was so alien a sensation that I couldn’t pair it with any emotion I knew. The state of affairs was hardly conducive to communications: I couldn’t tell if they didn’t understand me, or if they were essentially just making a counter offer.

It was only when they spoke that I understood how they felt.

You insult, they said. I am greater in value than all elves together.

Briefly, I closed my eyes. The more we spoke, the less faith I had that we could come to a shared agreement. To you, that is true. To any of us, it is not. Do you see that we each see differently?

I see, they said. You are a distinct pack, you elves. I am not, and yet I have more territory, more bodies, more strength. Appease me.

Well, we were getting somewhere, at least. It was negotiating for protection money.

Have you a name, creature? I asked it.

I have only a nature, they said. See.

My mind was suddenly assailed by a discordant symphony of thoughts and impressions, none of them pleasant. I felt the brute, dumb minds of insects and animals in the moments they were extinguished, their inner minds crumbling, their thoughts becoming fragmented and then fading entirely as they were destroyed. This creature wasn’t the psychic hivemaster for one particular species of insect, as I might have suspected—they were a mass psychic parasite. They lobotomized creatures to make them easier to permanently control. Insects were easiest because they tended to have weaker minds when it came to psychic magic.

But they were sure they could take elves, too.

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I will call you Palimpsest, I said, masking my disgust—and legitimate fear—of them. Is that acceptable?

Again I felt only the strange pressure and painful vibrations as it considered this new word. Yes, they said. To you I will be Palimpsest. That is acceptable.

I considered the creature. Appealing to its compassion would be useless. If it had any real compassion, it wasn’t in a place I would be able to reach—I couldn’t make emotional appeals to something whose emotions were utterly alien to me.

Instead, the only chance at peace that I could see before me was to convince it that it had too much to lose by attacking us, and too little to gain..

I will you tell you my name now, Palimpsest, I told it.

You are elf.

I am Aziriel, I said. And I have fought wars that spanned worlds, Palimpsest—can you imagine it? Or do you even know of the existence of the River of Realms?

Again my mind filled with a strained, alien rumbling. Even through our psychic connection, it was difficult to imagine Palimpsest could perfectly understand the meaning of what I was telling them.

I have sojourned that jeweled causeway under broadest swath night, I told him, piloting my ship of starlit silver on a voyage between worlds that are each as vast as this one. Heed me: many suns shine over those who have learned to fear my name should they ever hold an elf in bondage. You are not equal to the foes who have come before you. Pursue your course, and my wrath will be inevitable and unbearable. Before you die, you will witness the might of elvenkind.

I continued. But I am strong with the primeval, deep in its ways: instincts guide you to do that which will keep you alive on this world which is rife with life and its violence. I know this. I will not fault your transgression against us so long as you admit that it was a transgression by paying us recompense for the harm you caused.

I felt the pressure on my mind rise, and the unpleasant pain that came with it peaked for a moment.

I will take less than half of all elves, Palimpsest said at last. Half plus one will remain with you, Aziriel. Half minus one will be given to Palimpsest. In this way no elves, no stock, are wasted by death. This exchange is the only way that it shall be so.

I exhaled in frustration. You threaten and insult us, I said. You say you have watched us long. Surely you have seen that we are unlike anything else you have witnessed? You expected to be able to subdue our weak ones easily, yet you could not subdue even one. Elves are capable of things that you have never seen, Palimpsest. We could show you those things, teach you how to be greater than you already are in exchange for your help in making us prosper.

Now I let them see just a little of my emotions, of the iron in my heart. But you threaten us with death? Again I insist: heed me. I promise you, Palimpsest, our powers of violence are beyond your reckoning. You don’t know what even a single elven life will cost you if you try to make good upon your threat.

A pause. I could see their mind, but there was no way to tell what they were thinking: I might as well be trying to get a read on the thoughts and feelings of a stone by sensing how quickly it was vibrating.

I am coming, they said at last. I am coming, and will await your surrender.

I hung my head. Appeasing them hadn’t been an option, and threatening them hadn’t worked either—which meant that we would at least need to show them some of our strength to get them to reconsider.

But that itself was a questionable prospect. If Palimpsest saw our full capabilities, they were as likely to strike out of fear, with everything they had, as they were to give up on subjugating us.

I thought of the strange array of thousands of insects that I’d found underground on my first day here. If Palimpsest controlled every creature they dominated, then they might be limited in how many they could control at once—hence the army I’d found in stasis. I didn’t know how many bodies they had, or could control at once, but I knew that I didn’t want to face the worst of what they could field, not if I could help it.

I turned to face the elves behind me. “Everyone listen up,” I said, projecting my voice through the bond and into the minds of all the soldiers on the ramparts, ensuring everyone would hear me.

“This new entity is hostile. Their intention is to fight us until we capitulate and give them elves that they can psychically enslave. Our intention, then, is to make it so that after today they will fear us so much that they never try again. We have two options.”

I looked around at the gathered elves with a sense of reluctance. A full-scale battle could see some of them dead, but Palimpsest had given us little choice.

“First is that we kill their central mind,” I said. “This is least likely: but we’re trying to find it in any case. The second is that we deplete Palimpsest’s supply of minions to the point where they can no longer attack. Unfortunately, we don’t know how many creatures they have to attack us with—we might be two and a half thousand against more than a million.

“Normally, trying for the second option would require us to use excessive, awesome force against them, as soon as we possibly can. But our enemy has clearly survived on this world for a while, and I doubt they’ve done so with only swarms of digging insects, which are likely not higher than level 10. To grow and spread as their nature suggests they do, they need to be able to fight convergences, behemoths, and anything else this world throws at them.

“Because of the way that this creature acquires its minions, it’s likely that they’ll want to conserve the strongest of them. As such, we’re going to hide our true strength from them for as long as we’re able. With our defenses, we have answers to innumerable forms of attack—and Palimpsest must think that every tactic they employ might be successful for as long as we can possibly manage it. With luck, they won’t realize that they should be striking with everything they can possibly muster until we’ve already found where they lived and organized a counterattack.”

I looked around at the elves closest to me, my expression grim. “To speak directly, I don’t think coexistence is possible. If we get a chance to sue for peace, I’ll take it—but very likely only to give us more time to make ready to eliminate Palimpsest as a threat. It’s not just because they want some of us to suffer either death, or a worse fate. It’s that they could barely even frame their request in a palatable manner. It will be difficult to get them to sue for peace even to serve their own interests—we simply can’t reach one another.”

Then, because our forces were a mix of elves with military careers, elves not in the military but with some military experience and training, and elves who had none to speak of, I added: “That’s all for now. Be ready to follow orders when they come.”

I found Zephanel, our chief architect, in the group attending me—he’d arrived as I’d been speaking.

“Zephanel,” I said, turning to him. “I want you to do everything you can to make sure our waterworks are sound. We have a half hour or so before they arrive, by my estimate—can you do anything to reinforce them or increase their throughput?”

“The pipe is a buried concrete spillway,” he said, sounding unsure. “It’s not possible to widen it now.”

“We can defend a ditch that runs from the reservoir if we need to,” I said.

“And go outside the walls?” He asked uncertainty.

“If it means keeping the foundation secure? Absolutely. Our icebinders can make fortifications if we need them. We need that water flowing. It’s vulnerable as it is, but it’s essential to the defense.”

“A channel made from ice, then,” he said. “I’ll see what can be done.”

“Good.”

I set about making sure our defensive forces were well-organized, and that every group of soldiers and defensive spell could be easily deployed even if I intended to hold them back. It was mostly about making sure that the right people were in the right place: our leadership was well-trained to handle a crisis, down to individual squad commanders.

With any luck, it would be all too easy. Even if they’d been watching us for a while, Palimpsest had little idea what we were capable of. My hope was that they’d seen two and a half thousand elves and assumed we were just a strong pack of interesting animals. There was even a chance that none of the creatures they could field in battle could cause me any serious harm, let alone kill me.

But unease filled my heart as I stood at the point where two faces of the keep met and looked out at the silent forest before me, tortured by the knowledge that many thousands of insects were burrowing their way toward us through solid rock at that very moment. I didn’t feel lucky.

All there was to do now was wait.