It took some time to even start getting an answer. The Elf stood in silence for at least two minutes, so long I was starting to think she had a stroke.

“Madama Kishirra?” I called out to her, trying to take her out of her reverie. She blinked and rubbed her hands over her wool-covered arms. “Sorry. I did not mean to offend you.” So much for being a master orator. Maybe I really did overstep?

“I heard perfectly. I was merely taken aback. Nobody ever asked.”

How to save this?

“Just start from the beginning,” I tried. Which, actually, was not the best way to put it to an Elf. How old was Kishirra anyway? Where I came from, Elves were functionally immortal. In stories, at least. They were fantasy characters, not flesh-and-bone beauties with a cute streak and a penchant for history. “Alright, that might have been a mistake. I mean, from when you decided to come here and fight. The moment when you took the first step on your quest.”

Her silver eyes lost focus. She took a step towards me and she brushed her fingers against my hair, catching a few soot flakes that still dirtied my hair. I winced.

“Ah, sorry about that, I spent all my time at the forge today and-”

“It began with this,” she replied rubbing her fingers and spreading the soot thin over her dark tips. “And my desire to avoid the same fate.”

“Ash?” What was she talking about?

“My Quest brings me over the hills surrounding the city of reeds and mills,” she said. She set her weapon to the ground, a black poleaxe. If that was what I thought…

Even now, the axe’s bite looked so sharp it could cleave sunlight in two, glinting over the edge of the shaft. Everything was made of the same black not-glass of the forge. A Kiengiri relic? “To weed out the illness that slithers in its bowels. Gaunt things of chalk and bone that stalk in the night.”

I frowned, thinking about the stories told by the farmers.

“I have heard accounts of strange things going on in the countryside. Monsters of some kind. Mom used to tell me stories about them: are you saying they actually exist? Is that what you are trying to fight?”

She nodded, balancing the poleaxe on her arms.

“Chalkers. There is One, deep beneath the earth, a mother who does not sleep and always generates foulness anew. Her will is like strings and hooks and the Chalkers are her puppets.” Her voice dropped, growing darker. I felt a strange wisp of fear, as if the things she was talking about could jump into the walls to grab me or my family into some black lair. “Her might with each year waxes and the surface has forgotten the warmth of the Sun. In Her absence, this thing can grow stronger. I am afraid she is an echo of the Seven Sisters…”

“You are starting to get me worried.” And she was talking in a weird manner, seemingly more to herself than me.

“I was not… it was not my intention.” She blinked, seemed to come back to the present, and set her poleaxe down, tugging at her collar in a way that once again made her look vulnerable and embarrassed. “Sometimes I get a little bit caught up in the needs of my Quest.”

“So you are fighting these… Chalkers. And why are you keeping this a secret?”

She shrugged.

“A bright deed shines by its own light,” she muttered. “Or at least that is what Ansàrra taught me. I am much more self-centred than it may appear. Maybe I am making a mistake. I should…”

“Madama Kishirra.” I set my hand against her forearm. The way her grey eyes pierced mine made me feel like a butterfly, pinned to the wall by a pair of silver needles. I gulped.

This was worse than ordering some milk.

But I couldn’t let go. I had invited her to open herself, and I wouldn’t back down. I knew that if I did, something between Kishirra and I would forever break. I wouldn’t let that happen.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“I want to know about it,” I continued. “I know I’m just the girl who helps repairing your armour, but you are not alone. There is no need to. You know, I used to be so scared even to just talk with people, but over the past few weeks I…” oh god, this was going to sound so stupid! “I tried to do better! And I had to because Mom was ill, but I did it because of you!”

“Because… of me?”

“Y-Yes. I m-mean, it’s not l-like I was thinking about you specifically, I mean, not like that I… I mean that I did find you as an inspiration! You are always out there in the wilderness, doing who know what, living who knows where. And when you come back you are always bruised, bleeding even! I’m worried! Allow me to be worried!” I stopped to catch my breath. That was probably the longest string of words I had shared with her so far, and during it I had leaned forward, so close that I could feel Kishirra’s breath gently break against my forehead.

When did I reach that close?

“Just… please don’t leave.” I rubbed my hands together as her brigandine crinkled, spread as it was over my arms. “Tell me more about it. About what you are fighting, about your goddess, even. About you. I can listen.”

Kishirra spent a long moment looking at me again, her green eyes roaming over my face.

“Then, if you will listen, I can talk,” she smiled. “Just let me know if lose myself in my own words.”

+++

Kishirra sat with the reed-smith girl in the middle of the garden.

No, not the girl- Lugana. Lugana Delebasse. That was her name.

They sat together beneath a large tree, and for the longest time, neither spoke, and both listened. She held her poleaxe in her arms, trying to gather her bearings and set her mind into proper motion. Words bubbled against the forefront of her mind, and she did not know which one to choose. There was just too much to say – each of the thousand directions she could carry this flashed over her mind like the endless facets of Ansàrra’s will.

In the end, she had to accept her limits in this as well. She sighed, and started to pull on the end of a single thread.

“My weapon is far older than I am.” She handed Lugana her poleaxe and the girl accepted it, weighing it in her hands.

“This must be Kiengiri. Sab’gi-su, you said? ” She asked.

Pretty and smart.

Powers above, she was going to make a fool of herself once again, wasn’t she?

“It is. I do not exactly know where it comes from or who built it. And what is even more wondrous, that single poleaxe is naught but…” she caught herself. “Apologies. I’m speaking like that again. Old habit.” She better watch it.

“I don’t mind,” Lugana replied with a smile. “It’s cute.”

Second time she had been deemed cute in such a short time! Ah, her treacherous heart was starting to beat far too quickly.

“Perhaps but… ah. Nevermind.” She was having such a hard time talking to her. And this was the same girl who was inspired by her Quest? She could consider it too prideful a thought. But it was mostly thanks to her faith, so she could accept it. “What I mean is that the Kiengiri produced many artefacts. Wonders that we are unable to match in our age. Poleaxes. Furnaces.” She took a deep breath. Her eye caught more soot tangled in the girl’s locks, but she resisted the impulse to reach out for them. “And Elves.”

Lugana’s lips parted in a silent gasp.

“You are a robot?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Sorry, sorry, that was…. it’s not even a word here. I mean, are you like… an artefact?”

“Not one made of steel and glass, no.” Robot? That sounded foreign. She did not take this girl as a traveller – in fact she had said she used to spent all the day huddled in her room. Queer. And intriguing. “But we were made, and not born. We cannot infuse ourselves into other beings like you do.”

Lugana frowned, then blushed again, her cheeks growing redder.

“Oh. Like that. I see.”

“Our likeness is shaped from the matters of our soul imprinting onto the world. It’s paper folded upon itself in a new shape, one the world would not forget.”

“So that’s why your name sounds so different! Kishirra is a Kiengiri name, isn’t it?”

Perhaps dangerously smart?

“Good guess. My likeness is also Kiengiri, at least partly so.” She pulled up her sleeve, exposing more of her arm. “Our sable skin tone, our thin and long noses, our thin lips, our bright eyes and long straight hair: they were all fashioned after Kiengiri likeness. Though…” Kishirra wrapped a lock of blonde hair around her finger and played with it a little. “As far as I know their hair used to be so black they shone azure, and their eyes were a deep blue as well, so I do not represent their looks well. Perhaps some of us were made with variations in mind, like you would breed different species of pets.”

Lugana stiffened at that word.

“Pets,” she repeated, and the word sounded so bitter between her lips. “Why would they… some sort of genetic modification? Were you spliced between humans and other creatures?”

“I have no idea what your words mean,” she replied. “But I doubt it was that simple. You see, our kind is… anchored in a way that no other living being is. As I said, a fold upon a fold that the world cannot forget.”

She pulled her knees towards her chest, as if to hide herself. Kishirra briefly wondered if this, too, had been implanted into her soul millennia ago, under a sky still unburned by silver.

“I have been here before,” she confessed. Ansàrra may have pity on her soul, it was the first time she was talking with another being about this ever since she got ordained. “This is my third life.”