Yelora

As the Sky Engineer-turned-witch uttered her incantations, her black, curved nails (which Yelora had only just noticed—had she had them before?) sent the spinning wheel into a frenzied whirl. The bioluminescent Elf-symbols on her face glowed, and Yelora’s own symbols sparked to life. The witch’s green eyes slitted as she voiced the foreign words, and when she opened them again, they burned as blue as a Wizard’s portal.

“Ask your question,” the witch rasped.

Yelora hesitated. How exactly should she phrase it?

“Ask it!”

“How do I save the Elven Faire?” she blurted.

The wheel pulsed with light as it spun, turning the room into a kaleidoscope of flashing light and color. Reality rippled like folds of silk until it tore away and a new, dreamlike scene took its place.

She saw herself.

She was at the crash site, leaning forward, up to her elbows in a pool of shallow water. The vision was soundless. She could only see the back of her head and that she was struggling with something. What was she doing?

The scene spun, as if on a carousel platform, revealing that the Yelora in the vision was holding something underwater—a wriggling, gray thing with gnashing teeth and wide, terrified eyes.

Gorlo.

Her heart thrashed like a living thing in her chest. Though she’d thought about killing the creature many times (had almost accomplished it, even), watching herself do it was different. With her hair in her face, cheeks red with exertion, teeth bared, she looked downright villainous. Ugly. Vile.

The vision rippled away. A new one formed— Kashur’s smiling face. She took a deep breath of relief. Did this mean he was unharmed? That he was part of her future? Sunlight gleamed down on him, illuminating his cheeks as his mouth moved, wordlessly, playfully, his eyes bright and animated.

Who was he talking to, smiling at? Was it her?

She doubted it. They’d never had a moment like this, of pure, simple, sunlit joy. Plus, he was looking up. At someone taller than him, perhaps?

As he spun in a slow circle, the answer was revealed. Yelora gasped, as if all the breath had been sucked out of her.

It was a baby. An Elf baby! He was holding her above his head, smiling and crooning to her.

Her legs almost buckled beneath her. Sprites, this was it! Proof that she’d been right about the Oracle’s prophecy! Gorlo must be sacrificed to free the Elves from their curse of infertility. It made sense. He was the newest-born Elf, sullied by darkness. He was tainted. Never meant to be.

“I’ve seen enough.” Yelora called out as the vision rippled away. “Stop the reading.”

The witch’s voice was a rough whisper in her ear. “There is more.”

“I know what I need to do.” Yelora shrugged off the gooseflesh and stalked forward, hands outstretched, grasping for the walls, the clutter, a bump against the wooden table, anything to ground her back into her reality. “End the reading. I demand it!”

“There is more!” The witch’s hand shot out of the abyss and clasped around Yelora’s wrist like a vise. The blackness of her nails had bled into her fingers, creeping past her bony knuckles.

“Unhand me!” Yelora shouted, twisting out of the witch’s grip, but her cry disintegrated into a gasp as the spinning wheel inhaled her into a new vision—one she no longer simply watched, one she was a part of.

She was standing in a circle of white sand ringed with purple crystals. Dead trees made of ash hovered over her, falling to pieces with every breeze.

“I know the crystals are killing Terris!” Yelora shouted. “Let me out of here!”

At her feet, something split the white sand. Tendrils of black pushed up, thick and shiny, like oily tentacles. Yelora sidestepped out of their way. More of them emerged from the sand, twisting and twining with one another, creating a black jungle. Yelora backed away, bumping against a tree trunk. The whole tree blew apart, like ash in the wind. In its place hung a swollen, purple pod inside which something pulsed in a foreign rhythm that made Yelora’s own heart falter, as if knocked out of its timing.

Her head began to ache. It was her crown! Pulling it off, she saw two purple crystals throbbing there. The crown grew hot as coals in her hands, and she dropped it. Where it fell, a mound rose up, covered in grass. Yelora recognized it immediately. Her heart pounded in shame as the earth beneath her swelled and shifted, driving her upward until she was perched atop the form of the dead Elemental.

No, no, no, Yelora’s fear screamed inside her. The witch could not see this! The witch could not know she had killed an Elemental. Her great transgression must be kept hidden.

“Stop this reading!” she shouted, voice cracking. “Let me out!”

Underneath her, the mound shifted, its crust breaking like a thin shell. Her leg broke through as the mound crumbled in on itself. She fell, screaming and landed in a humid, damp place—the bottom of a well. Her boots sank into organic-smelling loam. The sound of a waterfall, like Creation Falls, but there was no waterfall. She looked up at the circle of visible sky above. Five planets burning brightly against a purple sky, almost in alignment.

“Nothing good can come of this.”

Yelora whirled. Kashur was there, staring up at the convergence. His gloves were off. His hands were no longer mottled—they were the same olive-gold as the rest of his skin.

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Her heart took flight against her will. She did not have time for feelings of this sort. But it was just a vision. It wasn’t real. She could do as she pleased here—seek comfort, be vulnerable, trust. She went to him, folding his hands in hers. “No more gloves,” she said, studying the way her pale skin contrasted with his darker tone. “The curse is lifted!”

His thumbs caressed hers, but his face was sad.

“What’s the matter?”

He stepped back, blood spreading across his chest, staining his tunic. He dropped to his knees.

“Kashur!” Yelora crumpled to the ground with him. This wasn’t really happening, she reminded herself. It was a scene conjured by the witch’s spinning wheel. Something that could come to pass or that represented what would come to pass.

But it felt real.

“I’m sorry I was wrong. We were both wrong.” Kashur’s lips trembled. His hands moved to cup her face as if holding a sacred chalice.

“What were we wrong about?” she whispered, covering his hands with her own, pressing them to her cheeks. They were cool against her flaming skin.

He blinked, long and slow, then pitched forward, his forehead falling against hers. She could feel the tickle of his fluttering lashes on her cheek, the heat of his ragged breath. His lips were close. So close.

But she had seen him, alive, with a baby in his arms, happy. She hadn’t seen herself in the vision, but somehow she knew she had been there, too. She, too, had shared in that joy.

A sob escaped her as he took a final wheezing breath. “No!”

She pulled him to her, hesitating once before pressing her lips to his. This wasn’t real, after all. His lips were soft and still. Not how it was meant to be. Not how she’d imagined it.

“Please, Kashur, don’t leave me to do this alone!” she rasped.

But he sagged in her arms, dead weight.

She forced authority into her voice. “Summoner, I demand you wake up!” She twisted her fists in his bloody shirt and shook, but it only made his head loll. “Wake up!”

Around them, the darkness shifted. Movement, like dark insects on a dark backdrop. But these were not insects. They were tendrils of blackness, creeping, growing, entwining. Blinking back tears, Yelora kicked at the tendrils, pulling Kashur’s body closer, folding herself around him. Her staff was gone. Her crown, too. When she fluttered her fingers, not even petty magic responded. The black growths twisted and wove, creating a matrix behind which a purple heart beat out of sync.

Her own heart fought the asynchronous throbbing, skipping beats, making her lungs spasm with half-taken breaths. She found a dagger in a sheath on Kashur’s thigh and drew it.

A show of strength.

“Come!” she shouted at the blackness, brandishing the weapon. “Come and taste the wrath of the Queen of the Elves! It will be the last thing you do!”

A guttural laugh echoed off the well walls. It came from nowhere and everywhere at once.

The ground moved beneath her, stretching like taffy, spiriting her away from Kashur. She reached for him, but it was too late. They were separated, and Yelora found herself positioned on one tip of a five-pointed star suspended in a night sky. Under her feet, a shape burned with yellow firelight—the Elven leaf. On each of the other points, the symbols of the other people of Terris similarly blazed: a shield for the Imperials, a hammer for the Dwarves, a snake for the Wizards, and three bottomless triangles representing the Elementals.

“You think we are your worst enemy?” The disembodied voice rattled her chest, her skull. “You think we bring the darkness? The darkness was already here. We just exploited it.”

A tendril lunged for her out of nowhere. With a cry, Yelora slashed at it. Her dagger cut through air. She stabbed the emptiness over and over, screaming, while the star disintegrated under her feet, sending her plummeting until, with a gasp, she found herself sprawled on the witch’s floor.

Thank the sprites it was over.

The witch’s green eyes blazed as she rose from her seat at the spinning wheel. “You!” she cried. “Why do you bring these unholy truths to me?”

Yelora scrambled to her feet. “You’re the one who made me keep going. I told you I’d seen enough! I only wanted to know how to save our people!”

“There’ll be no saving anyone! I left the Sky Engineers to get away from this. Now you’ve made me a party to it!”

Gorlo awoke and whined. Yelora swiped the end of his leash from the floor. “You know nothing.” She glared at the witch. “You saw nothing.”

“My queen, it is not that simple!” The witch’s voice dropped to a hiss as she trailed Yelora through the hut to the door. “In killing the Elemental, you have killed Terris itself! Now it will never heal from this plague!”

No. She didn’t believe that. She couldn’t. “More Elementals will come to our aid, when they feel the time is right.”

The witch, moving impossibly fast, blocked her at the door.

“Stupid, arrogant queen. There is only one! There has only ever been one spirit of Terris, incarnate in different forms: Water, stone, earth, plant life. One land; one being, appearing as it sees fit, using the resources at its disposal. And you have murdered it!”

“No!” Yelora hardened her glare. “You mis-speak, Sky Engineer. In my vision, there was an Elf baby, born healthy and perfect.”

The witch showed all her teeth in an ugly laugh. “And what world would you bring it into?”

“The Elves must survive, at all costs.”

She scoffed again. “You ask for a vision, and then you ignore it. Fara would not have been so blind!”

Yelora’s blood simmered. “Speak plainly if you must, or not at all!”

The witch closed the distance between them until Yelora could smell the cloves on her breath. “The Celestiri are coming! When the convergence arrives, so will they. This greater evil must be defeated or Terris as we know it will be lost. Your vision—five Peoples, five factions, all points on the same star. Divided, we cannot stand against them. Unless we reconcile, we will surely fail.”

“Celestiri?”

A sharp rap sounded at the door, startling them both. “Open up!”

The witch grabbed her winter hat from the table and shoved it onto her head. “Re-cast your shade spell,” she said to Yelora, already changed into the dumpy, strange Imperial woman wearing too many layers.

A pair of Imperials were at the door. “We need all the luck tokens you have,” a gruff voice said. “There’s a battle in the woods.”

Her facade in place, Yelora replaced the witch in the doorway. “Of which battle do you speak?”

The Imperial’s eyes were gray as ice. “Some unknown creatures are attacking the Imperial and Dwarven forces. We think it is the Wizards’ doing.”

“Wizards?”

The word was lost in the scuffle of money changing hands and the men pocketing the witch’s trinkets. The unknown creatures must be Goblins. Had the Wizards turned those foul creatures into an army already? Would Kashur be with them? Yelora dropped five coins on the table for the treatment for her leg, secured Gorlo’s leash around her wrist, and made to follow them.

“One more thing,” the witch said.

Icy fingers of fear invaded her spine. She wasn’t sure she could handle any more of the Sky Engineer’s dire predictions. No wonder the woman had chosen to run away and hide. “What is it?”

“Do not put too much credence in your vision of a healthy, happy Elf baby, Your Highness. Like the planets, the future moves. It is not a fixed point.”

Wonderful. “Is that all?”

The witch opened the cabinet and extracted her frantic little dog. “See that you aren’t a fixed point either.”