Ivy

Two ice-chip eyes gleamed in the shadows of the cave that had been filled with water only a moment ago. Soaking wet, Ivy scuttled backward through puddles until her shoulder blades struck the rock wall. It was hard to breathe as she scanned the cave for an exit, a crack, a hole, anything she could crawl through and escape. There was nothing large enough. She dug out her knife and brandished it in front of her, the blade trembling.

“Who’s there?” she demanded, voice barely more than a whisper.

The shadows shifted. Was it another one of those Goblins waiting to bite her? Eat her? She’d seen the horrible things they could do.

But their eyes were purple. These weren’t.

Ivy gasped as a pile of pebbles formed into a small body attached to a small head with two bright eyes. The proportions were all consistent with something she’d seen before, something all residents of Terris had seen before: an Elemental.

Ivy noted the droplets of water clinging between the small stones that made up its body. It stood there, unmoving, watching her.

She let her blade fall to her side. “T’was you who brought the water. T’was you who saved me.”

It lifted a pebbly fist and signed yes.

“Thank you.”

The Elemental was cute. Only the size of a small nightstand, its craggy, frowning mouth reminded her of a rag doll she’d had long ago. It was top-heavy at the shoulders, with smaller hips and two cube-ish legs made out of dirt. She thought she saw flecks of green plant life in them.

“I’m Ivy,” she said, remembering her manners. “What’s your name?”

A scraping sound on one of the tall walls startled Ivy, and she turned to see black moss skittering across it, rearranging itself into rough letters forming a word: Terris. She had spent enough time in classrooms to know that it would have failed scription class.

Ivy smiled. “Terris,” she said. That made sense. “Nice to meet you.” She looked around again. “I’m trapped. Can you help me get out of here?”

Terris turned its attention to a crack in the wall. The crack immediately split wider, the rock on either side of it liquifying and repurposing itself to create a low tunnel.

Ivy felt her chin drop. She started to move for the exit, but in a split second the little Elemental had cut her off, melting into the rock floor and re-emerging again in front of her. It signed furiously. Stop! Look! Help!

She squeaked and hopped backwards. “Okay, okay, I’ll help you,” she replied to its furious signing. “But what do you want me to do?”

It pointed at the moss-covered wall. The moss shifted again, this time bringing in lighter colors of white and yellow and minty green—even dark purply-black. It formed a picture like the ink drawings Ivy had seen artists selling on market day—tiny dots forming something you could only see clearly from farther away. A woman with long, yellow hair and green eyes, a crown upon her head, and a staff.

“The Elf Queen?” Ivy guessed. The Elemental looked at her expectantly. “What about her?”

It pointed at the picture, as if Ivy hadn’t understood.

“The Elf Queen,” she said again. The Elemental’s eyes glittered and its oversized frown seemed to deepen.

“I don’t know what you want me to do—”

A rumble started somewhere inside her head. Ivy winced and covered her ears, but the sound was inside her. Her neck burned, right where her birthmark was. A voice thundered in her brain like two mountains scraping together.

Find her.

***

Yelora

The tendrils reached up for Yelora, their pointed tips like hungry appendages. She leapt into a tree, inches ahead of their grappling tips, hoisting herself up into the belly of the crashed golem where it lay face-down on a canopy of branches. Clinging to the inside of the metal cage, she watched as the tendrils wound around the outside of the carapace but did not enter it. The Dwarf had said the golems repelled magic. It seemed he was right.

Through the open viewscreen she could see Kashur slashing at more tendrils with a knife while also fighting to free the Emperor boy from a purple crystalline cocoon. All around them, more black tendrils were unfurling, sprouting purple crystals like thorns. An odd, medicinal smell wafted through the air. Just beyond them stood whatever was left of the Dwarf, completely enclosed in a crystal shell. Her mare was in similar circumstances, with only a white rope trailing from her prison.

Gorlo!

The other end of the rope was chewed off. Relief and annoyance tangled inside her. He’d escaped. That meant he was likely alive, at least.

“Kashur!” she cried, waving him her way as the tendrils nipped at him. “It’s safe in here!” She tried to cast a freezing spell on the tendrils, but the golem appeared to dampen spells cast from within itself, too. “Leave them! You cannot help him!”

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He made one final reluctant slash at the tendrils, then must have cast a time lapse spell, because the next moment he was beside her in the cage, breathing hard, flushed with exertion, his smell of spice and coffee almost overpowering the cloying scent of the foreign magic.

“No good can come of this,” he said, eyes wild.

She met his frantic gaze with her own. “Gorlo’s gone. I need to find him.”

“Are you kidding me?” Kashur cried. “Two people are being eaten alive by alien pitcher plants! That little monster’s the least of our worries!”

“I can’t let him get away.” She fidgeted with the controls. “Do you know how to work this thing?”

“I think it works better when it’s on its feet.”

“Unfortunately, magic doesn’t work on it or in it!” She gave up on the controls and peered around the cage of the cockpit. The tendrils had given up, too, creeping along the ground away from the vehicle. All around the golem, the ground was covered with a vibrant alien garden. “Can you fly us to healthy ground?”

He was gaping at the three cocoons. “What do you think it’s doing to them? Is it eating them?”

“Summoner!” She cupped his stricken face and turned it to hers. She softened her voice. “We cannot save the boy or the Dwarf. But we can save ourselves. Can you fly us to healthy ground?”

They were pressed together in the cramped cockpit. Her gaze fell to his lips, full and pink and parted, just like in the witch’s vision.

His gaze dropped to hers as well, and she felt his heartbeat slow to a steady thudding.

“Okay.” He nodded, swallowing hard. “I’ll try. It’ll be easier than last time. We don’t have Gorlo. We need to get outside of here first. Let’s climb to the top.”

Kashur hoisted her at the waist then gave her a respectful boost on the backs of her thighs. She thought about how those hands had looked bare, in her vision. Not blotchy, poisoned things, but strong and olive and effortless. The air was fresh high above the alien garden, free of the heavy, sharp/sweet scent.

Kashur clambered up beside her. There was white all around his dark irises. When she slipped her arms around his chest, he clung to her even more tightly, as if she might be the one to keep them from falling.

“The magic won’t kick in until we’re clear of the golem, so we’re gonna fall a little first.” She nodded. “Jump high,” he said, and she didn’t have a chance to reply before he counted backwards from three, and they launched.

Yelora squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her cheek into Kashur’s chest as they plummeted. The sensation of sailing through the air and then plunging downward, without magic, completely vulnerable, overwhelmed her with anguish, and she was sorry—sorry for all her mistakes, sorry for killing the Elemental, sorry for poisoning Creation Falls, sorry for wanting to kiss Kashur, sorry for not doing it, sorry for losing Gorlo and not being a good enough queen, sorry for the fact that she was going to die here, either from two broken legs and foolishness or from an alien cocoon swallowing her whole.

Then Kashur’s spell caught them and swooped them aloft, but not high enough to avoid the jagged branches of the tree canopy. Yelora’s foot caught one, and Kashur’s must have, too, because they went careening downward like a poorly shot arrow, landing hard and rolling apart, Yelora ending up with her face buried in a pile of pine needles. Brown pine needles. Untouched by the alien magic.

“You did it!” she cried, rising to her knees, but her next words caught in her throat. What she was looking at sent a chill through her like a dip in an icy river. Stone and bark, shuddering, then leaping one atop another as if magnetized. They formed a stocky body and a familiar face—square and fashioned from chiseled bark and twigs and soil, with a long, frowning mouth and two eyes as sharp and sparkling as flint.

An Elemental! Had it come back to haunt her?

Yelora staggered to her feet, gasping, her limbs moving in slow motion as if she were trapped in someone else’s time lapse. She grasped for her staff, but it eluded her. Even her crown with the failing Riverstone had tumbled from her head during the fall. All she had was natural magic, no match for a vengeful Elemental. It was small—why was it so small? No bigger than a cider barrel. What spell did she dare to cast without a riverstone or crystal to boost it? Nothing would be strong enough to do anything but anger it further.

This was how it would end for her—her great mistake catching up with her and taking her down like a hungry bear after its winter nap. Perhaps everything she’d seen in the witch’s spinning wheel would happen without her. That, at least, was a consolation.

But she did not want to die now, even if she deserved to. Perhaps she should apologize. Throw herself on its mercy.

The Elemental stalked toward her, face stony, shiny eyes glittering with fury.

Or perhaps she should run.

Yelora turned and stumbled past Kashur, ignoring him when he called her name. But the Elemental cobbled itself together once again in front of her, this time formed from gnarled wood, a black axe scar across its face.

She switched direction. It cut her off again in a rough body of sedimentary rock and pine needles.

Shifting laterally, she skirted the edge of the crystal garden and gasped when she almost ran into the creature formed of bedrock and sparkling quartz, its mouth shimmering with what looked like jagged teeth.

Yelora stumbled backward, catching herself on a branch before she fell. But it was not any branch. Purple crystals glittered under her hand. They shone under her feet, too, and the black tendrils were crawling up her legs. She tried to kick at them, but her ankles were knotted together with black vines, already blooming with new crystals. She lost her balance and toppled to the ground, the maw of the hungry cocoon already opening for her.

“I got it!” a high-pitched voice yelled. It belonged to a little girl with a pinched brown face and two skinny arms carrying a piece of Dwarven technology. It was not a magic dampener. It was bigger, boxier. Snapping a newly formed crystal like a bean from one of the tendrils, the girl plugged it into the device. A whirring sound filled the air and the garden began to disintegrate around her, crystals and tendrils turning to sand under her hands and knees.

Yelora kicked the shriveling tendrils off her legs and crawled out of the garden like an animal, heart racing, breaths coming in shallow gasps. Kashur caught her by the shoulders. She yelped and tried to push past him, but he trapped her in a tight embrace.

“It’s okay, Yelora! You’re safe. Look.”

He turned them both so she could witness the little girl standing over a whirring machine glowing white with power. It was like she had a star at her feet.

“Wh—what’s happening?” Yelora gasped.

“Just breathe for a minute,” Kashur whispered into her hair, his breath hot, his arms cinched around her.

The machine continued to hum and glow until the crystal garden faded to dust. The cocoons disintegrated as well, and the boy, the Dwarf, and the horse all toppled to the ground. Only then did Kashur let her go. She watched him run to the boy as the little girl and the tiny Elemental bent over the languishing Dwarf. She was still having a hard time catching her breath. She checked her ankles—they were free of tendrils. She rubbed her arms, brushing off the feeling of the crystalline plants pulling her in, overcoming her, reading to feed on her.

She pressed a knuckle to her teeth. If this was the fate of Terris, Sprites help them all!