Yelora

Yelora forced her chin up as she padded in white slippers across the glass footbridge to where her groom awaited her, chewing on the silver chain that secured him. The cloying smell of the crystal gardens was so thick she could almost taste it. The faces of the assemblage of Elves and Wizards blurred all around her. On the platform at the end of the footbridge, the Alchemist practically vibrated with joy.

She and the rest of the Elven Faire would be shackled to the Goblins forever through this, legitimizing those abominations and allying themselves to the Wizards. But what was she to do? The convergence was upon them. Already the sky had grown almost white with the halos of the aligning planets. The air throbbed with untapped power. Even her fingers tingled with natural magic unspent. She could use it, but to what end? A new era was upon them. The Celestiri who had sent the meteorite to terraform their world would arrive to stake their claim. Mol Morin was prepared to hand it to them, and if she wanted her Elves to survive, this was the sacrifice she must make.

Grounding herself before the Alchemist, she sought the fresh, green comfort of nature, but there was none to be found here. Mol Morin lured Gorlo to her side with a treat, and the shame of it all washed over her. The Queen of the Elves, wed to something akin to an animal.

And where was Kashur in all this? Saving himself, likely.

Weren’t they all, at this point?

“Thank you all for joining us!” The Alchemist’s voice boomed across the humid chamber. “Today the Elven Faire joins with the Goblin Faction in an unbreakable alliance, linking the three magical peoples of Terris together forever! In this new Terris, there shall be a place for all of us. A future, thanks to what is taking place today. Let us begin.”

A Disciple handed the Alchemist a small, leather-bound book with the Wizards’ serpent seal on the cover, one of its pages marked with a golden ribbon. Mol Morin began to read, and the words ran like poisoned water through Yelora’s mind. A marriage of power had not been conducted in Terris since the Imperials named their first Emperor, before the Rift War. And this one, unlike that one, would be sealed with magic.

There was no escape.

The Alchemist waved her forward, pausing in his reading to place her hand over Gorlo’s, and she allowed it. Weak and lifeless, the appendage did not even feel like it belonged to the rest of her body. How was this happening? How had she allowed this to happen? The sensation of being watched overwhelmed her, and Yelora looked up to find Sochee’s eyes upon her. Her friend’s face was bruised, but her expression was even more wounded. Yelora looked away, unable to bear it.

Gorlo gurgled and wet his lips with a long gray tongue. It reminded Yelora of how she’d woken up with him licking her face on the raft. Disgusting.

The Alchemist was busy pontificating between reading the ceremonial paragraphs. She gritted her teeth and raised her chin higher. If dignity would not be granted to her, she would demand it. “Get on with it, Wizard.”

One purple eye fell upon her. The other was lolling about in its socket. Sprites, what had this unholy power done to him? What was being unleashed upon them? When would it come? Yelora glanced at the sky beyond the dome.

“You’re right, Your Highness,” the Alchemist agreed. “It is time to finish it.”

He slid the golden bookmark from its spot and wove it around Gorlo’s claw and Yelora’s trembling hand. The ribbon glowed, and the Elven symbols under Yelora’s skin responded, flashing to life.

“Once the ribbon is tied, these two shall be bonded in marriage, in power, in house and in territory. What is bound by magic cannot be unbound. By the power of the Ancients!”

“By the power of the Ancients!” the Wizards in the congregation replied.

Mol Morin took the two ends of the ribbon in his gnarled fingers and looped one over the other. Yelora looked at Gorlo, humiliation and resignation followed by a profound and odd sense that this had happened before—that she had stood in this very place, had peered into the oversized yellow eyes of this little monster, pupils like pinpricks in the bright light from above, a purple hue reflected on its gray skin. How was that possible?

Mol Morin’s fingers pulled the knot taut. It was done. The bond was sealed. Yelora felt everything inside her deflate. Whatever came next, she and her people would be resigned to it.

But the ribbon was no longer glowing. Neither were the symbols on her skin. The ribbon lay like a flat, dead, ordinary thing on her skin. The bond was not sealed! The magic was... stifled.

Shock and fury played across the Alchemist’s face. She whirled to see Kashur standing on the glass footpath, pointing a magic dampener in their direction.

“I won’t let you do this, Sir.” His jaw was set, brow furrowed under a wayward black curl. “No good can come of it.”

Before the Alchemist could reply, a horde of Dwarven and Imperial soldiers charged into the chamber behind him.

The room erupted into battle, Wizards and Goblins leaping into action. Yelora shook the ribbon from her hand and signed to Sochee and the rest of her Elves to join the Dwarves and Imperials in the fight. Kashur was already embroiled in hand-to-hand combat with a pair of Goblins. The Alchemist twirled a fireball in his gnarled hands. Yelora elbowed him hard, knocking him off balance, and splashed into the pool of water, scanning the area for a weapon. All she found was a frightened Gorlo, chained to his spot.

She froze in the water, suddenly realizing why this moment had felt so familiar. The witch’s vision! The spinning wheel! This was the Oracle’s prophecy come to pass. This was the moment she had foreseen.

Gorlo squealed and tried to flee as Yelora splashed after him in the shallow pool of purple water flowing under the footbridge. Heart pounding, she reeled him in by his silver chain and looped it around his neck. He snarled and fought, clawing and biting at her. Yelora ignored the attacks, pinning the creature between her thighs, and pulling the chain tight. Then she took a deep breath and shoved his misshapen head under the water. The sensation of the creature writhing for its life sickened her, but she ground her jaws together and held him down as battle raged around them.

This was the sacrifice that had been foretold—the sacrifice of the last-born Elf. Regardless of what was coming, this is what would save her people—Gorlo’s death. He was never meant to be, anyway.

It did not happen quickly. Elves and their derivatives could hold their breath for a long time. Gorlo’s struggling intensified, but Yelora held him fast, leaning all of her weight on the little monster, trying not to think about what she was doing. It felt like drowning a child.

It is not a child, she reminded herself as Gorlo’s flailing grew spastic and intermittent, then stopped altogether. His skinny arms floated to the surface, limp and lifeless.

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Yelora pushed the body away from her and stared at it. Had the sacrifice worked? How would she know? Magic throbbed heavy in the air. The water was thick with it. Yelora stared at her fingers, dripping with quiet power.

The water. The magical water.

Could she pull a child from these waters? It was not the proper place, but all water on Terris was connected, and with the convergence raging above, it felt not only possible. It felt necessary. An ache opened up inside Yelora—a want, a hunger that was more than a simple craving. It was like a law of the physical world acting upon her. Magnetism. Gravity. Time lapse.

Soaking wet, chin trembling, Yelora whispered the sacred words reserved only for Creation Falls. The prayer felt sacrilegious on her lips. Those words were meant to bring life forth, not to be uttered in the taking of it, but Yelora had not created the circumstances she found herself in. She could only play her part in them.

Gorlo’s body lapped toward her as she finished the prayer. She shoved it aside and sloshed around in the shallow pool, feeling for the baby.

Where was it? Where was it?

“No!” a voice shouted. Ronith was battling her way through the clashing factions toward her. The Dark Elf splashed into the pool and seized Gorlo’s lolling body, flipping him over. “What have you done?” she cried, her face contorted in fury. “What have you done? You’re a monster!”

Yelora ignored her, sliding her hands methodically through the pool, whispering her own, private prayer that the baby would come. She had done everything she’d been asked to do. She’d secured the crash site, she’d sacrificed the newest-born Elf. She’d brought to pass the prophecy of the Sky Engineer-turned-witch. All of this to save her people.

These waters were thick with magic. A baby could be brought forth here, she was sure of it.

Why was there no baby?

The surface of the pool began to ripple, a small tremble shaking the water. The tremble grew, expanded, until the entire chamber was quaking and the glass dome above them fractured with an ear-splitting crack. Shards of glass rained down on them, revealing a sky white with power, the planets aligned in a blinding streak across it.

“It’s happening!” the Alchemist shrieked with delight, hands aloft.

The fighting halted momentarily as everyone turned skyward, waiting for the arrival of the mysterious new faction the crystals had paved the way for. Yelora squinted in the brightness, waiting for vehicles, another meteorite, maybe even an entire meteor shower shepherding in the new world in which her people must learn to survive. Any moment now, the Celestiri would come, and everything would change.

What that change would look like, only the Sprites knew.

A purring noise erupted from behind Yelora. One of the pods in the crystal garden was peeling open! Two thin, sinewy arms with too many bony fingers pushed the flaps of the cocoon aside, allowing a tall, slender body to unfurl. The thing was easily a head taller than the tallest Imperial she’d ever seen, covered in purple, crystalline scales, with no recognizable facial features except a long, eely mouth. Still, there was something graceful about it as it stepped out on two, bony legs and stopped, opening its mouth to reveal rows of glistening black, needle-like teeth. It made a hissing sound, like that of an angry serpent, and its head veered sharply toward the nearest Dwarf with a speed the eye could barely follow. A fraction of a second later, a chunk of the Dwarf was gone, from shoulder to waist, bitten off by that awful, deadly mouth.

More pods split around them, vomiting out the monstrous creatures inside, some tall and lean, others shorter and boxier, but all covered with crystalline purple scales, and all with those needle-filled, deadly mouths.

Yelora realized with horror that the Celestiri were not coming; they were already here, evolving from Elves, Goblins, and whatever other unfortunate people and creatures the pods in the poisoned gardens had been able to trap.

They seemed to know innately who their enemies were, striking at the Imperials, Dwarves and Elves, while avoiding the Wizards and Goblins. The screams rang in Yelora’s head in a dizzying cacophony as she stood, frozen.

There was no baby. There would be no baby.

Something splashed into the pool beside her, and she gasped and whirled. But it was only Kashur, sweaty and breathless, a bloody gash across one cheek. He pulled her under the glass footbridge for protection.

“Ivy is hiding with the Elemental. Bayne’s on his way with the transformer.” Kashur’s forehead was pressed to the glass underside of the footbridge so that he could keep his mouth abovewater to speak. “We have to get it into the heart of the meteorite.”

Yelora tilted her mouth above the waterline, too. “So we’re on the same side again?”

Water dripped from his black curls. “We always were. I just thought it would be better if one of us stayed out of the dungeon. I didn’t know you were going to run off and marry Gorlo while I was gone. Was my kissing that bad?” His gloved hand found hers under the water.

She let the waterline hide the smile forming on her lips, then scanned what she could see of the room. She’d known he hadn’t been deceiving her all this time. “Where’s the golem?”

“Kenji Zamora destroyed it.”

“Kenji Zamora? Why would he do that?”

Bayne slid under the footbridge between them, holding the transformer above the waterline. “To spite the Emperor.” Air burbled from his half-submerged lips.

Yelora scooted back to make room for him, exasperation mounting. “How are we supposed to come together to destroy this enemy if we cannot even get along within our own factions?”

“It only takes one person to connect the meteorite to the transformer,” Bayne said. His smile was wry and soft at the same time. “I’ll be looking forward to seeing my Ruthie again.”

“No.” Yelora shook her head. “You’re not the one who’s supposed to be sacrificed.” She peered over the Dwarf’s shoulder to Kashur. “It’s the newest-born Elf. That’s who the Oracle said needs to do it. But I killed Gorlo, and...”

The mistake you have yet to make.

She choked as the truth formed in her mind. Everything she had done had been in selfishness, in short-sightedness. The Oracle’s prophecy was not about a baby at all, nor about her or the Elves. It was about all of them, all of Terris. “Oh Sprites, what if I destroyed our chances of beating the Celestiri?”

Bayne’s face wrinkled in confusion. “That creature was an Elf? I thought it was a Goblin. The first of ‘em.”

His words sunk in, slowly. The truth of them spread through her mind, tickling her consciousness. Could it be? Yelora’s despair sparked into realization, like a star coming to life.

She ducked out from under the glass footbridge and sloshed over to where Ronith huddled, sheltered by an empty crystal pod, with Gorlo in her lap. The Dark Elf, now Blood Mage, was curled over the little monster’s body, weeping. When she saw Yelora, her yellow eyes burned with fury. She stood up, letting the gray body slide from her lap into a shallow puddle on the glass floor. Three throwing knives glinted in her palm.

“That’s not going to happen, Ronith,” Kashur said from behind her, and Yelora felt the warm pulse of his protection spell on her damp skin.

“You killed him!” Ronith snarled. “He never did anything to you, other than simply exist, and you killed him!”

Yelora’s heart thumped in her chest. Ronith was right—Gorlo’s death had been for nothing. She held her hands open in the peace sign as the Dark Elf stalked toward her. “The Oracle said the newest-born Elf must be sacrificed to save our people. I thought it was Gorlo.”

Ronith threw herself at Yelora, but the protection spell held, her fists bouncing off the air between them. Ronith howled in grief and fury.

“Listen to me, Ronith!”

Ronith launched at her again, her strike missing a second time. This time, Yelora caught her wrists.

“Gorlo wasn’t the newest-born Elf. He wasn’t an Elf at all; he was something different.”

Ronith tried to wrench her wrists out of Yelora’s grasp, but she held her tight.

“He was something special!” Ronith wailed.

“He was,” Yelora agreed. “But you are something special, too.”

Ronith’s bared teeth were sharp in her snarling mouth. Her yellow eyes were full of hate, full of all the darkness she’d absorbed from Queen Fara’s subtle poisoning of Creation Falls.

But that darkness didn’t change the truth.

“You are the newest-born Elf, Ronith. You are the one who can save us all.”