Elysia led them over the bridge, but not back toward the village. Instead she seemed to follow the never-ceasing noises of wildlife out into the forest. Even after so many years as an adventurer, sleeping most nights with her bare face to open sky, Aletheia’s skin tingled at the thought of departing civilization for unfamiliar woods, at night, in the dark, with a stranger.

But in Seneria, the forest grew brighter the deeper they went. At some point the trail was lost; yet no trail meant nothing except that lights now grew underfoot.

Wisps twinkled about the branches overhead. In a pond, a frog with glowing scales sat still upon a purple lily pad. Small birds of mundane feathers, with long and crocodilian mouths instead of beaks, perched on branches and chirped bassy melodies.

Aletheia wondered if she were still dreaming. She could not believe that this was a real place.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“To privacy,” Elysia said. She stopped and pulled a branch aside, to make clearance for Aletheia, but the look she gave suggested no kindness.

They soon found an obelisk. It reached halfway up the tall trees that surrounded it, and, coming around its side, four more came into view. They formed a ring in a space where no tree dared to grow. At their center, hanging over all of them, burned a white magelight. Aletheia couldn’t see anything clearly from their outside, but as she came closer to the source of the light, she saw that each black obelisk was covered over in two-dimensional carvings. Like a tapestry, or an amphora jug, lines of elves with spears and swords had been left here so they could never be forgotten.

Deror stood beneath the magelight. He wore the same robes, and he didn’t notice Elysia and Aletheia as they came up to him. He was distracted with one of the obelisks—he held his hand to a carving, pressing into it with his thumb.

“Elder,” Elysia said, getting his attention. She stood straight and at attention, a few paces to the side.

“Yes, yes,” Deror huffed. “I feel you.” He turned, beaming beneath his beard. “Do you remember this place, Aletheia?”

In the forest’s pale lights, Deror’s squinting, smiling eyes and upturned lips could have been mistaken for human. Elysia and Astera and the other elves, even Trito, had an intensity that few mortals could. Like an aura of supremacy. But Deror didn’t come off that way. It was disarming, and frightening to consider it could have been an act.

Aletheia glanced around at the obelisks. She tried to find any hint of them in her—or Astera’s—memories. But she couldn’t.

She shrugged.

“No,” she said.

“That’s all right,” he said. He towered over her, yet he approached, and he put a comforting hand atop her shoulder.

His skin burned through her tunic. He radiated mana like a torch radiates heat. Her flesh electrified beneath the fabric, and she shuddered as he gazed into her eyes.

“It must seem so very Senerian, to be brought to this dark rendezvous in this strange place,” he said. “You will forgive me, but grant that it is not so without purpose as it may seem.”

“What is its purpose?” she whispered.

Deror led her to the obelisk he had been staring over at her arrival. “An elf lives for a very long time, and an elf does not forgot as a man or beast does. But some things… are lost between generations. The very first elves who survived in these woods after the Fall erected these stones so that we would not forget their struggles. A very long time ago.”

Aletheia stepped closer to examine the carvings. She saw a scene of battle, where a phalanx of elves with spears fought off huge monstrosities—hydras, elementals, and more beside that she did not recognize.

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At the obelisk’s bottom the monsters came thick, then disappeared altogether. In their place was left a fallen warrior, and another, an elf in a robe, seemed to hold her by the shoulders.

But the depictions were all weathered and indistinct.

“What do you see, Aletheia?” Deror asked.

She hesitated, hoping to make something up, but decided to be honest. “I don’t know. A funeral?”

“Not a funeral. Not at all. A birth.” He traced the carving with his finger. “These are the annals of our people. Here we see the history of Mithraz and Mela, the first Elder, and the first Huntress. No doubt they are unknown to men and women in Katharos?”

“You would have to ask Eris,” she said. “I’m not—I don’t know anything.” She spoke quickly to ask, “Why would they leave a stone like this? Why not a spell? Didn’t they have magic?”

“Magic can be dispelled. Spells wane with time. Mana fades.”

“A rock can be eroded,” Aletheia said. “Or blown up.”

“True. Quite true. But then so might mountains. It shows that there is no real immortality, hm? Not even for the earth. Well. It hasn’t eroded yet, and so I still know their story.”

He rewound his finger, tracing it backward up the stone.

“Mela rallied her people from the City and led them to the safety of the forests, where the land itself shifted underfoot. It was a terrible adventure to go so far in those dark days. Yet she found another group of survivors led by a sage, Mithraz, and together they joined their groups.” He traced over a large section that depicted more fighting—endless fighting. “They founded a village not far from ours, or so I believe, and became lovers. They ruled together, with their children, for many centuries. But they did not know the enchantments we do today to keep demons at bay. One foul creature descended from the heavens, and while Mela rallied her Huntresses and slew it, she too was slain. A mortal injury. Too much for her to regenerate, though her Essence was still strong.”

Aletheia saw all this in the carvings now. A creature like a dragon from a fairytale appeared in the sky over the spearbearers, and at their lead was not a man—but a woman, with a bow. They fought, until the creature vanished, and the woman collapsed to the ground.

That was when the man in the robe came to her.

Aletheia had to step around the side of the obelisk to see what happened next.

The man fell to the ground. And the woman, Mela, rose.

“But—and for the sake of brevity, I have skipped a detail or two—Mithraz could not imagine life without his lover. And so he came to her body as it prepared to fade from our world, and he transferred his Essence into hers. So grievous were her injuries that it took all the mana left in his spirit to start her heart anew. And yet it did start, at the cost of his life. Mela was saved.”

Aletheia shuddered again as the relevance of the story became clear. She peeked around the obelisk for a look at Deror’s eyes.

“Sounds familiar,” she said. “But why are you telling me this?”

“Because the story does not end there. Mela awoke, yet she was not herself. She had inherited her lover’s thoughts. His memories. His imagination, and his power. Mithraz’s Essence had not dissipated to save her. It had entered hers, becoming something new altogether. They were a new whole, known then-on to history as Mithara.”

He kneeled down to her level.

“This,” he said, “is what Astera has done to you.”

“She knows that already,” Elysia said. “Tell her the real reason she’s here.”

“I will get to all things, in time, Elysia,” Deror said. But he struggled to think of what words to say next. His elven ears rose and fell at the sides of his head. “You, Aletheia, are not an elf. You are not mana and Essence only, as we are. You are flesh and bone and blood. Yet you are also a magician; and you have an Essence of your own. By sacrificing herself for you, as Mithraz did for Mela, Astera managed to respark the life in your breast.”

Aletheia knew they were leading to something. She saw it in their faces and heart it in their voices. But she still wasn’t certain what.

“You have had strange memories, yes? Invasive thoughts? Feelings you cannot explain?” Deror said. “They have grown more serious since you arrived in Seneria, have they not?”

“Yes,” Aletheia said.

“Your flesh and brain cannot change as Mela’s did. You are still Aletheia. But your Essence has transformed. Your very soul, or what is left of it after you were seared forever by mana. That is why we have brought you to this place, for a quiet discussion.”

Elysia went for the throat:

“He means that you don’t carry a piece of my sister with you, human. My sister is trapped inside of your Essence. She’s still alive. You’re her jail cell. And we want her to be free.”

Deror raised a hand. “Do not speak for me, Elysia. Do not ever think to again. I will speak for myself.” He gazed very seriously down at Aletheia again. “But she does not lie. A lost member of our village is within you. We can feel her when you draw near. And it is possible that we might draw her out of you again.”

Aletheia stood suddenly. She retreated to an obelisk, until she felt her back hit cold and wet stone. “What do you mean?”

“I have been remembering,” Deror said, as a human might say that he had been researching, “and discussing what has happened with the other sages of our village. And we believe we know how we might have Astera with us again, in some way.”

“And what about me?” she said. “What would happen to me?”

“Nothing you wouldn’t want,” Elysia said. She kneeled down beside Deror. “We would transform you into one of us. You would become an elf.”