Weary steps carried Ulric along through the frozen forest floor. The last glimmers of the Twins were disappearing, the dancing binary stars themselves having fallen below the horizon of barren tree tops. Dark would be on him soon. That information was, mostly, useless to him. Just something to keep in mind as he dragged himself through the snow.

Despite everything he'd experienced in this world so far, mystical beasts, a primordial forest populated by skyscraper trees out of myth, magical people, the mana in his own body, he'd never anticipated anything like the vision that had torn him from his body to see the world from space.

Was it a dream? A hallucination born of the incredible stress of the moment? Possible. Maybe even likely, in part. Ulric was a career skeptic, he believed in nothing that did not show evidence of itself. Which was why he couldn't dismiss the entity that had crackled and branched, its arcing violet light spreading, like a great tree itself, roots of lightning connecting the world to the empty vastness beyond the atmosphere. He could still feel it. Where his core used to beat with a hot, cold, rhythm, now it hummed. The quiet force of its pulse reminded Ulric of powerlines, a feeling, more than a sound, of energy barely constrained. That thing was real, and Ulric was tied to it by the threads of its power that he'd taken into himself. His core was now a mirror, well, more like a shard of a mirror larger than he could imagine, of that entity.

Ceraun.

The god of lightning and electrical force potential. Ulric had seen the world through its ephemeral eyes, just a moment. Enough to nearly scour his mind empty and turn him into an elemental. Was it like that for every awakening? The Elves had downplayed it then. Hard. Maybe to keep from scaring him shitless and making him fuck it up from sheer terror. The wreckage and ruin around his feet when his mind returned flashed into his mind's eye. Massive hundred-meter trees turned into used matchsticks. Pools of glassed stone, still glowing, radiating the aftereffects of being touched by the attention of the prime elemental.

If the Akashic record had *ping*'d him in the middle of all that he hadn't noticed. He couldn't have noticed. You go see god and keep track of a little bell in your head.

It took only a slight effort of will to call his own status before himself and he viewed it with only a little trepidation.

image [https://imgur.com/qWTj7P2.png]

He saw the change immediately and couldn’t be surprised. Honestly? He was a little teensy bit underwhelmed. Probably he shouldn’t have been though, it wasn’t like a communion, his pitiful human conception had just brushed the entity above, and that incidental contact had been more than enough for him.

Nobody ever mentioned that the elemental forces, the inflections of mana, had manifestations. Or was the correct word Avatars? That thing had a will, an ego. It was inhuman, with nothing even approximating a mind as Ulric knew it. But he'd felt clearly its desires, its instinct to cross distances untold, to connect all things.

Ulric laughed silently to himself as he plodded. He'd always wondered about that. What do you mean the electromagnetic wave is infinite range? Doesn't that mean it would fill all the universe? The answer, as it happened, was yes. Yes, it did. And it was happy about it.

A shiver having nothing to do with the cold rolled up his spine. So close.

Nothing is silent like a winter night. As the last light faded, the still air became stonelike. The only movement belonged to his own body. The only sound was his boots crunching on the snow. His thoughts spiraled as he tried to wrap them around what he'd seen and felt while in the grip of the mana. When the great living fortress reared up above him, the fortress named Irielhos for that was the name of the [Heartwood] from which it was created, Ulric realized that he'd seen something similar to Ceraun before, though on a smaller scale. Irielhos, heart of the deep wood.

There was a parallel. He'd been inside the core chamber of that ageless colossus. He'd felt of its mana, a warmth, a desire to grow, to be hale inside it. The tree was another greater than mortal existence. It wanted to protect the Elves, it had spent its own vital energies to aid Bald'rt, to help keep him from being consumed by the atrocity inside his body. Ulric wondered how many of the Iriel'en knew that their fortress city was akin to a guardian diety. Maybe all of them. It was possible that Ulric had been the last to figure it out. They played that kind of thing close to the chest. With good reason.

No running around jumping for him, Ulric was exhausted. He rode the lift up to the entryway to the lowest level of the city. From there it was all a sightless blur, an impressionist painting on his every sense until he fell into his bed. He didn't feel the Elf woman throw a blanket over him.

*************

Ulric woke slowly. Otherworldly dreams of lightning faded from memory, evaporating as the frost beneath the Twins. His eyes were opened but the relief carved ceiling had yet to take on a meaningful image. Gradually the impressions of a wild pond hidden in a deep forest depression, and wild things coupled with the pond's waters filled his sight. Rise and shine.

Sitting up Ulric looked around. The now familiar apartment 2.0 surrounded him comfortingly. Sylvan wonder in furniture form, tapestries woven to depict scenes across Orlethrem, all of it a splendor of incredible artistry, right down to the wood-turned water jug that showed him bees wandering across a field of flowers. Elves.

Ulric missed his window and balcony. Being able to rise with the Twins and watch them ascend over the horizon had been a true joy. That had been ixnayed on account of he'd been one of the specific targets for assassination. The Elves were determined to keep Ulric alive out of sheer spite towards Prespang, if nothing else. Now it was an inner room with at least three layers of Elven warriors around it. Ulric didn't have a detachment of guards per se, it was just that anywhere he went there tended to be a couple of pretty hard-looking Elves hanging around like, maybe, they wouldn't mind someone trying something stupid.

He could live with it. Spend a few days having your meat scrubbed off and regrown and the rest of you boiled and you'll appreciate a couple of dudes chilling out in case something foul came a knocking.

Of Taipan he saw no trace, but a tray of food was on the table in the middle of the room so she'd been around. It was probably later than he normally rose. Ulric stripped out of his soiled garb, smelling of dried sweat, the earthy forest detritus, and, faintly, ozone.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Naked, Ulric took breakfast. He had not regained any of the modesty of the Before. If anybody wanted to come inside his rooms unannounced they were welcome to gaze upon his, formerly hairy, ass. Now they would get to see what looked like some kind of dairy cow pattern of pale skin and deep tan. Courtesy of Captain Firecracker.

As Ulric brought his breakfast sandwich to his mouth his eyes caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. The bread and meat slices scattered across the tabletop, falling freely from his deadened hands, forgotten.

His scars were back. The Lichtenberg patterns of webbed tracery had run from the back of his neck, running down the outside of his left arm, down the side of his torso, terminating in his left heel, in the exact same orientation as in the Before. He knew those scars intimately, had seen them every day for some thirty years. So. It would seem that not all of his out-of-body experience had been a hallucination. This was, strictly speaking, impossible. There was no realm of possibility in which the same exact path of current, from two different lightning bolts, could produce the same set of scars. Which meant that, somehow, he hadn't been hit twice. He'd been hit once, in two lives.

Now that's some magical fuckery for you.

Ceraun was a being of connection. Maybe it had been offended by the thought of the same existence being separated by two worlds. Ulric had to wonder how much of his life wasn't, somehow, a quantum anomaly. He was entangled, at least for that one moment in time. Was this some kind of Watcher's shenanigans? Long had he been suspicious of the circumstances of his waking up in the [Plateau of Ancients].

Didn't matter. Ulric stopped worrying about it. If the Impossible wanted him here, then here he would be. If some godlike living sprite wanted to play a joke, then fine. At least, he had a memento of his old life, no matter what else changed.

Ulric reformed his sandwich and downed breakfast. The affairs of immortals was cast out of his concerns, he had more pressing problems. Like how to explain to Taipan that she couldn't come with him when he went to Prosper.

She wasn't going to like that. Not a bit. And Ulric didn't know that there was anything he could actually do to stop her from simply following him around, probably without him even knowing she was out there, if she chose to remain hidden.

But Ulric couldn't see a way around it. He couldn't take an Iriel'en into the lands of the Otherkin. He especially couldn't take the daughter of their mortal enemy, herself not a minor threat who had been reaping them for half a century. His strategy involved remaining incognito. He couldn't fight an army. If he could just blend into the rest of the populace, however, he wouldn't need to. Doing that with a living work of art like Taipan at his side would be, more or less, impossible as far as he could see.

Maybe she'd see reason.

************

"I am your Shadow, not your mother, Ulric. I will break both of your legs if that is what it takes to keep you from killing yourself." Taipan's lovely, sultry voice whispered to him from across the short distance of water separating them in the baths.

Yeah. That was about what he'd expected.

He sighed and scrubbed his face with his hands, trying to push his stupid, stupid brain to think of some way to re-explain why, for the hundredth time, it would be a catastrophically bad idea for her to travel with him into the heartlands of her generational enemies.

Some overly optimistic fragment of his psyche, since banished to relive the most embarrassing social gaffes of his lifetime in penance, had honestly believed that this might be easy. Her initial smile of levity had been promising. Then she had realized that he wasn't trying to be amusing. And here they were.

Ulric took the threat under due advisement: She'd fucking do it.

Searching the mist roiling through the baths for clues, he tried, again, to outline the situation.

"Look, we are both aware that there is no way a Deep Woods Elf, just strolls into Prosper. There is definitely no way that, amongst all the Iriel'en who walk this rock, that YOU will stroll into Prosper. If I am to be able to take a shot at the sonsofbitches who are leading this war, I need to be able to blend in, go generally undetected, and not create a shitstorm by carrying around little Miss Black Rose, the reaper of Prespang." He said through clenched teeth.

The damned elf had the nerve to look smug about those labels.

"They will no longer be able to turn their eyes into Orlethrem, Glade Chief. How will they know that I have even left Irielhos? I have cut my hair and there are many other ways to alter my features to be so different as to be indistinguishable from any other Elf. I can alter my skin color to appear to be as pale as Lumyt'seit, or to have hair as crimson as Shor. Few there would be who even look twice at simply another Aes'r slave girl being towed along behind a barbarian from the outer reaches." She countered.

Ulric opened his mouth to tell her that was stupid.

But was it? That braid was some kind of familial thing, it was unthinkable for her to cut it. Geyrt Iriel would never be seen without that braid. If she could alter her other features, who was to know that she wasn't still inside the fortress? Not like their enemy could just scry it anymore, those holes in the magical protections of the confederation were gone. Irielhos itself was thrice guarded, the fortress city had never been as thoroughly impregnable.

Wait, had she just called him a barbarian? Focus, Ulric, not important.

"Ok, let's say you change your skin color and all the rest. How are you going to prevent some mage from doing some kind of screening for Iriel'en that neither of us know about? Surely someone, in the last couple of hundred years, has worried enough about being killed in their sleep by you or someone like you, to think to put up wards and alarms." Ulric reasoned.

"Delicate workings as you describe must be held or they fray apart, it would be, literally maddening for a mage to attempt to hold onto it perpetually. A catalyst imbued to maintain so fine a warding would burn out in days, and even Prosper's Merchant Lords could not keep replacing them." Taipan countered.

Her tone became grimmer as she further shot down his somewhat ad-hoc resistance.

"Besides, it would be mostly useless given the numbers of my kin that Prosper enjoys using as slaves in their palaces," his Shadow reasoned, "We will have more trouble evading conventional sentries, no expense will be too great to keep their own hides safe. There will also be experienced warriors as guards and elite mercenaries, deep in their classes, hired. The cowards living in their iron walls in Prosper would hold them close, afraid for our counterstroke. Exactly the kind of counterstroke you are planning, which makes it a foolish idea in the first place." Taipan countered.

Well, okay, she sort of had him there.

"I no more look as I did the last time they scried me as you do. I had hair then, and a beard. And now I have scars. Totally different, down to the core." Ulric defended himself.

"Indeed you do." Taipan said, taking him in. "Have I mentioned before how fetching those scars are? Tracings of Ceraun etched into your flesh, the storm's dance itself…it is…impressive." She purred, throwing him off.

Maybe she had mentioned them. Maybe she'd come in shortly after he'd finished his breakfast, taken one look at him sitting there nude, and jumped his bones. Maybe she had.

Gah! Get thee back temptress! Ulric ordered his lower half to stop stealing his brain. His lower half could not immediately comply, it was being encroached upon by her hands, causing him to jump and retreat into the deeper water of the great pool.

"L…later Taipan! Twin's above, people are watching!" Ulric choked, warding her hands away, before she started a battle she'd win, and stared mild outrage at her.

More than a few smiles were glistening around the room, Cheshire cats, marinading him in their attention. Iriel'en simply had not one fuck to give sometimes and he never knew when that time had arrived. He suspected there were no rules and they just did whatever they thought they could get away with depending on nebulous social standings. Or, whatever, fucking Elves.

She sat back, with a fake ass pout on her lips. She was doing that to draw his attention to them. He was on to her games. That didn't make them work any less, just he was aware of them. Ever since she'd realized she could bypass approximately forty percent of his mental defenses with her cleavage she'd become a far more fearsome opponent.

He wasn't sure what had gotten into her, normally she was more reserved in public.

For that matter, he still wasn't sure why she'd decided to start sleeping with him. He hadn't exactly parted with her on great terms before the attack. Something had changed in that period, she'd come to some kind of resolution. He was afraid to ask, it might be some kind of weird Elf shit and, so long as he could pretend ignorance he didn't have to wade into it. That didn't mean that he could leave things totally ambiguous though. Ulric had never been the type of person to take people's emotions for granted. It was too hard for him to make a connection for that to be possible. He had failed too many times to turn a budding relationship into something meaningful.

There was a whole ass possibility that he was her booty call too. Ulric was not a pretty man, but she was certainly a pretty gal. What if he was her way of "slumming"?

He didn't mind that thought as much as he initially thought he would. Maybe…

Later. Gods’ blood, later. For now, get your eyes off her and get your act together man!

Carefully finding a nice, harmless stretch of water, Ulric continued trying to convince his Shadow why her going with him was not going to work, and, furthermore, that he wouldn't let her do it.

They toweled off, heat-soaked flesh relaxed and clean.