Chieftess Venka felt her spirit shed her skin and soar high into the astral plane, to that point where the Circle of Eight met for their regular conference. Slowly the other members appeared in ghostly form, across from her, next to her, filling in the spaces like the spokes of a wheel.
A wheel once shattered, then reassembled… smaller now, perhaps stronger, perhaps not…
Fifteen years had passed since the night the Palace of the High Ones appeared over Thorny Mountain, closing the time loop that had first stranded their kind on Abode. The night that went by many names: the Revelation, the Moment, the Reappearance. No one could agree what to call it, but all agreed it was the fulcrum upon which their history turned.
They had survived that night with their past intact, but their future was forever changed.
The Great Holt, the College, the Hearthstone elves, the Islanders and the Waveriders were all represented as before. But the Firstcomer Haken no longer appeared as lord of Oasis. Now his descendent Ahdri led the Sun Folk and Gliders in their secret desert refuge – her form hazy, out of focus. Prince Brightmetal was gone as well, his place taken by his son Smokewater. The Plainsrunners were represented by Haxhi, daughter of Halcyon, who continued to sleep in wrapstuff while her spirit recovered from the wounds she’d received during the Siege at Howling Rock.
And in the space where Kit had once appeared, representing the Evertree, Venka saw only darkness. Kit’s Wolfriders had flown to the neighboring planet of Homestead, and the few feral elves who had sought to return to the forest of their birth had gone silent years ago.
“Blessings,” Venka greeted her fellow leaders. She glanced at Ahdri. “We draw strength from our unity in this difficult time.”
Ahdri’s spirit form flickered like a guttering flame. She was clearly distracted, unable to hold the link properly. “I cannot stay long…” she began regretfully.
“Indeed. Let us be brief, for the sake of our kin in Oasis. Any business that concerns the Daughter of Memory?”
“We’re still trying to get the Steam Road back up and running–” Smokewater began.
Venka held up a hand. “Then may Oasis adjourn?”
Everyone else nodded. Smokewater coughed uncertainly. “I’m getting reports from Sarazen that they’ll need to blast new tunnels all through the fault lines–”
“Such work can wait, surely,” Venka said, not unkindly.
“They’d call you on the sending wires, but the wires are down too,” Smokewater added to Ahdri. “You might want to send someone–”
“First, we must mourn,” Ahdri said.
“That’s all well and good, but the tides – and Captain Moth there can second me on this–”
“Later,” Venka ruled sternly. “Go and be with your folk, Ahdri.”
Ahdri’s spirit detached itself from the Circle. Smokewater’s form moved to the side to fill the gap she had left behind.
“I’m only saying the Steam Road benefits Oasis just as much as it does Blue Mountain,” the trollkin king muttered. “We lost the whole track to the waterfront in that quake. And if we can’t get the trains running by the time the Sea Holt docks for winter–”
“They lost lives in Oasis,” Venka said pointedly.
“So did we! We lost a whole train’s worth of good railriders.”
“Then surely you can agree it’s important to grieve.”
“Grief is well and good, but for how long?”
“It’s only been ten days,” Haxhi exclaimed.
“Only? You know how many cogs are out of rhythm now? Ask Aurek there what would happen if the Egg stopped turning for ten days! I’m sorry, but they lost four elves. Four! Yes, it’s scat luck for the families of those four. But we lose folk in Blue Mountain all the time, and we don’t let it grind all our gears to a halt. We can’t afford to. We have schedules to keep. Coal to ship out, grain to ship in. If we can’t get the Steam Road running–”
“You’ll make do with zwoot caravans, like you did in your father’s day,” Venka said.
“There weren’t so many humans swarming the Waste in my father’s day. There weren’t Strykers blasting sinkholes in my father’s day. And there weren’t over twenty thousand trolls depending on prompt, regular food deliveries!”
“The Sea Holt can make winter port at the Mountain,” Gypsy Moth spoke up. “Will that help?”
“A little,” Smokewater admitted. “But I’d rather see Oasis spare some of their rockshapers to help us get the tunnels open again. They’re in their rocks, after all.”
“Leave Oasis in peace,” Aurek said. “If you wish to use magic, we can ask Homestead. Or perhaps the Palace can–”
“I don’t wish to use magic!” Smokewater cut him off. “I don’t wish to go begging for help from my neighbors. I’d rather not be here at all! You think I don’t have enough of my own problems – what a wreck my grandfather behind for me to salvage! But I can’t afford to go off and weep like Ahdri and her little Oasis orchids! When those scouts turned up dead and raving and vanished into the stone itself – did go and hide in my rooms? Did I come begging the Circle for help? Did I try to wriggle out of my contracts? No! Slugscat! I lost ten times the warriors Ahdri did. One of them was my own grandson. And did you hear a murmur of complaint from me?”
“You lost a grandson?” Venka interjected, full of sympathy.
“Or… great-grandson,” Smokewater amended. “One of Kaleev’s boys… his daughter’s son. Morak. Good mump. He was leading the scouts… following a new fault line on the borderstone. Last month. Twenty went in, only two came out alive… barely.”
“A Stryker attack?” Aurek asked.
Smokewater nodded promptly, but Venka saw how his astral form flickered and glowed faintly blue, its edges crackling with lightning.
“You doubt it,” she said.
“I don’t doubt that’s what happened to the missing bodies. My great-grandson is a Stryker stewpot by now. But what killed them to begin with….”
“Tell us,” Aurek prompted.
Smokewater shuddered at the memory. “Sawbones – my royal healer – he said it was probably death-fumes, rising up from a fissure in the rock. When the party was overdue, I sent another dozen trolls into the borderstone. Out of twenty scouts, they found eight bodies… swollen, rotten… covered in mushrooms. And two survivors… a pair of trollkin.”
“They were raving, you said,” Venka recalled.
“They were screaming. Keening – the sound! I can’t get it out of my head some nights. And they were trollkin – thin-blooded, but enough to send... just a little. Even after their throats tore, they kept sending that noise! Bleeding from the ears… the nose. And their veins – all standing out from the skin, like… like they were swollen up, hard as rocks! Took three warriors to drag each one back to the Mountain. They had screamed themselves to death before Sawbones could even look at them. And their eyes…. Oh, their eyes… I’ve never seen troll eyes glow like that. The color of poison. Of spring slime molds.”
“Poisoned fumes, your healer says?”
Smokewater shrugged. “He thinks. But he’s never seen anything like it. He… um… he cut up the bodies to see what was happening inside.”
Haxhi and Evergreen both pulled faces. Aurek and Venka both nodded seriously. Warmask and Gypsy Moth looked intrigued.
“And?” Warmask asked, when Smokewater hesitated.
“Everything was already rotting inside. Fungal spores were taking root in their lungs – they must have breathed it in from all that screaming. And their brains… oh, never mind. I’m not boasting about it. It was foul, but it was no fouler than what happens to a skull that meets a Stryker great-axe. Slugscat… for all I know, this is some new Stryker weapon! If they’ve finally learned how to mine gas, they could be using it against us.”
“And you didn’t think this was worth of sharing with the Circle?” Aurek challenged.
“What does it have to do with you? If the Wolfriders were still running around topside that might mean something, but now… anyway, the Strykers are our problem. I wouldn’t want you calling me up to help you fight Djunsmen.”
“These borderlands… they’re near Greymung’s Havoc?” Venka asked.
Smokewater nodded.
Venka and Aurek exchanged glances. “Smokewater, this may be important,” Aurek said. “Their brains… did they rot like the rest of their bodies?”
Smokewater scowled. “That was the queerest thing. Their brains were full of holes. But the part at the back–”
A memory superimposed itself on all of them: a short, fat troll with goggles and canvas gloves, handling a rotting piece of pallid meat. “We call it the elf-knot,” the healer was saying. “It’s this lobe here, my king. Only found in those with elf-blood. We believe this is the seat of psyonic abilities…”
He turned the meat over in his hands, revealing a bloody, tangled mass of filaments. It looked like a coil of red-black twine strangling the rear portion of the brain. The elfin sending nodes.
“The other scouts, the ones who died,” Venka pressed. “Where they troll or trollkin?”
Smokewater had to think about it. “Probably mostly troll. I’d have to get out the rolls to be certain.”
“And the ones who disappeared? They were more elf-blooded, weren’t they? They could send properly.”
“I don’t know. Well… Morak, certainly. He was always one of the better senders – what?” Smokewater looked from Aurek to Venka in confusion. “What does that have to do with anything?”
* * *
Under the searing summer sun, Oasis slowly rebuilt. The bones of the spires had survived the quake, but their facades were all crumbled and sheared off, and Tallest Spire’s top floor had collapsed into the one below it. Several of the smaller, older huts lay in shambles, and the irrigation system had buckled, flooding the fields and the lower plains. But the worst damage was at the Steam Road, where the station lay buried under elfspans of rubble. At least no one had been down among the rails. Had the quake struck a month earlier, when the train from Sarazen came to trade, the death toll might have been in the hundreds.
As it was, Leetah had been working day and night. Yet even after ten days, many more injured awaited their turn inside wrapstuff. The Preservers had been the heroes of the day, seeking out and cocooning the wounded, spitting slings to keep the rubble from crushing the fragile cocoons, singing out for the rescuers. But no one could have saved Lashah and Yiri, deep in the fleshvine caverns, nor young Razo, trampled when the milking zwoots panicked and broke free of their paddock.
Even the power of the ancient Gliders had not been enough to spare Cloudreach. Of the four deaths, the injustice of that one stung Ahdri the most. Of all the magic-users, the air-walkers should have been the safest. But only if they could get to the open air. Door’s great-grandson had almost made it – they had found his broken body hanging off the balcony of his fifth-floor apartment on Tallest Spire. A lump of broken cornicework from one of the stories above had crushed his head.
Everyone thanked the High Ones that no one had been on the eighth floor when it had crashed into the seventh. If the quake had struck at night… or during the daysleep hours…
Everyone pointed out how fortunate they had been. But Ahdri felt anything but lucky. As she drifted through Oasis, watching her people suffer, watching them grieve, the same thought kept returning to her.
This never would have happened on Haken’s watch.
The All-Father would never have permitted such a tragedy to occur. In his nine thousand years as Lord of Oasis, he had seen only ten elves perish – all in tragic, singular mischances, and almost all outside the walls. While Haken had reigned as master rockshaper, not a single quake of consequence had rocked the mountain. Never once had the spring failed to flow, never once had the harvests failed. Failure simply was not conceivable for him.
Ahdri had tried to take up his mantle fourteen years past. And in that time, she had seen Oasis riven by internal strife, tormented by three poor harvests that left them with precious little surplus for trade, and now this disaster. Four lives snuffed out in pain and terror, by an enemy she should have seen coming.
Haken would have seen it. He all but said so, when they spoke on the astral plane. Under his distress and anger at the news, she could swear she sensed a grim satisfaction. He had predicted that they would not thrive without him. Now he was being proved right.
“Fault lines are not usually difficult to sense!” he had accused. Later, Ekuar had tried to reassure her. “None of us felt it coming. Not even me. And if an old rockshaper like me couldn’t hear the stone warning us… how could a young thing like you?”
A young thing…. She was over thirteen thousand years old, yet she felt as helpless as a child. And as she wandered through the rubble, her doubts continued to eat at her. She was unequal to the task of being Lord of Oasis. She had failed her people. And she would continue to fail them.
Why hadn’t she heard the warning? She communed with the stone every day upon waking. Her faithful ritual, an astral descent deep into the bedrock to sense the rippling currents in the bones of the earth. The morning of the quake she had sensed nothing unusual, save perhaps the silence of Yurek’s spirit. But her ancestor did not invariably greet her every day, his spirit wandered throughout Oasis. The hunters were setting out from Sun Gate that morning, surely counting on Yurek to part the rocks for them at the border.
But then she remembered: Fennec and his fellow crescent-horn riders had still been within the walls when the earth began to rumble. They had been invaluable in turning the hard of stampeding zwoots.
Fennec hadn’t mentioned anything at first. But later, when Windkin had commended him for his quick thinking, he had said that it was sheer chance they been delayed.
“The Sun Gate wouldn’t open. Yurek wouldn’t answer us. And while we were waiting for a rockshaper to come and help us, the quake hit.”
One thought led to another. Yurek hadn’t been at the Sun Gate, he hadn’t been at Tallest Spire. Perhaps he hadn’t been within the walls at all. If there had been a warning to be read within the rocks, surely he would have read it first. But he had given them no warning. Perhaps there had been none to give. Perhaps there truly was nothing Ahdri could have done.
Now that the hope had seized her, she fled to the north wall, and found a quiet corner next to a collection of hoodoos where she knew Savah and Yurek’s spirits could often be found at play. She sat herself under the shadow of the largest rock, and let her spirit sink deep, deep into the stone.
**Yurek…** she sent. **Many-times grandfather… hear your child’s call…**
No answer. She pressed deeper into the bedrock. **Yurek! I must speak with you.**
She could sense something now, a rumbling presence, like thunder imprisoned deep within the stone. But still no sending star answered her. She let herself shout. **Yurek! I know you’re there! Come forward. Your children need you. I need – I need to know–**
A reply, like the groan of shearing rock. **Gone….**
**I need to know! Why did you not warn us of the quake? Why did no one sense the fault in the stone?**
**Not in the stone… gone… gone gone away gone gone…**
**I don’t understand.**
The plates of stone shivered. **The fault grows… she fell into it… gone gone into the green…**
**It… grows? Is another ground-quake coming? Please, Yurek, what do you know?**
**She’s GONE!** Yurek’s sending star pierced her like a dagger. The rock buckled around his spirit, cracking with the strength of his emotions. High above, Ahdri’s body trembled as the ground shivered with aftershocks.
**She’s gone!** Yurek screamed again. **Gone into the fault! Gone gone away and I can’t get her back! I warned her, I WARNED HER! She heard the song and she had to see! I screamed and screamed, but she can’t hear me!**
Ahdri understood then, and the horror of it was enough to drive her spirit back into her body. But she hung on, pleading, **Yurek, please! Calm yourself! You’re causing ground-quakes. You’re hurting your children.**
**GONE!** Yurek continued to howl. **GET HER BACK! GET HER BACK FOR ME!**
The psychic assault was too much. Ahdri opened her eyes to find the ground heaving beneath her. The hoodoos at her back had crumbled into a heap of slag. She leapt to her feet and ran back towards Tallest Spire.
* * *
Melati sat on the sloping roof, watching the rings of Homestead shimmer in the night sky. Abode hung just below the ring-line, a small, unblinking blue star. In another month – they divided the year into sixteen of them, either twenty-eight or thirty days long – the blue planet would move behind the rings, heralding the start of summer.
Homestead had make its way around the Daystar ten times since the elves first arrived. In that time, the settlement of Haven had grown from a small camp in the shadow of the Ark to a bustling city of seedrock and starstone. From her perch on the roof, Melati could see the many twinkling lights of the stone huts in the shadow of the Ark. Out on the fringes of the city, some of the folk preferred to live as their ancestors had, inside walls of shaped rock, lit by candleflame. But as the Lord’s daughter and the nation’s healer, Melati occupied a series of rooms inside the Ark itself, with walls of pure starstone.
Melati heard a soft sound behind her, feet almost-silently padding across the roof, and the faintest click of claws on starstone. Melati smiled as she sensed the shadow falling over her.
“Almost, Beast.”
A playful growl as a massive scaled foot planted itself on either side of her, and her lifemate scooped her up in his arms. Melati laughed lightly as his scarred cheek nuzzled her throat.
“That’s not taal,” she insisted.
“Yes, it is.” Beast hugged her tightly, giddy as a child.
Melati reached back to stroke a lock of his silver hair. “I take it the hunt went well?”
“We won.”
“I should hope so. After three days!”
“Five to four,” he added.
“Oh?” Melati arched an eyebrow. “You let those flea-ridden cats nearly best you? Ah...” she rubbed his flesh-shaped arm, feeling the heat rising off his scales. “Let me guess. You let Maleen win a round, didn’t you?”
Beast squirmed bashfully. “I have to. You know how she gets if she can’t find me fast enough.”
“You’re never so indulgent with our child.”
He let out an amused huff. “She’s good at taal. I don’t have to indulge her. Mm,” he gave Melati another possessive squeeze. “Where is our girl? Still up?”
“No, she went to bed a while ago. Growing pains,” she explained. “Poor thing’s worn out after the paces Sylas put her through today.”
“He pushes her too hard,” Beast said disapprovingly.
“She rises to the challenge. Her magic is rising in time with her bloodsong. She needs an outlet. She needs to be kept busy.”
Beast tsked. “You want her kept too busy. She’s just a cub.”
“A stripling,” Melati corrected. Nine Long Years old now, to those who had learned to count by Homestead time. But Melati still thought in Abodean years, and she knew her daughter was fast approaching the age Melati’d been, when her blood had run too hot, and her pride had led her into disaster.
She had been dreading these years.
“Have you eaten?” Melati asked, to change the subject.
“Mm-hm. Real meat! We caught a pughog on the way back. Sust roasted it.”
“Savage,” Melati teased. “Next you’ll be eating your meat raw!”
“Cricket eats his meat raw.”
“Fish doesn’t count.”
“But fleshvine does?”
“Yes, it does, because you don’t eat it raw!”
“Fleshvine’s fruit,” Beast added with a challenging air.
“Oh, let’s not start this again–”
“Sust is right–”
“No truth in the history of our kind has ever begun with ‘Sust is right.’”
“If it grows on a tree–”
“Beast, I’m warning you–” she moved her hand to the crook of his elbow where she knew he was most ticklish.
“It’s common sense–”
They tussled and laughed, until the shriek of alarm rose up from below.
The pair scrambled off the roof, jumped down to the balcony. The screams came again, wild and wordless. “Naga!” Beast shouted, quickly outpacing Melati.
They sprinted through the sitting room, past the dining alcove, and down the hallway to Naga’s bedroom. Beast waved his hand to make the starstone door dissolve, and a rush of hot air and smoke struck him in the face.
The maiden thrashed in bed, her legs tangled in burning silk sheets. Her eyes were wide open but unfocused and unseeing, as she slapped at the flames spreading across the bed.
A crystal jug of water sat by the bedside table. Beast snatched it up and threw it over the bed. Half the flames died, but others rose up in their place. Sparks flew from Naga’s fingertips – her hands weren’t beating back the flames, but making more. “No!” she screamed. “No, NOOOO!”
Melati waved, and a sudden gust of wind swept through the room, extinguishing the flames. Beast dropped to his daughter’s bedside and shook her awake, crying, “Naga, Naga!”
“Get back! You can’t – you can’t have me!” Naga shrieked. She tossed her head. Honey-blond curls slapped Beast in the face. It was surely the strange light as the flames guttered out, but for a moment Melati thought she saw a strange green spark in her daughter’s eyes.
“Light! Melati commanded, and the starstone walls glowed to life. In the white light, Naga’s eyes turned silver-blue again, and she blinked repeatedly as she began to wake from the nightmare. Angry red welts had broken out across her arms and legs where the flames had touched her, but as her breathing slowed, the burns began to heal.
Naga looked at Beast, dazed. “Papa?”
“I’m here. I’m here, snakelet. What happened? Did a candle fall?”
Melati shook her head, even before Naga could answer. Beast knew better than that. They kept neither candles nor lamps in their rooms – what need had they, when the starstone gave them all the light they needed?
Naga had learned to heat air when she was a toddler. She learned to make sparks before she turned eight. But she had never manifested a full flame outside the training rooms.
Melati’s daughter could float, shape her own flesh as she willed, and heal others. She could manipulate the “hum” of the air to create wind or flame. And each new skill she learned, she mastered in a matter of days. She was always in control of her magic.
“What happened?” Beast said again.
“I had to…” Naga murmured.
“What did you do?” Melati asked, more sharply than she’d meant.
“I had to!” the girl insisted. She looked up at Melati forlornly, her eyes glassy as though still half-caught in the dream. “It was coming. I had to stop it… I had to… it was the only way – it has to burn!”
* * *
Bluestar climbed to the very top of the Egg. First Shell was thinnest at the summit, more air than rock. In places the thin filigree threads of seedrock were no wider than an elf’s finger – almost invisible from a distance. But it provided enough handholds for a determined elf lad to scale its peak.
“There you are.”
The winds howled at the summit. They whipped Bluestar’s hair about his face, obscuring his vision. He had to hold on tight to the stone to feel safe. But the golden eagle perched comfortably, its claws wrapped around a filament of stone. The bird broke off preening its feathers to turn its gaze on Bluestar.
“I knew you’d be back.”
The bird blinked. Thin eyelids clapped over huge, luminous green orbs. Bluestar had never seen a bird with such eyes before.
“‘Adapt or die,’” Bluestar quoted bitterly. “Well, you’ve made your choice. I hope it was the right one. We’ll all have to live with it.”
Elfquest copyright 2017 Warp Graphics, Inc. Elfquest, its logos, characters, situations, all related indicia, and their distinctive likenesses are trademarks of Warp Graphics, Inc. All rights reserved. Some dialogue taken from Elfquest comics. All such dialogue copyright 2017 Warp Graphics, Inc. All rights reserved. Alternaverse characters and insanity copyright 2017 Jane Senese and Erin Roberts.