“The elf.” The words echoed in my mind every hour of every day. There was a part of me that was infuriated at being reduced to my species and grammatical gender – not the elf wizard, or even the elf woman, just … “the elf”. Most of me, though, was terrified. Aemillian Solirius, Usurper of the Rorgoth Throne, the elder and stronger of the two Great Wizards, knew who I was.
Rennin was worried about ogres. I was worried about the Usurper showing up in my dreams, or striking me with lightning from half the world away, or even – despite Derrek’s confidence that it could not be done – just sending another company of Heart’s Guards to murder us in the conventional way.
Day by day, we crossed the rugged northern mountains. Each morning, Derrek would cast his flying spell – each iteration more perfectly executed than the last – and check our progress toward the Venn headwaters. We were making good progress, he thought. And, despite our struggles to breathe and our frequent rests, we could all feel it.
We were five days off the Great Ice Wall when we saw the first sign of ogres. At least, we assumed it was ogres: a ram’s skull nailed to a tree, with stone and copper charms hanging from the horns on brightly colored cords. A territorial marker, perhaps, or a protective charm? It didn’t look like the work of elves or dwarves, and no humans had ever lived this far north that any of us knew of.
We redoubled our vigilance while we hiked, and took greater care to conceal our cookfires. Our nightly watch shifts became more tense, and our sleep restless.
Once, on the sixth day, we thought we saw an ogre scout or hunter: a looming shadow, half-hidden by a rock formation; a glint that might have been metal – a belt buckle, armor, jewelry – or just the sun on a patch of ice. We never knew for certain. The cliff was the wrong direction, back north, and the shadow vanished as we shifted angles.
Two days later, our fears were realized.
Our path toward the river had taken us into a deep valley, hopefully the last before we reached the River Venn. The hike down had been a pleasant relief. The path up the other side of the valley, however, was proving a greater challenge, and not just because up is always harder than down.
In the time it had taken us to descend the valley, we had crossed the line into true spring. Snow and ice had been replaced by rock and mud and countless runnels of water, which proved much harder to navigate. Again, down had been one thing, and up was proving to be something else altogether. We had to use our hands as well as our feet, our weapons stowed on our backs, and it was almost impossible to keep a watch. By the end of the day we were all wet and muddy, and when we stopped to camp we had to carefully scrape all the grime off of our gear, and meticulously dry ourselves around a larger-than-ideal fire.
Rennin was in the lead when it happened. The path we were picking out turned around an outcrop of solid rock that we’d hoped would prove to provide a cleaner path upward. And it did. But that wasn’t all.
Just as we all managed to crowd into the rocky cleft, a massive, barrel-chested creature dressed in bearskins stepped out of the shadows to block our path. Before this adventure, full of dragons and giants, it would have been the biggest thing I’d ever seen: out-massing even the black and brown bears that sometimes wandered into my mothers’ hunting range. Its legs were short and gnarled, while its arms hung almost to its knees. Its head, crowned in curling ram-like horns, looked almost too large for its body, an impression only emphasized by its wide mouth, with tusks protruding from full lips, large nose, and huge eyes, and massive braided beard. In one hand it carried a broad-bladed spear. Its other hand rested on the hilt of a dagger big enough to serve one of us as a sword.
It made a sound, then, low and guttural, and I could feel the diplomat’s tongues spell tingling in my brain. The meaning blossomed in my mind, something like “stop”, “stand down”, “surrender”. But it would take hours of parlay before we could utter a word in reply.
Another sound came from behind us. Two more creatures, somewhat smaller than the first – only a head and shoulders taller than Derrek – had emerged from the woods. They, too, were dressed in bearskins and carried spears. They lacked horns and beards, but their enormous warthog-like tusks more than made up the difference.
Rennin, from his point position, took a step back and put his own hand on the hilt of the Blade of Xadaer, ready to draw. Elana, a step behind him, adjusted her footing. I reached into my belt pouch, slipping my wizard’s claw onto my finger. Derrek, behind me, reached for his dagger.
“We don’t speak your tongue,” Rennin said in the language of the Compact. The ogre gave no sign of comprehension.
“Khanaarre?” Elana prompted.
It was worth a shot, I supposed.
“We are just passing through,” I said in elven. “We are trying to find a river to take us south.”
When that was met with silence, I tried the language of the earth spirits, just to be thorough. I was not surprised that that did not garner a response, either. I wished that I had taken the time to learn the dwarven language.
Behind me, Derrek offered a greeting in the giant’s tongue. That provoked a reaction. Not a good one.
Until that moment, the largest ogre had looked stern, but mostly bored. Now it – he? – looked furious. It had been leaning on its spear. Now it brandished the weapon.
Rennin, taking this threat seriously, drew the Blade of Xadaer.
That was the end of the ogre’s patience. It roared and charged. The two behind us roared as well. These, the diplomat’s tongue spell informed me through its silence, were not words.
I drew my claw across the meat of my hand, preparing to cast a shield spell, but Rennin moved too swiftly. Armed with the Blade of Xadaer, he moved like not even Veralar had. He didn’t just blur: he left tracers, like I’d eaten a handful of good mushrooms. His first swing cut the ogre’s spear in half. His second spilled its intestines across the ground, stinking and steaming in the cold spring air. It stared at us in dumbfounded wonderment as it fell the short distance to its knees.
I turned, feeling like I was moving in slow motion. Derrek’s knife was out, his hands raised. The other two ogres were already dead, their heads burned clean off their bodies.
“Well, fuck,” I said.
The blood on my palm welled up, and dripped uselessly on the ground.
===
I had not killed any of the ogres. I had barely drawn my weapon, so to speak. Even if I had, what made this different than the other times I had fought and killed with the prince and her fighters? But for some reason, it felt different. For some reason, this felt like it had the very first time.
I had been the very first elf to show up on Elana’s doorstep after Queen Rrallashyl’s pronouncement that any elf who found the prince’s cause just could join her resistance movement against the Usurper. That, and the friendship we had cultivated on the road to Tanirinaal, made me unique and valuable in ways that even my wizardry did not. So Elana had made time for my company even as she spent the next month meeting and interviewing the hunters and sorceresses who came to volunteer, and the Sisters of Amalai who came to administer to the needs of those elves, and overseeing Rennin’s earliest efforts to train those volunteers into an actual fighting force.
It had been in those first weeks, too, that I had first met Rrii`aa. She had not been the leader of the group, but she had been among the first few Sisters of Amalai who came to Elana to explain the need for their order to accompany and care for the elven volunteers. We had waited together in the garden of the hospitality house where Elana was staying, while the prince met with others.
We had left Tanirinaal as summer began to wane, almost half a hundred of us in that first wave, and I had the privilege of riding at the front with the prince along with Rennin and Orland and Veralar, and with`Aandrulaan and Rrandaan, the hunter and the sorceress who had been appointed to speak for their contingents. The long march took us into Georg, where we hired a smuggler to ferry the lot of us across the river into Vencar by night. To this day, I don’t know if the Usurper’s spies knew we were coming, or if we were just spotted by scouts, but early the next morning, only a few miles into the country, we were ambushed by Vencari soldiers.
Neither side was fully prepared for that encounter. There were more of them than of us, but our number included fifteen firedancers, a wizard, and thirty elven archers. Four elves died that morning, and four more quit the field. None of the Vencari soldiers survived. I killed three, myself, and wounded six others with my first fireball thrown in anger.
The Order of the Black Mask is known for many things. At the top of that list, and arguably a summary, are questionable ethics and destructive potential. That had never been the emphasis of my master’s work, or my own, but he had made certain that I knew the order’s most iconic spells. Levin bolts, lighting, fire, force … I had mastered a half-dozen applications of each. But only ever against trees and rocks.
That day, I reduced three human lives to smoking giblets and charcoal, and burned twice that many such that death was a genuine mercy. They were no more dead than those killed by firedancer’s flamewhips or hunters’ arrows or the Prince’s Fighters’ swords, but the dramatic brutality of the concussive blast, the scorched earth where the soldiers had once been… I was so sick that I could barely move for an hour after the battle.
I was not the only elf in that condition. Our people have no army, per se. We never have and, gods willing, we never will. But our lands are no less plagued by strife than any other; as many monsters haunt the Alsan mountains as the Serpent Plains, and our hunters are famous for their vigorous defense of our homes. And yet … hunting for food and being willing to take lives for the sake of self defense and the common good … these things are not the same as killing fellow mortals in bloody battle.
There were five Sisters of Amalai with us, then. There would be only four by the end of the day; one of the Sisters would be among those that left, unable to face the killing. They were hard pressed to tend to our trauma in addition to the needs of the wounded. Of those five, only Rrii`aa was prepared to face my guilt and horror.
I did not speak to anyone for two whole days. I barely slept or ate. More than two years and a dozen battles later, I still have nightmares about that morning.
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