Sedder spotted his mark while making the rounds along the docks, though he was hard to miss. The blue-skinned elf rode a giant eagle the size of a horse cart. Long, silver hair whipped away from the Windrider’s handsome blue face as he slid off the back of his great bird.
Setting aside his rounds, Sedder cloaked himself in shadow and tailed him into the House of Gnomish Ale. This took priority.
“Back again already, Silver?” asked the pink-haired gnome proprietor. “You’re always coming back for the booze.”
The Windrider elf took a seat at the bar. “It disappears much too quickly. Get me a round of the usual.”
Sedder always wondered what the blue elf’s real name was, but his assignment precluded any direct contact. Pity, really. Being able to actually befriend the man might have made keeping an eye on him easier. Sedder figured that Silver would be at this for a while, and slipped off.
Once back at his own hideout, he retrieved a purple crystal from beneath the floorboards and gripped it firmly in his hand. With a thread of mana channeled into it, a connection quickly appeared in his mind, as well as the image of a hooded face with glowing red eyes.
<Sedder, report.>
<My lord, your ex is back in Scalyr>, Sedder thought. Tepped, really. That was what teppers called what they did, after all. While Sedder was half-tepper, he rarely thought of himself as such, but it was the entire reason why this arrangement could work.
<Tell me, is he drinking again?>
<Yes,> Sedder replied. <He’s in the House of Gnomish Ale, drinking away at their questionable swill.>
A disgusted noise emerged from the image of the hooded face in his mind. <Keep an eye on him, as usual. Report back anything unusual or if he leaves again.>
<Yes, my lord,> Sedder tepped.
The connection severed, and Sedder put the thought crystal back in its hiding place. He had work to do.
Following the waves of mana wafting out from the pocket-world, Keolah led the party out of the Witchwood, carefully trying to make sure they weren’t walking into any places that might still be on fire. They came upon a road with a warded wall along the near side, and crossed over.
“The forest is a lot less nice than the pocket-world,” Hawthorne mumbled.
“So, did we manage to get back to the same road?” Keolah asked.
“I don’t think so,” Delven said, looking to the sky and shielding his eyes from the sun. “My guess is we wound up on the road running north of the Witchwood, not the one on the south where we started out.”
“We can still get to Scalyr from here, can’t we?” Hawthorne asked.
Delven nodded. “This is the road that runs along the bay.”
“Bay?” Hawthorne repeated.
Delven chuckled. “Shall we head down to the water so you can see for yourself?”
They turned off the road into a small fishing village that probably didn’t get a lot of traffic, and went down to the shore. Keolah gaped at the expanse of water before them. She thought she might be able to see a distant line of mountains along the each side of the bay, but in the center, water stretched on to the horizon as far as the eye could see.
“Holy Valissa’s breasts, that’s a lot of water,” Hawthorne said.
They bought fish for lunch. After weeks of trail rations and fast-grown fruit and vegetables, it was a nice change, especially since Keolah and Hawthorne had rarely seen fish. Hawthorne took the opportunity to try out her language skills on the locals.
“There must be plenty of fish in the sea,” Hawthorne commented.
Delven chuckled. “You know, that’s an idiom.”
“Are you calling me an idiom?” Hawthorne glared at him.
“A phrase, my dear,” Delven said. “A figure of speech.” He helpfully repeated that explanation in elvish.
“Oh, right,” Hawthorne said, switching back to elvish. “So, what does this ‘idiom’ mean?”
Delven waved a hand. “Never mind. How about we stay here for the night? We can probably make it to Scalyr tomorrow.”
“Hmm, an actual bed might be nice,” Hawthorne said. “Keolah doesn’t even know how to grow a proper hammock.”
Keolah snorted. “I told you, I’ve never done that before. It’ll just take a bit more practice to get it down. When we get back there, I might simply grow an entire city just to practice.”
“Can Earth Mages work with stone, or just plants and dirt?” Delven wondered.
“Yeah, but I don’t know how,” Keolah said. “Elves don’t normally teach stone shaping. I’d suppose a dwarven Earth Mage would probably know how to work with stone and not plants. If you’d rather have stone buildings, you’ll need to talk to a dwarf.”
“Hmm,” Delven said. “Maybe it’ll be a good idea, once we get to somewhere that people might actually speak elvish and be overhearing us, not to discuss the pocket-world.”
“Why not?” Hawthorne wondered.
“Do you want everyone to know what we found?” Delven asked.
“I doubt anyone’s even going to be able to get to the place without me,” Keolah said.
“And what if they force you to?” Delven asked.
“What?” Keolah said. “Nobody’s going to force me to do anything against my will.”
“You know Mind Mages exist, don’t you?” Delven said. “I’m sure some of your elves must have been Mind Mages.”
“Well, yeah, I guess,” Keolah said. “But they’re not exactly common, and most of them can just communicate mentally, that’s all.”
“And even if someone doesn’t mind control you, they could just kidnap your girlfriend and threaten to hurt her if you don’t comply.”
“We’re not—” Keolah cleared her throat and glanced sidelong at Hawthorne. How could she deny that without offending her? Sure, they’d flirted a bit and Hawthorne was clearly attracted to her, but the girl was impetuous and frustrating.
“So long as nobody knows what we really found, people can just think we’re just scholars,” Delven said. “Just some people interested in ancient history. Nothing that’s going to be remarkable to most people. No sense in tempting fate or drawing attention to ourselves. Other people might have less benign uses to put it to. At the very least, they’d have a base of operation that the vast majority of people won’t even be able to get to. And that’s not even considering what the rune complex does.”
“Are you sure we’re really all that benign?” Hawthorne wondered.
“Hawthorne, your reaction was ‘Whee!’, not ‘Mwahaha!’,” Delven pointed out.
“I see what you mean,” Keolah said. “We’ll keep this under wraps. We can do this research without telling anyone precisely what we found where.”
Scalyr appeared slowly, buildings scattering around them as the road they were following came into the outskirts of the city. In the center of the city stood a large wall, decorated with banners and yellow ribbons. It was growing dark by the time they reached Old Town, and the gas lamps lining the brick streets winked on to light their way.
“There’s the library, right there.” Delven gestured.
The massive stone building must have once been a keep, but now instead of heraldry, the banners outside the doors depicted books. Glass windows along its walls and towers lit up against the evening sky.
“That’s a library?” Hawthorne said, staring up at it with an expression of awe. “It looks more like someplace a king should be living!”
Delven laughed. “Prince, actually. Scalyr was a principality before its integration into the republic of Hannaderres.”
“So where was the king, then?” Hawthorne asked.
“There wasn’t a king,” Delven said.
“But there was a prince,” Hawthorne said.
“This distinction might make more sense in the common tongue,” Keolah said. “While you’re discussing language oddities, I’m going to go check out the library.”
“I’ll book us a room at the nearest inn,” Delven said.
Keolah was tired and hungry after the journey, but her curiosity got the better of her, and she headed inside. Dinner could wait. Sure, they could stay in Scalyr as long as they liked and look through this library as many times as they wanted, but she wanted to see what they were dealing with first off.
A young woman with a pink aura sat at a desk in the entry room. She pulled off her spectacles and looked up at Keolah as she entered. “Good day. Can I help you find something?” Then repeated it in elvish, “So you are here. Can I help you find something?”
“Not right now,” Keolah said, in elvish since the woman could apparently speak it. “But you can be sure I’ll be back in the morning. I want to know, how is your library organized, and what are the rules for its use?”
“General nonfiction is on the first floor,” the librarian replied. “Fiction, folklore, and mythology is on the second floor, except for romance, that’s all on the third floor. The entire third floor. Rare books are in the towers. Those aren’t for general checkout and must stay in the library.”
“How does checkout work?” Keolah asked.
After going over the details of the library rules, Keolah headed for dinner and sleep and got to work the next morning. She wanted to just settle in and start reading right away, but reasonably, she figured Delven or Hawthorne would just come in and drag her out, interrupting whatever she was working on.
Information on the Witchwood was stunningly lacking. It was already ‘cursed’ at the time of the Albrynnian invasion, and the stories of historical native societies corroborated that. It provided something of a natural barrier that kept Doralis independent, since anyone invading the country had to come up the coast and couldn’t approach from inland. The tribes of central Doralis remained semi-autonomous even to this day.
No one had ever penetrated as far in as the skull cave. Not that any of the books she read recorded, at any rate. Had an inborn Seeker really never approached the place and taken a look? Or even just a sufficiently trained Seeker? Keolah could only assume that most people could not sense raw mana or read it in as much detail as she could.
A book titled Heart of the Witchwood sounded interesting at first, but turned out to be misshelved fiction, and she hadn’t realized it until midway through. The first clue was the protagonist finding her way through the forest, drawn by the power of love. Another book, titled Mysteries of the Witchwood, was full of such wild speculation that Keolah wasn’t sure whether to believe any of it, seeing as the author clearly didn’t know anything. Strangers from the Sky: Witchwood discussed a theory in which the Witchwood was the secret headquarters of a group of beings from outer space. According to the Strangers from the Sky series, every mystery, historical event, and innovation on the world of Lezaria was really the responsibility of space people. Rolling her eyes, Keolah put them away.
Unable to find out anything about the Witchwood, Keolah turned her attention to the writing. Interlocking triangular runes made up the wheel and lined the obelisks of the pocket-world. It wasn’t the common alphabet used by all modern human languages in Kalor. The Sunrise Islands, on the other hand, used a system of logographs, descended from pictographs. Keolah spent several hours reading up on the writing of the Sunrise Islands, only to conclude that this definitely wasn’t it and had only been a distraction.
While Scalyr’s library contained some basic books and dictionaries of the two main elvish languages, Zarhian and Tevric, as well as the gnomish and dwarven languages, they didn’t have much in-depth information, nor did they mention anything whatsoever about the trollish language. While she doubted that trolls would have constructed a large arcane construct inside a pocket-world, she wasn’t about to discount the possibility of any relation yet, especially considering the lack of other leads. Still, given its location in Kalor, she doubted anyone in Zarhanna had built it, considering the elves of Zarhanna had only discovered Kalor a few hundred years ago.
Sighing, she delved further into the language section to see if she could discover anything more about the native languages of Kalor and whether they had any writing systems before the Albrynnian occupation displaced them. Apart from the island of Unar, however, it seemed to be generally agreed upon that Kalor did not have a previous writing system at all. Unar had originally used a system based around different numbers of parallel lines converging with a vertical line. After reading through part of a book about it, Keolah was not at all surprised that Unar had no complaint about adopting the Albrynnian alphabet.
The common areas exhausted, Keolah went up into the towers to look at the rare books. These areas had a rudimentary warding system to disrupt teleportation, and each book radiated a faint mana marker, probably to protect it and deter theft or to outright prevent them from leaving the room.
The selection of rare books was eclectic and esoteric, all of which predated printing spells and machines. While ancient handwritten philosophical texts might hold interest to some people, they weren’t what she was looking for.
One book caught her attention, about an organization called the League of Wizards, which the book claims to have once united “all the mages in the world”. Since it was written in elvish, she assumed that by “the world”, it meant Zarhanna and Domgad-Festig, or maybe even just Zarhanna. It mentioned how the Wizards kept sets of magic books and had translated them into each of their own languages, and that the original set was written in Tinean, the arcane “tongue of the trees”. Keolah had never heard of Tinean and could find no further information about it.
Keolah spent the next day searching the library, and the next, and the next. She pored over the sections on languages and magical constructs. Nothing in all her research turned up anything even remotely resembling the symbols she’d found in the pocket-world. In frustration, she went out to meet up with Hawthorne again.
“Found anything interesting in the library?” Hawthorne asked.
“Plenty of things that are interesting,” Keolah said. “Nothing that’s particularly helpful to our current project.” She’d been trying to be vague in public about what exactly their project was.
“I’ve met someone I think might be able to help,” Hawthorne said. “Also! He’s a Lightning Mage. Next time we get stuck in a thunderstorm, he’ll be able to keep it from killing us horribly.” She paused. “Aside from the forest fire part. I don’t think he could do anything about forest fires.”
“Who is this person?” Keolah said.
“Come on, I’ll introduce you,” Hawthorne said. “I’ve been talking to him—”
“What did you tell him?” Keolah asked.
“Oh yeah, I told him all about our little project,” Hawthorne said.
“But I thought we agreed not to go into the details to anyone,” Keolah said.
Hawthorne waved her hand. “Bah, he seemed like an honest, trustworthy guy.”
Keolah groaned. “Alright, fine, let’s meet this guy.”
Hawthorne led her over to a tavern named the House of Gnomish Ale, whose placard depicted a mug containing a frothy pink beverage. It sat incongruously across the street from a human temple to the Three as well as a small shrine to the elven gods. Inside at the bar sat a blue-skinned elf with shoulder-length silver hair and a dark blue aura, absently nursing his own drink. Keolah raised an eyebrow. How odd. She’d never seen a blue elf before.
“Silver!” Hawthorne said. “Here’s the girl I was telling you about. Meet Keolah. Keolah, meet Silver.”
“Ah, your girlfriend,” Silver said.
“We’re—” Keolah swallowed her words. Damn it, why did people keep assuming that? And why was Hawthorne introducing them as such? She was going to need to have a talk with her.
“So you are here, Keolah.” Silver inclined his head toward her. He spoke with accented Zarhian, although he was still readily understood well enough.
“So you are here, Silver,” Keolah replied. “What did Hawthorne tell you?”
“You found an interesting ancient magical structure,” Silver said. “But you have no idea what it is or who built it.”
Keolah cast a sidelong look to Hawthorne, then glanced around the room. The place was mostly empty at this time of day. Behind the bar stood a man with an orange aura, firmly ignoring their conversation and looking completely disinterested. Over in one corner sat a half-elf with an almost-black aura, not drinking and just watching them. Her eyes met his for one moment, and he looked a little surprised before looking away.
She turned back to Silver, not having intended to make the tavern patrons uncomfortable. “Right. Hawthorne says you might be able to help?”
Silver nodded. “My people, the Windriders, may have information that could relate to this. I am uncertain that they can truly assist, but I am quite curious about this discovery myself, and we may have resources that are unavailable here. We have a good deal of lost knowledge from before the fall of the League of Wizards.”
“I’d like to double-check the library here a bit more, but that sounds like an interesting prospect,” Keolah said. “I don’t suppose we could reconvene this discussion there and I can bring out my notes? I hardly think a tavern is an appropriate venue for discussions on ancient ruins.”
Silver chuckled. “Very well. As you wish. I would like to see these notes, myself.” He picked up and drained his mug, hopped down from his stool, and gestured them toward the door.
Once Silver and the pair of song elf girls left the House of Gnomish Ale, Sedder hurried to his hideout to pry out the thought crystal, almost breaking the loose floorboard in his haste. Heart racing, he opened the connection and felt the hooded face appear in his mind, red eyes peering into his very soul.
<Lord Sardill,> Sedder tepped. <There has been a very interesting development.>
<Report, Sedder.>
<Silver has met up with two song elves by the names of Keolah and Hawthorne,> Sedder replied. <These girls seem to have found something very interesting, some sort of old ruin in the Witchwood. They spoke in song elvish, probably assuming no one in earshot could understand them.>
<Did they elaborate anything about this ruin?> Sardill asked.
<Yes,> Sedder said. <It consists of a rune complex resembling an eight-spoked wheel, about a mile in diameter, with an arcane device in the center in the form of eight obelisks in a circle. It exists in a pocket-world with amplified magic located in a cave in the heart of the Witchwood.>
The voice at the other side of the connection was silent for a long moment, and Sedder was uncertain that Sardill had even heard him.
<My lord?> Sedder prompted.
<Yes,> Sardill tepped back. <I’m giving you a new assignment. Highest priority. Even if Silver becomes separated from them, you are to follow these girls. This is more important.>
<You want me to shadow them instead?> Sedder asked.
<You need not remain in hiding. Approach them, offer your assistance, and ingratiate yourself with them. If that fails, then yes, shadow them and keep track of what they are doing by any means necessary.>
Sedder tepped, <Silver offered his assistance in learning about this ancient structure.>
<Do whatever is necessary to learn whatever they learn,> Sardill replied. <You have your orders.>
<Yes, my lord.>
Keolah returned to the library with Hawthorne and Silver in tow, and set up in a private reading room. She would be lying if she said she wasn’t apprehensive about this, and uncertain if she could trust Hawthorne’s instincts, but they’d gone this far. In for a penny, in for a pound, as Delven said. She spread out her notes and diagrams onto the table in the center of the room.
“This is the complex you discovered?” Silver asked, pointing to the piece of paper where Delven had sketched up the layout of the whole thing.
Keolah nodded. “That’s it.”
“Strange,” Silver said. “I’ve never seen anything like this before. So perfect and symmetrical. And you say it was in some sort of pocket-world?”
“I could fly in there,” Hawthorne said. “I can’t fly out here. My magic isn’t normally strong enough to actually lift me off the ground.”
“I could grow plants as fast as I could use mana,” Keolah said.
A half-elf with a dark gray aura entered the room, in fact the very aura she’d seen in the tavern earlier. She still felt it peculiar to see dark brown human hair on top of a dark purple elven face, and odd, small pointed ears.
“Oh, pardon me,” the half-elf said in the common tongue. “I didn’t realize this room was in use.”
Keolah narrowed her eyes at him. Very convenient that he’d followed them here from the tavern.
“Hello,” Hawthorne clumsily replied in the same language. “I’m Hawthorne. Who are you?”
“Sedder,” the half-elf replied. “Sorry, let me just grab a couple books and I’ll be on my way.”
He snared a glance at their table as he came in and went over to a bookshelf. Keolah eyed him suspiciously as he went over and pulled out a few books.
“Sedder,” Keolah interjected. “Why are you really here?”
“What?” Sedder stood up straight and looked over to her in surprise.
“You were in the tavern, too,” Keolah asked.
“Oh,” Sedder said, looking around shiftily. “Right. Yeah.”
“What are you up to?” Keolah narrowed her eyes.
“Yes, he follows me around a lot,” Silver said. “He’s harmless.”
“You’ve noticed!?” Sedder practically squeaked.
“Yes, I’ve noticed,” Silver said, chuckling. “Always peering at me and hiding in illusions like you think I don’t know you’re watching.” He whispered loudly to Keolah, “I think he has a crush on me.”
Sedder flushed mauve. “I thought I was more discreet than that.”
“I was wondering when you’d have the balls to approach me yourself,” Silver said. “So you’re gone from watching me not as discreetly as you thought to awkwardly stumbling into wherever I am. This is an improvement! There might be hope for you yet.”
Sedder put his forehead against the history book he had grabbed. “I’m just… going to go now.”
Shadowy mana flowed and Sedder’s image split. A construct of mana formed to look like Sedder ran out the door, while a black aura outlining an invisible body hid in the corner of the room.
“Right, where were we,” Silver said, turning back to the diagrams on the table.
Keolah folded her arms across her chest and looked straight at the spot where Sedder’s actual aura was standing.
Silver raised an eyebrow and smirked. “He’s invisible again, isn’t he.”
“Damn it,” Sedder muttered, becoming visible again.
“Nice trick,” Keolah said with a smirk.
“Not nice enough, apparently,” Sedder said. “What are you, a Seeker?”
Keolah nodded. “You’re going to need to do better illusions than that if you don’t want me to see right through them.”
“Sorry,” Sedder said sheepishly.
“Sedder,” Silver said, chuckling. “Come over here and sit down. I’m not going to bite.”
Sedder stared over at him anxiously for a long moment before finally hesitantly coming over and sitting as far from Silver as he could and still be considered ‘at’ the table. Keolah dismissed any concerns she’d had about him. He was clearly just a nervous young man infatuated with another man. Nothing worrying or peculiar about that.
“So… um…” Sedder stammered. “Sorry to interrupt whatever you were doing here, really. What are you doing?”
Hawthorne grumbled in elvish, “Are we going to be switching this discussion to human tongue just for the benefit of this half-elf?”
Sedder grunted and replied in kind, “I do speak song elvish.”
“Oh, good, now I might actually have a chance of following the conversation,” Hawthorne said. “What did I miss?”
“Sedder likes Silver,” Keolah replied.
“Oh, okay,” Hawthorne said.
“How did you meet Silver, anyway?” Keolah wondered.
“He had a bird,” Hawthorne said.
“What?” Keolah asked.
“A really bird big,” Hawthorne said. “I saw it and was curious and so I went over there and told him, ‘Wow, that’s a really big bird!’”
“Very eloquent, Hawthorne,” Keolah said. “I don’t see how hard that would have been to say in common.”
“Beeg bird!” Hawthorne attempted, spreading her arms wide as if to demonstrate just how big the bird was.
Silver chuckled. “Yes, I would imagine a floka is quite the attention-getter to someone who hasn’t seen one before. You shouldn’t have fawned over her quite so much, though. Narcella has been insufferably preening ever since. She’s really rather vain.”
“Sorry,” Hawthorne said completely unapologetically.
Sedder looked like he might be wanting to try to turn invisible again, and Keolah wondered how she might be able to get the boy to relax. Really, she shouldn’t be thinking of him as a ‘boy’. He was probably older than her, although it couldn’t be by much. Not that she was entirely certain how fast humans aged, never mind half-elves.
“I don’t suppose you’re interested in archaeology, Sedder?” Keolah asked.
“Well… yeah, I guess,” Sedder murmured.
“Do you like adventure?” Hawthorne asked. “You don’t seem very adventurous to me.”
“Hey, I’m adventurous!” Sedder protested.
“Oh yeah?” Hawthorne said with a grin. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“Whatever you’re doing, I’m sure an Illusionist would be useful to have along,” Sedder said.
“You’re not just saying that because you have a crush on blue boy here, are you?” Hawthorne asked.
“This could be dangerous,” Keolah warned. “If only because Hawthorne tends to go looking for trouble.” She smirked.
“Hey!” Hawthorne looked around shiftily. “Only some of the time. Besides, if it weren’t for my ‘looking for trouble’, we wouldn’t even be here.”
“I didn’t say I was complaining,” Keolah said. “Anyway, Silver, you said you might be able to help with our project?”
Silver nodded. “It’s been a while since I’ve been back to Dalizar, but there are resources there that you probably won’t be able to find here.”
“Why is that?” Keolah asked. “You mentioned something about the League of Wizards?”
“Yes, the Windriders settled in Kalor prior to the destruction of the League of Wizards,” Silver said.
Hawthorne frowned. “Wait a minute. The elves only discovered Kalor like three hundred years ago. Wasn’t the League of Wizards destroyed thousands of years ago? How were the Windriders here first?”
Silver chuckled. “That is why we escaped its destruction.”
“Oh, I see,” Hawthorne said. “And you just stayed hidden here, like we did in Rascalanse?”
“How many hidden elf kingdoms can there conceivably be?” Keolah wondered.
“Dunno, they’re probably hidden.” Hawthorne grinned.
“I can’t guarantee that Dalizar will have what you’re looking for, either,” Silver said. “But it’s certainly worth a shot.”
“Agreed,” Keolah said.
<My lord,> Sedder tepped into the thought crystal. <I have successfully infiltrated the group. I don’t think they suspect me.>
He didn’t mention how he’d screwed it up and how badly it could have gone, and that it had been sheer luck and his own acting ability that it had worked.
<Excellent,> Sardill replied. <What are their plans?>
<They’re planning to go to Dalizar to see what knowledge is available there,> Sedder tepped.
<Ah, the mysterious Windrider kingdom,> Sardill said. <Report back once you’ve found it. This is quite the opportunity. I have been looking for Dalizar for some time…>