Opening Gambit
Part Three
Aurek had had this dream before. The bewildering walk through the hallways of the Great Egg, the repetitive etchings in the walls – wolf skulls and ribcages and dead trees – all of it was sickeningly familiar. Once again, he made his way to Seventh Shell, to find it littered with a briar patch of obsidian thorns. Once again, he had to fight a growing lassitude as he struggled to the glowing starstone center of Eighth Shell.
Each time he reached the core of the Egg, he discovered a different horror: the shackle of Blue-Mountain-That-Was; the death-light of Howling Rock, or the corruption it spawned in concert with Kahvi.
This time he found Timmain.
She was sitting on a starstone stool, staring at an image she had conjured out of the ambient magic. Glowing filaments of light wove together as she moved her long fingers. Like a weaver at a loom, she braided the colors together into a tapestry of a blinding whiteness.
“Timmain…” Aurek’s mouth moved, but no sound escaped.
Her fingers stilled. The threads began to snarl and snag. The strip of white light tore, letting broken threads of red and blue escape. As Timmain lost her momentum, the remaining threads of light tangled into a glowing knot. Only one purplish-blue string remained, stretched taut by the weight of the failed tapestry beneath it.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “But it cannot be helped.”
Aurek wanted to ask why, but he could not find his voice. His legs had become pillars of stone. It took all his strength to stagger forward, dragging his feet across the starstone floor.
“Countless threads in the Multitude, countless outcomes, none better than the other. But only one will lead to our survival here, on this World of Two Moons. I have looked to past and future alike… but witnessing is no longer enough. It is time to act.”
Aurek willed all his strength into a single world. “What…?”
She looked over her shoulder, and her green eyes were filled with sorrow. “Know that I take no pleasure in this, my great-grandson. If a gentler path existed, I would have chosen it. But the threads do not lie. Out of countless outcomes, there is but one certainty.”
He raised his arm, trying to reach for her.
She turned back to the snarl of light, and the one frail string supporting it. Aurek saw it begin to stretch, to fray, and he felt a grinding pain deep in his chest, as if his life’s thread was tearing along with it.
“This is how it ends,” Timmain pronounced sadly. “For you.”
* * *
“It’s so… humiliating!” Naga raged. She and Bluestar walked along the parapet on the outside of First Shell. Autumn was advancing in the valley below, painting the forests in great swathes of orange and yellow. Naga stared down at the landscape laid out beneath them, as if she longed to throw herself into the air.
“Might as well be an animal. Can’t float. Can’t shape things. Can’t do anything! If I want a cup of tea I have get up and walk to the table!”
“You’re getting better at moving those rocks,” Bluestar encouraged.
“Lifting pebbles! Babies do that!”
“Only babies like you, snakes.” And there aren’t any babies like you, Bluestar thought, with a mixture of fondness and disquiet. Most babies were born capable of little more than sending raw emotions. It was only one infant in a thousand who could actually manifest powers from within the womb. But Naga had sent songs before she’d even had a proper heartbeat. By the time she was born, she had a greater command of magic than most elves could develop after centuries of training.
It was hardly surprising. She been conceived by starstone, born on a world where magic flowed freely, raised by High Ones. A creature without limitations. Once again it struck him how cruel it was to keep her on Abode, shackled by its primitive worldsong. The closest he could come to imagining her plight was for him to go without arms and legs.
But she couldn’t return home. Lord Haken had made that very clear. Not until she learned to control her powers, to refine them enough to manifest them even through the shackles of Abode. Naga had never needed to work for her magic before. The focus and self-control all other magic-users developed in their youth were unknown to her.
Bluestar had promised her she would soon adapt to the limits of Abode. Everyone else did. Yet after nearly a full turn of Mother Moon, Naga had made no progress. Her sleep remained fractured, tormented by nightmares whenever she refused to drink Toss-Stone’s tea. Her blood refused to thicken in response to Abode’s thinner air, and she had lost weight despite trying her best to eat four meals daily. Her father fretted about her constantly, but his increasing pleas to Homestead went unanswered. Bluestar wondered how much longer her elders intended on torturing her.
Weatherbird laid Naga’s poor spirits to stubbornness, Cheipar to homesickness. Aurek was less certain. “Her spirit is in a constant battle. With what, I can’t say. Not the worldpull of Abode. Not her own bloodsong. Something… outside herself, and yet deeply buried within her. I cannot put it into words. It is as if… there is a prism inside her… reflecting some primal fear until her soul is in terror.”
The mention of a prism made the elders shudder. Bluestar understood why. Naga had starstone in her veins, her family would often boast. They never chose to remember that it was corrupted starstone.
“It’s not the death-sleep on Homestead, is it?” Bluestar said, to distract her from her misery. “What season is it? I’m always losing count.”
“It’s the dry-cool. Migration season. I bet the pughogs are on the move by now. The New Blood are probably camped out near Haven. Kit’s jackrunner was due to pup around the time I left. She promised I could have one of the babies.”
“How would the peace-hounds have taken to that?” he teased.
Naga shrugged. “I dunno. Drukk ’em anyway. They growl at me now.” She flicked a speck of dust off the rockshaped railing. “Bet they’re all cuddly with Redcrow,” she growled resentfully. “She’ll take Eight for a new mount if Greenflame doesn’t watch it.”
“Red…crow?” Bluestar asked curiously.
Naga’s eyes widened, and a slight smile tugged at her lips, which she hastened with her hands. “Oh, scat! You didn’t hear that! She wanted to tell you herself.”
Which is why you made sure I heard it from you first, Bluestar thought wryly. Aloud he said only: “Sick of being called ‘Fawn’ is she?”
“It’s not set. I mean, it hasn’t been announced. But she’s wanted to change it for the last year – our year – and she’d finally convinced Rue and the Waykeepers it wasn’t just a cub’s whim. Promise me you’ll act surprised when she tells you!”
**Promise,** Bluestar sent obediently. He kept enough of Redfawn – Redcrow’s – secrets from Naga, after all. Like all close agemates, the pair were born rivals. They shared everything and they constantly jockeyed for dominance. Especially in Bluestar’s eyes. He lived in terror of their bloodsongs burning in earnest; he had no doubt each maid would want him to be their initiator, and High Ones help him if one had a better time of it than the other.
“Then tell them both ‘no,’” Weatherbird said, when he had recently taken his worries to her. “You’re allowed to, you know.”
“It would break their hearts.”
She tsked. “As long as you break them both equally.”
They finished their tour of the First Shell lookout just as the wind was beginning to bite. Bluestar escorted Naga back down to Fourth Shell, where she shared comfortable quarters with her father. Beast seemed to be adjusting to life in the Egg far better, but then he was Abode-born, and the rock walls of the Egg were not so dissimilar from the ones of the World’s Spine.
As they approached her door, Naga made a familiar appeal. “Please, Bluestar. Take me down to Eighth Sphere. I want to see the core of the Egg. I want to feel real starstone, not these little flecks of polished seedrock.”
Bluestar shook his head sadly. Aurek’s rules were clear: no unsupervised contact with pure starstone. That meant no trips in the Palace-pods to see distant kin, no meditations on the shards all the teachers kept locked in their schoolrooms, and no entry to the abandoned Eighth Sphere.
“No one goes in there, you know that,” Bluestar reminded her. “Not even Aurek. That’s Timmain’s space.”
Naga dismissed the High One with a sneer. “She’s been gone for years!”
“No trips to the core,” he said firmly. “So stop asking.”
Her mouth crumpled in displeasure, making her look far younger than her years. “You sound like Sylas,” she grumbled. She made the name sound like a curse.
“I remember when you thought Sylas was kin to Threk’sht,” Bluestar remarked lightly, trying to make her smile.
“And I remember when people cared about me!” she snapped.
“I do care. We all do. You know that–”
“Then help me! I’m drowning, Bluestar! They’ve thrown me in deep water with a stone around my neck!”
He touched her shoulder, but she shrugged him off. “Oh, stop coddling me! You’re as bad as father. Pet, pet, pet the little pup! So much easier than actually doing something!”
“Then what can we do, Naga? Force Haken to take you back?” Bluestar laughed humorlessly. “How well is that going to work? And then what? Someone startles you and your magic nearly throws them through a wall. High Ones, you set your room on fire because of a bad dream! I’m not blaming you, snakes!” he insisted, before she could protest. “No one is. But if you go back before we’ve figured this out, you’re in as much danger as anyone else. Probably more!”
“I’m in danger here! I can feel it… like a troll’s pick and hammer, chipping away at my head!”
“I’ll talk to Aurek. You need to get to a lower altitude… thicker air.”
“It’s not the air – don’t you understand? It’s this world – it’s blinded me and crippled me, and now it’s eating me alive. I’m not meant to live like this!”
“I know you’re not. And it’s breaking all our hearts to see you like this – you’ve got to believe me. And as soon as Aurek figures this out–”
“What if he doesn’t? Am I supposed to stay here forever? Until what… I wither away into nothing? Or until I throw myself off First Shell because I can’t take the – the drumbeats in my head?”
“Wrapstuff,” Bluestar decided.
“Oh, that’s something a child would say!” Naga snapped.
“Well, I am a child,” Bluestar countered angrily. “And so are you. Put our years together, we don’t even make five eights. Put that against Aurek and Haken – and Sylas! I’d help you if I could, snakes, you know that! And five, ten years ago… I probably would have snuck you into the core, just toss the stones and see. But I’m smarter than that now. I’m smart enough to know this is far, far above me. And I have to trust that our elders know better than either of us.”
“But they don’t!” she stamped her foot for emphasis. “They haven’t seen – haven’t felt. But I have. I felt it on Homestead and I feel it here and it’s only getting worse!” She grew frantic, her curls whipping about her face as she shook her head. Her voice didn’t sound like her own anymore; desperation had turned it raw. “I need – I need – my magic back! Now – now! – I don’t have – we don’t have the time to wait! I need to be ready! Because it’s coming! It’s coming and I have to stop it!”
Bluestar tilted his head quizzically. “What’s coming? What do you have to stop?”
But the frenzy that had suddenly overtaken her passed just as quickly, and she was left staring at Bluestar, her lips moving silently as she tried to retrace her train of thought.
“Naga–” again he tried to reach for her. This time she slapped his hand away. Her other hand was on the handle of the wooden door to her chambers, and she wrenched it open so hard, Bluestar had to leap back to avoid being smacked on the nose.
Naga recoiled as well, yelping in alarm. A splinter of rough wood had caught in her palm. She stared at it in disbelief before she let out a second, louder scream of outrage. “I hate this world!” she howled, fleeing to her bedroom.
She nearly collided with a concerned Beast, who had clearly been lurking within earshot. Beast’s shape-changed hand caught her elbow to steady her, and she hissed in pain as if he had raked her with his claws.
“It’s not right!” she howled in his face, in her strange and strangled voice. “None of it!”
“Snakelet?”
“Don’t call me that!” she tore from his grasp as fled to her bedroom. She yanked the curtain closed across the doorway, and Beast was reluctant to breach her privacy.
“Naga?” he pleaded
“Just go away!” she snapped, in a more familiar petulant tone. “Go back to Mother! I don’t need you here!”
Beast turned back to Bluestar, his expression equal parts confusion and anguish.
**She doesn’t mean that,** Bluestar locksent.
**What do I do? I… don’t know what to do,** he admitted, and Bluestar heard the shame in his astral voice, the helplessness. **I always did with Mel.**
**Give her some space,** Bluestar advised.
But Beast only shook his head and took up a position beside the curtained doorway. “I’m here,” he told Naga. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“You should!” Naga threw back.
Beast gave Bluestar an imploring look, and the young elf nodded his understanding. Quietly, carefully, he retreated from the room and let the door swing closed.
When he joined his parents for supper, Weatherbird noted his grim expression. “Naga have another tantrum?” she asked archly.
He nodded, though he did not elaborate. Her words continued to gnaw at him.
It’s coming…
Were they truly her words? Or the latent memories of the liquid starstone in her veins? He’d have to ask Aurek about it in the morning.
* * *
Beast sat a silent vigil outside Naga’s bedroom for hours. When exhaustion robbed her of the ability to weep, she could hear him breathing on the other side of the curtain. When she lay on her bed and stretched her neck, she could just make out his shadow under the edge of the cloth. When an elf came bearing their supper, Beast ate his portion on the floor, and pushed his daughter’s portion under the curtain. It was a thick, milky-smelling porridge, topped with seared strips of meat. Hearty food designed to fill the belly and encourage deep sleep. But Naga had no appetite. She left it to grow cold.
In the darkness of her room, she fell into a dreamless sort of stupor, and passed several hours in a state that could almost be called sleep. But then the pain in her head returned, and when she opened her eyes, the dull ache became a restless gnawing, deep in the base of her skull. She awoke with the feeling that something was trying to strangle her.
Instinctively, she sent out a mental command for lights, but the dead seedrock did not obey.
She slowly got out of bed. Her eyes were crusted with tears, and her nose was congested. The candle in the main room had burned low; little light now peeped under the curtain. Naga nudged it open. Her father was still there, but unlike her, his sleep was deep. He lay on his side, his shape-changed legs lying across the doorway, his chest rising and falling in a steady rhythm. Once Naga would have floated over his effortlessly. Now she gingerly stepped over his legs, praying he wouldn’t sense her.
He stirred, but only slightly. Soon he was deep in sleep again.
She let herself out into the hallway. It was late; the corridor was deserted, the candles guttering in their niches. The midnight lamp-lighter had yet to make his rounds. Naga made for the lamp with the steadiest flame and pried it out of his rocky cradle. Holding it by the carved bowl, she made her way further down the corridor, towards the entrance to Fifth Shell.
No more, she told herself. No more waiting, no more begging. She was long past the time for patience. Her salvation lay in the core, in the pure starstone that could spark her dormant magic as surely as flint on steel.
She passed a troll in the hallways of Fifth Shell, and he gave her a quizzical glance, but said nothing. She waited impatiently for the rotation of the spheres to unlock the doorway to Sixth Shell. Her stride lengthened and her pace quickened the closer she came to the core. She couldn’t yet sense the starstone, but anticipation alone filled her wearied limbs with a newfound strength.
The answer was there. She had known from the moment she touched down on Abode. The nagging pain behind her eyes would not abate until she could commune with true magic. The drumbeats in her ear came louder and faster with each step.
Sixth Shell was all teaching halls and empty corridors. She made good time to the entry to Seventh Shell. Now she could feel the starstone calling her, singing to her, like a bird calling its mate. I’m coming, she thought. I’m almost there.
* * *
Beast’s sending jolted him out of deep sleep. **Bluestar! Is Naga with you?**
Bluestar moaned and rolled over in bed. **Uhn… no… no, of course not. What time is it?**
**She’s gone!**
**Did you check the pit closet?**
**BLUESTAR!!**
Now Bluestar sat up and wiped the sleep from his eyes. **All right, hang on. Don’t bring the mountain down. I think I know where she went.**
* * *
Aurek had explained that Seventh Shell was little more than a safety buffer between the inhabited chambers of the outer shells and the starstone of the core. But it was much more. Here seedrock was slowly converting to starstone, in an atomic reorganization as complex – yet as simple – as the fusion-fires in a star. Naga moved through a long, serpentine corridor, constantly turning and bending and it wound around the core like thread on a spindle, its constant friction sparking the transformation of the humble stone into solid magic.
Her candle had burned itself out, but it didn’t matter. The ambient light of the conversion process was more than enough to see by. She staggered like a drunkard; it was hard to keep moving when the walls were in constant motion, the stone the texture of wet clay, the whorls and symbols within them shifting and sparkling. Each time a new mote of starstone was born, a tiny light flashed.
The singing was getting louder, almost deafening. Under the melodic hum, she could hear more: clicks and trills, whistle and pops that seemed to follow no set rhythm. Strange… if she listened closely, she felt she could almost hear words woven into the noise.
Someone was calling her name.
“I’m coming,” she whispered to the starstone.
She was almost at the edge of the transitory layer. The core was just beyond the wall. She was reached out and placed her hand against the soft stone, watching it soften further and swallow her fingers. Silvery light danced around her fingers. She felt the heady pull of magic, as sweet as the best honeywine.
“Let me in,” she whispered.
Are you prepared? the stone seemed to sing back to her. Are you ready at last to learn the larger truth within you?
“Let me in!” she commanded.
Again her name, no louder than a whisper, but echoing through the twisting halls.
Na-ga-ga-a-a-a-a-a…
The stone parted like water, and blinding light beckoned her forward.
Now the drumbeats seemed to come from outside herself, distant at first, but coming closer.
It’s coming, she thought distractedly. But I’m ready.
She took a step into the light, only to be yanked back at the last instant.
“Mother of drukk! What in the doom-pit do you think you’re doing?!”
“Let me go! I have to see!”
They tussled in the doorway, Bluestar tried to pull her back, Naga trying to break free. He had the greater strength, but he was afraid to use it. She could feel by the way he held her elbow that he was afraid of hurting her. So she marshalled all every ounce of strength and will and wrenched them both over the threshold into the core.
He stumbled and stepped on her foot. She lost her balance and toppled forward, pulling him with her. They fell in an inelegant sprawl on the glowing stone floor. Bluestar groaned into her hair.
“Well, you got into the core. I hope you’re happy.”
He lifted his weight from her back. A gasp escaped him. Naga lifted her head, and she saw what had so startled him.
She stood in the center of the core, bathed in the glow of starstone. The silver-white hair that reflected the light was her only garment. Her limbs were as long and lithe as those of the elder of Homestead, and in her grave face Naga thought she saw something of Lady Chani at her most severe.
Her eyes weren’t Chani’s, though. They were a bright, sickly green, like the deadly fungal hives of Homestead.
“So,” the High One said. “You have come at last. Now our work can begin.”
“Timmain–” Bluestar began.
The core lurched sharply, accelerating. The change in momentum threw them both to the floor.
The hum in Naga’s ears became a whine. She clapped her hands over her ears, but the sound was deep in her mind, and nothing could shut it out. The core spun faster and faster, like a child’s top, and she felt herself begin to slide across the floor. Somewhere beyond the walls of the core came the crack of thunder. She felt her ears pop.
Bluestar screamed, “No!”
* * *
Aurek felt the disturbance, the absence. He bolted upright in bed, breathing hard. For a moment, nothing in the Egg changed. Inertia was a powerful force. Objects at equilibrium fought against chaos. But the moment couldn’t last forever.
Aurek slapped his hand against the stone bedframe, sending his spirit deep into the bowels of the Egg.
At his side, Vaya awoke as she felt the first of the tremors.
Seventh Shell was the first to fracture, then shatter, its bones falling into the void left by the core’s departure. Sixth Shell began to list inward. Stress fractures sought the path of least resistance. Stone surrendered to the worldpull.
“No,” Aurek vowed.
His spirit set to work: reinforcing seams in the rock, bracing archways, marshalling the remains of Seventh Shell to prop up Sixth. But as he repaired one fissure, another one burst open. The tremors raced outwards and upwards. Fifth Shell began to buckle. His spirit felt the fears of its inhabitants, as they were roused from sleep by the sudden shaking.
Vaya’s eyes opened and she squinted up in the darkness at her lifemate.
He had to work faster. He had to stretch his spirit farther. He had sat helpless as the first Egg of Eight Spheres collapsed around him. Not again.
A breath of air worked its way to Vaya’s tongue as she began to speak his name.
He stretched himself into the stone. He extended his powers farther than he had ever imagined possible. He infiltrated every trace of the stone. He drew every reserve of magic from his tired body, until he felt the sinews of his very being humming, like the string of a bow on the verge of snapping.
Still the Egg continued its slowly collapse. He had push deeper, faster. Deeper than space, and faster than time.
He was out of time.
“Aur-” Vaya began. But he never heard the rest.
He felt a sudden, intense heat. He thought of the friction that brought dead stone to life.
He was the stone.
A final, defiant sending rang out through the crumbling halls of the Egg.
**This is not how it ends!**
Elfquest copyright 2019 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 2019 Warp Graphics, Inc. All rights reserved. Alternaverse characters and insanity copyright 2019 Jane Senese and Erin Roberts.