Once we were out of the cave, it became clear that Palimpsest had lost all interest in defending the location: the skies were clearing and the slopes were free of beetles. I waited until Varalos had taken a thorough look around us and determined there was no trap lying in wait, and then flew ahead, away from the main group to rejoin the defenses at the keep.

  As I flew, I watched through the bond. Seriana was already conferring with her husband on how to go about creating a spell of detection using some of the vines and shell fragments that she’d taken from the cave. The windborne elves had intercepted and killed several of a new kind of insect, a flat, cricket-like beetle that had struck back with surprisingly powerful [Earth Magick]. The news from below was good: Palimpsest had apparently done nothing to drain their tunnels and facilitate another attack on the keep from below.

  Very soon I’d landed back on the walls, where Larash, Luthiel, and Galenni stood with some of the archers.

  “Lux Irovex,” Larash said, nodding to me. “Luthiel says we might be here a while longer.”

  He had an brusque, joking tone about him when he said it, but I could still detect a certain unease undergirding the words. Our only plan to find Palimpsest was now the tracking spell that Luthiel had been working on.

  I turned to him. “Any guess as to how long it may take you?”

  “The old method won’t work,” Luthiel said, his face grim. “The spell I was building would have pinpointed a relay, not the main mind. Once Seri returns with the materials, we can get started.” He paused, then added: “there’s still no guarantee.”

  I nodded. I’d know as much already: the spell could work, but only under a specific set of circumstances. Palimpsest’s main mind would have to be of a similar constitution to the shelled knot of plant matter we’d just destroyed in the cave. What was more, their main mind would still have to be different enough from all the others that it could be distinguished once we had sight of them, an act which itself would take further effort.

  If Palimpsest kept up the pace they’d maintained since meeting us, we might see several more waves before we even had the opportunity to strike back against them.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Luthiel regarding me thoughtfully. I looked over at him, my expression grim.

  “I understand, Aziriel,” he said softly. He returned his gaze to the fields beyond the walls. “I’ll try to come up with a miracle.”

  I let out a humorless laugh. There was still a chance that Galenni, our current psychic vanguard, would be able to glean something from his repeated contact with our enemy. Luthiel might be able to gain some information from mental contact with the creature, but I doubted that I would when it came to be my time to take the burden. It just wasn’t my specialty.

  And if nothing came soon? Galenni wouldn’t last forever. I would last long—Mirio had the talent, but I at least had more endurance. We could start working on re-skilling some of the other psychics for higher [Aegis] so that they could take the position of our foremost psychic defender.

  But no matter how good our defenses were, we were still on borrowed time. Palimpsest was a psychic being before they were a physical one. I didn’t trust that they would grow mentally exhausted before we did. Enduring prolonged contact with an entity such as they was torturously difficult. It didn’t matter that we’d fought off every other form of attack they’d leveled at us: they only needed to get through in one place to succeed.

  “We have to watch the skies,” I said, not wanting to linger too much on the eventuality of psychic defeat. “They’ll have seen now that unless they can occupy our aerial forces, we’ll tear them apart before they ever get to the keep. Spread the windcallers as wide as you need to.”

  “Aye, Lux Irovex. You saw that they already encountered a new kind of beetle—we expect they’ll strike from afar. Hurl heavy stones like catapults.”

  “Well. Catapults we can deal with, if not very efficiently.” The walls themselves were concrete reinforced with steel—they would not simply crack and crumble when stricken by heavy stones. Our earthshapers could push simply push oncoming rocks downward rather than fully deflect them.

  “Another thing,” said Larash. “We haven’t seen them yet, but some of our seers flew low and said they sensed an insect in the tunnels that you may be familiar with. Rust-colored, with [Lightning] keys.”

  “The lightning bugs,” I said, nodding. Figured that Palimpsest would have a number of them tucked away, somewhere.

  I wondered: if Palimpsest had levelled them up, would they be able to take advantage of their natural capacity for lightning and have them throw bolts even farther than they could naturally? Our enemy hadn’t tried to place any lighting casters in amongst their beetles, as they had with light: surely if they had access to the lightning bugs, and thus [Lightning] keys, they could have done so. The fact that they hadn’t made me think they’d be relying on the lightning bugs’ natural abilities—that they weren’t capable enough to use lightning magic without a proper set of underlying instincts.

  “My guess is that they’ll be for defense, primarily,” I said to Larash. “Something to protect the bigger insects from the first windborne. But we’ll need to watch for not just mana lines, but insect lines—when all of them are in a row, they can throw a bolt with terrible speed.”

  “I’ll tell the archers.”

  “Unfortunately,” I said, “We have no reason to believe that our enemy needs to exert themselves more to control one of those mantis-hulks than one of the beetles. It might take them time to aggregate all their strongest, but the next wave may be far more difficult to fend off than the others, especially if they’ve abandoned their desire to attack from below. Have Ranival prepare to raise the deadvault. With luck, this entity has never faced necromancy before.”

  Larash inclined his head slowly. “As you wish, Lux Irovex.”

  I understood his trepidation. It was easy to decide that necromancy was just another weapon in one’s arsenal when lives were on the line… until the undead were loosed. Those of us who had seen what happened when the undead got out of hand would never be fully comfortable with their use.

  But we didn’t need to be comfortable. We needed to survive.

  Somewhere below us, the bones of the wyvern that Zirilla and I had killed atop the Skytusk rested, runed and ready to be steeped in mana so they could fight once more alongside hundreds of other skeletal monstrosities. The wyvern, though, had been made to destroy another behemoth—against everything Palimpsest had fielded thus far, it would be invincible.

  Larash suddenly straightened beside me. “You said to watch the skies,” said Larash. “Well, something’s diving toward us from the fourth mist layer.”

  “Flying so high?” I asked.

  We hadn’t yet seen any of the insects fly above the third layer. My guess was that Palimpsest had at some point learned that Akkakesh forbade it for all but elementals—and like any reasonable entity, didn’t want to incur the storm lord’s wrath.

  Perhaps they were desperate enough to risk it? A flame of hope rose in me at the thought: if we could somehow inform the elementals, Akkakesh’s retribution could be a serious boon to us.

  “The scouts say they’re plants, not insects,” said Larash.

  I cocked my head in surprise. One of them implied that they weren’t under Palimpsest’s control.

  Insects had the easiest minds to manipulate, and I’d assumed that Palimpsest had a whole host of [Insect] skills to make their command of armies efficient, but their desire to enslave us clearly meant they could subjugate other types of creatures, too.

  At that point I felt a sudden touch on my mind, something vaguely familiar that I couldn’t quite place. But I was sure it wasn’t Palimpsest—this mind felt more akin to my own, and I doubted our enemy could have deceived me in such a manner.

  Cautiously, I answered them.

  Violence, they said.

  Recognition—and realization—spread through me like a fire. “Order our people not to attack them,” I told Larash. “They’re not hostile.”

  Luthiel had said that Mirio was asking Palimpsest for help before he fell unconscious, but the information he’d given had been valuable: he seemingly hadn’t been mentally compromised. He hadn’t been asking Palimpsest for help—he’d been asking these creatures.

  I’d met them before in our first days on the new world. Hidden voices in a ravine by one of the flowerfalls that sometimes coated the cliffsides, creatures I hadn’t seen that had cohabited a cave network filled with large bats. They’d asked me to leave their territory, fearful after having watched me slay wyverns by the dozens, and I’d assented. We hadn’t tried to make contact after that: the wildhearts had wanted to, but we’d been unwelcome and had too many other tasks before us.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Why are you in our territory? I asked.

  I tried to keep my tone neutral, conveying a sense of curiosity more than reproach. It was hard to know whether the intelligent plants would successfully interpret my feelings, but it was worth a try.

  We watched you, and Mindful Prism saw us. We tried to stay hidden, but he saw us.

  Mindful Prism was Mirio, I took it—a more flattering name than Violence, even if both of them were at least accurate to some extent.

  Mindful Prism spoke to us and pleaded our help. We withdrew, and watched, sure that the….

  Here their means of expression seemed to falter. They used what seemed to me to be the word parasite, but it was also enslaver, creeper, and sleep-inducer.

  —The parasite would destroy you, they continued. It would have its way.

  The parasite underestimated us, I said. And so did you.

  Mindful Prism begged us to watch, they said. He said we’d see you were worth protecting.

  My eyes had been on the sky as we’d been speaking, and I began to see the first of them emerge from the third mist layer.

  They were unlike any creatures I’d seen before. At first glance, they almost resembled aerial jellyfish or squid: a bulky, oddly-shaped main body seemed to precede a gathering of long, thin tentacles that fluttered behind them as they dove, moved freely by the breeze.

  The part of their bodies that was nearest to us was made of green, translucent membrane that flapped and billowed in the air as they fell, sounding like a flag blown by heavy wind. Long tendrils covered in thin, gauzy leaves trailed behind them as they dove.

  They fell awhile, then the part of their bodies that the tendrils were attached to filled with air, somehow arresting their descent so that they floated a few hundred meters above us in the sky.

  Around me, elves looked up in curiosity, wonderment, and trepidation. Larash had told them what was coming—but still, we were in the middle of a battle, and strange creatures were now filling our sky.

  I smiled. So that was what they’d looked like. The were a sort of biological air balloon—they likely filled their bladder with air that they then pushed around to fly. Maybe they even heated it.

  Mindful Prism said you would kill the parasite before they darkened, they said. This is violence we assent to. Our minds can withhold the parasite. We will protect.

  They sent me an image of a flock of what might have been waterfowl, flying in a wedge so that the lead bird took the brunt of the wind, each of them alternating. They meant to join our psychic bond and form our psychic vanguard. That had been Mirio’s plan.

  I looked at Galenni, our head psychic. Once he’d been exhausted—or worse—Palimpsest would begin to chew through the rest of the elves in short order, unless we diverted either myself or Luthiel. Valir could do it, but only by reskilling, and he was a powerful fighter that we’d be better not to lose.

  “Galenni,” I said. “These creatures are offering help in hope that we can kill Palimpsest, who I gather is an enemy of theirs. Mirio negotiated for their aide before he fell unconscious. I want you to link them to the bond and let them alternate the position of psychic vanguard. Any objections?”

  Galenni’s eyebrows raised in surprise as I spoke. It would have been easier if Mirio were the psychic vanguard—Galenni was less experienced with plants.

  Then he nodded. “I have my reservations,” he said. “But I expect it’s nothing you haven’t considered already.”

  I nodded. Trusting a group of creatures that we knew so little of with something as big as the entire colony was hardly an ideal position. But I trusted Mirio, and I trusted at least that this wasn’t some clever trick of Palimpsest’s that had been long in the making. Our enemy wouldn’t know how to put on this sort of performance. It wasn’t in their nature.

  These floating ones, however, were at least communal by nature: it wasn’t out of the question that they would consider an alliance. And while their psychic talents hadn’t much impressed me when we’d first met, that was because I was a singular entity they were trying to repel with a mental assault. Defending themselves from psychic predators in their environment was likely something they were more talented at.

  In fact, their community would likely have several potent psychics, each of a higher level than any elf had been able to attain, each naturally disposed toward exactly this sort of defense.

  That, and we could just start killing them if they tried anything duplicitous. Not a happy thought, but true—and a truth they knew.

  “Valir will take your place if you reach your limit, but be ready to reskill the others just in case. With any luck, this will buy Luthiel more time to complete his and Seriana’s tracking spell and keep me free to fight.”

  Before I could say more, I felt a familiar, but unexpected touch on my mind. Lux Irovex?

  It was Mishlo, the head healer. What is it? I asked him.

  Mirio is awake, Mishlo said, his mental voice as slow and steady as his physical one. He very much wishes to speak with you, but he can’t use the bond.

  I see, I said. A moment.

  “See if you can find out why they fly above the third layer,” I told Galenni. “Mirio’s awake—I’m going to see him.”

  “Yes, Lux Irovex,” Galenni said, nodding as I turned away from him to rush down the steps behind us.

  I wondered how up-to-date Mishlo was on the ongoing battle—surely he knew that we’d gotten Mirio’s message, struck at the location he’d given us? If Mirio thought he had to urgently see me, I had a feeling that it was because he thought we still needed to know either about the floaters he’d asked for help or the location of Palimpsest’s relay.

  I stepped into the infirmary and was greeted by the sight of a half-dozen children turning toward me from where they sat up on straw mattresses.

  “It’s Aziriel!” The nearest girl, who looked to be six or seven, said delightedly.

  “Are you winning the battle?” A older boy asked.

  “Yes, but I’m afraid I can’t talk,” I told them, walking past them. “I need to see Mishlo.”

  I found them a moment later, Mirio lying on a mattress in a closet-sized room while Mishlo sat nearby, eyes closed.

  Mirio did not look well. His skin was grey, his eyes were bloodshot, and tremors ran through the whole of his body.

  Still, he gave me a feeble smile as I entered. “The plants,” he said. “They came.”

  “I know,” I told him. “We’re still at the ready for holding off Palimpsest’s mental assault… but for now we’ll see what kind of job they do.”

  “They’re adapted for it,” Mirio said. “You know how it is.” He blinked, then looked down at his hands, which were trembling almost violently. “I need a map,” he said. “I found them. I found Palimpsest.”

  “We went to the place you gave to Luthiel,” I said. “It was a node. A—”

  “No,” Mirio said emphatically, shaking his head. He spoke again, faster now, but the words came out in a jumbled babble and he paused, clenching his jaw.

  “Breathe,” said Mishlo. “Take each word one at a time.”

  I felt a pang of pity for the archdruid as he took a few unsteady breaths, clearly struggling to tell me what he felt was so important. There are many forms of psychic assault, all of them horrific to endure.

  “The big one,” said Mirio. “The real one.” His eyes made contact with mine, and they were so tired, so ragged that he seemed like a different person. “The one you have to kill. They’re far, Lux…. very far.”

  I lowered myself beside Mirio. “You don’t have to speak, just nod,” I said. “You’re telling me that you’ve found Palimpsest’s central mind?”

  He closed his eyes a moment, then nodded.

  “How?” I asked. I had to treat the claim with a little skepticism: he had apparently told Luthiel of the other location right before he fell unconscious. That he should not only realize that it was just a psychic relay, but somehow trace it back to the real Palimpsest

  Mirio’s face became a grim, satisfied smile. With what seemed like great effort, he spoke again. “It came to me in a dream,” he said.

  I spared a glance at Mishlo. One procedure that was used on someone whose mind had partially shut down due to psychic backlash was to try and have them first reconstitute their waking identity in a place where it was easier to assemble as a fragmentary thing—to bring them forth in a dream instead of trying to wake them.

  “He wouldn’t let me bring him back,” said the healer. “Not at first. I’m… not sure quite what he did, Aziriel, but he carved a hole in your enemy and plundered their mind, ripped out their secrets even as his mind burned at their touch. He had to gather the fragments of what he’d taken before he was willing to wake. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  I listened, but felt like I didn’t truly understand. Mirio was as generational prodigy when it came to psychic talents, and I’d seen miracles that were harder to believe than this one… but I wasn’t even sure what Mishlo had told me. Mirio had invented some new form of assault to deal with our unexpected enemy?

  It wasn’t what was important right now. Mishlo would have been meticulous in checking to see if Mirio was mentally compromised—if he saw cause to trust the information, so did I. I turned to the archdruid.

  “If we kill this central mind,” I said. “They die?”

  Mirio nodded.

  “The battle is done?”

  He nodded again.

  “You’re sure?”

  Mirio paused for a moment, then nodded again.

  I rose, having heard all that I needed to. “I’ll bring you a map,” I said. To Mishlo, I added: “make sure he stays awake.”

  Then I reached out and found Zirilla with the bond.

  I stopped to think for a moment, then found Luthiel as well.

  I want you both to come with me, I said. We need to move fast and strike hard.

  Another node? Zirilla asked.

  Not a node, I said. We’re finishing this.