“Was it all lies, Eli?” I asked, speaking aloud and through the bond. My eyes stayed fixed on the murdered tortoise. There had been partial truths in what Eli told me. Had to be. “Were you only promising what you thought I wanted, or is there some truth behind your inventions?”

  Shall you tell me as much? asked Eli. I kept my gaze focused firmly upon her as she quietly floated closer, abandoning her winding motions from before to keep her head—and her beak—above me at all times.

  You have not been truthful, Aziriel. Your second skin, your tools, your scent all betray you. There are others of your kind, somewhere. You did not abandon them. They are with you. They are like you.

  I reached out with my gaze and tried to sense any kind of trap, magical or otherwise, in the wood of the tree around me.

  “And have you known other creatures who make tools, Eli? Do you know what it means to refine materials, to make enchantments?”

  I can sense the weave in your cloak, your belt, your necklace of teeth. It is fascinating—and yet it is also weak. All weak.

  I took a few steps to get a better view of another side of the shell, cautiously watching Eli with my gaze while my eyes scanned the pictographs. All manner of creatures and things were depicted on the shell—but more birds. Many more birds than others. Had Eli told the truth in saying that more birds ascended to intelligence?

  I killed the hydra in the forest, Eli said. I have killed many such creatures. I hunt them as easily as the bird hunts the beetle. There is no contest.

  “I believe you,” I said. There were no anthropomorphic creatures that I could see depicted on the shell. No humans, orcs, dwarves….

  You know I am deadly, said Eli. You know I am cunning, and fast. Tell me: where are the others?

  “No.”

  Eli lurched toward me, but it was easy to tell that she only meant to frighten me. As she moved, I turned toward her and prepared to draw my windsleeve into a thin, dense layer over the front of my body. I knew a technique that would let me use the threshold between her claim and mine, her windsleeve and mine, to quickly push myself back from her if she really went in for the kill.

  But she stopped a foot away from me, beak frozen in its descent toward my face.

  Tell me, she said again.

  “No.”

  I am going to kill you then. If you are not going to try to reason with me, why pretend you are not afraid?

  “There is no pretense,” I said tiredly. “I’m not afraid, Eli. I feel no more fear than the chill of anticipation that I always feel at violence to come, and that is a kind of fear which has no hold on me. No; instead I am sad, and tired, and angry.”

  I reached out and touched a hand to the rough, worn texture of the shell before me. “Surely of all the ascended beasts of this world, some of you, somewhere, learned how much safer you are if you make peace with each other, even help each other? Surely all your talk of wandering tortoises and distant kings had to have some truth to it?”

  You speak of violence to come, said Eli. But violence need not come at all. Her voice softened, became an unnerving lilt. Until now we have traded lies. Why not trade truths? Speak of your kin, Aziriel.

  “No.”

  No? Eli asked. Perhaps you want violence, then.

  “Tell me,” I said, ignoring her threat. “Since it will matter not if you kill me and keep my skull, be honest. Was this tortoise intelligent? Did they know intelligent creatures?”

  My fingertips hovered over the huge shell where paints and dyes had formed pictures and images. “Some of these pictograms were made with brushes of animal hair, or perhaps simply an animal’s tail. Some with tools. Some have been dripped, or smeared. If I had to guess, I’d say this tortoise didn’t paint their own shell, and neither did any single creature. Did they wander the world making peace with every creature who could think enough to paint?”

  They did, said Eli. But what can it matter to you? You are a liar. The paintshells bear the truth. You are of my kind, not theirs.

  “If you must pretend you know me, then so be it,” I said. “Yet you said that it is possible to raise beasts to intelligence.”

  I said many things. Even at the prospect of finding yourself an equal mate, you showed no interested in my promises.

  “I know it’s possible,” I murmured. “But only theoretically, technically. The problem is that I don’t know how to do it.”

  My eyes were still scanning the shell. I saw many images overlapping one another, all of them representing different forms of plants and beasts. I kept searching, looking for something in particular.

  Perhaps I know it, said Eli. Perhaps a bargain can be made.

  My thoughts darkened as I watched them hover in the air across from me. There was a possibility that Eli simply wanted to taste as much elf meat as possible, that curiosity drove her to find this colony of creatures whose like she’d never seen… but I was fearfully suspicious that it was something more.

  Was knowledge of intelligent life valuable in and of itself? Did Eli intend to report our existence to others?

  “This knowledge, if it exists, has more value than you could possibly realize.”

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  Than I realize? Echoed Eli. You do not know the extent of my sight. You do not know the full breadth of what I see, Aziriel. But I will not ask much to give a simple answer to your question.

  The tortoise, I thought. From what I’d seen, Eli was strong enough that I didn’t want to try and capture her for an interrogation—best to kill her quickly and minimize risk. Our diviners could examine the shell in front of me, and I could only hope that would be sufficient in helping me us track down potentially friendly creatures.

  Nothing that Eli said could be trusted anyway, and there was nowhere she could lead me that our people wouldn’t find themselves.

  “Let’s just begin,” I said, at last turning to face her.

  Eli drew back, cocking her head.

  “I could try to talk longer, to outsmart you,” I explained. “But what could you tell me? What is your use? Let’s begin: one lives, one dies.”

  I am the stronger of us. You know not what you ask.

  “Would you like to do this here, or outside?” I asked. “I’ve searched this place for traps while we’ve spoken and found none—you would do better fighting in the open air, I think, than cramped in this space with me.”

  Aziriel. You cannot trick a trickster. It is clear what you wish, and so I decline. She drew herself up higher. You will not see the open air again.

  I watched Eli, trying to draw my attention in to focus only on her. I would need to be fast—and to be fast I needed fear. She wanted to kill me and keep my bones as a trophy. She wanted me to never return to the settlement, wanted the elves to first wonder why I was not returning, then slowly grow to fear whatever had kept me away.

  A horror too great to dwell on. My mind veered away from considering it to think on her beak, dipping into my ribcage, crushing bones and organs alike in a furious, killing blow.

  Truly, you wish to kill me? And yet I have done nothing to you but lie, as you have done. It was you who trespassed here, and you know not whether these bones belong to other hunters, creatures killed fairly in a contest they chose.

  “I don’t need to.”

  No?

  My vision held the serpent as clearly as it had held anything. Her every motion, from the breathing in her chest to the twitching of her claws, was known to me.

  “No, Eli. The priests need their justifications, the mages their rationalizations, but you and I abide older ways than theirs. I am going to kill you and feed you to my children.”

  You are curious, Aziriel. And yet I only wish to—

  Eli lunged.

  I expected it.

  I wanted her close. I could fight her at a distance, but that would involve methods that she’d undoubtedly seen before, could respond to. Instead I wanted to surprise her and finish it quickly.

  I expected she would be cautious. Some sliver of doubt had to exist in her mind, wondering if all my seeming bluster had been a calculated play, wondering if she was somehow in my trap. But without knowing what I was going to do, she’d have no way to counter it—and if she’d known what I was going to do, she wouldn’t have lunged.

  She sped through the air toward me, her beak rushing forward to strike at my skull.

  It was all about waiting. I had to wait until the motion of her beak had so much momentum that she couldn’t correct it when I pushed myself enough distance to one side to avoid it. Her beak split the air beside my head, missing its mark but still carrying through its momentum so that her chin would strike my shoulder.

  As she did this, I extended a dozen finger-width lines of mana from my face, neck, and shoulders, each a tendril that probed the air ahead. I raised my arms to either side of me, leaving my head and body unprotected.

  It was all about waiting. The perfect moment was when our windsleeves met. Her claim was stronger than mine, her zone of control pressing almost against my body, but it didn’t matter: I ignited my fingers of lightning just our two skins of compressed air met.

  My [Fray] lightning reached forward, seeking mana, and tore apart the magic that held the front of her windsleeve together.

  At the same time, I released the front of mine. Both of them gushed air into the space between us—and Eli’s had far more air in it than mine.

  Her chin struck my shoulder in the same moment that a wave of air blew both of us back and away from each other. I was sent flying backward, toward the ground.

  As I flew, I channeled a line of mana from each of my outstretched palms, pushing mana toward Eli as I simultaneously filled the air that I flew through. I forked each bolt, making tendrils that reached into the air like grasping claws.

  Eli fumbled without her windsleeve intact, her front half dropping to the floor of the chamber as her claws scrabbled at the ground, her back half still in the air.

  She wasted the only moment that she had to save herself by drawing her windsleeve together once more. It made perfect sense, of course: she was a flying creature, and had just been startled. Her instincts demand that she get back into the air once more, get moving.

  She raised her beak just as I ignited both my bolts of lightning. The world flashed red as two jagged tongues of power reached for Eli’s face, one striking her forehead and the other striking her eye.

  Her [Aegis] was strong… but a brain can only bear being cooked so much. I didn’t burst her skull, but there was clearly something wrong with her movements as she surged toward me in the moment that followed my lightning bolts. I sprang to one side, forming another line of mana… but there was no need.

  Eli fell to the floor, twitching as smoke poured from an empty eye socket. Another moment more and she was dead.

  I rose, then moved over to look down on her unmoving carcass. Smoke hung in the air around me as I stared.

  I didn’t feel the thrill of victory. Instead I felt a sense of dejection and anger.

  More and more, this world had gone to prove that every precaution we’d taken was justified. The harsh, barren architecture of our keep spoke to our fears—and the building had saved us from Palimpsest. Even now we were excavating deep into the rock of the cliffside so that our settlement could eventually be hidden by the mists.

  Would it be enough? No, I decided. We could do more, and so we would.

  We’d been able to forge a peaceful relationship with Akkakesh, at least for now. But all three intelligent creatures that I’d met on the ground had been disasters. More and more, it was looking as if our only hope for peaceful relations with others was to grow so strong that we couldn’t be challenged.

  And yet… I turned to look at the shell once more. Eli had called the tortoise who it had come from a creature she called paintshell. She’d said they wandered the world collecting stories. Had she been telling the truth, or simply saying whatever she needed to in order to earn my trust?

  I intended to find out.

  I hauled Eli’s carcass into some of the higher chambers at the base of the tree, hoping that this would be enough to keep it from being found by scavengers for the moment. Then I took flight and went straight back to the settlement.

  I called for Zirilla once I was within range of our psychics once more.

  I need a few strong windcallers as soon as possible, I told her.

  A carcass small enough to be lifted? she asked. I suppose it beats out leading it back to the colony.

  There’s something else I want to take back right away, I said. Something our sages and diviners will be most interested in. A shell.

  A shell?

  You’ll see.