The next day, I met the high council on the rooftop of the keep as usual and told them of my encounter with Eli. They listened intently as I told my story, their attention peaking noticeably as I described the tortoiseshell that now rested in the archive.

  “If anything, the whole episode has made me more paranoid,” I said once my tale was done. “Our plan for the settlement right now leaves the walls visible to any creature passing overhead. I’m not sure I think that’s a good idea any more.”

  “That leaves us with a set of… unappealing options,” Hassina said. “Either we lower the walls and rely mostly on other defenses, or we dig even deeper than we already are.”

  “We can do first one, then the other,” I said. “It’ll be another month of work for the earthshapers, but I see no other choice. If we’re found by another civilization, even one that’s small by any of our old measures… then our relationship with them will be entirely theirs to decide. That, or we’ll have to flee this place and travel into unknown territory.”

  “Well, we’ve at least planned for that much,” said Hassina.

  We had multiple escape routes in the works: several overland paths and a tunnel that we were carving through the rock that would soon emerge in a valley near the rift lake. Once it was done, we’d undertake an even greater effort to connect our excavation at the peak of the Skytusk to our escape tunnel and our settlement.

  It was an incredible amount of work, but if things went wrong with Akkakesh I wanted both the elves in the settlement and the elves on the mountaintop to have a clear escape route.

  “As for the keep,” Seriana said. “I’m guessing you’ll want a constant illusion to hide it? A rock formation, perhaps?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But naturally, all of this is going to have to wait until after the ritual. Right now, we’re too visible no matter what we do. We’ve got kilometers of my vines running the cliffside and a whole boundaries of felled trees. Not to mention the piles of excavated stone, the visible elevator, and the furnaces.”

  “Perhaps I should ask,” said Seriana, “was it really wise to leave us so exposed? The design for the settlement initially was made to keep us hidden by the mists—now that we see cause to be even more cautious, should we have tried to stay hidden from the first?”

  I shook my head. “We had to compromise. Or at least, it was wise to compromise. Palimpsest would have sensed us no matter how visible our keep and our logging was—and as it was, we were barely prepared for them when they came.”

  “Well, I suppose this settles what we’ll be doing with the personnel who become free once the ritual is finished,” Hassina said. She let out a little laugh. “In normal times, I’d wonder about morale. After all, most of us want to be free to pursue our more specific callings. I want more musicians on the mountaintop, the earthshapers want to be making buildings instead of just excavating, the wildhearts all desperately want to working with the animals….”

  “But the ritual’s conclusion will take care of morale,” said Galeena. “And another month or two of toil won’t seem like much to elves who can clearly see they’re at the dawn of a new age.”

  I smiled. “And if that doesn’t work, maybe we got rid of the insect carcasses too quickly,” I said. “A reminder of Palimpsest should be all anyone needs to understand the precariousness of our situation. And as for the ritual itself, things are beginning to become more clear. The last piece to fall into place will be the preparations for the divination spell. The next-closest will be the instruments Fireesha is crafting.”

  “There’s too much overlap in both tasks,” said Fireesha. “Half of the people we use to do one, we need for the other. We’re making the instruments first because then Aziriel can play around with them.”

  “The good news is that everyone else can go easier,” I said. “I can have some of the wildhearts continue with their catalogues.”

  “We’re almost completely finished making the keys we need,” said Hassina. “We would be already, but the more the timeline crystallizes, the more I dispense the ones I’ve saved. We only need them on the fateful day, after all, and spent keys earn us more than held ones.”

  “What’s our best guess for a deadline right now, Fireesha?” I asked.

  “Two weeks minimum. Three seems likely.”

  “It’s coming on fast,” I said. “Good.” I nodded to myself. “Anticipation will build and work in our favor. Everyone has waited long enough—soon their patience will be rewarded. But there’s matter to consider, beyond the ritual,” The corner of my mouth curled into a smile. “One that I… only partially hinted at during my story.”

  Hassina glanced skyward, her expression making it clear that she was trying to recall something. “Well I confess I missed it,” she said. “Don’t leave us in suspense.”

  “The eggs,” I said. “Eli had killed a hydra and was eating some of its eggs. There were eight eggs total; seven of them still remain.”

  I watched the other councillors absorb this information, each of them making a different, subtle expression to indicate that they understood its significance. From what we knew, we’d be waiting until after this world’s winter to start taming many of its wild beasts, which we needed to tame from birth.

  But these eggs didn’t follow the same rules that most of nature did.

  “A behemoth hydra is too large to function without some amount of levels and skills,” I said. “Even when they’re first born. Without enough [Strength] to bolster what their bodies are capable of, their hearts can’t pump their blood. That means we’ll need to be surrogate mothers to these eggs if we want them to hatch—we need to bring them the essence and keys that their mother would have.”

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “I doubt it will be a significant drag on resources,” said Hassina. “Not given the scale of what we’re harvesting already.”

  I nodded. “It’s good news, actually. These eggs are early along in their incubation cycle. By controlling how much essence we give them, we can control when they hatch. The first few we’ll hatch individually. This means they won’t have siblings they can contact with the [Wild Bond], which will make taming them much easier. Multiple untamed, newly-born hydras will agitate one another, instigate conflict. But once we’ve got a couple under our control, they’ll actually help us tame the other newly-hatched ones.”

  “And we’ll have seven behemoths under the control of our knights and wildhearts,” said Seriana.

  “It’ll be another thing to keep hidden from potential prying eyes,” I said. “But it will be worth it. Once they have four legs, hydras become particularly fast. Our hunters will cover more ground, and much more safely. With support from spellcasters, even a low level hydra will be a match for a more powerful behemoth, if it’s trained properly.”

  “They’d have crushed Palimpsest’s forces,” said Fireesha. “Even just one of them could have rampaged across the battlefield and collapsed every one of their exit tunnels.”

  “What sort of commitment are we looking at in terms of personnel?” Seriana asked.

  “For the first beast, Valir and Mirio could likely do it with one other wildheart,” I said. “Though they’ll likely have more of an entourage—the crests on their head indicate a different subspecies. There will be studies and observations to be made.”

  “Still, that’s not very demanding.”

  “No,” I said. “Individually, taming some of the wild beasts won’t be. But even if we devote two thirds of the wildhearts to the task, it’s still only going to net us a few hundred animals in the first year. Wyverns and broadwings will take multiple elves each to tame. We want some of the swamp spiders, too—they can haul cargo and handle the rough terrain, though I’d rather a giant spider more capable of spinning webs.”

  “I’m sure the children will love them as a domestic beast,” Hassina said.

  “Almost all of our children are from Ellistara,” I said. “Most of them have probably ridden a giant spider before. In any case, insects are easier to dominate mentally and the spiders are both readily available and equipped for the job. Although,” I added, “what I’d really love is some of Palimpsest’s drone beetles. They’ve got to occur naturally somewhere, but the hunters haven’t found any yet. They can climb, help with excavation, are big enough for an elf to ride, could carry cargo, and would be easily dominated.”

  “I can put together a tracking spell,” said Seriana. “Though only once the ritual preparations are finished.”

  “We can wait that long,” I said. “It’s not a priority. And one more thing, since we’re on the subject of what to do once the ritual is finished—we don’t know anything about this world’s seasons. It’s been slowly growing colder since we arrived, but Zirilla thinks that fact might be luring us into a false sense of security.”

  “I share some concerns with her on this matter,” Seriana said. “Namely, we don’t know how the mists affect climate, here. As best we can guess, they absorb the light of the sun and filter it through to the lower layers, somehow. Normal clouds would simply reflect the sun’s light and lead to a much cooler surface temperature, but we’re not sure how much that’s happening, here. With climate clearly influenced by a process we don’t understand, it’s not safe to assume the stability of our long term weather patterns.”

  “We don’t even have enough knowledge to start making guesses,” I said. “Who’s to say the temperature won’t drop twenty degrees in the matter of a week? That this whole slope will be buried three feet of snow, or flooded by a storm bigger than anything any of us have seen?”

  “Shouldn’t drastic climate changes be evidenced by the wildlife?” Galeena asked. “Wouldn’t the wildhearts notice if everything around us was made to survive a terrible winter, or a great flood? I’m no druid, but the birds would migrate, yes? Build their nests to withstand hurricane winds?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Though the creatures of the swamp might all hibernate, none of the birds that inhabit the great trees seem to have adapted to catastrophic environmental changes. At the same time, we don’t know exactly what to check for.”

  “Too many unknowns,” Hassina said. “You’re not trying to expect the unexpected… you’re trying to prepare for it.”

  “Think of it like this: most of the larger wildlife here have glowing markings all over their bodies, we still don’t know why. A broadwing is both a predator to smaller creatures and prey to the wyverns—it has every reason not to covered in glowing lines, and yet it is. We don’t know why it is in the same way we don’t know what forms the ubiquitous chasms through this mountain-range, or the nature of the mist layers. And with so many unknowns, it becomes impossible to gauge where our effort is best spent to protect ourselves. Do we make tenfold more drainage than we actually need in case of a storm, or do we prepare for a blizzard that piles snow ten feet high? Do we dig our escape tunnels, focus on our defensive enchantments, or put more resources into our binding spells?”

  As I looked at their faces, I was reminded once more that I was the only wild elf on the high council. Their experience with these matters was secondhand, at best, and not for the first time I lamented that most of our most ancient wild elves had died in the Doom.

  “You’re right,” Hassina said. “Eli did make you even more paranoid.”

  I sighed. “All I wanted to impress is that we may have grown complacent in assuming that the seasons will be mild,” I said. “But we’ve already met behemoth hydras that could sense us at a range of twenty kilometers, storm lords, and a whole new kind of terror in Palimpsest. What’s next?”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” said Seriana. “But it would have to be a fairly big storm to seriously threaten us at this point, yes?”

  “Yes,” I admitted. “We’re strong, now—far from the days when I had everyone hiding in Palefang’s lair.”

  “All we can do is make what preparations we can think of,” said Seriana.

  “I can try to ask Akkakesh about the seasons,” said Hassina. “They have some more talkative elementals who might tell us more, too. But ultimately I agree with Seriana.”

  “You’re both right,” I said. “But everything is so important that I don’t want to miss anything.”

  “We’ve plenty of safeguards already,” said Seriana. “And more on the way. In the time it takes to finish those we’ve thought of, we’ll think of even more.”

  I nodded. “In that case, I have another task that we should complete before the ritual.” I smiled faintly. “As thinly stretched as we are, I think it will be worth it to make some preparations.”

  “More preparations?” Fireesha asked. “What for?”

  My smile grew. “For a celebration, of course.”