“For a time, there was despair and terror. The many realms of the cosmos lay before us, but we were open to them, as well.”

  As I told our history, I felt as if a great power was gathering in the air around me. It wasn’t a magical power. Instead it seemed to come from the attention of my people as they watched, and listened.

  They were patient, but I could feel their anticipation building. Tonight I would deliver upon my promise and change our story forever.

  “Not all of the realms were hospitable. It seemed to us as if we were the enemies of some races as soon as they saw us. The many-minded oroi, who met their own extinction at the hands of the humans they enslaved. The dragons, who saw us as little more than treasure to be added to their glittering hoards. The fae, who looked upon us with eyes that burned with terrible envy.”

  Behind me, the silence of the instruments was broken by the icy tinkling sound of a few quiet, high-pitched bells.

  “We learned of death,” I said. “When the dragon Anaxes came to lay waste to one of our secret sanctuaries, Myrasciel and Tythuon stood against him—and though Anaxes was slain, so too with Tythuon. Tythuon was the first elf to die.”

  There was a swell in the music behind me, and a harp played a theme that Tythuon himself had written on Anar. He’d written it for Myrasciel, his closest friend, but the years had seen it become his own.

  “There were many more hardships,” I said. “And indignities beyond counting. We searched for a home that we could not find. We prayed for a nightborne solace that would not come. We sought refuge in beauty, only to discover that art made in fear is seeded with a terrible aspect of the fear itself, and we balked at the works of our own hands.”

  I let the music play awhile, listening as it fluctuated between hopeful and sinister, as it built toward a climax and then all fell apart before it could be reached.

  “And yet our goddess had not left us with nothing,” I said. “Indeed, she had given us many gifts. Our skill with the arcane was unrivalled. Knowledge that was passed freely between our mages was treated by the denizens of the cosmos as the most potent of arcane secrets. The elves were worldless, and few, but we were not without our advantages.”

  The sky had darkened completely, now, and the shards of quartz that were embedded in the stone around us gleamed with a light of their own, submerging us into a dark field of artificial night.

  “Faced the strife of the cosmos, we chose leaders. Aerien, greatest of our mages, and Myrasciel, the greatest of our fighters. They were the king and queen of the elves.”

  Not for the first time in my life, I wished I could sit and speak with them awhile. I missed Myrasciel more than I missed Finuel, my first husband. No matter how much time passed I’d always have to wonder if I was only her poorer substitute.

  I continued:

  “Aerien saw that our knowledge could be both sword and shield. And through careful sharing of our secrets, careful cultivation of our bonds with other peoples, he created the web of alliances with the humans of Hanaka, alliances that kept us safe in those first centuries. Under his guiding hand, pacts borne of necessity led to friendships sustained out of trust, and soon all knew that to raise a sword against a single elf was to invite a hundred legions of humanity to rise against you. Our bond was strong. With our protectors, we survived.”

  I was sparse in providing details, here. The colder facts of the matter regarding our early alliance with the humans were necessary pieces of knowledge for our children, but they didn’t belong in the storied hour, where narratives went uninterruped. They belonged in school, in lessons where the pupils would be prodded toward debate.

  The truth was that Aerien had been more cunning, and perhaps less benevolent, than I was suggesting. Myrasciel and I had seen that our warp magic alone could tip the scales of power between humanity’s seemingly endless nations and allow a few of them to dominate all others.

  I had urged against sharing the knowledge, insistent that any safety the elves found in the arms of others was inherently dangerous and unstable. Myrasciel had spoken against me, saying that we couldn’t survive sharing our secrets with no one at all—that we had to choose at least one ally. If meddling in human affairs bought ourselves a century or two of relative safety, it would be well worth it.

  Naturally, Aerien had sided with the Queen—and a good thing, too. Myra had, as usual, been right.

  When the dust settled and the blood dried, the only humans left in power were those who wielded elvish arcane secrets.

  More critically, the nature of power among humans had shifted, too. The arcane had eclipsed all other disciplines to become the central pillar of power in their societies. Mages reigned over humanity, and wrote favorable histories concerning how it had come to be so.

  Elves were placed everywhere in the hierarchies of the mages. Elvish sages were an immortal repository of living memory, and we shared it all, cementing ourselves as willing, helpful allies to humanity’s elites. But we were careful to always be assistants, never rulers: we were neutral in the conflicts that arose between their wizard-kings.

  The elvish vizier became a stock character in their plays. The pilgrimage to an elvish cloister became a prestigious mark of advancement among the human mages. The romance between human and elf, a dramatic staple: passionate love eclipsed by the shadow of inevitable death.

  I looked with sympathy at the children of Ellistara, sitting with their parents and watching me with rapt eyes. They would need to know these things, of course: need to know that our ancient king was not celebrated because he had simply made peace, but contrived a peace by meddling in the wars of humanity.

  Such stories I could tell them of that time. Would tell them, in time.

  I continued.

  “The elves had the wisdom of our king, the strength of our queen, and the protection of our friends—and so we prospered. Our knowledge increased, our numbers grew, and all was well for a time. But in his wisdom, Aerien knew not to trust any one thing to last forever, even something as strong as our alliance. For among mortals, the will of the father is inevitably superceded by the will of the son. Bloodlines can fail, promises can fade, and borders can shift as if moved by the wind.”

  It hadn’t just been Aerien who had seen that our position wouldn’t last. It had been everyone. Humanity was always in flux, and humans were as capable of misplaced wrath and fear as we were. All of us had seen that sooner or later they might turn on us.

  “We wanted two things,” I continued. “Our own home, and the means to protect it. Each of these seemed impossible to us. Often, envy would burn in our eyes. The gods, we saw, had granted each of these to the races they had made in their likenesses, had sponsored their children’s prosperity in the grand scheme of the cosmos—but not ours. Not the Queen Most Beautiful.”

  Again I glanced at the mists above. In normal circumstances it was arrogant to assume that a god was watching, but tonight was hardly normal.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Tonight was one of the most important days in all our history. Sabina was listening. Had to be.

  “Varyniel made her temples, and Mirion his symphonies. And as decades passed like seasons, we saw to it that no creatures in the cosmos was as skillful or reverent in their love of the night than the elves. But no matter how much we worshipped, the Lady of Sable Graces denied us what we so deeply desired. She did not become our patron god; she remained our creator only.”

  I paused, longer than I had for the length of my story so far. I let the quiet fall over the audience and form a kind of break in the story, a natural divide.

  Then I tapped out a familiar melody on my hollow wooden slats, followed by the booming beat of my deepest drum—and we were back on Anar, back to the girl and the bird.

  “Once upon a time on Hanaka,” I said, “as spring was just beginning to turn to summer, a woman wandered in the great, wild forest of the north, happy to know that with her every step, she tread in a place where no-one, elf or human, had tread before. The woman was, and had been, many things. Warrior, sage, vizier, architect, sculptor, herald, apprentice, smith, mage, sister, ritualist, commander… she wore roles like snow: here in the winter and gone in the thaw.”

  I smiled. “She was content with this. She was ambitious, but her was a strange and secret one. She did not seek the profound excellence that her kin among the firstborn elves often devoted their lives to. She sought to see and experience many things, but was untroubled if she also forgot them.”

  I tapped my pipes with supernatural speed, and the chaotic, many-layered sound created by the notes became the babbling of a brook.

  “She wanted to be a riverbed. She wanted to feel the water of the world flow over her. She knew that to trap the water of a river is to dam its flow, and it was the flow, not the water, that she sought. And as she wandered, directionless but not lost, through the northern forest, she met a cat.”

  Again I tapped out a melody on my pipes and drums, one that was echoed by the strings behind me, where it seemed to gain strength and shift into many different tunes.

  “‘Elf,’ said the cat. His voice was soft like velvet. ‘You are so far from home. Why wander?’

  “The woman regarded the cat. Once, she’d been a silver-haired girl on Anar, despondent for lack of a goddess’s love. But she was that girl no longer; she knew with whom she spoke. She simply asked: ‘Why not?’

  “The cat circled her with gleaming eyes, and she saw that his white fur rippled with a sheen of many colors. ‘Why not?’ he asked. ‘Why, because you are an elf. Your lot is to squint and scribble, to sculpt mana in high towers. Your lot is to fill these worlds with beauty.’

  “‘Not yet,’ said the elf. ‘For the nature of beauty is not yet known to me. I must study further.’

  “‘Study?’ asked the cat. ‘What can be studied? Tell me, what do you know of beauty?’

  “The woman sighed and looked fondly at the forest around them. ‘Beauty is the sudden rain that falls like a curtain which frays the sight and fills the ears to at long last slake the thirst of the world,’ she said. ‘It is known in the flesh. I do not wish to categorize or characterize it. Rather I find it where it is, and care not for its preconditions or components.’ Having said as much, the woman gasped, and pointed. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘A hummingbird.’”

  The music rose, became a mercurial tune that I let flow for a while.

  Then I continued.

  “The woman and the cat watched the bird awhile, and when the bird had gone, the cat said, ‘Come with me, little one. I will show you many new things; music that is fine and fluid and thrilling, music such as your divine ears have never heard.’”

  I paused, letting my mouth curl into an amused smiled, then said, “And the woman regarded him coolly. She was, perhaps, impossibly young, and far from the childhood she’d been in when the cat had last come to her. She thought herself a warrior—she fierce, and cunning, and she had just begun honing her mind in the art of conceiving great strategems.”

  I let silence descend upon us once more, pausing for a long time before repeating, “She knew with whom she spoke. Evershifting Olorai—God of the Wilds, of Natural Beauty, and of Change. She knew she was in danger, and she saw in that danger a worthwhile risk.”

  I tapped my drums for another moment. The sound of my wooden pipes was engulfed by a new melody, one that was exciting, overwhelming, domineering.

  “‘I will go with you,’ she said. And they went, vanishing into the northern forests of Hanaka. They ran together, hunted together, took many forms together. He showed her magic that only orcs knew, magic that only dragons knew, and even magic that would be hers and hers alone.”

  Then I smiled again, a fond and wistful smile. The next part of the story might have been my favorite.

  “Then, one day, she rose to greet the morning… and she bid him goodbye.”

  I tapped another melody against my instruments, another drum hit, all free of the influence of Olorai’s sound.

  “At first, Olorai was confused. She told him that their time together had been good, but that she sought new experiences. She told him that to always have him by her side was to see a world of many through one singular tint. She said she knew he’d understand.”

  The strings began to play a tense, fast tune behind me.

  “Then Olorai grew wroth. He spat. He condemned. He promised her that should she leave him now, he would forget her and she would never look upon him again.”

  “And she said: ‘So be it.’ And she left.”

  Again, I smiled. In a story, a hundred years can pass in the blink of eye. Even a hundred years of wondering if you’d made a terrible mistake.

  “A god’s word and a god’s power are not fickle, yet their nature may be. In a moment, the Shifting Lord is one thing, and in the next, another. He is not capricious or quick to anger, and yet he is, to the depths of his nature, always changing. The elf knew this. As such, she knew that Olorai would return to her. And she was right.”

  I tapped out another melody on my drums. The strings joined me almost immediately.

  “Almost a century later, she found him once more in the forest. Much had changed for the world, and for the elf, and even for the god. For Olorai now knew that she could leave him, could refuse him, and in some things they now stood eye to eye. He asked her to go with him, and she assented. They danced for more than a hundred years.”

  The music rose, more drums joining my own, many notes interweaving with the plainer music that had come before.

  “While the elves lived in their cloisters, ever-fearful of the greedy eyes of dragons, Olorai showed her a cosmos filled with wonders. In time, she brought new elves out of their secluded towers and into secluded glades, teaching them much of what he had taught her. And as these learned a new way to see the world, Olorai learned a new way of seeing them. Where before he cared only for the sad girl with the silver hair, now his affections extended toward the newly-born wild elves.”

  With a single strike of my drum, I signalled all my musicians to fall silent.

  “The woman saw all this and was satisfied,” I said. “They were still dancing, her and Olorai, and though they never moved toward it in a straight line, all the while they drew closer and closer to the culmination of the stratagem she had conceived when first she saw him in the woods.

  “In time, he saw what she wanted of him. He vanished, then reappeared soon after. She pleaded, and the argued, and she pleaded again. It went on for years, but Olorai couldn’t separate himself from the elves he’d grown so fond of.”

  I waited, letting the soft music behind me stretch out to fill many moments, letting time pass.

  “At last, one night, he called her too him. They sat upon the ledge of high mountain and looked down upon the calm waters of a moonlit sea. ‘We have done this for too long,’ he said. ‘I grow weary of indecision.’”

  I tapped out three short, quiet notes on my pipes.

  “She pleaded with him once again. ‘Assent,’ she said. ‘Become our god, and we will worship you forever.’”

  “Olorai looked forlorn. ‘I will assent,’ he told her. ‘But I fear now that you have not heeded a single word I have taught you.’”

  I paused, and soon the silence began to linger around me. I was frozen: I had to continue, but I didn’t want to say the words.

  At last I sighed. “The elf was jubilant. She exalted him. And when she’d finished with her celebrations, she asked him why he would say such a thing. Why accuse her of ignoring his teachings?”

  My eyes found Luthiel’s. “‘Because,’ he told her, ‘if you understood change, then you would understand its consequences.’”

  I spoke slowly, as if letting each word fall to the stone at my feet before uttering the next.

  “‘Nothing lasts forever.’”