“Olorai brought us far up the River of Realms, to a world that had been untouched by civilization. We called that wild world Maia. There, we made our home.”

  Maia. I could still remember the color of its sky: paler than Aranar, but a purer shade of blue.

  “We had endless gratitude toward our new god, Olorai, for this gift he had given us. His temples rose high. His priests were exalted. The music that we wrote to honor him and his works could be heard in every elvish settlement to be found. But the greatest sign of reverence to Olorai was in the wild elves themselves: where once they had been but a sliver of our people, fewer than one in a hundred, the years passed and their numbers grew and grew. The elves were learning to appreciate the beauty of nature—to fill themselves with the sight of what is rather than fill the world with what they think should be.”

  It had surprised me that neither Aerien nor Myra had been bothered to see so many of our people fundamentally changing their way of life. Neither of them had any interest in the woods themselves, and yet as elves set aside the ways laid out by Sabina to join me and my people in the deep woods, our royalty had simply bid them well.

  “Sabina saw all of this. In time, she found Queen Myrasciel in the dead of the night and admonished her. ‘Shall you forget the things which I taught you?’ she said. ‘The gifts which I gave you? Among the races of the cosmos, there are none who can boast of such favors as I have given you. You are immortal, and went forth from Anar knowing many things, seeing much. But now you turn your backs from me, intent on forgetting your purpose.’”

  As with the rest of my story, there was too much to tell in a single evening. Here, there was no way to communicate just how dangerous it was to incur the wrath of a god.

  But Myra had told me once that she’d known right away that Midnight Empress hadn’t come to punish us—if she had, she’d have appeared to me, not Myra.

  She’d wanted something else.

  “Myrasciel pleaded with the Midnight Empress at great length, making many assurances, hoping to show the Queen Most Beautiful that the elves had always been needful of her guidance. Through it all, our goddess was cold and distant. At last she left, taking the form of a sable unicorn to fly away into the night and giving no hint of what her judgement might be.”

  That was Myra, and it was one of the reasons I would always hold her in a higher regard than all other elves, save perhaps Narana. She’d spun the danger of divine retribution into a miracle that would last us for eternity.

  “She found her brother Olorai. No elf knows what was said between them. But as the sun rose they appeared to Myrasciel, and their divine decree was this: the elves would have two gods.

  “Then they passed above us, a sable unicorn and a dappled stag, running together for the first time in the history of all creation, their passage a sign of alliance. They would forever share the worship of the elves, whose hearts would hold two faiths together.”

  The music had swelled behind me as I spoke, strings and pipes to represent old Maia. I fell silent and let them play awhile, trying not to be stolen away by my memories, not to be captured by the blue sky and the soft sound of waves. Of Finuel, and our children’s laughing voices.

  Alcuon had been a better husband for me, that much I knew. But Finuel had been a perfect father, and I’d loved him for it even if it was never perfect between us.

  I carried on.

  “Sabina blessed our new world with a grand spell,” I said. “An enchantment whose like had never been seen in the cosmos. She crafted the Veil of Maia, and the path to our world was hidden to any who was not an elf and had not been given our right of passage. Even those who had once come to Maia could never find the way again, not without admittance.”

  We had been so blessed. The hidden world of the elves, exclusive and secretive. Invitations to study among us in the cities of Maia had themselves carried immense value, though Aerien had always seen to it that we were generous.

  “And for a time, we prospered as we never had before. Twelve hundred years. Twelve hundred summers. Twelve hundred celebrations of the flight of stag and the unicorn. Our wisdom grew. Our power increased. Our numbers multiplied. In that time, strife was only ever a passing thing, and the elves loved each other.”

  My eyes found Luthiel. Seriana. Zirilla. There had been cities on Maia. Once, I’d walked down streets so filled with elves that their voices had filled the air like the sound of a rushing river.

  And now there were a handful of us. Four.

  We’d left more behind, but the total was fewer than dozens. The days had been so pleasant to live, and yet now almost every part of the story hurt to tell.

  “I will pass over much. To us, the kingdoms of Hanaka seemed always to be in tumult, and yet a steady rhythm could be discerned through all their changing crowns.”

  Our hubris had been inexhaustible, in those days. No matter how many times the mortals showed us their quality, we clung to the stories that made us feel superior. From behind the Veil of Maia, we lived in plenty, and lived forever. Yet somehow we’d grown to look at the worldly wars of humanity as if they were beneath us on account of some special, elvish quality.

  “The dragons had brutalized and tyrannized the known realms as far back as our living memory went. They stemmed from a place far up the River, a place we could not reach, and there was nothing they would not spoil. In time, they besieged prosperous Hanaka. The humans beseeched us for aide in their war.”

  I paused, letting a silence gather in the air around me.

  “And we refused.”

  Should I have been more self-flagellating? After all, it was me who had turned so many minds against the idea of helping them. My arguments were simple.

  Elvish blood was immortal, was invaluable, and yet we were to spend it in defense of mortalkind? No—whatever help we would give to our oldest allies would have to come from behind the safety of the Veil, would be for the generations to come, not for those who suffered now.

  “The dragons were powerful, but their alliances were weak and chaotic. Aerien and Mysaciel sought to make peace without bloodshed, sought to show the value of strifeless prosperity to the dragons. Heeding not the warnings of humanity, they sought friendships with those dragons who promised to yoke their kind into peace, once they attained power—seeking to do to the dragons what we had once done with the humans of Hanaka.”

  I’d been a dissenter in that matter, too. My fervent belief had been that we had no hope, none whatsoever, of guiding the dragons into some form of greater society. There was no comparison to be drawn between them and humankind.

  They were immortal, and fiercely powerful. What was more, we had no idea how to travel the River as far as they could. They had savaged the races of the cosmos since time immemorial, and we had only the word of dragons to trust that their politics worked in the way they claimed.

  But Aerien and Myrasciel had seen hope. They thought that from our place of perfect safety, we could at least cause enough chaos amidst the dragons to alleviate some of the war they had brought to Hanaka.

  It was a more reasonable expectation, even if I’d still disagreed.

  “But a hand extended to a dragon in friendship is a hand extended too far,” I said, letting my voice be harsh. “To trust too much in hoping for a better way is perhaps the noblest form of folly—and yet it is still folly. The dragons, once brought to Maia, wrought destruction on a scale that we never could have dreamed. They ripped apart Sabina’s gift, the Veil of Maia, and their kind descended upon us with all the force they could muster.”

  Even now, I could hear the screams of a people that had thought they were safe forever as dragons descended from the sky to burn them alive.

  How had the dragons broken the Veil? Even now, we hadn’t settled on a theory. There were half a dozen methods that would have done it, and in the end it didn’t matter which one they’d used.

  “Our cities were sacked, and elves burned. And when it was done, the dragons left: they cared not for weak Maia, a world that the River fed little in the way of essence and whose treasures they had already stolen.”

  Silence. I was still angry when I thought of it. I was always angry when I thought about it. I’d fought so hard to save my children… and only saved two.

  “They left us alone, thinking they were finished with us, and this was their folly.”

  Drums began to measure a steady beat, one whose pace was like the ticking of a clock.

  A familiar theme—Hashephel.

  “For in ages past, long before Olorai had ever embraced the elves as his own and led us to our new world, Hashephel had spent almost all his waking hours searching for a remedy to our plight—and he’d never stopped.”

  Fifteen hundred years. That was how long Hashephel had spent working out how to do what he’d needed to. An unthinkable number of [Diamond] keys had been spent in experiments—until at last he’d done it.

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  “Maia was weak in essence, but this meant its innermost elementals were weak, easily bound by our mages. The depths of the world were open to them, and rich with many gemstones. The dragons had stolen the gems, true—but Hashephel still had a thousand years of aspects. With mastery beyond anything that had been seen in the mortal realms, Hashephel crafted three powerful artifacts; the manahearts.”

  I was purposefully leaving something out, of course, and that was Sabina. Hashephel never would have managed to create something as potent as the manahearts if not for the fact that a goddess had taught us the secrets of the cosmos when the other races had yet to be born.

  I looked back up into the red light of the mists as I thought of her. She was watching. Had to be.

  “There were three manahearts,” I continued. “One for King Aerien, one for Queen Myrasciel, and one for me. I will pass over the endless tales I could tell of the conflict; with the power of the manahearts, we scoured our world of the few dragons who had remained, then put ourselves in service of humanity once more, waging a bloody war that would last for decades to at last defeat the dragons. They receded from the known cosmos, retreating up the River of Realms to their unknown source, and we at last looked forward to another age of peace and prosperity.”

  Or rather, some of us had. I had wanted more in the way of vengeance. I would never be satisfied until I’d found their safe places and burned them all to ash.

  “But peace was not to be.”

  The music ceased. Silence reigned; there was no fitting theme for an apocalypse.

  “The Veil of Maia was gone. And though all knew of the power we wielded, they also knew its source. The manaheart inspired covetousness. What was more, two had been lost in the conflict, and it would take ages for Hashephel to gather the aspects he needed to create them again.”

  “We sought new ways of protecting ourselves. Enchanting our entire world, as Sabina had once done. Delving more deeply, so as to hasten the creation of new manahearts. Conjuring creatures from places we did not understand. Our victories, our powers had made us proud. We did not dwell on the risks we were taking.”

  In reality, we’d all dwelt on the risks… but only those that the others were taking. I’d wanted to delve deep, Myrasciel had wanted to remake the Veil, and others had wanted still crazier things: enchantments to route more essence from the River to Maia, warp spells that would convey one from world to world, legions of reproducing constructs to harvest essence from the sea….

  Insanity, all of it.

  But what Hashephel had accomplished had been the greatest of great works among our people. It had made so many of us hungry—we’d seen the glory in his labor of long years, seen that miracles could be made by elven hands, and we’d thought ourselves on the cusp of a new age, one where the manahearts were but the first of elven wonders.

  “And in time,” I said quietly. “We broke the world.”

  I let the silence stretch out into a seeming infinity. At least then, we’d known why the gods had not protected us. It was our hubris.

  “This, too, I will not speak much of. It hurts me. The oceans rose up to swallow everything. A freezing wind encompassed all. And Maia, sweet Maia, was severed from the River of Realms itself.”

  Again, I paused. I had to. The words came slow, hard, and quiet.

  “But Aerien, our King Aerien, who himself had no part in our doom but who had preferred the path of caution, saved half a hundred thousand elves at the cost of his manaheart—and his life. There were none like him, and never shall be again.”

  We had decided it, in his wake. He’d been the only one to seek no new great works; he’d had the wisdom to say that what was gone was gone, and that the manaheart would have to suffice.

  We’d passed it off as arrogance. He was the King, and he was the only elf left with a manaheart. Of course he hadn’t wanted things to change.

  And then he’d died for all our mistakes. When the cracks of discord were already spreading, we’d chosen that the elves would never again have a king.

  “Myrasciel left us in despair, vanishing to an unknown place. Once again, the humans of Hanaka took us in—but now we felt more vulnerable than ever. For the humans had grown stronger, but we were much diminished, and all creatures of the cosmos seemed to covet the secret of the manahearts, even if we had lost each one.”

  It had been the worst of all possible worlds.

  Everyone else knew that we knew the method to create artifacts of immense power, but we had none of them to defend ourselves with.

  Worst of all, we had every reason to hate each other. Everyone we’d known had drowned, killed by none other than ourselves.

  We’d thought we were moving toward a new golden age. But instead?

  “We fell to an age of strife,” I said. “The high, the deep, and the wild elves lost sight of their bonds with one another. Blame for the loss of Maia fell like leaves in autumn. Elf was set against elf; blood answered blood and our people, spread thin across the realms, seemed to find no respite from endless death.”

  I did my best not to look at Hassina. My guess was that near everyone was thinking of her story, now. I knew I was.

  “Then came Narana,” I continued. “At great cost, she brought the three pieces of shattered elvenkind together again, then found our Queen Myrasciel and pulled her from her sorrows.”

  Again, I was skipping over events that historians had studied for lifetimes. But there was a method to my pace, a purpose. Time needed to start moving faster, now.

  Besides. If the children knew one thing about our history, they would know the story of Narana.

  “As the years passed,” I continued, “we saw our chance. For in the wake of the war with the dragons, Hanaka had grown strong. Refugees that had fled to the humans in the first war had flourished, and though it was not done without strife, new peoples had been welcomed into the world’s many nations. There were elves there too—for some of us had never left our old places, training mages serving as sages and viziers across their lands.”

  Hanaka had never been strong in essence, but its lack had driven the humans to a sort of rugged ingenuity. Mages with a decade of adulthood might sometimes think of a new use for magic that had eluded our archmages for millenia.

  “Their greatest pride was in their shipcraft,” I said. “A time came when the Hanakans sailed farther and faster along the River of Realms than anyone else in the known cosmos. They pushed outward in search of new realms. They explored. And in time, they came upon the mightiest world that anyone in the cosmos had yet seen. A world steeped in power-granting essence, and resting at the mouth of a current so impassible that even now no ship can traverse it.”

  A new theme began to play behind me, weaving into the music and then overtaking it. It was made of drums and pipes, was deep and slow and resonant.

  “Thanaxes. The home of the dragons who had terrorized all other realms for as long as living memory.”

  Oh, how grateful I had been to the humans who had found it. How I had stoked the fires of vengeance with tales of their fallen ancestors, of their cities burning as the labor of generations was stolen away.

  In the end, I got exactly what I wanted.

  “A new war raged for centuries. It was a war of ambition, a war of vengeance, and a war of spite. It was war on such a scale as had never been seen. The resolve of the mortals was inexhaustible. The armadas that sailed the River of Realms were tenfold as great as any that had come before them. And the elves joined them, no longer in our youth.”

  Now the music rose to something louder and greater than it had been all night. We were in the greatest of our military glories, the war that had cost us the most, gained us the most, and taken the last of my three children.

  “Furnished both with power granted to us by the other races and power stolen from the dragons, Hashephel crafted three new manahearts. The dragons were mighty, equal to any mortal who stood against them—but they could not stand against Myrasciel, Luthiel, or me. In the end, Thanaxes fell—and was taken.”

  We had been like gods ourselves. The [Arcane Champion], [Divine Champion], and [Primeval Champion], each of us making war with all our power.

  And in the end, I had clasped hands with the greatest of human kings in the ruins of the most opulent palace in the known cosmos. We had celebrated for what felt like years. The treasures we’d conquered had taken decades to count… and there was enough for all.

  We had done it; after centuries we had done it. The mythical homeworld of dragonkind was ours.

  I had seen to it that my deeds were so mighty and fearsome that any race or nation who looked upon the elves with greed in their hearts would be cowed by the length of my shadow.

  Luthiel saw to it that the magical secrets of the dragons were taken and kept in elvish archives, ours forever.

  Myrasciel had ascended into the heavens to take her place at Kalak’s side as the greatest of his heralds.

  There were none like us, and never would be again.

  The last of my family had died and left me alone.

  If I’d had a year to speak to them about the second war with the dragons, I wouldn’t have had enough time.

  The music faded, became a simpler theme played on a flute.

  “Now Thanaxes had a gentler twin. She was an ocean world possessing a few small archipelagos, and her name was Aranar.”

  We’d also had to drive the dragons from it, of course. And unlike Thanaxes, where many dragons had made alliances or capitulated in ways that let them continue to live amidst their world’s new masters, the elves had not suffered a single one

  Tt had been my decision. With Myrasciel gone and the war won, a new order had taken root: myself, Luthiel, and Hashephel had the strongest hands in guiding the elves. Hashephel abstained from almost all decisions that weren’t directly economic, and Luthiel almost always deferred to me in matters of war.

  In the matter of dragons, my mind was simple: No dragons. None.

  Gone.

  “In friendship, Aranar was gifted by the new Thanaxians to us—and us alone. We agreed that we would forever grant the greater share of its riches to the Thanaxians, for Aranar, like Thanaxes, was bathed in more essence than any other realms in the cosmos.”

  We’d also learned, by then, that our wealth wasn’t contingent on how much of a world’s essence we were entitled to. Letting the humans hunt our oceans while we kept almost every piece of land for ourselves did nothing to stop us from becoming fabulously wealthy as a people.

  The real purpose of our deal with the humans was simple: it gave them something to lose if they should ever come for us and our manahearts. Too many of their leadership enjoyed the wealth to be had in our oceans. The short-term loss in prospects that a war would bring would last the whole of their lives.

  And so we’d had every reason to solve all our disputes peacefully.

  “On Aranar,” I said. “We prospered. Our wisdom grew. Our power increased. Our numbers multiplied. And we did not forget the teachings of Narana. For two thousand years, we stayed together.”

  “Two thousand summers. Two thousand celebrations of flight of the stag and the unicorn.”

  The music stopped suddenly. Silence came over all. In the dark, I spoke.

  “And then, one day… a Doom came to Aranar.”

  I looked out at the assembled elves. My people.

  “To us.”