“Here we are,” I said to the gathered elves. “Here we stand with all our history at our backs. We have survived the breaking of worlds, but in truth, not all of us survives: each of us has lost some measure of our innermost self to the Doom.”

  I held raised my arms to either side of me, raising my voice. “And yet we who remain are together tonight, unbroken. It has always been our fate to bear memory, to see beauty, and to make music.”

  I ran a hand across the surface of my drum. At long last.

  “And the time has come for new music.”

  I struck the drum and reached out with my magic and with the bond, orchestrating both the mana and the many elves around me. The music began fast and chaotically, so that the instruments felt as if they were straining to come together to form an ordered sound, the ear having to strain just a little to hear music instead of noise.

  The rhythm was kept by the beating of my great, booming drum, bringing it together, guiding it….

  Caverns had been cut into the walls of the rock around us, and while one day they would be a part of our settlement, for now they stored the many acres of mana-infused vine that we’d grown along the cliffside, then harvested.

  At my prompting, the decay mages in the caverns, led by Ravinal, began to consume the vines. Their channelers began to slowly channel the mana toward us.

  As they did this, two dozen windcallers brought Eli’s carcass down out of one of the higher caverns, resting it on an open stretch of stone that we’d left by the empty pool behind me, positioning it so that Eli’s head hung over the edge of the pool.

  The music tightened as Eli touched the ground, the chaotic sounds drawing together into something cleaner, more concerted, a new set of sounds which revealed to the ear all the hidden sophistication that the old ones had contained.

  The stones beneath our feet were layered three deep, carved on both sides with the runes of my spell—runes that would not only bring the mana inward, but shape it as it moved. As I pulled the mana toward the pool behind me, it would be focused and composed into each phase of the spell.

  Valir and Mishlo stepped forward to flank Eli’s massive, beaked head. Valir drew a ritual knife, then cut into the carcass’s neck, severing an artery. He touched his hand to the place above the cut, using his blood magick to draw the still-fresh blood from my enemy, letting it flow out into the pool at our feet.

  Mishlo was with him, ready to force the carcass to regenerate some of its blood, ensuring we had enough for my ritual. The regeneration would dilute some of the blood’s magical potency—but Eli had been a small, powerful creature. The blood would be far more potent than it needed to be, even after Mishlo’s intervention.

  The mana moved inward as the blood flowed, many elves channeling it out of the caverns and through the circles that I had drawn. It was compressed, structured as it flowed through my runes, changing character each time it was brought forward into a new circle.

  Half an hour passed as the pool filled and the mana moved inward.

  We had only so much time. The nature of primeval mana was to move and flow faster than the other forms. The longer we spent manipulating it, the more of it we would lose. And the mana grew denser and denser as it moved inward, growing more and more agitated.

  The mana was soon to reach the central circle of my spell—the blood pool. There it would be as dense as any mana I had ever channeled, a knot of seething power of such intensity that yoking it to my spell would be an insane feat of spellcasting.

  But that was what needed to be done.

  My drums thundered as I moved around them, turning inward to face the pool of blood. The rest of the elves had controlled the mana up to that point, from the necromancers and decay-mages in the caverns to the rest of the orchestra in the second-to-last circle, but the innermost circle was mine alone.

  One mind, one will had to finish the spell.

  I began to channel.

  My hands blurred through the air above my drum, my mind shaping the spell.

  Half my skills had been replaced in order to give me the power over mana that I needed to move this much. It rushed in from all sides, and I guided into the pool of blood at my feet, forming it into the last phase of the spell.

  As the channelers at the outer circles completed their task in moving the last of the mana inward, they turned their attentions to the blood pool, holding the dense mana there, restraining it while I filled the pool with even more.

  But I paid them no heed. My thoughts were an unfocused rush, the music and mana flowing through me as I lost all perception of time.

  I wove the spell as I pushed the mana forward. The music was my focus, the story was my focus, the runes were my focus and the elves, all of us, were my focus: the spell would use it all.

  Blood and mana, essence and keys.

  Soon there was nobody shaping the mana but me. Soon every elf, not just the channelers, was reaching forward with their claim to hold the raw power in the pool of blood.

  Soon the last of the mana flowed through me, and I stared down into the pool of blood as it churned and boiled, glowing with faint, multicolored light.

  My drumbeat ceased, and the music fell silent in a moment.

  I stepped toward the pool, knelt, and touched the surface of the blood. In an instant, millions of essence and more than five thousand [Primeval 3] keys were transferred into the pool.

  The blood stilled, and the light became a faint shimmering, evenly distributed across its surface.

  The spell was complete.

  I stood and turned to face the elves. Valir approached beside me, carrying a runed ceramic cup.

  “It is done,” I announced.

  I took the cup from Valir. “Yetheren,” I said. “Kalara. Bring forth Vashan.”

  Vashan was the youngest elf in the colony—a white-haired boy who was barely two. His father, Yetheren, carried him to the fountain’s side, his wife standing at his side.

  I knelt as they set Vashan before me.

  “I get to go first!” he told me.

  I smiled at him. “You do, Vashan. Are you ready?”

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  He nodded. I dipped the cup into the water and held it out to him with a bloody arm.

  Vashan didn’t display a shred of uncertainty as I held the cup to his mouth, grabbing it with both hands and drinking down several gulps of the enchanted blood.

  Normally drinking blood was hardly pleasant, and getting a two-year-old to do it would indeed be a trial… but my spell had changed the blood into something that an elf, incompletely modified by Kalak’s spell, would instinctively know they needed.

  The spell would also invigorate him with an abundance of life magic. Any wounds he he had would have been healed, and any tiredness would have been dispelled. Nobody would be sleeping, not tonight.

  Vashan stopped, his eyes widening as he no doubt felt the new power flooding through him. I set the cup back down at the edge of the pool, then rose to clasp each of his parent’s hands.

  “Thank you, Lux Irovex,” Yetheren said with a quiet fervor.

  I nodded, and they moved away to admit the next-youngest child. Zirilla and Valir were quietly instructing everyone, moving them about so that we could do things in the proper order.

  Everyone wanted a few moments with me at the edge of the pool of blood, and they got them. It was going to take us the whole of the evening to have everyone drink, and I didn’t require silence. Hushed conversations began to fill the air around me. Soon after that, Hassina directed some musicians to begin to play as Eli’s carcass was carried away.

  Very soon, the children who drank were old enough to both communicate the change that had taken place and communicate its importance. The babble around me became urgent and awed as they elves learned what was happening.

  I ignored all of this, continuing to oversee the children as they drank of the primeval blood.

  Soon the last of the children of Ellistara had drunk. The youngest adult elves had formed a more orderly queue, not needing to approach with their parents. They were faster, probably realizing that it would take twelve hours to feed the blood to all two and a half thousand of us even if they were fairly fast.

  They passed the cup from one to another, each of their faces filling with awe as the change came upon them.

  Soon enough Hassina was stepping up to the pool. “Is it true, what they’re saying?” She asked the question in a whisper, though she had to know the answer.

  “Drink, Hassina,” I told her, passing her the cup.

  Soon she was wiping her bloody mouth and staring at me with incredulous eyes. “I didn’t think it was possible,” she said. “The gift of the children, perhaps—but this?”

  I only smiled.

  As the night wore into early morning, food and water were brought, and the music grew louder. The elves I served grew older, and their bearing reflected this: they each took the cup, bowed their heads, uttered a formal-sounding phrase to mark the occasion, then drank.

  Soon there were only a few of us left, and everyone knew what was happening.

  Zirilla took the cup. “You’re going to lose your edge, Aziriel,” she told me. I laughed, and she drank.

  Next was Seriana. “It worked, then,” she said softly, meeting my eyes as she took the cup. “Never have I seen such a spell.” She drank, then bowed her head to me. “Lux Irovex.”

  She passed the cup back to me, and I filled it and passed it the man at her side—to Luthiel.

  He said nothing, but his eyes held all. His wonder at what we had accomplished tonight. His sorrow at knowing he would not be by my side in the days to come. His pain at knowing that there was no peace yet between us, and his hope at knowing that one day there would be—had to be.

  He drank, then passed me the cup. “My sister,” he said, bowing his head.

  I took the cup, then dipped it into the now-shallow pool of blood, rose, and drank. I could taste the power in it as the spell took hold, surging through my body.

  Then the Verse told me what I knew it had told every other elf already:

  You gain 1 [*Primeval 3] skill core.

  I turned, standing on the stone rim of the pool, then raised my hand for silence.

  All that I had intended had come pass—except for one thing. I resisted the urge to glance back at the sky. The mists were just beginning to lighten above us.

  Now would be the time. My ritual was done. This was the only moment in which everyone would be present, their attention focused on one point—me—but an interruption wouldn’t interfere with the night’s main proceedings.

  I tried to hide my anticipation as I began to speak. “My people,” I said. “It is finished. A new world lies all about us, and with this new power we will—”

  Two thin bolts of cool, white light streaked down from the mists above us to strike the ground at my feet.

  Black arrows, each tipped with diamond heads and fletched with feathers that were spun from glass, stuck cleanly into the stone at my feet.

  It was her. My mother-creator. The Midnight Empress, the Queen Most Beautiful, and the Lady of Sable Graces had made herself known.

  I paused, looking down upon them and resisting the urge to smile. I had to act like this was a surprise, after all.

  But this was exactly what I wanted to happen.

  After all, if another elf had told my story—Luthiel, Seriana, or even Hassina—there would have been many differences.

  They wouldn’t tell of how harsh Sabina was in rejecting me when I was just a child.

  Instead they might say that an artists work sometimes escapes their intent, that it grows and acts beyond how they expected, and that Sabina let me go for this very reason, conscious that even the most well-intended art sometimes grows to be wild.

  Another elf might say that it was well-known to the Midnight Empress who that silver-haired girl was speaking with, and where their conversations might one day bring them. They would suggest that in her wisdom, Sabina had played a long, many-layered game, and that this why we’d eventually gained two gods and a new world.

  Surely they would say that our capacity to be filled with the beauty of the world was not a vacancy that Sabina had given us by accident—that our ability to see through Olorai’s eyes was a goddess-given gift.

  And without question, they would treat her as the true source of the manahearts, and Hashephel as her agent. For she had given us not only the foundational knowledge of the arcane, but a love of it that led us to seek ever more skill with magic.

  Hashephel had spent more than a thousand years trying to bring that knowledge together to create something godly. He’d seemingly wasted enough [Diamond] keys to buy a kingdom many times over in the endless experiments that he’d undertaken before finally succeeding.

  And the immortality and skill which had enable this had, at their root, been given to us by Sabina.

  Sabina, who had to have been watching from her place in the heavens while I spoke and undermined her very place in our history.

  The message I had sent her would be clear enough.

  Can you see me, Sabina? It’s mine; all mine. I write our history now, No Aerien, Myrasciel, Luthiel or Hashephel to balance it. I lead the elves of this world, and I do it without equals.

  Me; the child who you scorned. I never wanted to be your favorite: only to be as loved as my least-loved siblings.

  And now, in my history, your role is much diminished.

  After all, Sabina knew that I had cause to feel abandoned by her. My strategy relied on this: it was essential that Sabina believe that I was doing what I was doing either out of deliberate spite or because long years of resentment had let me convince myself it was all true.

  My strategy relied on her not seeing that I was goading her into an intervention.

  She couldn’t strike me down: the elves would forsake her forever. But primeval power was suffused into our very being, now, and the child who loved her least of all, the child who’d first forsaken her, was now free to lead them along any path I desired.

  She had to do something to stop it—and punishment would only undermine her further.

  Sabina had to send us divine aide.

  And so I looked at the ground before me. The elves stared with me, silent.

  Two arrows. One for Hassina, who already stood near the front of the crowd.

  “Your Holiness,” I said, my eyes finding Hassina’s. I nodded down to the arrow.

  Slowly, Hassina stepped forward, knelt before the arrow, and gingerly plucked it from the ground.

  I watched her eyes widen as she held it, heard her sharp intake of breath. A god-granted epiphany is no small experience. I knew that. Olorai had given me one in old Anar, when he’d touched my head in the form of a bird.

  Hassina rose. Turned. “The second arrow is for Luthiel,” she said, “and Luthiel alone.”