Chapter 3 #2
Sunlight drips through the liquid green canopy, painting the forest floor emerald.
I arch my brow at him, and he smiles. His eye color migrates from blue to green, which communicates his contentment and peace.
Our eye colors never remain one shade for long, thanks to the centuries-old curse on our people.
No one knows the origin of this curse, only that it applies strictly to elvenkind.
As do the laws regarding laughter and our curse to relay only the truth.
I can’t imagine what our people could have done to earn such restrictive punishments, but others have theories. The late queen Karmin might’ve had a contagious laugh that wrecked the king’s heart, so the king punishes creatures with the prettiest laughter if they tried to outshine her.
As silly or serious as the reason might be, the law makes protecting our people that much more difficult.
I’m worse at concealing my emotions than Pluto is. I bet my eyes are still a bright, electric blue. The anxiety and focus haven’t yet left my system, but I’m sure with the distraction of today’s hunt, my eyes will drift toward a calm green.
“It stopped raining,” Pluto says with a thin smirk. He glances at the hut’s opening, then at me with an intensity, a hunger. He’s as ready as I am to abandon our posts once the kids are safe with the sages. “You want to show me how it’s done again, E?”
Of course, I do. If I can’t spill fairy blood, hunting is the next best option.
And I have the exact skills required to stake out a nest of vicious klopses .
They burrow in the tallest of oaks, where the wind chills and hardens branches into brittle twigs.
Only the swiftest of our kind can move so carefully, and few can with my rate of success.
I stand, spin my knife once, then tuck it into an old leather sheath strapped around the thickest part of my thigh.
My forest-colored braies are ragged from repetitive wear, but they still conceal my weapon perfectly.
I tighten my waist belt and adjust my oversized moss-stained tunic, then grin at Pluto, who is now tapping his giant foot at the entrance.
We pass the sages dressed in white as they comb through the elven children’s damp, colorful hair.
Matron Olive is the sage who cared for me when I was orphaned.
I nod at her and she sighs, her eyes a stormy teal.
My smile flattens at the concern knotting her features together.
I reach behind me to link my arm with Pluto’s.
Immediate comfort.
When I returned to Nwatalith to be a protector, I hadn’t expected everything to be different. But a lot has changed. My village is one of the more heavily settled communities, so I no longer recognize every face. I’d be very lonely if it weren’t for Pluto. And Matron Olive, I suppose.
We distance ourselves from the village, then idle around a few older oak trees surrounded by winking Aldor-berry bushes, a sign we’ve discovered an ill-frequented part of the wood around Nwatalith.
We sniff the air for the telltale scent of wet hair and metal—the disturbing musk of adult klopses.
Now will be the perfect time to catch one of the fuzzy black creatures, before the clouds make way for the day’s blinding blue sky.
Klopses have one of the richest eluviam in all of Aldorin, and they’re nearly impossible to trace, even with our keen sense of smell. They have footfalls almost as light as ours, so any tracks their three-toed feet leave behind are often destroyed in the slightest breeze.
They also aren’t visible in sunlight. Which makes hunting them all the more difficult.
And annoying.
After two long hours of bending our backs beneath the trees and staring into the hypnotizing canopies above, our waiting pays off.
A blur of black flashes across my peripheral vision. I whip around, my hand flinching to my dagger. But maybe I’m seeing things. It has been two hours.
My eyes dart around, desperate for another glimpse of black fur.
A sigh parts my lips, but I don’t breathe, because sure enough, winking in and out of the shadows, a fuzzy spherical creature scurries along a tree’s branches with twitchy movements.
“He’s leading us right to his nest,” I say in a voice barely above a whisper. I point at the thick, moss-covered wood. Pluto rolls his eyes, but his toothy grin betrays his annoyance.
With a step back, I leap, clear half the tree’s height, and land silently on a broad branch. Sudden, disturbed birdsong whistles through the air, and I have to restrain myself from cursing it.
Klopses are sensitive to sound, and if a robin costs me this rare chance, I’ll be having plucked bird for dinner. And, frankly, I hate fowl.
“Careful, now,” Pluto says almost inaudibly from below, hovering his hands in the air like he’s somehow able to control my balance. The confidence has left his voice, and his eyes are, again, bright blue.
He isn’t worried about the height of the climb. We regularly travel long distances by gliding atop Aldorin’s lush treetops. No, he’s worried I might disturb the klopse nest when I find it, and that wouldn’t be good news for either one of us.
My feet grip the branch beneath me, wrapping around the bark like claws.
I spring upward, and the wind guides me to another sturdy branch.
The trunk is quickly thinning, and as I near the top, the air grows cooler and the sun becomes a threatening beacon lurking behind wispy clouds. Just a little farther .
The upper air bends in waves, reacting to the swirling strength of my eluviam.
The cool tendrils lace around my fingers as though alive—no, they are alive.
Everything in the Aldorin forest is alive with the ancient pure magic of our goddess.
Her presence flows abundantly, from the roots of the trees to the gusts of wind clearing the clouds from the skies.
I hop up, now a few feet from the top, then straddle a splintery branch and inch toward the thin trunk. Klopse burrows would be indistinguishable from normal tree knots if their sky-scraping location didn’t give them away.
My arms stiffen as I raise them to the tree’s skeleton. I close my eyes to concentrate so my fingers can sense even the slightest magical pulse. In the silence, my body absorbs the energy of the forest below and the sky above.
Warm, welcoming, beautiful.
My fingers twitch. When I open my eyes, a flickering black vortex unfurls, and greed possesses me to force my hands into the cold void.
Energy swells from within and prickles my arms, then flows into my starving eluviam.
The feeling is overwhelming, perfect, addictive, and dangerous.
It’s easy to get sucked into something so pure and powerful, especially when it can make you feel so whole . The magic pulsating from the portal intertwines with my inner being, tempting me to become one with it. But I know better.
I force a glance down at Pluto. With needles for eyes, he watches my every movement.
When I was younger, he’d catch me every time I fell.
Though he beats me in age by a few years at twenty-four, he’s been more than a brother to me.
He’s also my best friend. His concern for me is genuine, burning in his cerulean eyes like the flames of hellfire.
He won’t stop me. He knows better than to interfere with a hunt this risky. But if I fall, he will catch me. That, I am sure of.
My body hums with the energy from the klopse burrow, and my eluviam pulses like an extra heart. I’m overflowing with pure magical energy, almost to the point of intoxication.
Careful to keep my thoughts sharp, I brush my hands together.
Dust from the tree sparks in the air, and then I reach up, stretching my fingers so the glorious overcast sky splits between them in shadowy gray slivers.
With power like this, I wonder if I’d be able to move the earth as our long-passed Queen Nadia once could.
The thought brings a smile to my face, a wiggly, dumb smile that disrespects the sanctity of our long-dead monarch. I shouldn’t be thinking myself capable of performing magic only she was able to use.
Pluto hisses loudly from the base of the tree, indicating something has gone wrong. He wouldn’t otherwise blow my cover.
With a steady breath, I toss my head over my shoulder.
My heart stutters.
Hundreds of juvenile klopses run along his arms and legs. A storm of them swarms the ground around him in undulating waves. They are like fuzzy black balls of soot and leaves, and as they continue to jump from the ground onto him, the more and more he starts to resemble a horrific beast.
I turn my head back to the burrow, my chest tightening and my knife searing through its sheath, itching to rest in my palm. To swallow some of the raw energy for itself.
I bite my lip. There’s so much untainted magic just begging to be harvested. I’d be loath to leave it alone.
Pluto curses below, and my heart sways.
He is far more important to me than this.
I twist away from the trunk and begin my descent, eyeing each branch briefly for stability. The limbs barely move under my feather-light weight, and I’m at the bottom in less than half the time it takes me to scale the tree.
I reach for Pluto, and he stretches his arms stiffly toward me. Our hands touch, and the sizzling energy from the burrow leaves my body to enter his.
The klopses flee to my body as though repelled by the energy now filling Pluto’s eluviam. Though they’re nearly weightless, their little toe pads graze my exposed arms, legs, and face. I remain as still as I can while Pluto finds a way to get them off of me.
Klopses get violent when provoked, and the young ones are no exception to this fact.
“Thanks,” Pluto says with a huff. His eyes shift from black to cobalt as he shivers from the magic’s stimulation.