The young Elfqueen stooped to pick up the ruined leather collar as she touched her neck, pulling away her fingers to examine the blackening, sticky blood. So that was why Linza’s arrow didn’t take her life. It had struck the metal and leather, robbing it of lethal velocity. The everstone had come free of its fitting and she couldn’t find a plain looking stone in the middle of the woods. She had four discarded bows and their quiver mates. One pair was hers, the rest needed returned to their owners. They would need them for the journey.
She felt so much taller now, though really fifteen centimeters on top of her diminutive frame still left her incredibly petite. More than its fair share had gone to her legs and if her heart could break through the numbness she would take joy in the lengthening of her stride. Maybe once she was free from the battlefield. Her body felt stronger and her arms and legs had become shapelier from the added strength. Her breasts were twice as large, which sounded like a drastic change but double next to nothing was still close to nothing. Something was different in her face, she could feel the muscles were shifted but without a reflection to examine she couldn’t yet know of the new tone her jaws, cheeks, and elsewhere had gained. She also didn’t yet know that her chlorophyll colored irises now held bright emerald colored individual striations.
The Elfqueen reached to prepare her bow when she spotted the silhouette of a few new figures but before she pulled it free from her shoulder she recognized the young man. “Isaac…” Jin, Oleksandra, and Astoreth were there too. They were solemnly examining the scene of her battle. Three dead Elves, all just a few years older than she was, laid out in a row.
Isaac turned to face the voice and saw a face that belonged on an Elf when he had last seen her. A pensive, dour, hard face with pain filled eyes. “Neasa?” The Elfqueen lifted the collar Isaac had given her to avoid the very thing that happened in spite of the intent.
She’d been afraid. Afraid of facing the reality of the situation. She’d accepted that what had happened wasn’t her fault but in accepting that she then lied to herself that she was free of any obligations or attachments to the court. The court had been her home and her home was still ruled by an evil tyrant. The evil tyrant would never be content only taking one home.
And that usurper was sending formerly good people out to take the homes and lives from other good people. Neasa knelt next to the three bodies. Linza’s bow and quiver were tucked in the arms of Linza. Gerd’s bow and quiver into the arms of Gerd. Daireann’s bow and quiver to Daireann. She’d already laid the husks of the three Elves’ Thorn Cutlasses across their chests.
When she had given in to her rage, when she began to fight with a strength she wasn’t even sure where it had been residing, when she acted without thinking and was reduced to a purely animal state of kill or be killed, power exploded from the earth beneath her feet. It changed her and struck down the three huntresses at the same time, skewering their hearts, lungs, and viscera while breaking their bones. At least, that’s what Neasa was telling herself. When she really thought about it, when she stared deeply at every wound, she could remember making each and every strike. She didn’t want to remember, but she could. Vaguely and yet with crystal clarity.
She’d done what she could to lay them down respectfully.
The last step in the burial for an Elven warrior, at least as far as Neasa understood the tradition, required seeds. She stroked the stem of a shrub seedling from the spring. It drank in her power and offered its progeny to her. Neasa delicately placed a seed between the lips of the three huntresses. Then she rose and took a step back before pouring her boundless sylvan energies, compared to what they’d been as an Elf, into the dormant seeds. Stems and roots slowly stretched into the air before they wrapped the bodies with their tools of war and gently pulled them down into the ground. “I need to end this madness,” Neasa’s quaking, tiny voice conveyed to no one in particular.
Isaac put a hand on the Elfqueen’s shoulder. She flinched but then leaned into the touch. He couldn’t think of what to say but he wanted to help her.
Neasa seized him about the middle and buried her face into his chest. She started to squeeze with all of her strength but a warning in her mind showed her that she would break Isaac’s ribs if she wasn’t more careful, so she hugged with more care. “I couldn’t stop thinking about you. The entire time I was fighting, it was for me, but it was also for you.” She looked up at him and the dangerous and hard edge to her countenance was almost entirely missing. Her eyes were hypnotic, like Chandrakanta’s but limited to the verdant portion of the visible spectrum. Like staring up at sun rays breaking through a forest canopy in the summer. Her face was etched with confusion and she looked ready to say more but a new voice interrupted.
“Markiyan! Freshman Cadet Isaac Markiyan!” Isaac broke away from Neasa’s gaze. He could feel the desire to ignite his passions but there wasn’t any more fuel. He was on the verge of collapse as it was, only the fact that he wasn’t somewhere safe kept him upright and on his feet. The individual calling out to him was a sergeant. One he hadn’t seen before. Actually, she didn’t have the sergeant rank tabs, nor the academy emblem on her uniform. She might have been from a different branch of the Vorona Corps. In fact he was pretty sure the A-bra was from Logistics. “I’m to take you to Dnipro for an emergency debriefing, please put up all of your pokegirls and come with me.”
Neasa sighed and stepped away from her male, discreetly nodding her head as Isaac lifted her pokeball. The Elfqueen was recalled and then Jin and Oleksandra were stored. The A-bra watched expectantly as Astoreth remained material. “All of your pokegirls, cadet.”
Astoreth stared at the small psychic type intently. The A-bra started to melt away even before the harshly toned response from the infernal. “Cadet Markiyan is my man, however I am not registered as his pokegirl and he does not possess my pokeball.”
“Oh, then I will only be allowed to transport the cadet. If you would allow me to-” The A-bra flinched and her antenna jumped up to an alert position.
“Let me see your teleport point and I will transport Isaac there. You may follow.”
Astoreth was still anticipating more conflict. She was masking her remaining apprehension with aggression directed at anyone she didn’t trust, which with Isaac’s pokegirls recalled, that list was everyone but Isaac. In his state of weakness Isaac appreciated the protectiveness but it was misdirected right now. Now, how to correct the incredibly powerful, dangerous, proud, and very amoral infernal acting as his guardian? ‘Star,’ he projected a telepathic message across their delta bond along with an image of him taking her hand in his. ‘Be nice.’
Astoreth toned down the intensity and the A-bra relaxed. “I am obligated to the safe passage of all Zaporizhzhia cadets. The teleport must be performed by me but I am willing to let you see the teleport point so you may follow. Otherwise I will need specific orders from a superior to allow this.”
Astoreth reached over to physically take Isaac’s hand and squeezed his fingers. “Fine.”
The debriefing did not seem very military. More checking to make sure all of the cadets and their pokegirls weren’t going to fly off the handle now that the fighting was over. Isaac was wobbling and there were a great many loose screws holding him together, but he remained composed enough to be released. That’d been his relative condition before the ambush anyway. Astoreth was his looming shadow the entire time and the pokegirls of the Vorona Corps gave her a lot of leeway. Details of who had ended the fighting and how she’d done so had disseminated quickly. Her presence was accepted out of fear, respect, and gratitude.
As soon as Isaac was dismissed Astoreth teleported away with him to her mansion home. Isaac’s will was too weak to argue against it, as more time stretched by between the end of the fighting and now the adrenaline crash was becoming more and more crushing. He made it to the bed and released his pokegirls with the grace and motivation of an automaton before falling on the mattress and letting the feverish dream take him.
In the realms of the unconscious Isaac found himself staring at the graveyard of decaying universes again. The wedge shaped void of a total absence of creation. Not even the compressed singularities that failed to ignite or the infinitely stretched cold realities given in to entropy. There was one fresh corpse before him, and something was resting within it. A corpse within a corpse. A deceased parasite that couldn’t liberate itself from its host.
Morbid curiosity spurred him forward and he scattered the remnants of reality that clung to the corpse of this unknowable creature so he could try to identify it.
Isaac hit the top of his skull on the headboard as the fear caused him to wake and recoil. It’d been him. He was the dead thing threading through the cadaver of that neighboring reality. Or… another one of him.
“Star! He is awake now. Let me go see him!” Chandrakanta’s pleading voice entered his ears, or his mind. He probably couldn’t hear the words clearly but the delta bond gave him enough context to piece together the message.
The Megami and infernal pokegirl were in a standoff at the base of the curving stairwell in the entryway to Astoreth’s opulent home. Astoreth was standing tall, straight backed, arms crossed, defiant. Chandrakanta was the confrontational one. At least for her. Leaning into Astoreth’s space, moving her arms with aggressive gestures along with her words, a desperate anger building in her eyes.
“Not until you explain why you, the farsighted Megami, did nothing while our man was in danger.”
“It is not that simple, Star!”
“It is that simple. You will not play your games with him. I will not allow it.”
Chandrakanta’s patience finished fraying and she shouted. “I am not playing games Star, I am a piece on the board!” The towering infernal warrior’s stance shifted minutely as her weight was shifted onto her heels. “Yes, I saw this all before it happened. And I saw before it and I saw beyond it. Yes, I could have prevented any of it from happening, I could have came to you and told you what they were planning and you could have broken them before they fired the first arrow.”
The prismatic lights in her eyes faded, died out, and there was nothing but milky white sorrow. “And even more death and violence would have transpired further down the line. Isaac was going to survive either way. His girls would survive either way. You would see to that. You were an inevitability in all but the most aberrant outcomes. Everyone else though, even more innocents… even more of the lost…”
“Candi I-” Astoreth uncrossed her arms and held them to her sides helplessly.
“It is alright, Star. I was so scared too. I am still scared. But you always assume that this gift of foresight you covet, that it would allow you to steer this great vessel we inhabit unerringly. It only lets me know which way to lean to brace against the crests of the storm.
“I do not spin the cords of fate, I may only study the strands. Something critical needed to happen in that battle. Something that may finally break this cycle of hate and abuse, at least here. At least where the people important to us reside.”
Astoreth relented, her shoulders slumping and posture stooping slightly. “I still don’t like that you knew Isaac and Jin were going to be in danger and didn’t even tell me.”
Rainbow lights started to flicker within the striation of Chandrakanta’s irises. “Only Isaac and Jin, Star?”
“No one else is important to me.”
“They are important to Isaac. They are important to the people important to Isaac.”
Astoreth snorted in derision. She’d heard this sort of argument before and it had never convinced her. She’d made the counter arguments she was about to state before and they never convinced Chandrakanta. “And how far do we consider the span of this social web? Must I save every friend of Isaac’s, no matter what they are doing? Close relationships to his friends? Do I protect everyone to prevent the ripples of grief from reaching him? Where do I draw the line?”
Chandrakanta put her fists on her hips and gave the infernal a hard, questioning look. “Are you trying to argue your way out of considering the well being of Neasa and Oleksandra, of the cadets that Isaac enjoys the company of and who help him feel comfortable and sane?”
Astoreth sighed. “No Candi, that’s not what I’m arguing at all. I like them, Isaac’s other girls. I tolerate the cadets. If nothing else, the happiness they bring Isaac makes them useful assets. I just don’t understand, when will you be willing to fight?”
“You know I will fight, Star. I cannot say when, but I will when it is necessary. May I go up and see Isaac now? You are not being fair withholding him from me and Elena.” Astoreth let out a deep and low sigh before stepping aside.
The door to the bedroom where Isaac had been resting opened, but it wasn’t the statuesque Megami standing in the frame. It was a petite Elfqueen. She was moving with cautious quiet steps, pushed the door open with gentle care, but when she saw that Isaac was sitting upright she rushed to the side of the bed. “Isaac.”
“Neasa, where’s Jin and Oleksandra?”
“We were all here, but we just had breakfast. I finished eating first.”
Isaac scratched his head and wiped at his eyes. “I was asleep for longer than one night, wasn’t I? I can sort of remember getting up to go to the bathroom too many times.”
Neasa nodded her head gently. “It’s been more than a full day. You basically slept the entire time. Astoreth’s cook will make you something if you’re hungry.”
Isaac didn’t feel hungry. He felt like he’d throw up water if he tried to drink. He thought he could remember doing just that in the fragmented memories of his trips to the toilet. He’d try to eat something but was dreading the experience. So he didn’t move and Neasa leaned her weight onto the edge of the mattress to get closer. “I… What I was saying before the A-bra…” Neasa’s expression was one Isaac wasn’t too familiar with. It wasn’t angry, or sad, or happy. It seemed confused, contemplative. “I should be angry with myself for giving in and letting myself become your pokegirl but…” Her eyes drifted away from his.
“Neasa. You know I’m yours too, right?” Neasa’s attention snapped back to his face. Her rapt attention was frightening. “That’s what I want, anyway. What I was raised to think. It’s just how men, males, are. How we’ve been for thousands of years and three, four hundred years shouldn’t change that nature. I’m yours, you’re mine. We belong to each other. It’s about… it’s about that. The mutual care.”
Neasa’s face was swimming with emotion and Isaac thought he could see the words on the tip of her tongue but then the doorway to the hall burst open and an energetic black haired Witch, a ponderous and dutiful redheaded Battle Angel, and an unnaturally tall, extremely buxom Megami exploded into the scene, bringing with them all of their various emotions to the mix and smothering the small and delicate feelings that had been blooming without their presence.
-
Astoreth’s eyebrows were low on her face as she shifted her judgemental gaze from the giddy, giggling, touchy feely Chandrakanta to the subject of all of her affection, Isaac. He was taking a call from the Paza boy Vardan. Astoreth’s cook had complained to her that the mistress’ favored guest hadn’t wanted anything for a breakfast meal on account of an upset stomach. Yet the infernal could feel from over the delta bond with her man that his stomach was settled and full. There were few things that made her Megami friend this drunk on joy and only one of them also explained Isaac’s state.
Astoreth smothered her growing envy. Isaac would need nourishment beyond milk eventually, even if she had to cast Candi out the doors of her home beforehand.
Isaac put down his phone and let out a great sigh. “Cosmina’s fully healed and awake. She’s doing as well as can be expected, but Vardan says she’s considering dropping out from the academy. She doesn’t want to wait for them to secure a new ground for training operations. I guess she’s questioning a lot of things she thought she wanted…”
“Facing death tends to give people a new perspective,” Astoreth said with a shrug. Isaac sat and pondered more. He’d liked spending time with the senior disciplinarian cadet. She had a weird way of teaching, but Isaac definitely had learned from her. There was going to be a funeral for the fallen sergeants and the pokegirls belonging to the cadets; if the cadets wished for it. Cosmina had been the most gravely injured cadet, no one else rose to the challenge like she did. It was discouraging to Isaac to hear she was considering dropping out so close to finishing.
He needed to follow through though, at least to finish this first year and get his legal identity. Isaac wished he could get this obsessive feeling about the future under control. What was causing him so much dread? The sudden and unprovoked attack from the Elves. The macabre imagery from his dreams. The sense of other looming threats. The obsession seeping across his bond with Elena.
He stopped and focused on that and scowled. “Star, Candi. Can one of you take me to Elena’s? I think I need to check up on her.”
Chandrakanta frowned for a brief moment. “Oh Nel… I’m sorry Isaac, I should have thought to check on her too. You’re right, she does need your care right now. I can take you to her-”
Astoreth shot to her feet and snatched Isaac’s hand. “I’m taking him!”
Chandrakanta smiled at the possessiveness, even if it was a slight against her. It was good for Astoreth to have someone to care for. “Very good Star, you take him. I’ll follow along.”
-
Elena stepped back, away from the monolithic boulder she’d pulled up from the ground and cut into a crude slab before her trees dragged it inside the old, empty greenhouse. It was taller and thicker than she was. She lifted her magnifying spectacles and clicked her tongue. It was the only sound she’d produced for the past couple of hours and she’d been doing nothing but clicking and preparing this stele and the schematic for the ritual engravings for nearly thirty hours. She couldn’t stop her hands from shaking and now she had to rub out the erroneous mark she’d made sketching in the runes for her enchantment. She grabbed her mug and took another sip of tea. When she detected the intruders near her home her mouth rippled in a snarl when she broke the seal of her lips too quickly. She refused to relent on her work and Chandrakanta would leverage Isaac against her to ‘take care of herself.’
How could she worry about such petty things as sleep, hunger, and hygiene right now? She had to fix this… this travesty. The short sighted ignorance. The hate that had torn apart her community.
Slov’yanka might not ever rebuild. Nowhere in the world was truly safe but the humans were good at creating the illusion of safety for their own peace of mind. Samodiva’s raid had shattered that illusion. In their fear, many of the younger townspeople were fleeing to the greater protection and control of the cities. The primal urge to form a herd. Strength in numbers.
So now it fell to her to grant that same knowledge to Samodiva. That she wasn’t safe. Elena would not rest until that lesson was prepared. At least she wouldn’t have before Isaac entered her life.
She could feel his gaze, his concern. Also his appraisal of her work. He was impressed and curious and piecing together what the ritual may be. She truly loved his mind and that admiration finally freed her conscience from the grips of her vengeance.
She turned to face him. He was alone with nothing but a fresh, hot cup of tea in one hand and a hearty plate of breakfast foods in the other. “Hungry?” The smell of cooked eggs, cheese, meat, bread and vegetables assaulted her and roused her stomach to growling. “Anything I could do while you take a break?”
Somewhere in Elena’s psyche a great glacier cracked. Isaac could draw the symbols. He was a competent draftsman and while the entirety of the spell was still beyond him, the individual components were not. She’d have to double check his work but she would have to double check her own work as well, especially with all of the tiny mistakes she’d been making since... Elena wasn’t sure how long she’d been working.
So long as he remained focused. He could be trusted to remain focused when it came to magic.
She was incredibly hungry.
-
Jin sat cross legged near the base of the stone stele. She was watching Isaac work. Elena had gone inside planning for only a short rest several hours ago. Doubtless Chandrakanta had intercepted her. Astoreth had returned to Svyatlysche for a business concern she’d been neglecting, she trusted the security of Elena’s property almost as much as her own, and Neasa and Oleksandra hadn’t remained interested in Isaac’s drafting work for more than the first hour.
Jin wasn’t really paying attention to him work anymore either. This sort of magic took too long for combat and she wanted to be better at fighting. She wanted to be more powerful. Neasa fought three Elves by herself and won. She evolved because of it. Oleksandra held the entire line by herself for a short time. Even if Jin pushed herself to her limits like that, she couldn’t compete. The most she had done in that battle was provide support magic. Yes, she killed the one Elf sapper but Oleksandra or Neasa would have been able to stop her from reaching the berm. Jin’s one victory wasn’t good enough.
She scrunched up her nose and snorted out air. That smell had been… intense. She didn’t like remembering it.
Then there were the two big sisters. Astoreth wouldn’t say how, but everyone knew she ended the fighting by herself. Elena had fought against the raiders sent to town and now she was preparing a ritual to hurt Samodiva somehow. There would be a cold wind somewhere once she activated the enchantments that would be worked into this stone.
As far as she could tell, Jin was the lowest placed pokegirl in Isaac’s group. She was supposed to be his best, she was his first pokegirl. His starter. Isaac wanted her to evolve, he wanted her to be an Enchantress. That’s why he bought the moon stone. Elena had explained how Jin would provide the most benefit to Isaac and her harem sisters by being an Enchantress. Jin was probably just being selfish by wanting to be a Sorceress. Isaac already thought she was willful, she didn’t want him to think she was selfish as well.
Besides, Jin was good at magic. She was a prodigy. It didn’t matter what she evolved to, all she needed was to study and experiment enough and she would be the best. There was no way she wouldn’t.
Outside the greenhouse, facing the slope of the hill that ran throughout Elena’s entire property, Oleksandra stood with her right arm outstretched and armored. Out popped her tri-barrel, she lifted her arm to study it from every angle she could, then it vanished. She manifested it again and looked it over once more as well. Her orange and cream furred ears tilted at a curious slant. This was what she knew to do, but she had done something she didn’t know how to do when she executed what she had called Heavy Arms. She also referred to Isaac as ‘commander’ and not ‘master.’ It was the memories from Beru, it was what she would call her human. Beru never had a human though and Oleksandra felt sad for her because of that. Beru’s memories wouldn’t help her solve this problem. She needed to learn on her own. How?
The Battle Battle Angel pondered and then thought to herself, ‘What if I store the tri-barrel as slowly as possible?’ So she tried to slow down the action. It still was a nearly instant transition. So she tried again, maybe managing to stretch the process out for twice the duration this time. Again, and again, and again. Now she could ponder through all of the subroutines of what she was doing. She smiled triumphantly when, on the seventh attempt, she halted the retraction process when the three spinning barrels had compressed back into the cylindrical body. She held this new configuration and studied it. This was where it had been before she had made it bigger in preparation for her sustained barrage. If she wanted to attack like that again, she would want better heat dispersion. More rounds in the air would be preferable to a similar number of large rounds. Her thought became an impulse and that broke her concentration on maintaining this transitional stage of her tri-barrel, so its barrels popped back into existence. Three barrels, and three more. It was now a six-barreled rotary cannon.
The rabbit eared Battle Battle Angel spun up the weapon experimentally but didn’t fire. Curious. She formed her melee weapon in her left hand. She’d made this based on the smashing things she’d found in Elena’s cooking room. She stared at the mallet head and it reshaped the pulverizing teeth to be less or more, which made them larger or smaller, longer or shorter. She extended the handle and retracted it. It changed the weight in her hand.
Oleksandra stowed away both of her deployed weapons and fully armored up. She couldn’t see herself that well but she looked down at her own chest. She could remember the Elves shooting her. None of the arrows had penetrated her armor, but some had hurt while others glanced off. The plates guarding her chest reconfigured to have more sloped faces. Maybe this would cause more indirect hits. She twisted her arm around to feel along her back, where her armor burned her both times she overloaded her combat systems. There were conduits for exchanging the thermal energy. She thought she could feel the main one under her fingers so she concentrated on it moving closer to the surface while also producing more panels of armor to ensure this vital system wasn’t exposed to harm.
Finally she touched her ears, or the armor over top of them. It was her body either way. These were what she used to shed the heat. It was because of their surface area. And that was what she remembered feeling as a Bunnygirl. If she was too hot, exposing her ears to the cooler air could help. Thin radiating plates formed in the shallow bend of the ear panels.
She remembered her match against the G-Pointdexter, Flaviya. She still didn’t know how to shield herself against electromagnetic disruption. That was a great danger. She would need to learn more about the Thunderwave technique that was used against her. She would need to learn more about the paralysis condition and how it was cured. She would need to learn more about her own abilities. She retracted her armor system and relaxed. Then she deployed it all again and twisted around to look herself over once more.
Her ears drooped and under the glossy faceplate she frowned. This was her armor before any of the modifications she deliberately made. This was back to her default.
She sat down in the dried, chilled, and browning grass. She needed to learn more.
-
The sun had traveled across the sky enough to shine through the window on the west facing wall of Elena’s bedroom. A ray of light brushed across her face and over her eye, pulling the Grandelf out of her extended nap. Isaac and Chandrakanta had been right, she did need to take a break. Now she needed to get back to work. Samodiva needed dealt with.
Elena slipped out of bed and out into the hall, down the stairs and out the back door of the kitchen. She was going to go straight back to the empty old greenhouse where Isaac was hopefully still working but leaning against the wall her hot tomatoes grew up was a familiar sight. Neasa inspecting her bow. Elena remembered a promise she’d made, or what amounted to a promise in her mind. She needed to fulfill that promise, and maybe it wasn’t the Grandelf’s place to deal with the usurper. That was the role of an Elfqueen, and as a Grandelf it was her role to arrange such an opportunity.
Neasa noticed her and verdant green eyes searched arctic blue ones. “Elena, who was High Queen Vesna? Why would her law have anything to do with Samodiva challenging my mother?” Elena was stunned into silence for a moment. The Law of High Queen Vesna was never invoked this far East, but those words, that name, the thought of Sapphire League’s most powerful Elf queendom, the only High Queendom to maintain its power. That gave Elena an idea. A more potent solution to the problem Samodiva presented than what Elena had come up with on her own.
-
Chandrakanta slipped into the greenhouse and briefly studied the engravings Isaac was preparing. Elena’s wintery magic. She looked over Jin and Isaac and her heart was weighed down with even more grief.
She’d been a feeder Milktit supporting a large pokegirl base on the Indian subcontinent. She didn’t see any of the fighting, she’d left the base through good fortune long before it fell to the humans. She did see those who returned, though. Feeding them was so intimate, how could she not pay attention to how they were feeling. More and more of those she nursed became more numb and more confused as they returned mission after mission. Would they look like Jin, like Neasa, like Oleksandra, or like Isaac did now, if she could see those soldiers with her eyes now? Isaac and his pokegirls, they all were so numb and confused right now. Could she have helped the people from so long ago if she’d began her life as a Megami?
She took a deep breath and oriented herself towards the here and now. She would help how she could wherever she was.
(-[|]-) End 11.2 (-[|]-)