She's All Thaumaturgy

by A. K. Caggiano

  “They wanna talk about Heulux!” she shouted over her shoulder.

  “Ha!” The voice laughed then began to cough.

  Again the woman rolled her eyes, but she also turned on her heel, stomping into the back room. After a moment, Elayne decided to follow, Rosalind, Frederick, and Bix just behind her. Through the archway, they found a small bedroom with a single cot below an open window, the incoming breeze crisp against the warmth of the fire on the room’s far side.

  Atop the cot lay an old man, sputtering as the woman helped him to sit up. His skin, unlike hers, was tinged with grey, thin so that his veins were starkly visible. His hair had lost its sheen, and though his features were long and pointed, they sagged under the weight of years where delicate wrinkles carved deep lines all over his face.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen an old elf before,” Rosalind whispered directly into Elayne’s ear, for once taking decorum into consideration.

  He took a long drink from a cup the woman held up for him and cast his nearly white eyes on the group. “That’s because it happens all at once.” His voice creaked like a rusty hinge, and Elayne had no idea how he’d heard Rosalind, though she suspected the size of his ears helped, pointed still, though the lobes were droopy. “It’s only been about ten years or so since I saw my first crease.” He lifted a shaking finger to the corner of his eye. “Just there, it was. Then with a snap,”—he pressed his thumb and middle fingers together, and they slid across one another without a sound—“I turned into this.”

  “Gramps, are you all right?” The woman asked, a kindness taking her voice that had not been there before.

  “Of course not!” he shouted at her, “I’m dying!”

  She blew out through her nostrils and growled, “Well, if only W’ey would take you and rid me of this misery!” Jumping to her feet, she slammed the cup down onto the table beside his bed. “Here he is! The great and powerful—”

  “Just Gramps is fine.”

  The woman swept past them with a huff.

  “Neoma, dearest, my pipe!” Gramps called after her, but she was already banging around in the front room.

  Elayne glanced at her companions who shrugged in unison, then looked back to the old elf. “I’ve come on the suggestion of Gael of the Trizians, hoping that you can—”

  “You wanna know about Heulux.” The elf placed his palms against one another and tapped his fingertips together. “Why?”

  Elayne swallowed. “Something terrible has happened to it.”

  “Well, of course, I know that.” He gave the slightest nod as he stared down at his lap.

  “I’m trying to find out if there’s a way to,”—she glanced furtively at the others—“to maybe get through the miasma.”

  Gramps made a small noise in the back of his throat.

  Elayne watched him, waiting for more. When he said nothing still, she bit her lip. “Because I want it back.”

  Gramps snapped his head up with the speed of a much younger elf, his white eyes set on her. “Now that is interesting.”

  She didn’t look back at her friends, not wanting to see whatever their reaction to her words might have been—a reaction she might have shared a day ago. Instead, she took a step toward his cot. “She said you understand the nexus.”

  “The nexus?” He snorted. “The nexus is just a pit. And Gael knows more about it than I do, certainly.”

  Elayne flexed her fingers, turning her hand over. “Well, she also said you, um…”

  “Show me.”

  Elayne wasn’t sure she should, or even if she could. She fidgeted, squeezing her fingers into a fist, then glanced around the room. It was small and packed with bodies who could easily be hurt.

  “Go on,” he croaked, his eyes focused hard on her hand.

  There was a plant in a ceramic pot at the foot of the bed with brilliantly green, thick leaves trailing over the edge. Elayne went to it and leaned down, touching a single finger to the end of one of its tendrils. She wasn’t angry or frightened now, but the thaumat stone around her neck was warm and alive, and it sparked that feeling inside her, that deep-seated something that made her insides hot, yearning to come out.

  She imagined those feelings as a black ball inside the hollow of her chest, and then she pulled that ball through her arm and down just to the tip of her finger. It wasn’t allowed to come out, not all of it, she said in her mind, and a voice there answered back but just a little, and then the leaf was set alight, engulfed suddenly in a shock of purple. Elayne pulled back, shaking her hand so that the flame-like aether went out.

  In but a moment, the plant was no more, eaten up instantly, not burnt, simply dried out and sapped of life. The pot remained untouched, the dirt perhaps a bit blacker than before. Elayne glanced at Gramps, his eyes wide and unblinking as he stared at the husk. And then he broke into a fit of laughter.

  Elayne looked around at the others and they seemed to share her bewilderment. The old elf continued to laugh, devolving into a coughing fit, and Neoma returned, bustling past them with another drink. He took it greedily, and then she offered him a small jar that tapered at the neck and was stoppered. With shaky hands he pulled out the cork and a blue smoke rose from the thin neck. He breathed in deeply, eyes closed, and a grin spread across his face before he popped the cork back in. Gramps leaned back against the headboard, his head lolling to the side, eyes closed.

  “Is he all right?” Rosalind asked in a whisper.

  Neoma blew a raspberry. “Better than ever, I assume.”

  “That’s really something, youngling.” Gramps’s voice was a little louder, but his body laxer. He rolled his head toward them, eyes droopy, and he blew out a long breath. “Haven’t seen something like that in hundreds of years.”

  Elayne’s heart skipped. “You’ve seen this before?”

  “Sure, sure. Big mistake. Never lived it down.”

  Neoma looked at the rest of them then with startled eyes.

  “Humans are so strange.” Gramps glanced up to the window. “It’s spreading, you know, but I suppose they think they’ll be dead by the time it gets here, so what’s it matter?”

  “Spreading?” Bix’s little voice rose up. “Does he mean the miasma? There is an abundance of theories about how something like that works, but in practice it’s anyone’s guess.”

  “Yup!” Gramps grinned, an odd choice. “There isn’t much I can do from this damn bed though. And my Neoma.” He reached out a shaky hand to the elven girl, and she reluctantly took it. “She’s but a child and has hundreds of years left. I don’t want this for her.”

  She squeezed his hand back, then released it to clear away the cups.

  Frederick shifted uncomfortably. “You’re saying the…darkness coming out of Heulux will eventually reach across all of Yavarid?”

  “And Apos’phia too. Maybe even the sea.”

  Clearly he had not been expecting that, and his mossy eyes darted around the room as he clenched his jaw.

  Elayne took a deep breath. They would understand if she said it now. “Is there a way to stop it? Is there a way in if I go there?”

  Gramps turned back from the window, his grin growing. “You have it, don’t you?”

  She nodded and pulled out the crystal from her neckline. When Gramps’s eyes fell on the thaumat stone, his face changed. He appeared so sad, so hollow, that Elayne felt tears prick at the back of her own eyes. But then he wiped the look off his face almost as fast as it had come.

  “A youngling like you, even with that thing, won’t be able to cross the border from Yavarid to Heulux, the miasma is too strong there,” he said matter-of-factly, “but the far side of the duchy at the coast, is penetrable.”

  “The crown tried that,” Frederick jumped in, eyes narrowed, “but our skips were destroyed on those cliffs.”

  “You may as well have sent them a lovely little letter telling them exactly what you aimed to do!” Gramps began to chuckle. “Dear Dark Cabal of Elves, We’ll be sending a co
nvoy to your back door on the third day of the new moon. Looking forward to seeing you! P.S. Please don’t set us on fire, we only want to overthrow your genocidal leadership.”

  Frederick grumbled in the back of his throat something about barely being a teenager at the time but ended up shutting his mouth.

  “The miasma crawls across the land, looking for things to corrupt, and he wills it to reach out.” Elayne shivered at how Gramps croaked out the words, his eyes going shifty from side to side. “It’s there, on the shoreline, of course, but weaker, I expect. There are caves in the cliffs, and if we could traverse them—”

  “And how might we even get to these caves?” Frederick had found some semblance of himself again, and had his arms crossed, tapping his foot. Elayne huffed at him.

  “Pirates, of course!” Gramps rolled his eyes as if it were obvious. “You can buy anything with the right amount of gold, even passage on a ship into the abyss.”

  Before Frederick could go on, Bix cleared his throat. “Pirates are colloquially known for their criminal goings on, thievery, pilfering, marauding, and the like, but their jurisprudence is actually quite complex and long-established.” He pushed his glasses up his nose. “Or so I’ve read.”

  Elayne then huffed at herself. “Well, that’s fine, but we don’t have any gold.”

  “We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.” Gramps shooed the problem away with a flick of his wrist. “But first we’ll have to climb Doria and go across the range to the Bay of Bizgain. He can’t see into the mountains as well, those little dwarven bastards have seen to that, but you must keep out of Apos’phia. They wouldn’t like this, not one bit!”

  Frederick rubbed his temples. “Okay, okay, so say you cross the mountains successfully, and manage to survive that lawless bay city, and even manage to charter some corsair’s ship. Fine. But the miasma is still there. How do you expect to cross it when whole armies can’t?”

  Gramps leveled his eyes at the knight and a knowing smirk crawled across his lips. He raised a hand, a finger pointing at Elayne. “They didn’t have her, did they?”

  She held her breath, her hand closing around the thaumat stone. At that, Frederick said nothing.

  “So that settles it, eh? We’re off!”

  “Gramps,” Neoma sighed, shaking her head, “you’re like, literally the oldest elf in Maw. They’ll all be dead by the time you get your socks on.”

  He grumbled as he sat himself up a bit more. “Bring me that vial, Neoma. The one in the far cabinet I always tell you not to touch.”

  She clicked her tongue at him but crossed the room to a small cupboard there and began to root around inside.

  “Now, wait.” Frederick came around in front of Elayne and the others and put up his hands. “I agreed to take you this far for a conversation, but crossing the northern range? And heading into Heulux? That’s way above my skill, even as a knight.”

  “But what about as a senior knight?” Rosalind bounced onto her toes.

  “Ro, uh, it’s not exactly that simple.”

  “I dunno,” Bix said. “Gramps has a pretty solid plan.”

  Elayne peeked around Frederick as he tried to quell Bix and Rosalind’s excitement, watching as Neoma brought Gramps the vial, a small glass piece filled with a silvery liquid.

  “What is that?” she asked, squinting to see the shimmering liquid better as Gramps struggled with the stopper.

  Neoma shrugged. “I’ve asked about a hundred times, but he just insists I can’t get rid of it.” She went to help him, but he pulled the vial away from her with a hiss, and she sighed, throwing her hands up.

  Gramps finally pulled out the cork, a wide grin finding its way back onto his face. His white eyes fell on Elayne once more, and he raised fluffy brows, whispering, “To life.”

  Tipping his head back, he drained the little container of its sheen. The others were still quibbling, but their voices were faded and distant as Elayne watched Gramps smack his lips. He held the vial delicately between two fingers, gave both Elayne and Neoma a little nod, and then without another word promptly flopped over in a lump.

  CHAPTER 15

  The vial tinkled across the floorboards, falling from Gramps’s grasp and rolling to a stop at Bix’s foot.

  “Gramps?” Neoma ventured carefully. When he did not respond, she took a step toward his cot. She laid a hand on his shoulder and gave him a gentle shake. “This is not funny, old man.”

  Elayne felt her breath catch. She’d only seen it once before, so many years ago that she couldn’t remember much of her life before it. No one had been particularly sad or upset when the shimmer left her grandmother’s body, it was expected and welcomed after all, and Elayne remembered it as one of the most stunning things she’d ever seen. Even now, and even without the ceremony, the attendants in full gowns, the clerics singing in the balconies, the twinkling mist that rose up from the wrinkled, old elf’s chest was utterly beautiful as it caught the setting sun’s light through the open window above the bed. But her mother had let slip a single tear when her grandmother left Maw, and Elayne learned then that losing someone you love is painful no matter how planned it had been. And then there was Neoma.

  “Gramps!” The girl fell to her knees, shrieking beside the bed and silencing the others in the room. She grabbed his arm, and it lolled under her grasp. “You fool, what have you done?” Her voice cracked as she shouted at his body, but he surely couldn’t hear her.

  The shimmer rose from his chest, thousands of specks of light and every color at once, and then his corporeal body vanished under Neoma’s hand. She gasped and fell forward onto the bed, grasping at empty blankets.

  The shimmer condensed itself then into a small, glowing orb. Elayne remembered the ceremony vaguely, but she could recall a group of elves who had constructed a beautiful vase to gather up her grandmother’s essence, as they’d called it. The essence would be contained for three sun rises and sunsets, it would be spoken to and guarded and honored, and then released where it would continue on its journey into whatever came next.

  Gramps’s essence hovered for a moment, glittering in the sunlight, and then suddenly shot off across the room, over Neoma’s head and straight for Frederick. He ducked, and the ball of light banged right into the wall behind him.

  The orb vibrated off of the wall with a sort of metallic hum, then tried again, flying upward and to the far wall where it slammed into a pitcher sitting atop a high shelf, reverberating a clang throughout the room.

  “Gramps?” Neoma’s head popped up and she wiped at her face. “What in the godless gorge?”

  “Calm yourself, dearest!” Gramps’s voice came from the orb, a bit distant, perhaps watery, but undoubtedly his own. “This is proving a bit more difficult than I anticipated!” The orb shot again across the room, and they all took cover as it crashed into a cabinet, knocking around its contents with a racket worse than when Neoma scrubbed up pots.

  “Gods!” Neoma jumped up with a huff. “Even in death you’re causing an absolute mess!”

  “Get me an urn!” the orb’s muffled voice sounded from the cabinet.

  Neoma was at a loss. “I’ve not got one, you know that!”

  The orb escaped the cabinet and zipped toward her, smacking her in the forehead and bouncing off. “The pipe will do!”

  The elf looked at the stoppered pipe on the table, an almost ugly thing, copper and dented and certainly not befitting of the oldest elf’s essence. But with a cork it would be sealed up tight, and so she sighed and grabbed it, pulling out the cork and holding it out. The orb flew past it, and she grimaced, chasing after him. “Well, hold still!”

  They watched Neoma run across the room, hop up onto the bed, then pounce down, finally trapping the glowing ball inside the pipe and corking it up. She rolled onto her back, huffing, then pushed her silvery hair out of her face. “I absolutely cannot believe you!”

  “It worked!” The voice from inside was muffled and a bit tinny but was unmistakably G
ramps. “I’m free of that wretched bed and that useless shell!”

  Neoma got to her feet again and looked wearily at the others. Her face was reddened, like she wanted to cry and curse all at once, but instead just stared hollowly through them until she focused on Elayne.

  “Well, let’s go!” said his bodiless voice.

  “Go?” Elayne’s eyes flicked between Neoma and the stoppered pipe that had become an urn. “You mean, all of us? Now?”

  “Well, I don’t mean after the miasma has turned the rest of you into naught but your essences too!”

  Neoma grunted and thrust the urn at Elayne.

  “No, no!” the voice spoke, and the urn wiggled of its own accord in her hand. “My dearest, you must accompany me.”

  She held the bottle up to her face and shouted at it, “What? Why?”

  “You were instructed to be my caretaker! Your task is not yet complete!”

  “My task was to keep you alive! And now I’ve…gods, I’ve failed.” Neoma crossed her eyes as she stared down the urn. “Mother would be utterly appalled.”

  “Well, Iowen isn’t here, so we can do whatever we—or, uh—I want. Now, off we all go!”

  Neoma bit her lip, dropped her arm and the urn at her side, and looked at the others. “I just want to go back to the forest. Is that so much to ask?” The urn knocked into her then, and she scoffed at it. “Oh all right!” She crossed the room to the far cupboard once more and retrieved a few pieces of rope that she began fastening around the container, mumbling to herself, “I cannot believe this.”

  Elayne felt a ping inside her as she watched the elven woman. It was happening. Only days ago she’d simply been an ugly thing that hid inside a castle with no prospects and no hope for change, and now the opportunity to reclaim her home was egging her on, dangerously.

  She turned back to the others, huddled around the doorway to the room. “I, um,”—she cleared her throat—“I think I have to do this. And I want to do this. I know it’s mad, and I know it’s nearly impossible, but I have to at least try. But I don’t want to put any of you in danger. You’ve been through quite enough already, and I—”