by Stone Thomas
Climbing through the short doorframe of my prison cage led me to a long corridor between other open cages. A dozen elves came through, and one beastkin, all prisoners like me. The beastkin’s arms were covered in armored plates, as were his neck and the lower half of his face. His nose, and his eyes, looked human, the same way that Brion was a lion-shaped man, with touches of pink flesh and human features.
We held each other’s glare the whole time he walked past me. We were the only two non-elves I had seen here so far, and maybe in another life we could have struck up a prison alliance. Eventually. There was no time to make friends though. The elves in the city overhead wouldn’t take long to decide what to do with Cindra, and if they didn’t kill her time would. I needed to find Mercifer and get out of here before she suffered any more than she already had.
At the end of the corridor, almost too distant to see, was a large central room. Fairyflies flew past us as we marched there, occasionally stopping to nibble and sip from the veins of prisoners that passively allowed the insects to feed.
We lined up. Twenty elves stood between me and the guard station. The nearest elf, a blue-skinned man, was missing both of his ears.
I leaned forward. “They do that to you in here?” I asked.
“No,” he said. He looked me up and down, but decided not to elaborate.
“At least you missed the mandatory piercing,” I said. My own ear still hurt, and so far no one explained how to keep a new piercing clean. I could go for some ointment, maybe even a wet wipe.
Without a word, or a smile, or even a minor hint of a warning, the little elf man unzipped his fly. I didn’t turn my head away in time to avoid the flash of flesh and the glint of sunlight off a bright metal band.
“Good gods,” I said. “You poor guy!” I was infinitely grateful that Vix never followed through with her threat to remove my ears. These gnarly skin flaps just saved little Arden a great deal of trouble.
The elf zipped up and I decided not to make any more friends. We stepped up in line one by one until I could see why Awna called this exercise “revenge.”
A guard outside the mesh wall placed a bottle inside a metal drawer that tilted inward, allowing him to feed that small glass bottle into the prison without opening a hole large enough for someone to climb through. A prisoner uncorked it, took a captive fairyfly out, and tore off its wings. He didn’t hesitate or show any remorse for it. Then the fairyfly cried out, shed a tear, and went limp.
The man’s posture improved, like some terrible pain had just vanished. He put the glass bottle back inside the metal drawer and moved on, allowing the next prisoner to take a fresh bottle for himself.
This was the life cycle of the prison. Feed the prisoners to the insects. Sacrifice a small portion of the insects to heal the prisoners. Repeat.
“Awna!” I yelled. She was a few people ahead of me. She looked back and frowned. Other elves gave the both of us contemptuous glares. She wasn’t supposed to fraternize with a human. Elves didn’t trust us.
“Don’t do this,” I said, ignoring everyone else.
“I’ve been bitten five times today,” she said. “I deserve this.” She turned her back on me. I didn’t watch what she did with her bottle. I just waited for my turn and wondered what would happen then.
The drawer clanged as it opened toward me. I took the glass bottle and stared at the insect woman trapped inside.
“Pop it and move on,” the guard said. His face was illuminated from the magic radiating from the prison’s wire walls.
I turned the bottle over in my hands.
“Pop it,” he repeated. “Or we’ll have one less human to cater to.”
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I twisted the bottle’s lid and pulled it gently aside. The fairyfly banged four balled fists against the bottle, begging silently for her freedom. Her movements were weak though, her body already half-limp. This must be what they do with the sick or injured fairyflies they can’t sell to adventurers at full price.
I reached toward her. I wrapped my fingers around her small, delicate body. I held her close to my chest and bowed my head, turning away from the guard.
“Fall to the ground and pretend,” I whispered. “Otherwise, we’ll both suffer.”
After pinching my fingers against the air and miming a quick tug, I dropped the fairyfly and faked a sigh of relief.
She hit the ground and lay there, her wings tucked close to her body.
So they are intelligent.
I dropped the glass bottle into the drawer, picked up the fairyfly’s body, and asked the guard, “What do I do with this now?”
“Chuck it in the bin,” he said.
I walked toward a metal bin and bent down, placing the fairyfly on the ground where she could hide from view. “I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re still a prisoner like me. For now.”
When I glanced up, I saw another bug pressed against the wire mesh. She was outside the prison, and her red-gold-green wings gave her away. It was the one that had been following me all week. She tried to squeeze her body through the small square space between metal wires, but she couldn’t fit.
“Shoo!” I said. Then I turned to find Awna. She sat at a long table with a plate of unsavory food slop in front of her. Awna turned her body away as I approached.
“You’re despicable,” I said. “I didn’t get to tell you how awful you are for insulting me so intelligently and making me feel like a small and worthless human.”
She turned back. The elves she sat with looked impressed.
“Your tongue is even sharper than Mercifer’s,” I continued. “That rotten old elf. Where is he? I need to give him a piece of my mind next.”
“You ain’t got no pieces to spare, stupid human,” she said. “Mercifer is the one there, with the gentle eyes and soft wrinkles. I hope he turns you to slime. It would be an improvement.”
As I walked away I looked back, in time to see Awna mouth the words, “thank you.”
Mercifer sat alone, poking the slop on his plate like he feared it would poke back. “Mercifer?” I asked.
He furrowed his brow. “Who wants to know?”
“My name is Arden,” I said. “We don’t have much time. Cindra needs your help.”
Just the mention of her name drained the yellow from his face. “This is a cruel joke. I came here to get away from her. Don’t bring her near me.”
“She’s in Mournglory, above us,” I said. “Her body is giving up on her, her soul is melting away.”
“She shouldn’t have that soul!” he yelled. “I created her body for my daughter. I risked everything for her. I spent my life’s worth on a blessing from Avelle. I… obtained a scroll of soul-tethering. I snuck away to the human lands where no one would see what magic I worked.”
“So you’re a necromancer,” I said. “In general, I think that’s on the ickier side of the magical spectrum, but I’ll try not to judge.”
“I’m an enlivener,” he said. “Necromancers raise the dead and use them as extensions of themselves. I give life to the lifeless, a spark of instinct all its own. If I enliven a skeleton, it won’t be with the life of the person that left it behind. It will be with a new mind. Not truly sentient — the same is true with any plants or slime pets I might enliven — but reactive. A life-like being. I might negotiate for my creations to help me, but I do not control their actions.”
“Cindra negotiates,” I said. “Damn well. Save her and we can work out whatever help you need. We’ll get you out of this prison.”
He laughed. “I put myself in this prison. I knew that the scroll called for a bone, a tooth, a lock of hair — something of Ferrah’s own body to lure her soul back to this world. It would improve the odds, but I had nothing. By the time I had prepared everything else, she had been dead for too long.
“Still, I had hope. I conjured primordial ooze from the ether and begged for Avelle’s blessing to remove any time limit on the slime’s vitality and provide a safe vessel for a soul’s pas
sage back from the underworld. I shaped her face, so gentle and young, from the blessing of perfect memory I sought from Hipna. With two goddess’s energies at work, how could this fail?
“When the body awoke, I was overjoyed. Then the shape began to morph. A body fit for an elf was stretched beyond the limits of its casing. The slime I had crafted thinned out as it contorted out of proportion. That woman is not my daughter, but I can never try again.”
“So you shut her inside a cave to punish her?” I asked.
“To protect her,” he said. “I spent days with Cindra. She had no memories of her own life, so I tried to convince myself that she was my dear daughter. She was not, though the fault was not Cindra’s. It was mine.
“I shut her away because I’m not a monster. That body was pushed beyond its limits to accommodate a soul too robust for its own good. That slime cannot protect her from the world’s harsh elements. Slimes don’t need to eat. She would have lived forever in that cave.”
“Cindra isn’t just slime,” I said. “She’s a woman, and she couldn’t survive the loneliness.”
“If you let her out of there,” he said, “then you’re the one that killed her. Leave me out of it.”
“There must be something you want,” I said.
“I want Ferrah,” he replied.
“What if I could arrange that? Not permanently, I wouldn’t know how, but a meeting. A conversation.”
He looked from his plate for the first time. He looked deep into my eyes. “You mean that,” he said. “You truly believe you could do that for me?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Then you’re a fool,” he replied. “Now let me eat my stew. I think it’s fish today.”
“It doesn’t smell like fish,” I said.
“It’s mostly mud,” he replied, “but I’m going to think that it’s fish. It’s the only way I’ll convince myself to eat it.”
“But—”
“Go away you pink-skinned flop-haired small-eared broad-shouldered self-wanker!” he yelled.
A few elves near him clapped. The armadillokin at a distant table looked up at me, then back at his food.
I turned to leave, but my nose started running and refused to stop. I coughed, warm salty water rising in my throat. The same elf guard that chased me from my cell laughed on the other side of the prison wall. The free side.
“Look what I found trying to squeeze her way out of the farms?” he said, his face close to the wire mesh cage.
Water continued to pool in my lungs. No amount of coughing could clear them.
“We pop our daily fairyfly,” the guard says, “so we can feed the rest for months to come.”
I suppressed the urge to cough. I’d had enough of this prison farm, where the elves farmed the fairyflies and the fairyflies farmed blood. I kicked one of the lunch tables, sending elves running as the table collapsed. I tore off a metal table leg with its screws still attached.
I activated Piercing Blow, thrusting my weapon at the wire wall. It crashed into the metal, but the makeshift spear’s white gleam died out the second it struck. I pulled back and tried again, to the same deadened effect while the elf guard laughed.
“One-way nullmagic walls let me cast in but you don’t cast out,” he said. “And I’ll count that as a weapon, doubling your sentence.”
I ran, hunching from the constant urge to cough as much as from the low ceilings. The guard trailed after me along the outer wall.
Scrambling to get some distance from my attacker, I lost my footing and skidded to the ground. I scraped my arm against the screws still poking out from the end of my weapon, breaking the skin and letting blood drip down my arm. I ignored the pain and pulled up my skillmeister menu. Just as I thought, the scrape’s damage was negligible but I was losing HP from the constant drowning attack. So be it. I wouldn’t waste any more AP on Piercing Blow in that case.
I got to my feet, pushed past the line of elves waiting for their own bottled fairyfly, and went back the way I had come through the winding warren of glowing cage walls. This endless prison labyrinth must have a weak spot, a way out where my skills would matter.
Halfway through a small doorway, my body seized up and I couldn’t contain the coughing. I spasmed and lay there, bleeding from a long gash down my arm. I reached forward, grabbing for the ground beneath the dead leaves. My fingertips sank into the dirt and I clawed forward.
Something glowed a few feet ahead of me. My lilac energem, the last of the ones we had recovered from Kāya. It pulsed with the power to create explosive anibombs, but it required a goddess to activate it.
I could barely crawl now. My whole body convulsed and splashed out the water my lungs couldn’t contain. A dozen guards gathered to watch the spectacle through the wall grating.
A fairyfly landed on my arm. For a brief second, I imagined her shedding a tear for me, healing my wound and giving me the strength to proceed. Instead, she sent a long pink tongue from her mouth that lapped at the blood leaking from my arm.
“They smell blood now!” one guard yelled. The others laughed and jeered.
More fairyflies landed on me, some attracted to my bloody arm, others attracted to the soft skin at the base of my neck, the long stretch of flesh on my uninjured arm. They sank their teeth in and gorged themselves.
I was down to a fraction of my AP. It was time for something stronger. I aimed my weapon at the walls and activated Spear Cannon, sending out a thick torrent of white light that blasted against the wire grate. It crashed into the prison wall, and the wall pulsed brightly for a moment before dimming to its original state. It had absorbed the entire impact.
Still I clawed forward. My compass was here. My energem. My seedpod.
I thrashed my weapon against the metal, hoping a physical strike would do more harm than a magical one, but it didn’t even leave a scratch.
There was only one skill left to use. I let out one long cough, ejecting seawater from my face, then stood. I ignored the dozens of fairyflies zooming toward me and pressed my upper back against the low ceiling.
I Vaulted.
The metal wire that formed the ceiling creaked and bucked as the force of my leap attack thrust my whole body upward. I felt the metal bend, watched the walls reshape themselves to accommodate the shifting state of the ceiling that bound the room together.
Then the pressure against my back receded. My feet pressed more firmly against the ground. I had proven that this prison wasn’t impervious to attack, but it would take more than one Vault to tear the cage apart.
My vision started to black out from lack of air and I lay back, onto the leaves, clutching my last few possessions in blood-drenched hands.
A shrill sound caught my attention. Overhead, in the space between metal wires that I had bent out of shape, a fairyfly climbed into my prison cage.
She flew to my ear and tugged on the metal band that hung there. I couldn’t help her now. I couldn’t even speak. I unfurled my fingers and shook with another round of desperate coughing while elf guards watched me drained of blood and pumped full of water instead.
The energem rolled a short distance. The seedpod fell open, dropping one bloody seed into a patch of leaves.
Behind the sound of fluttering wings and laughing elves, I heard leaves crunch. I felt the ground rumble under my body. The elves grew silent. My vision faded out again, a second longer this time. Then, I saw it begin.
First a small tendril emerged from the ground, bright and green. Then it thickened and split open, a deep red trench inside its central stem. Leaves sprouted, dark green with thin red lines like veins. The trunk continued upward, finding a hole in the mesh ceiling and forcing its way through until the trunk was too thick. It took the ceiling with it, uprooting the walls and ripping them from the ground.
The fairyflies flocked to this red and green bush as it began to drip something thick and dark red. This magical seed adapted not to swords or gold, but to blood. My blood.
I sat up strai
ght and dug around for the other seed. It sat inside the seedpod, so I took it, rubbed it on the wound on my arm, and held it out. My fairyfly companion, the one I had freed from an adventurer’s bottle and who had seen a reason to follow me all over the world, took the seed from me, kissed me on the cheek, then emitted a shrill sound to the others of her kind. She escaped through the hole in the roof, and a swarm of fairyflies left with her.
They weren’t the only prisoners freed from my little skirmish.
A rush of yellow elves, once pale from loss of blood and frail from undernourishment, were suddenly heartened by all the commotion. They hung back, watching me, the guards, and the open space before them.
My vision fogged over and my lungs stopped struggling to pump water out of my body. They had given up. My chest swelled with seawater as my head grew faint.
“Halt all movement and magic!” a woman’s voice called out.
Suddenly I could breathe. I filled my lungs with air in what was still a splashy, coughy affair. “Tanny!” I half yelled, half choked. She was still wearing her long delicate dress, but now a crown sat atop her head between her long, yellow ears. A contingent followed her, dozens of people wearing black cloaks.
“That is a name for historical accounts,” she said. “I am now Queenette Glory, seventeenth monarch to wear this title for the benefit of the Mournglory elves.”
“All hail Queenette Glory!” one guard yelled. Everyone knelt, including the prisoners. Everyone except the armadillokin, who probably didn’t know what was actually happening.
I guessed as much, because I felt that exact way.
“How?” I asked. “I thought the queenette survived the attack.”
“She did,” the new monarch said. “After the last Queenette Glory ensured your arrest, she became so overwhelmed by the death of her husband, the attack on Mournglory, and then the death of her husband again, she gave up the crown.
“My coronation was swift, as I waived the usual ceremony to make sure I could set the city right. That begins with pardoning the heroes of today’s fiasco. If it were not for you, a human warrior arriving at precisely the right time, I shudder to think of what our fair home would have become.”
