Corvis Eralith
The last Sand Dweller fell with a wet, parting sigh.
Olfred's hand, sheathed in jagged, marble-like reinforcement, had moved with a brutal, clinical finality, dividing the creature at its midsection.
There was no flourish, only efficiency. The two halves slumped into the dust, their separate twitches a grotesque parody of life, steaming in the cool, subterranean air.
The surgical precision of it was more chilling than any wild blow.
The promised fifteen minutes stretched into a subjective eternity. Time, in the absolute dark illuminated only by a bauble of magma, became measured only in the rhythm of our footfalls, the rasp of my own breath, and the occasional, distant skitter that tightened my shoulders.
Each corner felt repeated, each stretch of tunnel a déjà vu of crumbling stone and lurking shadows. My mind, unmoored from the sun, began to play tricks.
The skeletal remains seemed to shift in my peripheral vision, and the hissing silence morphed into whispers, a language of malice and hunger. I clutched the fabric of my tunic, feeling the grit of the tunnels ground into its fibers, a tangible reminder of the decaying world pressing in on us.
Then, a change. The air lost its stagnant, tomblike quality. A faint, dusty warmth touched my face, carrying the ghost of a scent utterly alien to the fungal damp—the dry, clean aroma of stone baking under a fierce sun.
The darkness ahead began to soften, not into light, but into a deep, murky gray. The tunnel walls widened, their ceilings lifting away from us, as if the earth itself was breathing a final, expansive sigh before releasing us.
And then, the sun.
It was not like the gentle dawns I was used to in the Elshire Forest, where light dripped like honey through a canopy of leaves.
This was an assault. A single, blinding lance of pure, white-gold fury stabbed through a grate ahead, piercing the gloom with such violent intensity it felt solid.
Dust motes, stirred by our approach, exploded into constellations of fire within its beam.
I flinched, raising a hand against the glory and the pain of it, my eyes watering instantly.
Without a word, Olfred moved to the grate. The key turned with a metallic shriek that echoed like a victory cry in the vastness. He braced himself and hauled the rusted iron aside, the sound of it scraping against stone the most beautiful noise I had ever heard.
And then we stepped out.
The heat felt like hitting a wall. It slammed into me with the weight of a woolen blanket soaked in hot water, wrapping around my limbs and pressing down on my chest.
I gasped, the air itself tasting of baked rock and hardened clay. This was not the sun I knew. The sun of Elenoir was a benevolent artist, painting the world in dappled greens and golds.
This was a tyrant, a furnace in the sky, hammering the barren land into submission. Its light was merciless, exposing every crack, every stone, in stark, shadowless detail.
Yet, there was mercy. A few paces away, a cluster of strange, towering trees rose like defiant sentinels. They were not the sturdy oaks or graceful willows of home, but slender giants with fronds fanning out at their peaks like ragged, green stars against the azure violence of the sky.
They cast pools of deep, inviting shade that looked almost black in contrast to the scorched earth. Short, wheat-colored grass, tough and sparse, clung to life around their roots.
"Is this an oasis?" I asked, my voice hoarse from dust and disuse. The word felt mythical on my tongue.
"It is," Olfred confirmed, his own gaze scanning the perimeter with a warrior's patience. "Aren't you going to suffer the heat? I don't think you elves are used to such climate."
"I will manage," I said, the stubbornness automatic. Olfred merely hummed, a sound that conveyed both skepticism and a strange respect.
"Our mounts should be stationed here," he said, beginning to walk towards the heart of the shade.
"Mounts?" The concept felt archaic, romantic. We had moved through tunnels like rats, and now we would ride?
The oasis seemed like inverted ecology.
In Elenoir, life exploded outward from the soil in an uncontrollable riot. Here, life clung with desperate intensity to the source of water. All greenery—the tall palms, the sparse grass—orbited a central, circular pond of water so clear it seemed to be a hole punched through to a cooler, bluer world.
Its stillness was perfect, mirroring the fronds above with an accuracy that felt magical.
"Is that water? Why don't dwarves take water from oases?" The practical question surfaced through my awe. It seemed a cruel irony, to have cities starved for water above such treasures.
"Many reasons," Olfred grunted, not breaking stride. "For one, oases are rare and wouldn't sustain the population. And second, the water you see there is drinkable only by mages."
"Only by mages?" The notion was bizarre. Water was life, a universal right. "Why's that?"
"I am not a professor, Finn," he said, the alias a persistent wall between us, even here in the emptiness.
"Right..." I let it go, filing the mystery away. Another piece of this harsh, magical world.
Then I saw two creatures knelt at the pond's edge, their dark, powerful heads bowed to the crystalline surface. They were not horses albeit they were very similar to the horses from Earth I remembered.
They shared the basic shape—four legs, a torso, a head, agile yet powerful builds—but the resemblance ended there.
These beasts were built like fortresses. Their bodies were compact, dense, riding low to the ground on legs as thick as young tree trunks. A coat of shaggy, dark-brown fur covered them, matted in places from travel and dust, and long, heavy tails swished at flies with a sound like whips cracking.
They emanated a sense of immense, grounded strength, as if they had been sculpted from the very mountains we were approaching.
Olfred approached without fear, pulling a pouch from his belt. He poured a measure of what looked like gray, powdered stone into his palm. Not grain, not hay. The creatures lipped it from his hand with soft, rumbling snorts, their teeth grinding the stone with a sound that set my own teeth on edge.
The Lance—Olfred Warend, playing the role of Damien Malaisson—turned his head, catching my wide-eyed stare.
"You want to know what these mana beasts are, right?" He didn't wait for my nod. "These are Darvish Highcolts. Darv's own breed of Highcolts."
Highcolts. The name meant nothing, yet everything. I reasoned they were this world's answer to steeds, but evolved for stone and dust, not grass and meadow.
"And what do they eat?" I asked, already knowing the answer but needing to hear the absurdity aloud.
"Granite dust," he confirmed, as if stating they preferred clover. "Now mount up."
I approached the beast Olfred indicated. Even kneeling, its back was level with my chest. The sheer, muscled bulk of it was daunting. I reached out, my hand hovering over its flank. The fur was coarse, hot from the sun, and beneath it, I could feel the slow, tectonic pulse of its life and the subtle, thrumming energy of its mana core—a deep, earthy resonance.
A fierce, sudden longing gripped me. Not just to ride, but to connect. To have this creature's strength as an extension of my own will.
Olfred saw my struggle and wordlessly offered a hand, calloused and broad. His lift was effortless, and I was deposited behind him on a saddle of worn leather strapped over thick blankets. The world elevated. The Highcolt's warmth seeped into me, and I felt the incredible latent power in its shoulders.
"Can't I ride one myself?" The question burst out, tinged with a desire that went beyond childish whim.
Olfred glanced back, his eyes appraising. "They don't seem much, but Darvish Highcolts desire strong riders. And I am not talking about magic. I am talking about muscles. You are a bit too short and little for that."
The truth of it was a cold dash of water. I clicked my tongue in frustration.
The perks of a four-year-old body were indeed over. Here, in the realm of physical might, I was still insignificant. My mind might house strategies and memories of another world, but my arms were frail, my stature minuscule.
The hunger for power I had carried since being born sharpened into a new, acute point. I needed more than spells. I needed a bond, a companion that could lend me its physical majesty, as Arthur had with Sylvia through her Beast Will and Sylvie through her bond.
I could not aspire to an Asura, but perhaps… perhaps a creature of stone and mountain. The thought was a seed, planted in the arid soil of my futile ambition.
"So what is this other steed for?" I asked, nodding to the riderless Highcolt now following us obediently.
"In case something happens to this one," Olfred said, patting the thick neck of our mount. "We will have a substitute."
He talks like he can't fly, I thought, the irony a private amusement. Of course, the Lance of Darv could likely cross these wastes in a fraction of the time. But here, he was Damien, a gruff guide.
"Understood," I said.
With a low command from Olfred, our Darvish Highcolt rose. It was a rolling, powerful motion, like a small hill deciding to move. Then we were off, leaving the sanctuary of the oasis.
The pace was not the gallop of a horse, but a relentless, ground-eating trot that seemed to shake the very desert.
The furnace sun beat down, but the wind of our passage was a blessing. I looked back once. The oasis, with its impossible water and shade, had already shrunk to a mirage-like smudge of green against the vast, tawny expanse, a single, fleeting parenthesis of life in a sentence written in stone and fire.
Ahead, the horizon was jagged—the Grand Mountains, our destination where the Red Gorge and its Phoenix Wyrms inhabitants lay.
—
The silence of the desert was a heavy, smothering weight that pressed down from the endless sky and rose up from the shimmering, bleached sands.
It wasn't the peaceful hush of the Elshire at dusk, full of latent life and whispering leaves. This was the silence of a kiln, of a finished thing, profound and absolute.
The only sounds were the rhythmic, plodding footfalls of Olfred's Darvish Highcolts and the ceaseless, mournful sigh of the wind as it combed the dunes into new, transient shapes.
The novel had been a map of events, not a sensory experience; it had never delved into the reality of the desert above Darv, beyond the mentions of the Sanctuary's hidden geometry and the stone cities of Burim and Vildorial.
It hadn't described this feeling of being an insignificant, shrinking speck under the relentless eye of the sun.
My mind, desperate for anchor points, reached for comparisons from a lost world.
The Elshire Forest was like the Amazon—teeming, dense, a labyrinth of living green. But this… this was the Sahara. Vast didn't begin to cover it. Dicathen was terrifying in its scale, a lesson in humility I was learning with every league we traveled.
A grim, logistical part of me whispered a cold thanks that Burim lay relatively close to the Grand Mountains. The thought of crossing the full, terrible breadth of this baked sea to reach the Red Gorge, a journey of weeks through this void, was a horror that tightened my chest.
The heat was a malevolent entity. It poured into my lungs with every breath, dry and searing. It drew the moisture from my skin before sweat could even form, leaving a gritty, salted film.
My light traveling clothes felt like a foolish, suffocating costume here. Every ray of the cruel, white sun was a needlepoint of agony. I glanced behind me.
The second steed, a creature bred from stone and stamina, followed placidly, its long-lashed eyes blinking slowly against the glare, utterly unfazed by the atmosphere that felt like it was cooking me alive.
And Olfred… Olfred was a statue carved from indifference. A white core mage, his body regulated by an internal power I could barely comprehend. He didn't sweat, didn't slump, didn't sigh.
He simply was, a part of the desolation, as immutable as the bedrock beneath the sand. His ease was a silent mockery of my suffering, a physical manifestation of the chasm between us.
I was a child playing at being consequential, wilting under a sun he didn't even acknowledge.
I needed a distraction, anything to pull my mind from the oven of my own body and the intimidating, silent mass of the Lance before me.
My fingers, clumsy with fatigue, fumbled at the sacks lashed to our steed's saddle—the other beast carried the bulk of our gear.
The contents were pragmatic: hardtack, dried meats, water-skins, coils of rope. I had brought my own small cache, things pilfered—borrowed, I insisted to my conscience—and stored in a storage ring on my finger I, again, borrowed from Grandpa's study.
But amongst Olfred's supplies, my searching touch found an anomaly. Not food, not tool. Something smooth and cool.
"What are you doing?" Olfred's voice was a gravelly intrusion, not angry, but bearing the flat tone of someone tolerating a minor nuisance. He didn't fully turn, just inclined his head slightly, a sliver of his profile visible from beneath his hood.
"I am just looking around..." I murmured, the apology inherent in my tone.
My hand closed around the object and drew it out. It was made of a grey, matte terracotta, shaped like an oversized river stone worn smooth by timeless waters. It fit perfectly in my palm, a solid, comforting weight. It was vaguely ovoid, like a flattened egg, but punctuated with a series of precise, hollowed holes.
A strange familiarity tugged at me, a ghost from a world away. An ocarina? The shape, the holes… it echoed the simple flute from my past life. But this was heavier, earthier.
"Don't touch!" Olfred's command was swift, sharpened by something that wasn't quite annoyance, but a flicker of… possession? Surprise?
"You are a musician, Damien?" I asked. The idea of this stern, formidable figure making music was so incongruous it was almost humorous.
He scoffed, a short, dry sound like two stones grinding.
"I don't have time for music." The statement was absolute, and I believed him completely.
I thought of Alea, spinning her dual life as palace maid and Lance, stealing moments to train me in secret.
Olfred's existence seemed even more austere—bodyguard to the Greysunders, agent for Rahdeas, a weapon constantly poised. His schedule would be barren of anything as human as leisure.
"Can I try it?" The question left me before I could consider it. I was desperate for any activity, any key to understanding this world or myself.
"Have you ever played an instrument in your life?" The question was rhetorical, his skepticism clear.
I shook my head, then remembered he wasn't looking. "My Mom plays the lyre from time to time."
A memory surfaced, unbidden and sweet: Mom, her face soft in the firelight, trying to teach Tessia a simple ballad. Tessia, with all her grace and fierce beauty, was hopelessly, endearingly tone-deaf. The attempt had dissolved into laughter and off-key shrieks, a moment of pure, normal family.
I stared at the instrument. Sound magic was a whisper in my veins, a potential I couldn't yet shout.
In the fantasy stories of Earth, instruments were sometimes conduits, focuses for power. Could this be a wand for a magic the novel never bothered to explain? A seed of desperate hope took root.
My swordsmanship was a non-existent, my body still weak. But maybe I could forge a weapon that didn't rely on muscle my four-year-old frame didn't possess and wasn't a cane I would need to replace every time I grew too tall.
"Do whatever, just don't annoy me too much," Olfred conceded, the sigh in his voice louder than the wind.
"I have a deviancy in sound magic," I offered, a fragment of truth as a token.
"Does that mean you can use even wind magic? Dual-elemental at four," he observed, his tone shifting minutely from dismissive to assessing.
"I can also use earth magic," I admitted. There was no point in hiding the tri-elemental truth from him now.
Olfred just hummed, a non-committal sound that absorbed the information and filed it away. I raised the instrument to my lips, my hands trembling slightly from heat and anticipation. I blew a tentative breath.
The sound that erupted was shockingly loud—a sharp, clear, high-pitched note that didn't just cut through the silence, it shattered it. It echoed over the dunes, a solitary, plaintive cry that seemed to hang in the air long after I'd stopped.
I flinched, the instrument's power startling me.
"When I said not to annoy me too much, let's say that noise annoys me quite a lot," Olfred grumbled, but there was no real heat behind it.
"I didn't expect it to be so loud," I said, my own voice hushed in the returning silence, now made deeper by the memory of the note.
"Stoneflutes are used in mines to alert miners, of course it's loud," he stated, as if explaining that water was wet.
A tool for danger, for signaling in the dark. Of course. Nothing here was just for beauty.
Stoneflute. The name was perfect, as blunt and functional as the man who carried it. I spent the miles until dusk in a private, struggling communion with the instrument.
I tried to shape my breath into a melody, something simple and less jarring, but my inexperienced lips and fingers produced only a series of wandering, plaintive notes that strayed into dissonance.
More importantly, I tried to push my mana through it, to weave my nascent sound magic into the tones.
The results were pathetic, frustrating—not the controlled waves of destructive frequency I imagined, but faint, invisible pops in the air around us, like bubbles of energy forming and bursting at random, weak and directionless.
Each failed attempt was a quiet humiliation, a mirror of my larger struggle. I had the knowledge, I had the will, but the translation from theory to practice, from spirit to substance, was a canyon I couldn't yet cross.
The silence of the desert was waiting to swallow my mistakes, but I would keep trying to make it answer to me.