Chapter 6 | Ravinica

Chapter 6

Ravinica

A FEW DAYS LATER, I found myself back in a clearing in the northern region of Delaveer Forest.

Though I was still in the dark about most things involving my captors, I had gleaned a few interesting tidbits. After hearing Corym talk with his Ljosalfar brethren in their graceful, angelic language, I learned they had different names for things than we did.

Delaveer, to them, was called Delf'avernin. It was an ancient phrase to the elves, who claimed to have inhabited the Isle long before humans arrived.

I didn't doubt it. Humans had a tendency throughout history to take things that didn't belong to them. My sea-faring ancestors from Scandinavia and other parts of the world were some of the worst offenders.

There was a romanticized version of my ancestral past, the Vikings, yet in truth it was a gritty, unglamorous history. One riddled with conflict, war, strife, and conquest. Pillaging. Religious animosity and betrayal.

It wasn't all bad. Many parts of the world owed at least some portion of their heritage and bloodline to my Viking ancestors. Whether that blood-mixing had come willingly and peacefully, well . . . that was a point of much contention for historians and people smarter than I.

The elves had their own history in Alfheim, with some of it spilling over into Midgard. They had been the human's allies for many years—at least for many years in the human sense. Elves lived much longer than us. The time they spent during the Taldan Wars with King Dannon and the humans as allies was a short blip on their historical journey.

What my kinfolk considered a pivotal, treacherous, and huge moment in our history was merely a passing blink for the elves. I was somewhat offended when I learned from Corym that, quite frankly, the three Taldan Wars were not such a big deal to elves.

What was more concerning to the Ljosalfar were the extraplanar wars with other realmfolk, such as the kobolds, giants or jotnar, goblins, trolls, sometimes the dwarves, and, of course, the Dokkalfar elves.

I supposed when you had been warring with countless creatures and monsters of legend for generations, endlessly, then, yes, the few years humans and elves mingled together was not such a huge chunk of time.

I wanted to learn more. I'd been patient as I said I would be, up until this point. Now, I stared at two rocks slanted on their sides in front of me, ten feet away. They were tall and skinny, with two feet of space between them.

"You are going to topple those stones into each other," Corym commanded.

"Sounds easy enough," I answered.

"Then you're going to break them and combine them into a single stone."

I turned my head to blink at him. "Excuse me? How in Hel am I supposed to do that?"

One side of his lips curled. "Use your ingenuity."

I scratched my head, running my fingers through my wavy silver. "I'll need some sort of binding property or element." I said it out loud, hoping for a hint from him, to know if I was on the right track.

"Good." He nodded firmly. "Do you know the rune for binding, and the Shape?"

"Yes."

He gestured forward. "Let's see what you can do. Remember, lunis'ai , your magic feeds you. Not the other way around."

I didn't know what that really meant, and it was frustrating every time he said it—which had been more than a handful during my stay at the elf encampment.

Corym explained it again as I started to concentrate and close myself off to the sunny morning around me. "You are different than others. You don't feed your powers like humans do—you are able to tap into the inherent magic within you. Draw on the essence within yourself. If you're lost, then fall back to your studies and training."

I had all of two weeks since my runeshaping powers had miraculously come alive. Not much to fall back on.

Yet Corym seemed to have abundantly more confidence in me than I did. I wondered why, and then stuffed the thought aside for another time as I concentrated on the two stones in front of me.

First, I crouched, kneeling on one knee. My palms caressed the earth, feeling the grass and soil beneath them. The tiny tickling of the grass sent shivers down my arms as I closed my eyes and tried to look within myself as Corym had instructed me.

It was like becoming locked in a cave. In my mind, a small light shone ahead of me. I needed to wrap my hand around that bright essence. Yet I could only reach the light by maneuvering through the labyrinthine walls and deterrents of my own mind, which took some finagling.

Rooting my hands to the earth helped me navigate the treacherous path. It was an out-of-body experience—pulling away from myself, becoming lost in the haze of magic now swirling inside my body and begging to be used.

All I needed to do was access it.

Sometimes, that was easier said than done.

When I opened my eyes, I was no closer to the light—the "essence"—but now I was sweating. A droplet burned my eyes, and I breathed heavily.

"If you can't find the thread, fall back to your human roots if your elven ones fail you," Corym said, essentially repeating what he had said earlier, except now more urgently when he noticed the focused, sweaty look on my face. "Your tether will not be as strong. Continue to use the element as your anchor before you draw the Shape. There you go."

Without thinking, my right hand lifted from the grass. I sketched the air with a few quick finger movements and the marks lit up white and red like a blacksmith's forge. Pure power was embedded in the runic Shape.

Under my left palm, the earth began to tremble from the energy transference. The directive. It was a slow murmur, hardly able to be heard or felt if you weren't looking for it.

I directed the source of my power—the grass and soil—to move and twist and change toward the two stones in front of me.

The trembling heightened and grew louder, with the earth itself groaning from the sudden shift in movement. Worms and other insects emerged from the disrupted soil as I created a path through it with shallow grooves.

I was bending the earth. With a small smile, I locked in, drawing another Shape to enhance the first rune because I was getting impatient.

Source and directive, I thought, remembering the teachings of Hersir Greta Selken. Even though I hadn't been able to Shape in my Runeshaping Basics class, I had taken notes and listened, for when this moment finally came to fruition.

I just hadn't expected the moment to come to fruition while in the midst of the legendary light elves.

The two stones swayed as the ground around me shook. The small tremor I caused made the stones topple inward, closing the two-foot gap between them until they crashed together with a rocky thud and stood tip-to-tip, forming the shape of a triangle.

"Now, Shape their destruction," Corym said.

My body trembled from the energy I'd already used. I couldn't get ahead of myself or be too happy about my first success, because Corym was a stern teacher—I had more things to do. He wasn't going to make it easy for me, because he said I had a lot to catch up on.

Gods was he right about that.

I Shaped the air again, faster this time. The trembling earth stopped shaking. My left hand came up from the grass, opposite my right.

I drew in a new source with the Shaping: the wind catching through the tree branches around the clearing.

A small tornado formed overhead, to my left, whirling and sending birds squawking into the sky. I could see the vortex forming from my burgeoning power, and my heart started to hammer as fast as the tornado grew.

"Good!" Corym yelled above the din of buzzing air and blowing leaves and sediment. "A fine choice, lunis'ai !"

His enthusiasm only made me stronger, bolstering my power. The rune's Shape stayed illuminated in the air in front of me, even as the first one—the directive to tremble the earth—faded from existence.

I drew a third Shape, calling to expel the wind toward the two stones. As the wall of wind swept down from the heavens, I gasped and noticed my error—

Shit!

—and amended its trajectory with a swift fourth Shape, my fingers dancing on the sky.

The whirlwind whittled down into a bottlenecked cyclone, focusing and clenching from a wall of wind into a blade of wind. I didn't want to blow the damn stones over, I wanted to slice through them!

With a shout, I threw my hands forward to give the blade a direction, and the invisible squall burst forward.

With an earthen groan, the blade of wind slammed and sliced through the middle of both stones, leaving a black line of surgical precision in its wake.

Panting, I lowered my hands, watching with wide eyes . . .

And the two stones became four—the top halves of both sliding down from the bottom halves and thudding to the forest floor, finely cut through the middle.

Corym clenched a fist. "Yes, lunis'ai !"

I yelped in surprise, pumped my fists into the air, and stood. Before I knew what I was doing, I laughed and jumped at him, throwing my arms around his neck in excitement. "I did it!"

He laughed with me, returning my embrace.

And I was suddenly much too close to the elf, feeling Corym's warm, lithe body against mine, his chest pressing against my breasts. His warm breath washing over me.

With a gasp and a flush of color to my cheeks, I unhanded him in a hurry, standing back and stammering. "I, erm, s-sorry about that."

Corym simply cleared his throat. For such a regal, noble-like race, he showed a bit of lost decorum by shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He stared at the ground, then pointed over to the cut rocks. "You still have more work to do."

"Right." I swallowed hard, my throat suddenly dry, and faced the destruction I had caused.

I felt thrilled and exhausted at the same time. How am I supposed to bind these rocks together? Water would destroy them more, eroding them. Fire would . . . could I solder them together?

I scoffed, shaking my head. I wasn't about to ask my elven captor—the one I had just brutally bear-hugged—for advice. I was too mortified.

So, I did what he had first told me to do: I used my ingenuity. Come on, Vini. You're the same girl who passed a runeshaping test with a water-filled condom and a bow and arrow. You can do this. Think!

I looked down to my belt, the thin metal buckle, and frowned. Well, it's half-ass, but . . .

With a wave of my hands and waggle of my fingers, starting a new Shape, I used the belt as my source. I unbuckled it and directed a new wave of wind to carry the belt through the sky.

I didn't want to bring more attention to my nether regions after lunging at my beautiful elven captor, by sliding my belt off, but it couldn't be helped. I had to complete the challenge.

Corym chuckled when he realized what I was doing.

The leather belt wrapped around the two bottom halves of the stones, which were still standing. Slowly, the stones fell inward on each other, until they were facing end to end on the ground.

I wrapped the belt around the middle, like a magical lasso, and noticed Corym shaking his head out the corner of my eye.

With a smirk, I added flair to the operation. I'm not done yet, golden boy. Drawing more Shapes, I pulled on the buckle of the belt. Slowly, with a grating sound that made me cringe, I stretched the iron buckle itself.

I Shaped a summoning and grabbed fire from thin air, directing the flames to soar through the sky onto the belt. The long strip of metal burned and stank and smoked, and after a tense moment of concentration, it melted.

My mind lagged and ached from all the incongruent Shapes I'd been calling on, trying to impress Corym E'tar. I fought against the pounding in my skull and drew a final Shape, summoning water from the melted ice of Niflheim.

I threw the water and splashed it over the brightly burning iron belt buckle. It sizzled and hissed.

When it finished sizzling, the metal buckle had been stretched to trace over the leather belt holding the two stones together, melted onto it, and quenched to cool and solidify the melted metal into place.

A layman's soldering job. Similar to how a blacksmith made a sword—from forge to anvil to well.

I sagged to my knees, bowing my head. Tingles ran through my body, stripping me of any power I had. I wanted to lay on the grass and stare up at the sky. My thoughts were dim, foggy, almost nonexistent. "T-There . . ." I croaked. "Combined." I waved a hand at my handiwork.

Corym smiled, scratching his brilliant platinum hair. "Certainly unorthodox. I'll give it a passing grade for your creativity."

I smiled devilishly. "You never told me how I had to combine the rocks. So I did it mechanically, rather than elementally."

Slowly, feeling came back to my hands and face. I wobbled onto my feet.

"You did well, Ravinica. This was a test to see how many Shapes you could simultaneously cast without exerting yourself to unconsciousness."

I beamed at him, though it felt sickly. Even with my success, my drifting, tired mind was stuck on the embrace I'd given the elf.

That's not good. Right?

He walked toward the rocks in his graceful, straight-backed gait. "Though I would have used other means."

"Like what?"

He kicked the rock. The binding held, though the belt wouldn't take long to unravel. If he lifted the stones—maybe thirty pounds apiece, sixty combined—my iron lasso would surely bend and break.

"Two ideas come to mind," he said, facing me. "Smelting. Firing the stones with such heat as to melt them into liquids so they can form back together as a whole."

"That idea crossed my mind. I don't think I'm powerful enough to exert that much energy on a single rune. Fire, in this case."

He nodded, pouting his lips. "Lithification, as well."

"Huh?"

He chuckled and walked over to me. "Rock surgery, in a sense. Destroying the rock into sediments and compacting it together through pressure."

"Gods. That would take a lot of pressure."

"Aye. It's not easy to cement two objects together. Yet it can be done. I didn't expect that bonus question to be solved, lunis'ai. " Corym smiled at me, and it was genuine.

My heart soared at the smile. It was rare for the uptight elves to show much emotion or feeling. Their demeanor was quite alien and unlike any humans I'd ever met—besides Magnus Feldraug, perhaps. The bloodrender was more alien than even people from another world, at times.

My smile faltered as I stared into Corym's eyes but thought of Magnus. I missed him.

"Come," the elf said, drawing me back to the present. He reached out with his hand. It wasn't gloved, and as far as hands went, it was a beautiful one. "You've done well. In a matter of weeks you've managed to excel in runeshaping beyond my expectations. I didn't suspect you'd be such a quick apprentice, even with power so strong inside you."

With a slight bow and smile, I said, "Thank you."

"I am proud of you. We must celebrate."

I lifted my head, blinking at him in shock. I stared down at his spindly, fair hand. "What do you h-have in mind, Corym?"

His smile turned roguish, golden eyes glinting in the sunlight. "Perhaps we should ask the council?"

My eyes widened. Ask the council? As in . . . I'm finally going to get to talk to them—to be part of the group? They finally trust me?

Without thinking, I took his hand in mine. It felt right. His palm was warm. Our fingers threaded together.

And I walked out of the clearing with my elven captor, hand in hand.