SHE HAD DONE THAT. Must have done it. Yet, she could not remember so much as moving. Somewhere, somehow, sometime, self-defence and murder had merged with lethal effect.

  That perspective changed everything. The necessity, the sheer weight of that act’s consequence – for, in a sense, regrets carried a weight greater than gravity, and sorrow, a burden impossible to measure even by its physical traces in her being. Allory knew that she would do this and far, far more, in service of Ehlshinoi – in service of all she knew and loved.

  Yet it was no trivial thing. It was a stain.

  Blood. Fae blood. The true sap of life. It spilled languidly down his neck, tracing the topography of skin and collarbones in seven perfect, deathly rivulets. The silver blood spilled more than mere substance. It had spilled what made him vital, a living being, and left in its place an echoing absence that could only evermore be marked by sorrow. Useless grieving.

  To gaze upon such an act of her own hand left her gaze feeling hollowed out. Sickened and despairing. For what did it mean to raise a creature from the boneyard – if truly a soul did linger there – if hers was the hand to despatch them too?

  Was this not to do as the Wraith itself did?

  Movement swirled unbidden, tearing her away from the heaviest of contemplations. Here in the now, it seemed to her that part of herself merged into the inexorable march of history, somehow wrenching the King and all his Councillors away to a place where they would stand on an outlook above the vast Bastions of Thorn and stare in melancholy incredulity as an army of hitherto unseen, unsuspected Dark Elves gave their lives to rescue Ahm-Shira in such a welter of bloodshed as would stain the very streams of the Deepwoods a crimson deeper and wider than any map could compass. Whole nations of Elves would pass into history, this fateful day. The Dark Elves would never regain the heights of the power they gave up.

  Yet here too in the now, she hovered in the air above that living map, seeing crimson tide lapping against and over crimson tide, the boundaries and troop movements perfectly articulated, perfectly recounting the myriad doomed lives of friend and foe alike. One merged into the next. The scene began to move before her like a throbbing heart, its beating measured in the ebb and flow of armies, in the tides of Human, Elf, Fae, Dragon, Giant and other life, as the map showed her snapshots of different times in increasing cadence. Units wiped out. Towns razed beneath the shadows of marauding Dragons. Kingdoms overrun. Populations put to the sword. Silver Fae blood spilled in countless forested halls.

  Ever and always, the boneyard’s presence gathered its dreadful weight.

  Indiscriminate, the gateway to eternity consumed all.

  She observed how the Wraith’s armies had first come in single dots – each monstrous, yet not ultimately enough to challenge the powers of the Deepwoods, then in rivers etching their terrible courses that swelled into broad tides that relentlessly scouring all life in their path and then finally, as one great, unending ocean of crimson destruction. Only once had she seen the real ocean – a day where butterfly-Allory fluttered against the clear bottle’s glass of reality – that day she had watched the Faroon being slaughtered in their thousands first by their own hands, then by the Kera-du-Kerakarool.

  This was worse.

  Ten thousand times worse.

  This noose had no weak point. It suffered no speck of respite, no spot on the map that was less than awash in that singular, bloody splash of redness. No noose was this. It was a flood. An endless torrent of annihilation. That was the reality she faced in the present that was this time’s future, when … no. Instead of fighting to see each throb of crimson, each minute revision, addition or subtraction to the map as living and dying caused it to change on such a scale that all become unimaginable and life itself – all these lives so heartlessly depicted seemed devalued and demeaned in some way, impossible for her to grasp in any sense of their entirety – she gave that problem over to Ehlshinoi and breathed again for some slight relief from indescribable weariness.

  Soul Blossom was greater than she would ever be. She had the capacity to remember them all.

  This Scintillant could not. It would break her, were she not broken already, a creature whose essential purpose remained murky at best.

  Carrier of remembrance. Boneyard girl.

  All her soul’s sap shuddered at that truth.

  Instead of suffering to understand, Allory knew she must let herself be. Simply be. All she was, was Allory Fae. This must wash over her. She must let herself rest – somehow, against all odds, rest in it, rather than fighting her perceptions wing and sap.

  A lesson would come.

  Faster and faster still, the projections flickered in front of her eyes. Over and over and over again. Hammer-blows against her awareness, undeniable, relentless, savage.

  Faster. Stronger. Heavier than a soul could ever hope to bear.

  From distinct beats, the images began to blur into intersecting arcs as if death’s own hummingbird took flight, suckling on the nectars of life. Fey power churned upward, spraying over her flinching body as though a great wound gave up its life’s blood, all the blood and wounds of ten thousand generations blending together into a single, throbbing, swelling apparition of horror. Reality sundered. Although the phenomenon was noiseless it nonetheless struck her with soul-shattering force, snatching her away in an instant, coughing and choking and drowning, rising and falling, clinging to whatever shreds of sanity were left to her; a precious handful that shredded and dissolved between grasping blue fingers in time it took her to think about them.

  Squeezed, battered, hurled beyond all strength of life or limb to withstand, Allory wanted nothing more than to welcome the darkness – yet a stubborn kernel of will yet flickered within her, a spark or sparkle which refused to be snuffed out. Light remained. A faint sense of light, treasured against all odds from the very beginning of her pupae-family’s cocoon. From her first memory. All around was this crimson-hued dusk, yet she seemed to linger impossibly long between consciousness and unconsciousness, so long that she had a moment to wonder if this was even living as she knew it.

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  Her mouth opened in a silent, unending scream.

  Without any warning whatsoever, gravity seized her tiny body and suplexed her to an unseen floor. Crystalline glass shattered with a violent explosion, bringing an ephemeral scent like charred roses to her nostrils. Indeed, she lay at the epicentre of an expanding puff of soft pink dust that, despite its gentle appearance, had shovelled Monsteron and Long Nose and all the Felidragons up against the walls of their chamber.

  Huh! Gravity Fae, reprised?

  Reversed?

  Allory decided that was worth an apologetic, emphatic, “Eep!”

  * * * *

  Raging sparkles and other weirdness aside, giving her captive audience the full benefit of her most dreadful eep and then a reflexive giggle did much to settle Allory – perhaps as much as it unsettled them. One Fae’s relieved laughter being another’s maniacal declaration of Spheris-spanning tyranny, she supposed. Never had she longed more for arms to rub or antennae to pull.

  Here she was. No longer oscillating. Bereft of dislocation.

  Allory, present.

  Presence presented presently.

  This silence deafened. The lack of echoes unsettled her. Gone were the pugnacious punches of history. The despair. Wraith-born rot surrounding the heart of Spheris.

  Absence made her stumble forward a step, questioning.

  “Sparkles!”

  Black smoke billowed before her, incongruously conveying a hint of sweet vanilla before it resolved into a towering Elf who held himself poised before her like a dark blade, ready at the slightest whisper to unleash a whirlwind of destruction.

  Yet it was not him who had spoken. That was Ashueli, who had smoked into being right at her back.

  Now, a throaty chuckle. “I see the Sparkles has the situation well in hand.”

  “Indeed,” Jhoranyal rumbled.

  “The treachery of the Golden Purrmaine Felidragons lies pinned in tableaux,” said she, somehow sheathing her sword without bothering to actually insert it into the scabbard. She simply relocated it there.

  That Elemental was growing into her powers by the minute.

  Eep times infinity, Allory snickered to herself. Glad she’s my friend.

  Nonetheless, she dusted off her little sparkles, pulled her oddly-solid and somehow reconstituted antennae, and gazed about herself with something approaching steadiness. “Monsteron Realm-Waster, devastating lord of vexatious poison and obsidian talon of the night, is at no fault here,” she said clearly. “These Felidragons are, however, up to no good. As usual.”

  As she spoke, a tiny beat of memory tugged at her awareness. Scintillants hiding in the forests in plain view of Ahm-Shira sometime in the past. A time when the climate was cooler, when ferny brakes of emerald and gold-hued fronds covered much of the forest floor in that region. The Deepwoods were drier now. Drier and … dusty, a shift in climate she had only just apprehended. Tinder-dry. Ready to burn.

  She needed to brief Yaarah. Immediately.

  Still trembling on a razor’s edge of readiness, Ashueli said, “You are well, Allory? Unharmed?”

  “Perfectly sparkly.”

  “Huh!” An inelegant snort escaped the Princess’ nostrils. “Not too unexpected. It appears that even anti-elemental magic fails to hold an Elemental, Jhoranyal –”

  Twitches of interest in their captive audience caused her to bite off whatever else she might have said, however. Ash was sharp. In a low voice, she bade Allory hold firm for a minute or two more, and that was when she became aware of a sound like a rising wind, and darkness flickered across the light streaming into the chamber. The armada of Quellsteel Pixies, she realised. Ten thousand or more decidedly unhappy, heavily armed Pixies with an appetite for settling a few generational scores.

  Terrifying, she decided. Allory flicks her little finger, and …

  “Sparkles! Mrrwl!” Yaarah poured into the chamber with a yowl of anguished delight as he beheld her, then a second sound, a hiss of discontent. “Prime Scholar Sharzaah. Uh – oh – oh, my whiskers!”

  “Release me this instant!”

  “Stop!”

  Allory was not sure how her chiming voice managed a growl, but it did.

  “Release me, or face the consequences!”

  Rich, cultured, utterly arrogant, that voice held echoes she had heard in more than a few times and places throughout her strange life. Wraith-like echoes. It demanded obedience in ways that she could not immediately fathom.

  Over Ashueli’s snarling and Jhoranyal’s hiss of discontent, a certain General Allory Fae summoned her inner steel and snapped, “Clap this fool of a Felidragon in chains! Eep – uh, all of them! Except Monsteron.”

  “SSSSS,” Monsteron hissed poisonously.

  “Who is not a Felidragon!”

  “SSSSS!!”

  Sharzaah howled, “Frrr-ssst! This is most unseemly! I demand immediate – hsst!”

  His voice choked off as Jhoranyal supplied motivation in the form of several feet of sharpened steel applied to the region of his throat. Blazing dark eyes dared the Felidragon to say one word more. The Prime Scholar appeared to have lost his powers of indignation.

  Yaarah said, “Release your images of my face at once. Long Nose, you have done us a great disservice this day.”

  Only this day? Allory seethed, yet she knew she could never reveal to him the full, historic perfidy of his kind.

  The unsightly creature chose to spit in his direction, only to pull up as Monsteron’s forepaw clamped his muzzle shut. “Silence, traitor. Scholar Yaarah, your commands?”

  The scholar drew himself up. “Well, seeing as the situation appears to have been sufficiently en-sparkled to my satisfaction … let’s see.” The whiskers required a moment’s stroking before he purred, “As Allory Fae suggested, let’s clap these fools in irons and bring them with us to Ahm-Shira, under heavy guard, where we shall see them settled into suitably foul accommodations in the deepest dungeons. I myself shall lead the interrogation of these traitors and Long Nose –”

  “Hessss will assistsss,” Monsteron snickered, clearly the boss-monster in charge of an inferior now. “The Scintillantsss promisssse remainssss true.”

  Long Nose appeared to fold in upon himself. Allory had no doubt that Monsteron had means of encouragement that she should not wish to imagine, but she simply nodded in acknowledgement of her responsibilities. She had made a vow. Nothing would change that – besides, the Raptor had not been asking a question. His tone was a statement of fact.

  “Good, good.” Yaarah dusted his paws fastidiously and sniffed as if he had smelled something unspeakably foul. Something like treachery. “Welcome to Ahm-Ulira, Allory Fae.”

  Should he say, ‘Welcome back?’

  For she had been here before, that she knew for certain – something in the scent of the air was incredibly familiar to her, pollens and a hint of sulphur from what she remembered were several active volcanic vents near the city. They would lie a little sun-spinward of the centre, in a sacred grove that had belonged to the Felidragons since before she could remember.

  Before? Spoken by one with memories as long as the birth of the Shyraiama Dragons themselves? When the forests, lakes and plains of Spheris must have been barren of life, for light and dark were not yet known within the great shell-world. Now, all those aeons-old mechanisms were damaged and failing. Where could she put her hope? Would Ehlshinoi descend in a blaze of redemption and rescue all creatures? Surely, that must be the plan.

  So, amidst all this accumulation of time – was she on time? Or a little late?