Chapter 2

Countless questions raced through Grace’s mind, none of which were able to find a voice. The thoughts that kept pushing their way to the front all had to do with who could this woman be, what was she doing in this (as far as Grace could tell) abandoned castle, and why she had horns and wings.

The woman now lay on the floor, her head resting comfortably on Lacryma’s lap while the Dokalfr girl looked over her sleeping face with an unreadable expression.  

At any rate it seemed as though the woman was only sleeping. Grace had already confirmed that she was breathing and had checked for her pulse, but she had not so much as stirred once since falling into their arms, and there was no way of knowing when or even if she would awaken again.

After exchanging a look with Lacryma and seeing the resolve in her eyes, it was clear that she had already made up her mind to stay beside this strange woman for as long as it took.

“Well, I’m not leaving you here alone,” Grace said, fully aware that Lacryma wouldn’t understand. Whatever had called her here had also summoned Lacryma, and even though it may have been pure happenstance that had brought them together Grace couldn’t simply walk away now. Grace had no idea who or what this winged woman was and what she might be capable of once she awakened. There was also the ever looming threat that scouts from Acacia might be on their way at this moment.

With nothing else to do, Grace searched the room they were in, starting by slowly walking around the perimeter. Murals had been made onto the wall out of mosaic tiles, and although the colors had faded, she could still make out shapes. The sun rising over mountains, a beast - perhaps a dragon - its wings extending across the scene, a sword in one clawed fist, a sceptre in the other. Flanking this scene was depictions of war, soldiers with wings fighting back against beasts and invading armies. Then there was what appeared to be a scene of a coronation. A man with wings sitting upon a throne while a crown was place upon his head.

Grace then went to look over the stone plinth that the woman had been suspended above earlier. On closer inspection there were glyphs carved into its sides and a round indentation on the top surface, as though something had rested there once before.

On the south facing wall a narrow window had been carved out, which explained why the room was well illuminated. Grace peered out of the window and was surprised by how high they were. She could see below the chasm and the bridge she had crossed over it, then further on into the distance at the rock formations she had passed on her way, and much of the surrounding valley.

Grace narrowed her eyes. From this higher vantage point, the more she looked down at the field that stretched below the less natural those formations appeared, stones had clearly been arranged in organized rows and angles that no amount of erosion could have caused. She lifted her binoculars from where they hung around her neck and peered through them, barely able  to examine a single rock formation before a voice snagged her attention.

“Luketto han si Drajken?”

Grace turned from the window. Lacryma had spoken those words aloud in an almost inquiring tone, though Grace knew it was likely a question the girl had posed to herself more than someone who couldn’t even communicate with her. Lacryma tilted her head curiously to look closer at the sleeping woman’s face and lightly traced her slender fingers over one of the woman’s horns. Grace hadn’t even realized she had clenched her fists, she considered trying to tell Lacryma to get away from the woman, or perhaps even pull her away but brushed both options away with a shake of her head. Then she saw Lacryma herself pull her hands away.

The sleeping woman was groaning, slowly stretching her arms and blinking her red eyes while looking around, bleary and disoriented. Her gaze eventually met Lacryma’s and for a moment the woman smiled and lifted her arm up to touch the girl’s cheek. Once again Grace felt an inexplicable urge to leap forward and pull the Dokalfr girl away.

But then some sort of realization seemed to dawn on the woman; her smile evaporated, she dropped her arm and her eyes narrowed. She glanced in Grace’s direction as though she could feel the heat from her stare.

“I knoweth not thine visage.” She said, her tone sharp and direct. She spoke the same language used extensively throughout the Erastian Empire, though it was in a dialect that had not been heard in nearly five hundred years. Grace had only heard it before in theatre.  “Wherefore art thou in these chambers? Wither art mine guards? What hath-”

Her eyes flitted across the room, taking in the signs of age and dilapidation that surrounded her, and was at a loss for words. She slowly rose to her feet, with the help of Lacryma, and looked around with a look of confusion. She walked, unsteadily, to the window where Grace had stood before and looked out at the valley, and the color suddenly drained from her face.   

“Tam placika lattyln,” Lacryma spoke in a placating voice. “Kun tulreme”

“‘Twas abandoned, thee sayeth?” The woman responded with a grimace, and lifted her hand to hold the side of her head as though it were in pain. “Everything…”

“You… you understand her!?” Grace almost blurted the words out.

“Of course,” she turned to Grace. “Doth thee not speaketh the Aelferic tongue? Tell me what hath befallen this place? Why can I not-“ The woman halted mid-sentence, and Grace wondered what she stopped herself from saying.

Grace recounted the events that brought her to discover the castle in the mountain, beginning with the light in the sky up to the point where Lacryma and herself had found the room where she had been encapsulated in a shell of light.

“Jaa, sim tarina?”  The woman then turned to Lacryma and asked.

Lacryma began speaking her own account, so quickly and excitedly that there was no way for Grace to even differentiate one word from the next. But the red-eyed woman just stood there and nodded as she listened.

“I see.” She said, putting a hand to her own chin. “Both thy stories art similar, and I has't nay reason to believeth thou art somehow both conspiring to fabricate a falsehood to deceive me. But what thou sayeth cannot be.”   

She turned to Grace and Lacryma and spread out her arms.

“Mine name is Erislethe. I am the heir of the Aschendorne Dynasty, who hath ruled o’er these lands for generations. Thou standeth in the halls of Steinhalt, mine ancestral home. All that lies before thee belongs to me by birthright.” Erislethe then spoke to Lacryma, presumably to tell her the same thing in the elven language   

Finally Grace understood what she had seen before when she had looked out over the field below: the ruins of a town, the buildings razed down to their stone foundations.      

Erislethe’s eyes suddenly narrowed and she turned again to the window, setting her palms down on the stone windowsill as she leaned forward to look at something in the far distance. “Interlopers,” she finally said, looking in Grace’s direction. “Be they thy comrades?”

Grace stepped up to the window herself, retrieved her binoculars, and looked through them into the distance where Erislethe was pointing. Horsemen, dressed in dark green and bearing no coat of arms that she could discern, were riding towards the castle. By a quick count there were at least twenty of them, but they could have been the vanguard of a larger force and by their staggered formation it was hard to keep track of them. They were also still too far away to tell even with the aid of binoculars, but they did not seem to her to be elves. Mercenaries would have been her first guess.

“They must be from Acacia, to have gotten here so quickly,” Grace said, lowering the binoculars. “But I don’t understand. Even if they were on the border it should have still taken at least a day to mobilize a scouting party.”

“I knoweth not what is this Acacia thee speak of,” Erislethe said in a low voice. “But yonder are nay scouts. Verily, those art raiders.”

Grace felt a hand lightly touch her arm. It was Lacryma, gesturing at the binoculars in her hands. Grace smiled and lifted the strap they hung from over her head and handed them to the Dokalfr girl saying, “I’d ask you not to drop them, but…”

Lacryma put the lenses up to her eyes and peered out into the valley, then gasped and pulled them away again before turning to Erislethe and began speaking frantically.

“I see…” Erislethe responded by putting her hand to her chin again when Lacryma had finished speaking and looked down at the valley with a dark look.

“What did she say?”

“The lady hath said her people, fleeing from the Losalfr, hath taken refuge in yond valley below." Erislethe explained, her fingers tightening over the lip of the windowsill until cracks began to form in the stone. “And that these blackguards are the ones who art hunting them.”