The demonic elven warrior was on us before I had time to try to fly. He moved quickly, and it was clear Sukura had barely managed to block his attack. He hissed at her, clearly considering her no more than an obstacle.

“Run!” she managed to shout while getting herself between him and me.

“W-we need to go. We need to get you out of here,” Aara added, pulling at my arm.

But… I couldn’t.

I hadn’t wanted to leave Chem behind. I hadn’t been ready to accept he’d been going to die… and I’d only been able to stomach it because I’d be taking Sukura with me. I couldn’t accept him dying for me, but for his daughter…

Sukura was clearly on the back footing, even with the Janzori warrior using his off arm. I could tell from the way their blades clashed that he was stronger than her. Stronger than any human, surely. 

He was using his off arm, though. Chem had hurt him. Seriously injured him, even. Which meant… which meant…

Maybe we could stop him. I just needed to work out how. Because just blocking that dagger still had me feeling gross. I couldn’t handle getting close enough to fight him. I wasn’t nearly as fast as Sukura. He’d slice me or stab me for sure. So what could I do?

Looking around, I remembered there were a few trees around. I could do something with that. Potentially.

Rushing over to the nearest one, I bent my knees and then yanked, pulling the tree out. Roots and all. 

It was cumbersome, but I could manage. Even if I still felt a bit shaky from the dark magic still swirling around my system. I spun around and rushed back, tree held back in preparation for a swing. I just needed Sukura to see me.

Thankfully that didn’t take long. There was a flash of concern in her eyes before she scrambled away as best she could. Which caused the demonic elf to turn around, wondering what had made Sukura break her distraction.

I swung before he could finish turning, slamming him into the house with the far end of the tree. It was clumsy and unwieldy, but it packed a kick.

Before he could have a chance to get up I then smashed the tree against him, driving him and it through the wall. I then took a moment to catch my breath, Sukura doing the same. I wasn’t sure what to say after that. But I felt I needed to try to comfort her after what had happened.

I was most of the way to them when we heard a noise from the house. We all had hope for a moment that Chem had somehow survived.

However, no. It was the demon elf, now limping slightly, but still on his feet. While we were exhausted.

I muttered a brief profanity to myself, before rushing over to the others. I shouted for Sukura to hop on my back. Then I scooped Aara into my arms. With both girls secure, I started running while stretching out my wings, beginning to flap them.

A few moments later we were airborne. Rising away from the ground and away from any sort of throwing range for daggers. I didn’t really have a destination in mind other than ‘away’, but I figured a real plan could wait. Surviving was enough of a goal right now. 

Not that flying was easy. Swinging that tree around had taken a lot out of me, and it seemed flying wasn’t going much better. I had to find somewhere to rest.

Not yet, though. I doubted we’d crossed over the horizon enough to have lost him. We also didn’t know how long it might take for him to heal. Or what sort of magic he might have to allow him to travel quickly. I was sure he had to have something, though. Travel in this world was just so slow by conventional means. 

Crossing over thinning streams, I realised we were headed towards the boundary between the savannah and the desert. We probably didn’t want to go too far out into the arid rocky expanse ahead of us, so I turned, trying to stay within the grassy regions.

Sooner than I wanted, however, I couldn’t stay in the air any longer. I brought us down for a somewhat too fast landing, stumbling and tripping, the three of us landing in a pile on a small hill. It wasn’t enough for anyone to be hurt, but enough for me to feel embarrassed about my landing.

And then I felt terrible that something as small as that was bothering me while Sukura had just lost her adoptive father. 

“We should keep going,” Sukura mumbled, her eyes and voice hollow as she got to her feet. “We have to keep going.”

“I’m not sure Emily is up for that… look at her,” Aara said in a soft voice, staring down at me.

“I’ll be fine,” I said, pulling myself up. “I just… I’ll walk it off.”

I made it a few more steps, before the weakness that had forced me to land turned into a full shiver through my body. I fell onto my knees, doubling over before throwing up a strange tar-like substance. 

I stared down at it, slightly terrified of what I was looking at. And then the world spun.

---

Blinking, I stared up at a tree, silhouetted against a starry night sky. 

I’d never been an astronomer of any sort, but I knew that it wasn’t the sky I’d grown up with. I hadn’t really spent much time looking at this world’s night sky, but now that I did I saw how different it was.

The constellations were all quite different, for starters. There was a large nebula-looking thing floating in the sky to one side. I also saw large and bright galaxies up there. Great spiral structures that took my breath away now that I noticed them. There was a moon above that looked to be a mixture of blues and browns. As if it were oceans on an otherwise rocky world. 

It also loomed larger than the Earth’s moon.

I rather wished I’d look at the sky more before. It was beautiful. I really hadn’t thought it could look like that, having grown up in the suburbs, the sky washed out by streetlights. (Though I suspected even the darkest skies on Earth weren’t this beautiful.)

“Oh, you woke up,” a deep and masculine sounding voice said to my one side.

Turning, I saw a man with deeply dark skin. He was a fair bit darker than Sukura, though (as best I could tell in the dim light) his skin tone was still in a human range.

He was also a rather large man, though there was a gentleness about his presence that put me at ease.

“You had some nasty spirit poisoning there, miss,” he said. “You likely would have been out for a few more days if your friend hadn’t called for me.”

“Oh… I… which,” I managed, realising I was a bit out of it.

It felt like I was on some sort of serious painkillers. Which I wasn’t worried about, but I vaguely suspected I wasn’t worried about because I was on them. If I’d been more grounded I’d have likely panicked about how loose my grip on things felt.

“The young druid, Aara was the one who called, of course,” the man said, before gesturing with his head to my other side. “Though neither girl has left your side much. In fact, this is the first I’ve gotten them to sleep for any significant length of time.”

Turning, I saw both Aara and Sukura sharing a bed roll not far away on slightly lower ground. They seemed rather peaceful there, Sukura holding on to Aara. Though it seemed more like one would hold onto an oversized stuffed animal than anything romantic.

“They told me you’re a goddess,” the man said, drawing my attention back to him.

“So they tell me,” I replied, still feeling some doubt about the claim.

If I could be taken down this badly by a cursed dagger hitting my magical shield then it really brought the whole idea back into question.

“Even if they hadn’t said anything I would have suspected it, with what you just did. You had tendrils of refined discordance running through your very spirit. Terrifying to think that Nemza has managed to get her hands on that… and I’d hate to find out what she had to give the dark gods to be given that much,” the man said.

“R-really?” I asked.

The man nodded, explaining that discordance was mined from the outer edges of existence, a mix of substance and energy that tore at the very world itself. The forces of Discord had crafted great blades of the stuff long ago when they rose against the Moon God, killing him with it and plunging his body into the ocean during the earliest eras.

He must have noticed the level to which I was listening, as he then continued to recount the myths. That the forces of Discord had been children of the Moon God and the Earth Goddess, born when the world was young and there existed only the plants, the animals, and the elves. The Moon God had banished the children, however, when one had accidentally brought death into the world while attempting to ‘play’ with elves. 

Furious at being punished as a group when only one was to blame, they’d armed themselves in the distant shadows and returned to usurp their father. They had then divided up the world, each ruling as terrifying and devouring tyrants, either enslaving the elves or chasing them into the oceans. 

Heartbroken by the cruelty of both her dead husband and her children, the Earth Goddess had decided that the first bloodline of gods was tainted, and instead offered a set of Elven champions the transmuted remains of the Moon God as a feast. The divine nature of it transformed them into godly beings themselves.

“Wait. They ate him?” I asked, staring at the man with terror in my eyes.

“All food comes from the earth, and the richness of that earth comes from the dead within it,” the man replied. “This is something we druids know well.”

I shivered a little at the thought, but nodded. I supposed that was, ultimately, true.

“Though, for you to discuss of it, it is not right to say ‘they’, but rather ‘we’. For you were one of them,” the man added.

“I—uh… I was…”

He nodded. “Perhaps the greatest of them. For, when the battle followed, and the Forces of Discord were chased back to the outer darkness, you were one of the leading warriors. Only the Ocean God and War God defeated more in combat. Yet both of them pushed for the next act. The betrayal of the younger gods, demanding the Earth Goddess Malu be locked away, lest she rise against the new order of the mortals, claiming she might prove as cruel as the rest of her family one day… the others either agreed or stayed silent. Only you, Vazehr, protested.

“Then, when the other mortals emerged, lineages of elves changed and broken by the Discordants, you again pushed for fairness and equality, while the others sided with their sea hidden fellow elves to cast out those seen as the most beastly. Gnolls, Nagas, Centaurs, Orcs, and all the others… we’ve been waiting for you.”

“We—” I began to ask, but it was then that the man stood up, and I realised he was a zebra centaur, his lower portion having been out of sight due to the raised area I was resting on.

“But, before you can do what must be done, you must learn better magic. The shield you use… from the way young Aara described it and the infection of your spirit, I think it is a summoning of your spirit. A technique that works for most threats, when you have a spirit as strong as yours, but one that opens you up to any truly dangerous strikes.”

“Oh,” I muttered. “I have to learn magic next… I’ll never see them again…”

“See who?” the man asked.

“Kris and Lena… my… um… my girlfriends. From my other life, in another world,” I replied in a quiet voice, not sure how he’d take my desire to go home.

Or, heck, how he’d take polyamory. I still had no idea how dominant monogamy was in this world. At least Sukura had seemed fine with the fact she thought Aara and I were dating, so homosexuality seemed to have some traction?

“Mhm… I might be able to help with that. At least a little,” he replied.