Mercedes unconsciously reached for the hilt of her sword at her waist, making sure it was in easy reach.

  “You’ve said they were ... strange, but is that really enough to be on your guard?” She asked uncertainly.

  “They’re dangerous.” Simone replied simply, nodding. “Worse, they’ve been touched by the Outside.” Simone looked uneasy for a moment. “I... am not someone who kills.” Simone clasped her slim hands together. “If possible, I would like to do this task without seeing even a single Mountain Elf.” Simone offered. “But anything touched by the Outside.... Needs to be destroyed.” Simone spread her hands wide. “It’s why I’m out here after all; the Pearl is of the Outside, and it’s wreaking irreparable harm.”

  Simone lowered her eyes. “But there’s ... a huge difference between smashing a Pearl and... and taking a life- even if that life is one that’s of the Outside.”

  Mercedes nodded, understanding the position Simone was in. To the shaman, anything associated with the Outside needed to be defeated, destroyed... killed. But at the same time, Simone was bound by her societal customs- things like fighting, violence, and killing were unconscionable.

  Mercedes nodded. “Let’s try to be discrete, then.” She agreed. Simone nodded, a look of relief flashing across the elf’s face.

  The campsite they’d chosen was just under the lip of an overhanging rock, not quite a cave, but enough of a windbreak so that they could have a fire and lay out their bedrolls.

  The sides of the rock were covered in dozens of tiny lizards, each just a little longer than her finger. Mercedes grimaced; she didn’t much like the idea of sharing space with the creepy little things, but Simone merely doffed her shawl and flapped it at them.

  The tiny lizards hissed like serpents, then unfurled tiny wings and launched themselves into the air, scattering away in the late afternoon sunlight. Mercedes gaped at that, she’d never seen the like before.

  “What- what were those?” She asked.

  Simone gave her a baffled look. “Flying lizards.” She replied, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “They’re pests, and they have a painful bite, but they’re not dangerous.” The smaller elf paused for a moment. “You could eat them, but they’re not very tasty.”

  “Flying.... lizards.” Mercedes mused, and Simone nodded.

  “What are we going to hunt for dinner?” Mercedes asked curiously.

  Simone gave Mercedes a skeptical look. “I don’t think...” she trailed off, and then added helpfully, “you make too much noise.”

  Mercedes rolled her eyes. “I have hunted before.” she shot back defensively; and then remembered she’d lost her bow and quiver of arrows at some point.

  Simone studied Mercedes for a moment, then pulled a leather strap from her belt. “Can you use this?” She asked, holding the sling out to Mercedes.

  The taller elf shook her head.

  Simone nodded. “I haven’t seen sign of many animals, and what I have seen was rabbit and squirrel. That means a sling.” She paused. “I could try to Call something here, but...” Simone shook her head. “It’s better if I hunt.”

  Mercedes grimaced but nodded, watching Simone trot away lightly, long white ponytail swishing.

  She couldn’t help but feel a little useless; she was a soldier, and not used to living outdoors unless it was part of a larger encampment. There was also the choice in her weaponry; if she’d really taken a moment to think about what she’d need, a spear and bow would have been far preferable than her sword. She’d borrowed a bow and a quiver of arrows from the last human village she’d been at, but had lost it at some point, likely when she had been attacked by the wolves the first time, before she’d met Simone.

  “I should have brought a hatchet, at the very least.” She muttered to herself as she set up the camp in the shadow of the cliffside. There was a brief debate on whether or not to kindle a fire for tea; the air was thin and cold, some hot tea would be great to sip on while she waited for Simone to return.

  She sat on a nodule of stone that formed out of the abri rockface and contemplated how she’d come to this point.

  After her mother had died, her uncle had taken over the House, had enrolled Mercedes in the army. Such a thing normally wouldn’t have been done; Mercedes was from a powerful and influential House, her mother just a step below the Pope, something as base as the army should have been beneath someone of her station, but Mercedes hadn’t manifested the talent for magic. A mage family needed a mage to lead it.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  What had happened to her older sister? She hadn’t thought too deeply about Vendela in some time; they’d parted acrimoniously after the death of their mother.

  Shortly after she’d come of age, her superiors had sent her from Degan to the colony of New Degan; a Church, no matter how far from the homeland, needed either a Brother or a Sister- an elf- as part of it.

  “And from there...” She mused to herself, “to hunting for the Pearl.”

  She pulled out her spirit stick and her knife, and went to work on the spiral, trying to straighten it out into something more uniform.

  Hey Liatris, is what Simone told me true? About the spirits? About the Mountain Elves? The Pearl? Everything?

  No mortal sees anything truly, but only through the flaws of their minds. That is the way all mortals see each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition-- all such distortions within your minds-- these condition your vision of those in relation to you. Add to those distortions to your own minds the corresponding distortions in the minds of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which you look at each other.

  Mercedes froze at that, her mouth opening to voice an objection.

  Did you not think of spirits as mere ‘barbarian superstition’ only a few days ago?

  Mercedes let out a shaky breath as shame coursed through her.

  How can I escape this... trap of... bias? Mercedes asked the spirit worriedly.

  You are mortal. It is your nature to weigh things against bias, you cannot escape it. The shaman struggles against her own biases, the same as you.

  This... isn’t what I wanted to know. Mercedes decided.

  Some things are inescapably true, regardless if you choose to accept it or not. The spirit fell silent then, and wouldn’t respond to any further queries from the High Elf.

  Simone’s hunt had gone well; she’d found several rabbits and even flushed a ptarmigan from cover. Not only had she’d gotten the animals, but she’d found some wild carrots, and even some herbs she felt like she could chop up and add to their meal.

  “I want a real meal.” She complained to no one, petulantly kicking at a stick, sending it flying.

  The stick tumbled over and over in the air and then froze, midair. Simone froze at the sight, then dropped to a ready stance, dropping her hunted prey, hands clamped around the shaft of her spear, eyes flicking left and right as she sought the source of the strange behavior.

  After several minutes went by, Simone carefully advanced on the hovering stick, inching forward, step by reluctant step. As she got closer, a chill shivered through her. A strange sense of wrongness washed over her, radiating sickly from the stick, suspended midair. There wasn’t anything that she could see, it was just a feeling, a sensation of something bafflingly, horribly wrong. She lacked the words to adequately describe it; her mind vaguely associated the feeling with an earthquake- there was something inherently wrong with the ground bucking and heaving and flexing beneath ones’ feet. The ground was supposed to be fixed, immovable, immutable. It was a fundamental belief that went beyond the instinctual, a feeling engraved in the genes that the ground was constant, consistent, stable.

  But an Outsider’s power went against the fundamental laws of the world. Up was no longer up, water flowed uphill, gravity behaved in strange, incomprehensible ways. This was why Outsiders- and their influence- was so bad for the world: the laws of nature didn’t apply to them. They could subvert them, because they existed outside them.

  Simone grimaced and gingerly leaned forward, pushing her spear to prod the floating stick with the spearpoint.

  There was a sensation, a feeling like she was slicing through something as ephemeral as cobwebs, as tough as sinew, despite there being nothing visible to cut, as if the air itself had thickened, hardened, trapped the stick like an insect in amber.

  As the point of her spear touched the stick, the tense resistance in the air suddenly unraveled, pitching Simone forward, even as the stick dropped. Simone stumbled, twisted, and fell in an ungainly sprawl.

  “Something happened there.” She mused, “but what?” She wished, for the thousandth time, that the spirits had sent a shaman with more wisdom, more experience.

  “I don’t belong here!” She complained, throwing her arms wide as she rolled on her back. “I have no idea what I’m expected to do!”

  “...I wanna go home.” Simone complained petulantly. There were many tribes on the Plains, many shamans. There were the People of the Forest. There was even that High Elf from the human place. Let them deal with it. Simone wanted to be home, on the plains, running through the grasses, hunting deer under the endless blue skies that stretched from one horizon to the other without interruption.

  The trees were strange, the ground all rough and rocky, she could barely see the sky at times, and there was always the need to keep going, keep moving forward, ever onward towards the dread mountains.

  She didn’t want to be anywhere near N’Granek, the mountain home of the People of the Mountain. She didn’t want to see any of the twisted ones, She didn’t want to have anything to do with the Pearl or the forests, or with anything.

  “A simple, uncomplicated life.” She muttered bitterly.

  Simone picked herself up reluctantly, picked up her kills, and began trudging back to the rock face where she’d left the High Elf.

  Unwanted or not, some things had to be accepted.