Mercedes watched as the bear was dismantled; the hide was tough and had to be hacked apart with axes. The carcass itself had to be secured to teams of mules and dragged out of town.

  Mercedes’ horse had died in the stall when the bear attacked; it seemed pure fright had killed it.

  She hated that her horse had died; like humans, there weren’t many horses in this land, having been brought over from the old continent. Unlike humans however, they didn’t have a say in whether they came over the ocean to this new land.

  She frowned a little. “I didn’t have much of a say in whether I came over here, either.” She realized to herself, remembering how she’d been told by her superiors in the Church to volunteer to come over with the colonists.

  Wrapped in her thoughts, she watched as the carcass of the bear was hacked apart by the villagers. She took notes in a small notebook; the creature appeared to be a normal animal in all aspects except for size... and that strange lingering feel of magic that surrounded and permeated the beast.

  When the villager’s axes cracked open the bear’s heavy ribcage, a glittering stone the size of Mercedes’ fist tumbled out, glistening wetly. She immediately bounced to her feet and waved the villagers away from the thing; the magic radiating out from the stone pulsed like a heartbeat in waves.

  She wasn’t certain what it was, but what she did know was that it was something she hadn’t seen before, and potentially dangerous.

  She carefully drew her sword and prodded the stone with the tip.

  Her sword vibrated dully in her grip, and the gem in the crossguard gleamed; whatever else it was, the rock had recharged the magic that the blade accumulated. Normally, such a thing would take days on its own, as the blade pulled in ambient magic from the surroundings to recharge the gemstone.

  She prodded the magical rock with the tip of her sword again, but the stone that had come from the bear had fallen silent.

  She sheathed her sword and cautiously picked up the stone. Even through her armored gauntlet, she could sense a residual hum of magical power, though greatly reduced.

  One of the things that elves had learned about magic over their history was that magical power could be stored in crystals, with the quality of the crystal determining how much magical power could be stored. Had the bear swallowed this? Had that been the catalyst for its growth?

  “Lady Mercedes-” one of the villagers called her, and she looked up.

  “Is- is that wise? To be handling such a thing, I mean.” The villager asked, a worried expression etched into her careworn face.

  Mercedes considered the question, and nodded slowly. “I’ll be taking this back to the capital for study.” She advised, tucking the stone into her belt pouch. The woman nodded doubtfully. “We need to figure out how such a thing came to pass.”

  The villager woman turned and pointed towards the mountain range towards the northwest.

  “All the beasts we’ve seen like this seem to be coming from there.” the woman replied. “Always from the northwest.”

  A number of questions rose to Mercedes’ lips, but she suppressed them; the answers were self-evident. If they knew where they were coming from, why hadn’t they done anything about it? The answer- they couldn’t. Why didn’t they put up some defenses? The answer was self-evident with the sheer size of the bear.

  Abandon the village and move somewhere else? Completely untenable. The amount of money expended to set up the village must have been considerable, and- as reluctant as Mercedes was to admit it- the colony capital wouldn’t care about the plight of a handful of villagers. That was the whole point of Mercedes coming out to begin with.

  “I should have brought some troops.” She muttered to herself. “And a spear.” A sudden list of all the things she wished she’d thought of to bring beforehand went through her mind.

  She suddenly realized she was in a quandary. She could return to the capital, but in the time it would take for her to travel back to the central colony, gather what she felt like she needed, and then come back, the village could be wiped from the map. It was a possibility.

  The mountains where the beasts were coming from were distant, but not so distant that she couldn’t reach them.

  ...except that her horse had died. The villagers didn’t have any horses, horses were reserved for nobility, they only had donkeys, and they weren’t suitable for riding. That meant going on ahead... on foot.

  Could she do it? She was a soldier, trained in the arts of war, but also, she had practically been born and raised in the Holy Church of the Goddess. Her training had taken place in cities, in a land that had been tamed, subjugated, cultivated. This new land was savage, unpredictable, and filled with things barely comprehensible.

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  Going on alone into unknown territory was tantamount to suicide.

  She looked up at the villager woman, who was eyeing her with a certain reverential awe.

  “Is there a place where I might pray?” She asked hopefully. The woman blinked.

  “No church ‘round here.” She replied a little truculently.

  Mercedes shook her head; that much was obvious. “I just need a ... quiet room.” She replied.

  The woman nodded slowly. “My house do?” She asked, and Mercedes nodded.

  “Please.” She affirmed.

  The woman nodded, and led the way back to the village; the woman snatching glances when she thought Mercedes wasn’t looking. Truthfully, Mercedes didn’t care overmuch; she was burrowing in her head, struggling with her choice to go on ahead- alone- or return to the city for reinforcements.

  The farmer woman’s house was a single room, with a large bed on one side of the fireplace, a kitchen area on the other, and some wooden boxes heaped with clothing. A crudely assembled table and bench were on the far side, and the air was heavy with the smells of woodsmoke, sweat, and lingering scents of cooked food.

  Mercedes wondered how the woman got any privacy in a home without walls, but realized that the woman probably just... didn’t.

  Mercedes shuddered. Peasants certainly lived differently from her.

  Once the woman left, Mercedes stripped out of her armor and set it to the side, along with her travelling packs and saddlebags, and then carefully knelt in her leathers on the warped floorboards.

  She took a breath, closed her eyes, and began her prayer.

  Another secret the elves of Degan kept from the humans: The Goddess rarely stirred. The human histories only went back a few centuries, but elven histories went back two thousand years, and in those secret histories, the Goddess only spoke a few times.

  She prayed anyway, not expecting any answer. Maybe, by speaking everything she worried about aloud, she would come across an unexpected solution.

  “Oh merciful Goddess, please, some advice would help me so much.” She prayed, mentally reviewing the choice that lay before her, trying to find some key piece that would help her solve the puzzle of what she should do next.

  Suddenly, however, there was a sensation of being watched, a subtle pressure, feather light, on her senses that said she wasn’t alone.

  Hmm? An elf? A tiny voice spoke in her head after an indeterminate length of time. The voice was feminine, redolent with tones of lazy curiosity. It was followed by what could only be interpreted as a long, exasperated sigh. Look for the fox. The voice finally muttered, and the sensation of being watched vanished.

  Mercedes was numb with shock. What just happened? Was that really the voice of the Goddess? Was it just fanciful imagination?

  Look for the fox.

  But what was a fox?

  She opened her eyes, and retrieved her notebook, and, in a cipher that was only intelligible to those high in the church, she detailed her encounter. It was possible that there was someone in the Church that would want to know of this. Her hands trembled as she wrote; if she had received a message from the Goddess, it was likely the first communication the Goddess had given in centuries.

  She wasn’t even certain that it was the Goddess. The whole situation was so baffling she couldn’t wrap her mind around it. Had it actually happened? Was she imagining things?Was it just wishful thinking?

  Look for the fox.

  Did that mean she was to press on into the unknown lands? She refastened her armor, piece by piece, and buckled her sword about her waist as she stood. She shouldered her packs, and then threw her long blue cape over her shoulder, then stepped out of the woman’s house, where she nearly ran into the woman herself, who apparently decided that she’d needed to stand guard outside her own home.

  “Sister.” The woman greeted respectfully.

  “What’s a fox?” Mercedes blurted without thinking, and the woman blinked a few times. “It’s a dog.” she replied after a moment. “They occasionally come from the forest to steal chickens.”

  Then it was decided, she would head into the forest.

  *****

  The fox spirit- not truly a fox, but something ancient- stared up at the moon as Simone slept, curled in a tight brown ball.

  It was motionless, though thin tendrils swirled and eddied around as if blown about by a wind that didn’t blow in the sacred place.

  Vast eternities drifted across its glowing eyes, glimmering like a million stars across the emptiness of space, as a silent conversation took place over Simone’s sleeping form.

  “Understood. I am not diminished.” it acknowledged its silent interlocutor in a language that was old when the bones of the world were new, and it bowed its head respectfully.

  Spirits were fundamentally different from mortals, and so they regarded mortals with genial contempt, an arrogance that stemmed from the differences that separated the two. Mortal lives were fleeting, ephemeral things that vanished almost as quickly as they were born, compared to the vast eternities that spirits had to cultivate their strange intelligences. It was impossible for a spirit to acknowledge a mortal as an equal. Likewise, a spirit would never willingly follow a command given to it by a mortal, and it certainly wouldn’t bow its head in respect to one, either.

  In this, the spirit that decided to call itself ‘Vitalen’ for the sake of the little mortal child, was no different. It would listen to the mortal’s babbling and amuse itself for a time with the mortal’s requests, but the mortal would die and Vitalen would remain, and that was the way of the world.