Mercedes and Simone hunkered under a short boulder as Simone shook her bag of tokens.

  “I’ll need you to keep a lookout while I do this.” Simone whispered to the crusader. “There’s no telling what could happen while I’m ... distracted.”

  Mercedes nodded at the shaman’s entreaty, and peeked out around the boulder. It didn’t seem as if they’d been spotted yet, but she wasn’t about to take chances.

  It was hard for Simone to concentrate. The young shaman’s head was filled with a chaotic mess of panic, irrational anger, doubt, worry, and a sudden, shocking realization of the reality of the situation.

  Despite the seriousness of the journey she was on, the import of it, despite her doubts and uneasiness, there was a certain casual naivete that had deceptively crept into her thoughts.

  The trip, though dangerous, would be accomplished without issue. She had nothing to fear, nothing to worry about. This was but an extended excursion into strange lands- and sure, it was into places she’d rather not go voluntarily, but surely nothing untoward would happen.

  But the wolves were dangerous. The Protean was terrifying. The land itself- the forest, the mountains, the trees, the rocky soil, the strange plants she’d never seen before- all of it eroded away that naivete bit by bit.

  The thing that had stripped that innocent hope away for good was her first sight of the mountain elf. There was a very real risk, a very real danger that didn’t whisper, but instead shouted itself into her mind.

  This was for real. The stakes were real. She was small, weak, and insignificant, and attempting to meddle in things she had no business meddling with. The Pearl? It could reshape the body, destroy and enslave the mind. She’d seen it in the wolves. What could it do to her? The Mountain Elves commanded powers that subverted the laws of the world itself, what could she do against that?

  The very real idea of mortality had slid into Simone’s heart as deftly as a knife’s blade.

  You were picked for a reason.

  The words echoed in her heart, but Simone couldn’t listen to them. Behind her eyelids, her mind replayed the sight of the Mountain People combing the hillside, looking for the Pearl.

  What would happen to them if they were discovered by those twisted elves?

  Focus.

  I can’t.

  You have to.

  I can’t.

  It was a strange thing Mercedes was observing. An odd procession of tiny metal things- no two alike, but all vaguely insect-like- crawling across a boulder. Tiny graceful legs as thin as needles supporting an inner sphere of metal no bigger than a pea, some with four legs, others with six, or eight, glimmering like polished steel, inching across a gigantic boulder.

  “What are you?” she wondered, watching them march.

  One of them stopped, turned to face her- though there was no face on that polished metal orb, nothing to differentiate any side from another- and raised one limb, as if in greeting. Mercedes smiled awkwardly, and, feeling like an idiot, waved back.

  It once again turned, and then rejoined its fellows, reclaiming its place in line.

  A clatter of stone against stone roused Mercedes from her inspection of the wonder she’d observed; she turned and silently drew her sword from its sheath.

  A voice reached her ears, muttering something. At first she couldn’t make out the words, but as the voice drew closer, she swore it had a ring of familiarity.

  Where was it that she’d heard that language before? Part of her mind chewed on the thought- there had been a point in her life where she’d heard that tongue before.

  That didn’t matter, however. What did matter was the fact that someone was about to stumble into them. She pushed the thought to the back of her mind and lowered her stance a little.

  Simone opened her eyes, and looked down. The carved bones with their runes, the river-polished hematite stone, the shockingly clear quartz crystal, all the bits and baubles that each described a specific meaning lay out in front of her.

  “Huh.” the young shaman mused in wonder. Simone picked up the tokens and returned them to her pouch, and cast them again. Same results. “It really is that simple.”

  Simone put them back into her pouch and tucked the pouch back into her pack and then stood, wrapping her shawl around her. It was welcome protection against the cold in the mountains; Simone looked forward to her return to the plains.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Suddenly, Simone frowned. A strange range of feelings- curiosity, alarm, determination, anger and then relief that washed over her that clearly wasn’t her own.

  Simone sighed. When Simone had used her shamanic abilities to create a link between herself and the High Elf crusader, she’d done so only hoping to learn Mercedes’ language better. That should have been the beginning, middle, and end of it- she’d duplicated the ritual that Alteima had performed on herself and Ash, with the exception that there was no Alteima to act as an intermediary- but the bond persisted on a subtle, visceral level. Simone occasionally got strong emotions from the elven woman, and it was frustratingly distracting.

  It suddenly occurred to Simone that there might be a similar bond between herself and the shaman- the woman was infuriatingly capable of discerning Simone’s innermost thoughts and feelings- was that a result of the ritual?

  “A lesson, my acolyte: A shaman doesn’t reveal all she knows. That is one of the first lessons in wisdom.”

  Simone ground her teeth in frustrated anger, then grabbed her spear and levered herself up with it to a standing position and went looking for Mercedes.

  Mercedes was wiping the nearly-black blood from her sword when Simone appeared, the shaman’s ritual seemingly complete.

  “Are we okay to keep going?” Mercedes asked, but Simone’s eyes dipped to the elf’s sword.

  “What...” Simone began, eyes narrowing, “did you do?”

  Mercedes hesitated only a moment. “What was necessary.” She replied, matter-of-factly. “We shouldn’t stick around, however.”

  Simone leaned to the side, peeking around Mercedes, already knowing what it was she’d see, not wanting to see it, needing to see it anyway.

  A storm of conflicting emotions washed over Simone. If Simone were in the same situation, if Simone had been faced with one of the gray-skinned Mountain People, She knew she wouldn’t have hesitated in the slightest- nothing touched by an Outsider could be allowed to live- but at the same time, life was sacred, valuable and precious, to just... arbitrarily take it away from someone else was- Simone glanced up at Mercedes.

  Calm. Calm and composed.

  Simone turned and vomited. How could the other elf be so... so noncommittal?

  Simone understood. They were from wildly different worlds, different lifestyles. Simone had also tacitly asked for Mercedes’ help dealing with the Mountain People, but still!

  “No elf would ever think to raise a blade against another.”

  Simone had been raised in a society that fostered cooperation for mutual survival. Things like anger and jealousy were strongly discouraged. Possessiveness, greed, rage, all of these things were counterproductive towards cooperatively living together in an environment that could kill the unwary. Everything that Simone was raised to believe told her that what Mercedes did was wrong.

  Simone heaved again just as Mercedes reached her side, putting a hand on Simone’s back comfortingly.

  Simone’s skin writhed at the touch. A killer’s touch. She twisted away from Mercedes’ touch, opening her mouth to castigate the elven templar, knowing full well that everything Mercedes had done was right, when Simone tripped and fell on her ass and bit her tongue hard enough to draw blood in the process.

  Mercedes knelt, sheathing her sword. Simone couldn’t take her eyes off of it, a thing designed purposefully to end the life of another person. A knife could be used for any number of things; a hatchet or a spear were valuable tools, but a sword, a sword was a weapon, a thing designed for the express purpose of killing.

  “Simone. We have to go.” Mercedes insisted. “Which direction?”

  Simone grimaced and spat blood- her blood- on the rocky ground. “North.” She muttered bitterly, pointing back the way she came. “Follow the ridgeline.”

  Mercedes nodded and picked Simone up, carrying the smaller elf.

  “Wha- wait, what are you doing?!” Simone objected, blushing hard. “Put me down!”

  Mercedes glared down at Simone. “I thought you said this thing has no side effects.” She snapped angrily. “I can feel you in my head, you know.”

  Simone clamped her lips together, her tongue an aching, swelling thing in her mouth.

  “Don’t glare at me like that.” Mercedes continued acidly, “This is your fault. And thanks to this vexing thing in my head, I felt everything you felt when you looked at me back there.”

  If you already know everything, then there’s no need to speak then, is there? Simone fumed silently at Mercedes.

  “At first, I didn’t understand why-” Mercedes began, but shifted what she was going to say. “I didn’t understand how important this was.” She glanced to the side. “I thought in the beginning that I’d just need to kill a few animals that scared the peasantfolk. You haven’t been too helpful, either.” She continued, “but I took one look at- at those... I don’t think I can call them elves, can I?” She mused, but shook her head.

  “Everything made sense, then.” She glanced down at the smaller shaman. “This is important. We do this, we do this for real.” There was a hidden meaning behind her words; Simone understood the implication.

  Hundreds of miles away, on the ocean, a massive seagoing vessel groaned as it forced its way through the waves that battered its hull. A woman sat on her bed- really just a plank built into the wall- arms crossed under her breasts, an angry frown marring her pretty face. The other passengers aboard the ship gave her a wide berth, and it wasn’t just because of the frown that seemed permanently etched into her face, it was also because of her elven ears.