Chapter Nine

Azuri flailed in blinding, gray shadows only for an instant, as if he had been only shallowly seeded in this otherworldy gutter, where his consciousness flickered despite the grayed-out continuum of near-nonexistence that enveloped him in unending gray. Just when his mind had dwindled to an ember, his hands--his hands, his mind dully echoed, resuming its commentary on coalescing reality--

clapped to his face to ward a light so piercing it seemed to clamor and shriek, making him a deaf, dumb, and numb clatter among the echoes of the blinding light, brighter than the Abyssal day by a magnitude of three or four times, and his knees--his knees, his instincts echoed, as he tottered, scraping his knees on grassy rocks. Grass? Where was he?

When he rose to his feet, and the horizon seemed to bunch up around him, he swayed. Had he swole to giant size yet again?

"Small world, Azuri." Perched crosslegged on a rock that was not only large, but unusually smooth, looking less like a boulder than an overgrown pebble, Elani regarded him with an impish leer.

"I can't say I'm surprised to see you." Azuri felt very much his age as the centuries seemed to settle on sagging, exhausted bones and worried, drooping flesh. Not to mention the triple hammer of passing through so many Doorways in one day. The world-gates exacted a heavy toll on a healthy body with only one passage, and while Azuri was healthy, countless doses of kinulcra had thinned his youth, until he was like an aged brandy, but less mellow than flammable, as just about anything set off his fury these days. "Having trailed you here."

"Why?" She looked down with a clenched brow and tight frown. "in the state I left you, I believed both the High Tzhurarkh and Ialuna as good as dead."

"The latter may have come to her end, but I didn't stick around to be sure of it." Azuri shrugged. "What do you care? You're not here to kill kings."

"No," admitted Elani. "That would be a waste of time."

"Why?"

"Why waste my time killing the already dead?"

"You're mistaken," said Azuri. "I just saw him, and he's very much still alive."

"It depends," she said. "If you knew she had drank a slow-acting poison, which kills by horrific, disfiguring throes over three days, would you bother taking arms against Ialuna?"

"I believe myself more philosophical than most, but my resentment of the poison for spoiling my revenge would unman me, and I would race the course of the venom, both hands lunging for Ialuna's death." While Azuri had regained his wind, his hot breath and cheeks told him he had not yet recovered his composure, and he shifted uncomfortably as silence followed the echoes of his admission. "Do you mean you have poisoned the High Tzhurarkh?"

"His death will be more certain and sudden than that," she snickered.

When Elani dropped from the rock to seize Azuri's hand, he steeled himself against his recoil, for while he was repelled by her mind, his body was enthralled. As their fingers laced, their pulses merged, and their hands beat like a heart. "To be fair, there's a greater-than-slim chance we might join him in death."

Azuri once might have cared about that, but his heart hardened against this news. "While I care little what comes our way, such ennui seems a bad habit when I begin to feel I have something to live for."

"What do you mean?" When her inquisitive tone was pinched by a suppressed squeal of laughter, Azuri turned to see not only a knowing face, but an expectant one, as if Elani had not only planned for his feelings, but sowed them, cultivated them, and now reaped them with joy. As her fingers caressed the wispy stubble on his chin, his scowl crumbled into rueful laughter, then that bittersweet reluctance folded into delight. As sorrow left him, his stern expression relaxed, and he felt the ache of holding that frown for nearly a year.

"Have you led me all the way here on purpose?" Azuri only half-meant this cavern that cupped its own small sky, shining with a light brighter than the triune moons. He also meant how she had led him to this emotional point, by seraphic faces that consumed his mind in a flame that burned brighter as it descended through his illuminated heart to a baser but brighter lust, itself a vast, cavernous hunger for this captured moonlight that sought to return to its source.

"If you mean 'did I have designs,' the answer is yes." As her smile dimpled at both ends,

the geas snared him, and while not as strong as her father's, it was such a snug, velvet prison that he only braced in reflex, before settling into its cozy web. "If you mean, did they include you, you may be imagining things. Which is unsurprising, given the entitlement of Alfyrian men."

As his brows crashed down, the swell of his disappointment shattered the limp tug of the geas,

a fact he masked in his brooding glare, returning a bitter smile, He tolerated the possessive pawing of her fingertips scurrying through his beard, his long, white mane, and his ears. "Have you met Ialuna?" When his joking tone fell flat, he tipped his head to accentuate his flat, false smile. "It isn't just the men." As his heart burned with hate, his cheeks and lips numbed trying to hold the smile.

"A very good point, my dear. Doesn't she make your heart race?" She glanced sidelong to see the effect of her imperious, mysterious admission, and seeing his face stirred not at all, but clenching its cool, masklike reserve and frosty smile--she batted her eyes mockingly, and allowed her dimpled smile to slip into a lopsided, sarcastic grin. "Not that I don't like men, Azuri. In fact, you're just my type--a failed, frosty elven king. But I'm here on my father's business."

"I'll admit I've failed here and there, but I've never quit, and moreover, I'm no king. Kings are feeble creatures, Elani." While not enspelled by Elani, he was still very much under her spell, and if he wasn't snared by the geas, he was very much under her power. While she was blissfully unaware that he could crush her skull between her bare hands whenever he wished, he wanted only to cup her to his chest and whisper nonsense into her ear. He knew it was senseless wishing, that it was only lust shooting blind arrows in the chaos of his life, but in that moment, he couldn't help it, Elani was what he desired, and he realized he had desired her since they had bumped into each other on the longbow world.

"On the contrary, kings are strong. Consider how much effort we've spent outmaneuvering one who doesn't even know our names."

"Speak for yourself. He's listed me with known conspirators." No longer able to hold the smile, Azuri allowed his face to sag into a sulking, brooding, scowl.

"He can't reach you here, Azuri." She shrugged. "Well, he could if he thought to check here, for he well knows this place. But he wouldn't think to find us here."

"Just where is here?"

"It's a very special place." Her smile was only ordinary sarcasm, and held no more of her playful cruelty, but demoted him from lover to confidante. "Not that I've been here. I only know it by reputation. But what a reputation." She mimed fanning herself. "It's an important scene in my father's history, you know."

"Of course I don't," snapped Azuri, then checked himself, and smiled winningly. "Go on."

"You won't believe me. So follow me."

Pulling her hand free, she skipped down the pebbly slope until it joined to a wide cobblestone path, its stones so large, and the route hewed so simply, that it seemed less a walkway than a rock garden. He followed timorously, but broke into a half-run when she disappeared over the very fine line that defined this miniature world, as if this cave system had swallowed a shallow horizon. The skywalk merged with a flagstone bridge towering three times higher than Azuri, and wider than a krydayn stable. She waited for him at the midpoint, her arms braced on the bridge wall. "This place is not only absurd, but gross, cramming all this material into only three dimensions. Why not tell me we returned to the giant world?"

"I could tell you other sweet little lies." She smiled coyly. "When we are finished here, that is a game I might enjoy playing. But with our lives at stake, why lie about where we are? This is Alfyria, Azuri."

"Alfyria? In truth?" Having crossed the gigantic bridge, they now followed the vast flagstone road into a city also rendered at a gigantified scale. "You lie. This cannot be the Elven World."

The sky-cavern surged up, up, and up to hazy gasses dimming the crystalline roof which twinkled not like oases of the Abyss, but like their reflections, rippling in the oceans of Alfyria. Winds hissed, susurated, then gushed, blowing Azuri and Elani into each other, then blasting between them, so that they clutched each other by a hot, trepid reflex. As her heart hammered against his, Azuri hoped she felt as he did, then cursed himself for the hope. He drew in a cool breath, then resumed his blank smile.

While the flagstones were coarse, perhaps hewed from obdurate pumice or some other volcanic rock, they were each cut to perfect proportions, like castle walls laid end to end. It was like he walked on the carefully ordered ruins of an elven palace. A vast tomb for elven pride. "Where in the elven world are we? Could this be anywhere but Ctholul?" In naming the elven land of the dead, now only evoked by the educated in mirthful or sarcastic tones, Azuri was suprirsed by the sincerity in his voice.

He no longer knew himself, he was the shadow, the forerunner of the vile thing that would remain when his honor had died; who thought nothing of defiling himself by clutching a shakashia,

or sating his carnal desires in the half-human hybrid blind to the world where he had lived half a millenia, marking days by jotting notes of passionless, diplomatic meetings...

"Cyhari liked it here."

The words resounded like drum beats, then doubled back, echoing in his skull until he was only this revelation. "You brought her here?"

"No." When her sarcastic smile relaxed into a comiserating one, Azuri recognized the mask, cut from blatant malevolence in the shape of coquettry and affection. "I never knew her, Azuri. Cyhari died before my rebirth." When she sighed, her chest expanded in a burst of crazed laughter. "But she brought my father here."

"Why? Assuming she found this hidey-hole, what purpose had she in bringing Frellyx?"

"Not that," she snickered. "Well, I'm not so sure. Not that I would ever ask my dear father to pick out his mistresses from the pawns, when much of that list is identical, and Cyhari is--was--exactly what he likes. That said, he used to tell me how she had them eating from her hand."

"Have who?" As they descended into a shadowy vale overgrown by pink, red, and yellow moss,

clustered by thick plots of gigantic toadstools and groves of dry, wispy trees with blue leaves, wide stone towers jutted among the stalagmites, some just scraped by the stalagtites stabbing down from the artificial light that flooded the underworld with a bright white. As they walked alongside hand-hewn walls of cave stone which ran to the towers up the ridge, Azuri unconsciously swelled to giant size,

bringing Elani to step back once, twice, three times, until her hands braced the wall to stare up at the gigantified elf.

"You've been pretending, Azuri."

"No." Azuri shook his head and waved his hands side to side.

"You're more than you seem. I should have expected a 500 year old elf might know some magic."

"You're mistaken," said Azuri. "If I have grasped this trick by intuition, you might call it a knack, but don't say I've learned how to do it. Not only don't I understand the theory, I am thunderstruck when it happens."

She shook her head. "That's even more impressive. Such legendary aptitude should have been discovered." Her eyes narrowed. "If you weren't found, perhaps you were hidden."

"Who? Why?"

"There hasn't been a great elven wizard since my father," she said.

"Don't think I don't understand what you're insinuating...but why?"

She averted her eyes as they shifted to a brisk uphill stride alongside the wall and toward the towers. "I should have liked to have known Cyhari."

"Answer me."

"Oh, I am giving you answers, Azuri. While I will not answer your questions, and, in fact, you will like neither the questions I choose to answer, nor the answers I bring to them, you will understand more an hour from now than you do now." She tittered. "Although whether you retain it tomorrow depends on your metaphysical opinions."

"Are you threatening me?"

"Me? I would never, Azuri. But you've come not only to a hidden place, but a secret place. Don't you think we want this secret to stay hidden?"

Azuri stopped in his tracks. While his confidence was enhanced by his expanded size and strength, and she tantalized him with the possibility of getting closure on his grief and the riddles that had puzzled him, he did not mind taking the slower, shadowier route. He was born for the shadow road,

having the curiosity and intelligence to be contented in ignorance, to puzzle things out himself, to attribute patterns in the chaos about him, to dwell cool and calm in the darkness. And even though he was 500 years old, and so near the final answers about Cyhari, he had a newfound greed to steal years, months, and even days. What need had he for Elani's cryptic answers?

"Take me back."

"It's too late. To make the best of your accidental discovery, we'll try to find purpose and closure in it. It's the least we can do."

"Then let's start there." Azuri's sharp, hot tone lashed out, surprising him with his vehemence. "Who is we?"

"Suffice to say it encompasses not only my father and I, but certain interests in Ielnarona and Alfyria who are unhappy with the status quo, desiring not only worthy inheritors on the thrones of the Five Worlds, but immortality for all who are worthy."

"In place of the oligarchies that rule now, Frellyx would impose a meritocracy, and decide by his own criteria who deserves not only to rule, but to live." Azuri sighed. "It's only a new shape for despotism."

"My father would be the first to agree. He's not interested in recreating the democracy of the ancient dryads, but in supplanting our tyrranies with enlightened absolutism."

"An interesting idea, and fine in theory, but Frellyx is the last one I would trust to head such an empire."

"Our thoughts exactly, Azuri." When these words had lingered for a few moments, Azuri's eyes flicked to her face, which seemed a mask of serenity, her lips quirked into a slight smile, as if suppressing some secret joke.

"You just threatened me with death, Elani. Surely you're not insinuating what I think you are...?"

"I never threatened you, Azuri."

"What was that about 'metaphysical opinions?'"

"You assumed my meaning was 'a corpse is no longer a man,' when what I meant was 'a king is more god than man.'"

The strange stone village gleamed bright white in the pearlescent illumination of the cavernous underworld. As they drew near, the buildings did not dwindle along elvish scales, but remained at monolithic proportions, and Azuri was reminded of the amphitheater on Uenarak, in that the dwellings were only part stone, and the rest oddly organic, tall, fluted pipes that, as the distance diminished,

resolved into enormous bones, as if hacked from ancient monsters.

Monsters. As the word resounded in Azuri's head, doors clapped open, and their rough-hewn denizens stepped into the ash-white light. Giants. In moments, the half-dozen that strolled to meet them, with terrifying smiles either inane or hungry, swelled to more than twenty, and Azuri's hand, falling to his sword-belt by reflex, clutched nothing. Where was his shakashia?

The giants were strangely clad, not in the runic robes and cloaks which affected elvish attire,

but in rags--hides, he now saw--rude shirts and pants hacked and sewn from animal skins. The thought of the huge animals that died to make these ensembles pricked Azuri's fear anew, and his eyes flashed here and there, expecting worse monsters to fall upon him on all sides.

"Stop that, Azuri." Elani's hand fell on his. "You won't find it anyway."

"You stole the sword?"

"I'm no thief," said Elani. "It's in there, only much, much smaller. Don't worry. They're waiting to meet you."

Having too often been in giant hands, and once just that morning, Azuri placed his fingertips on Elani's chest, shoved her into a sprawling somersault, then scrambled away from the giants' gawking smiles. While light filled the crevices, fissures, and even the tree-canopies of the brightly illuminated underworld, one notch seemed dimmer and less than a giant's width, and he sprinted for that cranny, with the giants shouting and loping just behind.

As Azuri ran, he knew he would have to shrink through the gap, but fearing his over-obliging magical gifts might shrink him now, and allow the giants' longer strides to overtake him long before he escaped, he reined that thought in until he reached it.

As he neared the fissure, hazy fumes caused his vision to flicker, and horrific, bestial moans resounded in the cave mouth, but fearing the friendlier horrors behind him might make a feast of him even at his current size, he dived for the entrance, willed himself to shrink, and closed his eyes, dreading the awful impact of his giant skull if it boomed on the boulders flanking the crevice.

It was unimaginably dark at first, until his elven mind peeled back the dark layers of the three-dimensional blackness called by the elves ultira. Not that it was easy to see by eiset, the subtle light which illuminated the fourth and fifth dimensions, and he stumbled a little, being blind to depth, width, and height, and navigating only the abstracted elven dimensions, a monochrome visual field in which all shapes were skeletons of themselves, light could only be seen by what it suffused, and the source of the five-dimensional light could not be traced, not even a pinprick, although the subtle cloud seemed to be centered around a narrow column at the center of the vast chasm.

At first he assumed it an elfin tower, but as he stumbled near, he realized it was a gigantic stalagmite jutting up from the chasm floor, and while it seemed thin from where he was, he knew that was a trick of the obscured distance, and the blotted out second dimension, and it might be miles and days away.

As the giants clawed at the cave mouth, Azuri picked up speed to a brisk half-walk, and tested his newfound aptitude to see if it would oblige him by expanding him again to giant size. While he prodded his magical gifts gingerly, he raised one hand over his head, fearing the cave ceiling lower than he could see, but as he mushroomed to enormous size, his enlarged fingertips waved in warm, whirling air currents, which he sucked down in a breath which seemed to go on forever, having started this inhalation at elf size, so that, as he inflated to gigantic size, it felt like drawing in all the air in the cave.

In the immutable darkness of the cavern, Azuri's three dimensional sight groped to distinguish boulders from the bizarre, thorny lichen shrubs he brushed up against, and if his ears were better guides in the bristly trees rustling crisply as he passed through, they were overwhelmed by his own stomping gait, and the echoes that answered the crush and crash of the branches as he barged deeper into the dark chasm.

"Azuri!" Even if Elani had not screeched, he might have picked out her shrill tones from the cacaphony that followed in his wake. "We would make you a king! This is how you repay me?"

"I haven't repaid you yet," muttered Azuri. "Not what you and your co-conspirators deserve." But what he called back was, "a puppet king! A figurehead!"

"You become what you pretend to be," while she had lowered her voice, it still carried, a dull echo more mirage than voice.

As the subtle elven light disclosed not things and bodies, but meanings and personalities, Azuri saw, less from the physical manifestation than the transformation it wreaked on her personhood, that half-human Elani had hybridized one step further from elfhood, her arms consumed by gigantic feathered thatched eaves of wings. As she alighted on the slope, and abruptly ended the spell, her arms and hands swarmed forth, swallowing the gigantic wings as a voluminous gown whirled and fluttered around her--its lacy sleeves quite out of place in the coffin-dark cavern, illuminated only by the subtle elfin light.

"Very nice."

"Just something I whipped up. Should I also favor you with more suitable dress?"

"For spelunking?" Azuri snorted. "This is as good as any."

"This is no cave, Azuri. It's a farm."

"A farm." Azuri chuckled. "Even if that were so, you're still overdressed."

"It's not a cattle farm, Azuri. Here is where your kings breed eternal life."

Having caught up with him, she whispered a few words, shot up to match his giant height, and grasped his hand. It was warm, soft, and supple as a breath. So enraptured by her sudden closeness,

and her radiant warmth, even more subtle than elven light, Azuri did not notice the creep of the geas until it trembled along their nested hands. While he squashed this enchanted serpent before its coils ensnared him, even quicker and more surely than before, annoyance shivered him head to toe, and, ironically, quickened his desire for the half-human. "Then make me a king." When he grasped the folds of her dress and twisted, the fabric parted, and where Elani shone, the subtle light pierced the darkness.

While his clothes were not as yielding as Elani's enchanted attire, they were soon wrung away by four hands, and as they rushed together, the pounding of his gigantified heart drummed in his ears and so throbbed in his manhood that her cries soon came in time with this enormous pulse, and he thought she might burst along with it. When it came forth, his heart hammered, his breath battered his lungs, and they collapsed into a shuddering heap in the darkness.

As his berserk lust gave way to a contemplative pause, his jetting breath and heaving chest began to compose themselves, and he cursed himself for being so arrogant to think he might make love at this gigantic scale. Being no true giant, but an elf stretched four times taller around a heart pumped sixty-four times heavier, and further burdened by mile-long veins and arteries, he would never be prepared for intercourse at this altered size, and he was lucky to have survived it. He may have never been so close to death. And he was already stiffening. When he rolled away so that Elani might not detect this sign of lust, her hand moved like a thing possessed, grasped him around this rigid point, brought him back around, and kissed him, so that, in spite of his fatal train of thoughts, his hands began moving of their own accord as well, stroking the half-human with an ardor that surprised Azuri. Alarm clamored in his brain, for he no longer knew if he was of his own mind or not; had the geas slithered past his defenses? He was no master wizard, after all, and she was the daughter of one.

"Wait." When she stopped his mouth with her tongue and straddled him, his body rose with the swells of her spine, stiffened in pleasure, and his hands clapped to her breasts, her ribs, her legs. Whether a magical compulsion or not, there was no doubt who held Azuri's reins.

It was hard to tell in the interminable darkness, but this time, he might have blacked out as he shuddered under her, as she stretched into a long moan of pleasure. His conscious mind contracted to nearly nothing, and when he came back to himself, it was as if the scattered bits of Azuri swarmed back inside.

He returned her kisses coldly at first, then leaned back as she kissed his impassive face.

"Don't think I've forgotten you have answers."

She groaned. "You're ruining this moment."

"Exactly. It's just a moment. And I've lived five hundred years."

"As if you could forget this."

"Oh, I'm not saying that. How could I forget you taking our lives in hand?"

"That's ridiculous. Giants make do at this height all the time."

"To them, that's nature. This is anything but natural to us."

"That's only theory, Azuri. Natural is as nature does, and we're nature, moment to moment."

"Also a very nice theory." Azuri sighed. "I can't help but feel interested in this line of philosophical inquiry, and I'm happy to bend your ear once you've satisfied my curiosity."

"Oh?" She gave him an arch leer. "Is there something you want to try?"

"Show me."

"What haven't I shown you?"

"Must you be such a coquette?" As Azuri rose from under her, Elani rolled back onto her knees. "Show me this farm. You said life eternal. You mean kinulcra?"

Although secluded deep in the Elven World, he felt the nearness of the Abyss, feeling himself a personal abyss darkened by lust, and embedded in this cavernous, giant-infested chasm, while the desert planet above, so recently scarred by a hurtled world, shivered from these tremors in the vast Abyss, the space seeded by the Spider-God at time's beginning. Was Azuri the nesting heart of these Abysses? Was the eye of the ages upon him, as he scurried near the secret of kinulcra?

Two secrets, he realized with a shudder, for while he couldn't trust his elven vision in this darkness, there was a glimmering flutter of recognition. A flicker that left him in deeper doubt,

for surely he had not seen what he thought? It was an impossibility. Short of mountaintops, Abyssal oases, and the far reaches of the Abyss, there was no chance.

"Is this an elaborate joke?" Having forgotten he was a virtual giant, his resounding boom startled him, driving him back a step, to jostle against Elani.

Elani giggled. "I'm crafty, but not that crafty. Even my father can't take credit for this buried Abyss."

"While this vast geode is staggering on first sight, I've now accustomed to these depths. What's truly surprising is what lies above, on the plateau of that rocky spire."

"You can see so far?"

"Elven vision bridges not only space, but threefold time. Your three dimensions are only the first dimension of time, while the fourth and fifth dimensions extend objects and beings further along axes imperceptible to you." He struggled to find words the half-human might half-understand. "Although even humans have a limited amount of foresight, elves can bring some perspective to bear on this visual information. What is insubstantial to you is very substantial to us, so much so that we can incorporate these dimensions in our architecture."

"You see the future."

"Of course not. Futures change moment to moment, just as you, limited to spatial perceptions, step side to side to make yourself a harder target for an archer. As our senses are just as slippery as yours, I'm by no means certain I saw what I thought I did."

"What did you see?"

"It's impossible. Don't laugh."

"I won't." She laughed. "Sorry, I can't help myself."

"I didn't even tell you."

"You saw a Baugn." She must have glimpsed his reaction even in the deep darkness, for her voice dipped a little deeper into velvety, smug tones. "A white Baugn."

"I couldn't see the color, but it was a mangy, skeletal thing."

"Skeletal? Are you afraid, Azuri?"

Still thick with infatuation and lust, Azuri nearly blurted out that, of all the denizens of the deep darkness, he feared her the most, even more than the giants. It wasn't that she could turn him into a serpent, but that she had reached into his basest nature, where he felt not only helpless to stop her, but greedy for her touch. Still an old elf at heart, he became impatient with himself; why couldn't he turn off his attraction to Elani? Sexual attraction was such an age-old game for Azuri that winning felt like losing, as he resented both the stolen time and the loss of self brought on by infatuation. "Hardly," was all that he said, before scrambling nearer the monolithic stalagmite.

"Azuri," she called out, "Where are you? Lend me your hand. I can't see here as well as you."

As relief eased his bones and stole across his limbs, he hiked for the pillar, half-running, then loping along the uneven chasm floor, his giant feet digging a few inches in the stone-studded dirt with every step, and scattering clods and pebbles behind him, to shower back toward Elani.

When there was a yelp, and a scuffle of feet, she cried out, more in irritation than in pain. "I tripped, Azuri! It hurts! Don't leave me here in the dark!"

While his heart clamored, and his nerves, perhaps roped by the geas, strained against his jogging legs, so that even his neck stiffened from the effort not to turn; and while he knew it was reasonable to bring her along, in that she had knowledge of this place, no doubt from being prepared by Frellyx, he wouldn't face Elani. While drawn to her, this attraction was not only heavy, but crushing,

and he would continue to dodge it like he would a physical blow. As Elani's yells swelled with loathing, they drifted over the dark rocks for some time.

An unpracticed runner, Azuri often became winded, leaning against one of the larger spurs, or sitting cupped to a stalagmite. In one resting place, he had the good fortune to plop in a stream, and while his pants were soaked, he cupped his hands and scooped up water with gusto, realizing as he shuddered, gulping down the stale water, that he hadn't had a drop to drink since the longbow world.

that lush Abyssal oasis, had crumbled into his desert homeworld. How long would its evaporated ponds and streams rain on Julaba's ruins, he wondered?

Even at this tiny watering hole, Elani's screeches rang on the rocks. When she abruptly stopped, Azuri held his mouthful of water, fearing to swallow in the lull. Though he strained his ears, he heard nothing.

Did she fall? Speculation ended, and his limbs flexed with the nearly overwhelming compulsion to sprint back to Elani. Then he remembered how she had shaped his will, and he relaxed in the cool water, beginning once again to spin possibilities, rationalizations which gave him the power to resist the snap of the geas and his well-meaning lust. Perhaps she was saving her strength. More likely, she had changed shape to some beast better equipped for a pitch black, stalagmite-studded cave than a doe-eyed half-human in a ridiculous gown.

But being more stubborn than he, she had persisted. When the light flared, it lit not only her distant figure, still clad in her conjured gown, but beams of enchanted light expanded to the far-off chasm ceiling, where stalactites glinted, reflecting a glittering web of rays along the cave walls. As motes of light played along his limbs, bringing his old, weary body back to the visible, this dimness was somehow more frightening than the darkness. He preferred the unknown to her manifold ambiguities. Before, death lay somewhere in the dark, but now it taunted him not only from a thousand uncertain and precarious points, but from the scorned source of the light.

As his enlarged heart pummeled away, still engorged with volatile lust, hot exhaustion, and now a stronger thirst, not for water but for air, which he felt he must stop and slake, his feet clopped along, bursting the soil with each racing step. He felt that something must give, whether his weary legs, his breathless lungs, or this enchantment he had conjured, in spite of living an unmagicked life. This is when he realized the inconsistency in his adventures, and the shock brought him to an abrupt halt,

clutching a stalagmite as he panted to regain his breath.

What was more likely, after all?

Was he likely to manifest an aptitude for sorcery at the ripe old age of five hundred? It was not only practically unheard of, it was literally unheard of. No one had ever changed their minds and become a wizard at that late, great age.

As he followed this line of reasoning to its conclusion, his spine shivered, as if he had plunged into an icy bath. If he had not been distracted, he might have realized it before now. But he had plunged into yet another pocket of deep darkness, this time not only pursuing one that sought to ensnare him,

but joining with that witch in the darkness.

"How did you do it?" As his voice echoed in the blackness, the sharp edge of his own certainty strengthened the steel of his resolve. "I know you're there."

When the silence persisted, he scowled, limped along, and sagged under the weight of his breathless exhaustion. "Don't worry," he grumbled, "I have no ambition to be High Tzhurarkh."

Again there was silence. Having propped himself against another cool stalagmite, he then slid down to his knees, until his legs were stooped but his back reclined against the rock. ""We're almost there. Who knows what we'll find there. We might not have time to talk then. And I want answers.

Maybe the past year was all in my head. Maybe I never left the pouch. Why push on in the midst of these uncertainties?"

"Why should you push on?" When the tiny voice tickled his ear, he strained mightily to batter the malignant pest that had alighted there, but his hands froze in his lap. "You're nothing but pushing on, Azuri. You're either determined as death, or resigned as the dead. I don't understand you."

"I'm too old to be understood by one such as you, Eurilda." Once again, he strove to bat at the pest, whose loud whispers burned in his ear, but his hand would not do his bidding. "Your mind can barely comprehend a year, let alone five centuries."

"But I can geas you," she chuckled. "And if I can barely know your mind, I can guard it from your hedge witch."

"She's not my hedge witch. And she's a better witch than you."

"Untutored."

"You mean unmastered. You should sympathize." Baiting her was a dangerous game, Azuri knew, but if he couldn't control his limbs, his only weapons against her were his words. And as it was about time she got out of his ear, pricking her with spiteful slights was the only way to bring about her appearance.

"Yes, you make quite a pair." The tiny titter was such an irritant at her minute scale that it made his spine crawl, until her miniature squeal swelled from a chirp to a booming snap, the levitating mote flitting from his ear to expand into the scornful sorceress, her whooping cackle echoing to fill the stalagmite trenches. "The unmastered and the unmanned."

"Why not just come with us?"

"As if Elani would have showed me this place." As she held her upturned hand aloft, it cupped a white flame, streaking half her face and her buttoned cloak with streaming white light. "Elves are a secretive bunch."

"That one?" Azuri crinkled his nose and twisted his mouth into a scornful moue. "She's no elf."

"If you truly think so, we have much in common, Azuri." At his disdainful flinch, her smile fattened with gloating. "We both have a taste for what is beneath us." Her face composed itself into a mask of reserve. "Don't get me wrong, Azuri. I'm not saying we're equals, but you care for what is broken, whether this half-breed or those wretches on Nahure. My greatest love was for one of those skin-wearing beasts of the Human World."

"I care either too little or overmuch." Azuri slumped as he groped his way through this blind epiphany, this dull tingle without any accompanying vision. It was as if he had morphed into a cave bat in this dim pocket cosmos of chimes and echoes, for his elven sight disintigrated into primal noise, a web of pulse and heartbeats. "No doubt this is not my actual failing, but my cowardly consciousness of it, which shrinks from love."

"Broken love," Eurilda sneered.

"Who in the Abyss does not lead a broken life? Even as we elves see hidden, celestial cities, our feelings are relics lost in the ignoble ruins of our history."

"Yes," Eurilda said. "You think giants cold creatures, but it was the elves, who lacking love,

and having pried what was great from the Five Worlds, rebuilt their colonies and garrisons as resorts and casinos, and became more decadent predators, trading secret immortality for the harvests of worlds and the fortunes of kings and queens. When the elves came to Nymerea, we were living hand to mouth in caves, but in short order, we learned not only to sow and reap, but to bide our time in all matters, to harvest our own thoughts as we cultivated our sense of history."

"Then our broken elven love remade the giants." Azuri spoke this carefully and uninflected, but Eurilda's face snapped into a feral, angry grin.

"And you've made your own agents of destruction," laughed Eurilda. "As he whom your High Tzhurarkh sent was consumed by envy, and Frellyx learned as much brutal revenge from giants

as we learned about the subtle extortion called history from him, your people made their own agent of destruction, and even you yourself had not a little to do with the disaster the longbow world wrought."

"I was geased."

"You were willing."

"That's insane. And how would you know?"

"To be fair, your nerves are well-mapped by many geases, and perhaps the past Azuri would not have been so eager to destroy his home city. But while his geas strings no longer snap you into motion, Azuri, you are, literally, no longer your own man. You are now so broken in that you do Frellyx's will by your own reflex."

"And now I'm your creature."

"As if." Eurilda sniffed. "You're only a prisoner of fear. I would never geas such a pathetic creature, who no longer knows his own will. I prefer better tools, but you were what was at hand, so I snipped the cords of other sorcerers that you might do as you ought."

"But I felt the flex of the geas!"

"If that was not the snap of your own instincts, Azuri, it was the sting that comes from being well-trained by many masters: Otoka, which you do not remember; Frellyx, whose geas Otoka rewrote; then Elani, whose crude enchantment you clung to even after I shattered her spell."

"But you were not with me on the planetoid."

"Even if I swore to that, would you know if I was? Far be it from me to sow doubt in your mind. As there is no justification for you, Azuri, only vengeance remains."

"Here? In this dark cave? With giants waiting outside? My only chance for revenge would be my remains, should they choke on my gristle and bone. What would you have me do?"

"So old, and yet no imagination. There is one revenge left to you."

"Are you so sure?" snarled Azuri. "I can think of a few."

Eurilda laughed. "While your dreams of taking vengeance on me are impotent, you might still revenge yourself on Frellyx, Ialuna, The High Tzhurarkh, and, for that matter, every Tzhurarkh." As the realization of what she implied spread across Azuri's face, Eurilda's grin grew sharper and more wicked. While her sneering face was still embedded in lengthening and darkening shadows, the subtle green light said Elani was very near.

"While I will be hated for my hand in Julaba's destruction, if I do not stand against you now,

I will forevermore be remembered as the destroyer of the empire, and Alfyrian culture itself."

"What empire?" sneered Eurilda. "What culture? Elves are parasites. You borrowed your light from the past, and bartered for your power and wealth." She snorted. "Look at you, Azuri. A prime specimen of elven immortality. Five hundred years old, and what have you? A smattering of laws and customs, a taste for goblin fare, and a heartful of grief, having outlived your century-old daughter. At this point, you could only hope to die from violence, like her, for kinulcra will indefinitely prolong your grief as surely as it will postpone your death. Having earned your eternal monotony, why risk that investment in taking action, no matter how exciting, given that the death you deny is the spice of living an exhilirating life."

While Eurilda's words stung, he felt their cruel truth: with only more tedium to look forward to,

what gave him the will to carry on were memories of his berserk ascent of the Quront Sabata's stairwell, a lunatic charge which, in many ways, had never ended, hurling him from Alfyria through the Abyss, where he had ridden an Abyssal oasis into the site of his daughter's death, annihilating both the place and the day which had ended his fatherhood.

"My kinulcra-fuelled life brought me here." He shrugged. "It ends here, opposing you."

"You would style yourself the champion of eternal life, when your kind have abused that gift?"

"A gift it was in truth, as Cyhari would not have been born had I lived my natural span. We had her when I was four hundred."

"Poor, maudlin Azuri," cooed Eurilda. "Battles are waged over self-interest, not sentiment, and you will not throw your life away on such a feeble cause now."

"Self-interest? Like saving face?" When Elani's scorn crackled in the dark, Azuri took a step back. While the half-human knew he hated the giantess with a passion, he wanted there to be no mistake, for he knew what it was like to be consumed by raging madness. In his own rages, he had broken bones indiscriminately. As a fiery bolt flared, scorching the shadow between them, the hairs on his hand smoldered, and Eurilda's head was engulfed in flame.

The giantess shrieked, then sputtered, through blackening lips, words so elditch and arcane that they blistered the air, and sucked the flame down to the last flicker, spooling it into a vortex of fire which shot straight back at Elani.

Instead of dodging it, the half-human witch expanded into scaly loops which twisted around and around, outracing and outgrowing the fiery spiral until the gigantic serpent towered over the tallest stalagmites, its venomous fangs rivaling the smaller stalactites above, so that when the flaming tornado burst, it sizzled and died on the massive, scaly head.

As Azuri's eyes flicked uneasily to Eurilda, fearing to survey what horror flickered in the dim, dying light of the flaming whirlwind, her scars and burns were snuffed out with the flame, revealing a face unblemished and whole. While no doubt an illusion, salving not her scorched skin but her vanity,

her chilling, evil smile felt real. "You'll pay for that!" Each word was so aspirated, it was as if each syllable expelled ash and smoke.

Her wounded tone was so vile that Azuri' fumbled for his sword belt without thinking, and clasped the shakasia hilt, which once again protruded from the scabbard. Azuri slumped his shoulder down, so that his cloak flapped in front, concealing his hand on his sword.

As Eurilda mushroomed to full height, both arms reared back, then clapped to the wiry, scaly serpent, clutching neck and tail, and raising it aloft. Even hoisted in the air, the serpent was so massive that it could and did throw its weight around, its scaly hoops flicking deft punches to Eurilda's ribs, hands, neck, and face, but the giantess only clutched fiercer and tighter, ignoring the fangs embedding, then piercing one wrist, and the tail cracking, again and again, her other hand. While the hand topping the pierced wrist could only hold fast, having lost much of its strength to the fang tearing her tendons,

the other squeezed and squeezed, inexorably, until the tail was impaled by Eurilda's bloody thumbs and fingers.

The hiss shivered not only Azuri's spine, but surrounding stones, then melted into a woman's scream as the gigantic serpent seemed to snap apart, dissolving into shadows, including one fragment that flapped away in a faltering path. Also spying this departing shadow, Eurilda's giant form poured down, diminishing to a tufted shadow that winged after it.

When both monsters had vanished, the space between the stalagmites cooled so considerably that Azuri shivered, wiped cold sweat from his brow, and sprinted for the pillar. It was the sprint of a much younger elf, as if Azuri had been renewed by his mounting fears or his unflagging efforts.

As Azuri loped along the darkened slope, Elani's light waned in the stony blackness, an otherness into which he didn't run forward so much as plummet, for running had become as easy as falling, and he began to enjoy his unending chuff of wind, his limbs both heavy and light, as if he ebbed in the cold, gelatinous darkness, scrambling on both hands backward from cultured elf to barbaric human.

As he neared the pillar, its sheer verticality proved in part an illusion, for while it appeared to jut straight up from the rootless dark to prick the cave roof, there were foothills and slopes: steep slopes that tapered sharply, but nonetheless made the pillar less needle than narrow cone. Azuri's transpiercing elven vision darted through the massive stone to a white swarm flocking at the tip, a vague, confusing cloud he was unable to interpret. Of the giantess and the half-human, there was no sign.

As he clambered up the slopes, the steep ascent tied a tiny pinch of vertigo in the back of his skull. The centuries had left him little affected by the interpenetrating dimensions of Julaba, but here and now, his nostrils pinched, then flared, in choking his twinge of fear. Immersed for hours in darkness so total it must be enchanted or divine, he felt sheared from the cruder dimensions of light and form, as if, in relying on his higher elven vision, his mind had paradoxically retreated to its primitive roots.

When his scrambling push became climbing, he hunkered against the cliff and climbed hand over hand, toehold after toehold, rising in the dark until he ascended to a pale, glimmering twilight.

While still a deep darkness, he had somehow risen from the total darkness of the cave to a gloaming darkness, like three-mooned Alfyria's rare, moonless moments, when Atoma had just set, Sardom was about to rise, and Gimas, finishing its second nightly circuit, had dropped below the horizon. Having lived in Alfyria's deep blue night most of his life, Azuri never thought, until now, that he had known very little of darkness. Unlike goblins and humans, he had no need for darkness, not even to sleep, but would rest wherever and whenever struck his fancy. Never having paid much attention to darkness, he now became deeply interested, seeing hidden significances everywhere. His most irrational fears bubbled in the dark surfaces, so that wherever he turned, he saw not only unbroken darkness, but the colorful phantasms concoted by his terrors, not only his understandable terrors of Ebotu and Eurilda,

and his more complex and seductive anxieties of Elani, but buried fears so unfamiliar that he felt barely acquainted with this subterranean side of himself, not only fears of heights and darkness (he was no mere child!), but of time and death, which he had thought banished ages ago by his study of philosophy.

As finger, wrist, and shoulder strain flowered into aches head to toe, and as these monsters rearing from his underground mind teemed into stark consciousness, Azuri began to swear, a litany of all the goblin curses he knew, the few curses he had overheard grumbled by low caste elves, and those his unburied, newly fertile mind invented. He swore with such fervor that sweat trickled in his eyes

until a stream of sweat, mingled with tears of frustration, ran into his cursing mouth.

While mountain climbing was as new to Azuri as running, and he slipped many times, once sliding no less than ten feet, through stubborn determination and aged brawn, Azuri made it to the top.

The base of the plateau had a gentle slope, rising along a shallow grade what seemed miles through the dark. If it defied logic that the pillar was a thin needle from afar, while its tip was a vast plateau, Azuri was an elf, and at home with the ambiguity. In elven eyes, ambiguity was transparent as glass. At the heart of ambiguity was not confusion, but conflict; conflicting visual information to be unraveled and intepreted.

Now Azuri's eyes rendered nothing from the higher dimensions. It was an oddly uncomfortable sensation, groping for dim three-dimensional shapes invisible to the highest ranges of his elven vision.

It was like part of the world fell away, as if he had been struck blind, and now only glimpsed shadows of the true world. It must be only illusion, he told himself. Such a place could not truly exist.

"Is this your work, Eurilda?"

"No, this is the work of a master spinner."

What Azuri had taken for a rocky overlook was, in fact, Eurilda: kneeling, pensive, and peering in the dark. Her vast head loomed just over Azuri's, and the dim gloaming of the plateau seeemed to collect along her lineaments, tracing a silvery aura. "Are they still Baugn, Azuri?"

"Your guess is as good as mine. At this point, I feel barely an elf."

"That's good," snorted Eurilda. "I'm glad for whatever part I had in knocking you off your pedestal. Let's so serve the rest of your race."

As Eurilda rose to her feet, Azuri drew the shakasia. In answer, she copied Otoka's trick,

mushrooming even more, until over forty feet tall.

When her fingernail--an apple's width, and hard as a breastplate--struck his temple, Azuri was flung ten feet from the force of her flick. As the giantess strode over him, she wasn't that careful to step over Azuri, and when her heel nearly crushed down on him, he just barely rolled aside, despite groggy eyes, bones knocked wobbly, and quivers head to toe.

While the Baugn were a little more mindful than Azuri, they weren't nearly as lucky, for in trying to mill away, they only clumped into larger targets for Eurilda's descending stomps. Here and there she stooped to pluck up white-furred Baugn, only to crunch them in her fists, then hurl them, in mangled, broken-winged, handfuls, from the pillar.

Azuri was uncertain of the how, but Elani had called these creatures the source of kinulcra. How long could he live without the influx of that drug? Was it their bones, or their fleece? As there would be little reason for this farm if kinulcra could be harvested from the plentiful Baugn of the Abyss, Eurilda might end elven immortality if he did not act. But he was frozen to the spot. And this time there was no geas knotted around his free will.

Only a few days ago, Azuri would have had no reason to ponder whether to let himself, along with his race, live out the rest of their days. Being assured to live eight hundred years or even a millenia, he might one day get past his daughter's death, just as he had outlived others he loved. If he outloved them as well, centuries grind away grief, until love became a memory, and, in another hundred years, that memory became a mere trace, filled in with dishonest but well-meaning sentiment. Portraits of Cyhari's mother now took him aback, seeing how much they differed from his lying memories of her; in his mind, her hair was a different shade, her skin was golden and not the ivory pallor captured by the painter, and her cold smile was infinitely warmer. As even ten years was enough to create a jarring dissimilarity between memory and reality, ninety years ago he had all the portraits taken down and put in the attic. As Cyhari now felt like a burden he would carry to his grave, most of him wanted Eurilda to destroy Alfyria's future. Through inaction, he would be at peace sooner, rather than later,

and elvenkind would get the judgment they deserved.

It was not as if he could oppose her, after all. If he rose up now--

In answer to his thought, his heart pounded, his skin shook, and he grew even more. In moments, he towered over the bleating Baugn, who had milled so near where he lay knocked in a heap,

they might have soon overran him, dragging him over the edge.

His magic was real. Eurilda had lied. Knowing him a potential obstacle, she had claimed to cast spells on his behalf to cover up his aptitude for magic. No doubt she had only leapt upon him, the size of a flea, when he fled from Elani. Or, perhaps she had raced after them, and clung to him as they flitted through the Alfyrian Fire. With her greater knowledge of the Doorways, she may have arrived at the Summer Palace first. He realized he hadn't quite broken her hold over him, for puzzling through her deception was the same as stalling; it didn't matter when she thought to exploit him, so long as he now took action.

As he pushed through the surging herds of blind white Baugn, he had to lean forward, as if he was a sail of flesh and bone tacking against a monstrous hurricane, for even ten tons of gigantic elf must strain against so many Baugh, each as massive as a krydayn. Moreover, blindness did not temper their spirits, but rendered them so much wilder than their feral counterparts in the Abyss, that he only weathered their blind onslaught by brute brawn, forearms outthrust, legs planted, pushing, and bruised, and head to toe ravaged by the battering swarm, their white fleece streaming past, as well as ribbons of rabid saliva from the terror-stricken creatures, unable to see their destruction, but better able to glimpse it by the darkness of their otherworldly intuition, the legendary drive that sent them through the Abyss, but here, in this underworld, drove them over the brink of madness.

As he neared Eurilda, the fearful mass thickened, and the bunched-up Baugn jostled and bleated, each shove a jarring blow that sent Azuri shuddering back, until the bumps piled up so fast that he was soon carried, as if by a wave, from the giantess. This may have saved him, for in his incensed rage, he cared little that she was yet much more a giant than he, still twice his height and many times his mass. Having doubled her natural size, Eurilda was so gigantic that she waded through the swarm as if the Baugn weren't there, each step crushing three, and bringing dozens in the shadow of her crouch, the terrifying echo of her mirthful and satisfied laughter, the long reach of her darting hands,

and the choking squeeze of her fingers.

Even at Azuri's enmagicked size, he was a child compared to a giant of this magnitude. While the shakasia was now just long enough to pierce her heart or eye, his might and reach were feeble compared to titanic Eurilda, who might simply reach over his thrust, disarm him with a pinch, and kick him from the plateau as easily as she did the sightless Baugn.

And while she was enormous, her dizzying, undiminished speed stepped, stooped, grasped, choked, and swatted until the pillar top was half clear, and broken Baugn littered the base of the gigantic stalagmite. While she slaughtered the Baugn at a terrifying rate, Azuri was an old hand at quickening thought into action, and no sooner had the herd thinned and the way cleared, than Azuri sprinted for the giantess.

The shakasia flashed, but her moon-white hand flashed faster, and though he drew a deep rivulet in her forearm, her other hand pinched his blade, holding it so fast, it seemed frozen in place,

just as he had imagined moments ago. Elven foresight was little better than the simplicity of ignorance,

when those flickers of the future came only from line of sight; with such little time to prepare, the confidence of foreknowledge might not spare one from consequences, but only feed one's fears faster.

Human vision, uncluttered of futures and dooms, was better able to scheme, plot, and cheat fate. Having seen himself at the giant's mercy moments ago, he could not stop it from coming to pass, but only doubled his feeling of powerlessness by mirroring his prediction in its happening.

When Eurilda's berserker speed dropped off, Azuri looked up, and his eyelids were blasted by her hot, foul breath, so tinged by smoke and the queasy sweetness of burned flesh that his eyes itched, his nose sucked back a sneeze, and his throat hacked back a gag of sour bile, so that he let go his sword, and clamped both hands to his mouth by reflex, too late, as gobbets of vomit leaked to the ground.

Eurilda had humiliated him again. His profound emptiness was like an echo hollowed of its originating noise, then swollen around this sliver of reflected sound. The crawling emptiness of his stomach--which sought to disgorge food in vain, having not eaten in a day--was drowned in the darker feeling of being overshadowed by the giantess's power.

In the pouch, he conjured forth the terrors of his own mind, but dangling from her grasp, he dwindled under her gleeful, malevolent leer and shrank from teeth grimy with smoke and blood. As she brought him nearer and nearer to her face, her hand slowed to an icy creep, no doubt to intensify his terror to a delicious fervor.

When she didn't stop, his brow seeped cold sweat, and her pinching fingers became slimy from his watering armpits, until he wondered if she was only making a show of it. When it seemed she really meant to devour him, Azuri's teeth clicked in a ghastly, skeletal grimace, and he grasped her sweat-slicked hands and shoved. Just as one grown finger might be forced by a child's whole hand, so by pushing two-handed against her squeeze, two fingers budged, and Azuri tumbled down, flopping on two mangled, mewling Baugn.

When Eurilda's face turned, he thought she would once again ignore him, and continue her massacre of Alfyrian immortality, but then her face stayed fixed, her eyes widened, and the plateau shook, then rattled, blasting a cloud of dust that choked Azuri and once again rendered him half-blind.

But while his vision was tinged red by swelling bruises and rising haze, there was no missing the gigantic maw billowing up with the dust, its fangs so colossal it was as if the stalagmites had risen to avenge Azuri, trailing not only dust clouds but scaly loops that beringed Eurilda.

As the gigantic serpent was at least five hundred feet long if not a mile, when its hoops constricted, they drew near whatever was pressed by their folds, not only stones, dark shrubs and lichen, and mangled Baugn, but Azuri, who was still flat on his back when the serpent's scaly segment pressed on his calf and dragged him by force of friction over the dry, coarse plateau rock. Although he dug with both hands, splitting his fingernails and tearing the flesh of his palm, the serpent's crushing, implacable weight dragged him, inexorably and rapidly, into the coils constricting Eurilda.

As he struggled to draw breath, Azuri was oddly calm. While it seemed there ought to be an end to the serpent, coil after coil piled in and on, producing such massive snapping and cracking in the shrubs and stones that Azuri wondered if smiling, cackling Eurilda was made of something harder than bone.

When the shuddering ground drummed, boomed, then fell into the jagged darkness, the coils sagged for a moment, then poured into the abyss, dragging the giant, the broken Baugn, and Azuri. The dim stalagmites rushed to make their points known, but Azuri knew no more.