Night Elves of Ardani: Book One: Captive

by Nina K. Westra

  In the center of the square was an enormous obelisk. It was the only part of the place that was fully intact, despite the plants crawling over its surface. Flowering vines and moss had climbed nearly to the top of it.

  If she looked closely, Novikke could almost see a pattern of greenery radiating around the obelisk, as if the plants were being drawn to it.

  Or, as if they were coming out of it.

  It was a ruin from the Auren-Li civilization—the ancient elves who had once occupied all of modern Ardani and Ysura. They’d disappeared thousands of years ago, but the remains of their cities were scattered all across the continent.

  She had only ever seen one other Auren-Li ruin: the Galanis ruins just south of Valtos. But that one had long ago been picked apart, divested of all artifacts of value and of any potential dangers, and turned into little more than a lifeless tourist attraction.

  Running into an Auren-Li ruin alone in the wild was a different matter entirely. Without the oversight of a team of mages, archaeologists, and fighters, they were impressive but dangerous places.

  Magic energy was always present in higher-than-usual concentrations in these places. Whether it was because the Auren-Li built their cities on top of places where magic naturally gathered, or if the earth had been contaminated with it by the elves themselves, no one was certain.

  A mage would be able to sense the magic there and draw power from it. Novikke had never had any sensitivity to magic. She felt nothing except a vague feeling of unease and curiosity.

  She was not particularly worried about the ruin itself. It was the things it attracted that you had to look out for. Mundane animals stayed away from Auren-Li ruins, but supernatural creatures were drawn to their magic.

  For a long few moments Novikke just stared at it all, awestruck.

  Aruna stepped up beside her. He gave a rare smile, looking almost proud. Novikke tried to ignore the fluttering in her chest the expression caused.

  He took the notebook out of his pocket. “The work of my ancestors,” he wrote.

  Novikke raised an eyebrow. She took the notebook from him. “I thought only sun elves were descended from the Auren-Li.”

  “Did an Ysuran tell you that?” He gave a sarcastic flourish as he wrote it. Novikke shrugged. He continued, “All elves are descended from the original elves, the great Auren-Li.”

  “And now you all hate each other.”

  She couldn’t tell if he was more annoyed or amused. “History is complicated,” he wrote. “Please stay close. Dryads and—” He paused, as if trying to remember the Dreioni word for whatever he was thinking of, then gave up. “—and other creatures have been sighted here. And the stonework is unstable. Many people have come into this place and never come out.”

  She nodded, looking into the dark corners in the shadows of arches and alleyways. She guessed he was exaggerating to scare her into compliance, but she was reluctant to test that theory.

  They crossed the square in eerie quiet. Novikke’s footsteps tapped softly against the stone floor and echoed against the nearby buildings. Aruna’s were silent. There was no rustling or chirping of animals. She couldn’t decide if the silence was peaceful or unnerving.

  She paused to study a remarkably lifelike statue of a winged woman wearing a suit of plate armor. Her head and arms had long ago broken off and lay in pieces at her feet. Aruna stopped beside her, scribbling in the notebook.

  “It’s the goddess Vahan. You call her Volkan.”

  Volkan. One of the five gods. The goddess of battle and fury.

  “The Auren-Li worshiped Volkan?” she wrote, surprised.

  “Did you think humans were the first to note her presence?”

  She looked down at the statue’s head on the ground. Framing the woman’s beautiful, fearsome face was a pair of pointed ears.

  “They’ve made her an elf,” she wrote. “She’s human in Ardani.”

  “Of course. Humans make everything about themselves.”

  “I suppose everything should be about elves, instead?” That was certainly the way Ysurans saw things.

  He shook his head. “I don’t care what humans do as long as they leave Kuda Varai out of it.”

  “What do the Varai think of her?” she asked, nodding toward the statue.

  “We believe she exists. We do not worship her.”

  “How can you believe a god exists but not worship them?”

  He looked amused by the question. It took him a few moments to think about how to answer it. “She’s never shown herself to us. She doesn’t answer our prayers. She doesn’t favor us, so we don’t ask for her help.”

  She’d never shown herself to most Ardanians, either. Whether gods could be seen or whether they answered prayers did not seem to be a prerequisite for worship in Ardani.

  “You follow the goddess of night,” Novikke wrote, looking up at him to confirm it.

  He nodded.

  “Does she have an equivalent in the Ardanian pantheon?”

  He shrugged, then shook his head.

  She paused, then tentatively wrote, “Moratha?” Another of the Five. The goddess of death, whose very name was taboo among Ardanians. She was the only one of them who was considered evil by nature.

  He looked up at her, frowning, and shook his head. He looked more baffled than offended by the suggestion.

  “I don’t know much about theology,” she confessed.

  “I can see that.”

  She twirled the pencil in her hand, considering him. “You know more about Ardanian culture than I expected.”

  His eyebrows pinched together slightly. He turned back to the previous page and pointed to the line that read, “humans make everything about themselves.”

  He thought Ardanians didn’t know about night elves because they were too self-centered to bother learning about other people?

  “We can’t learn about you if you never come out of your forest,” she wrote.

  “Leaving the forest has not gone well for us in the past.”

  He wasn’t wrong. Once, the Varai hadn’t been so reclusive. That was before their war with the Ysurans four hundred and some years ago, and then the crusades a hundred years after that, when anti-Moratha priests had convinced the King of Ardani to attempt to liberate the Varai from their dark goddess. It hadn’t gone well for either side.

  But that had been long ago.

  “The crusades were over three hundred years ago. Ardanians aren’t zealots anymore.”

  “That’s not so far in the past. My grandparents’ parents were there.” After a moment, he added, “And evidently, Ardanians have not grown much wiser or kinder in the past three hundred years.”

  And again, he wasn’t wrong, so Novikke didn’t argue.

  It occurred to her that he might have never left Kuda Varai before. If he had, it probably hadn’t been for more than a few miles. She could hardly imagine being bound to one place for her entire life, never getting to see the rest of the world.

  “Don’t you ever want to see the world outside Kuda Varai?” she wrote.

  He regarded her coolly. “Can’t,” he wrote with a clear trace of annoyance. She’d struck a nerve. He closed the book and started to turn away.

  Novikke grabbed his arm to pull him back. He stiffened, his hand jerking toward his sword.

  She quickly let go of him, raising her hands, and pointed to the book. Aruna, looking mildly embarrassed by the reaction, handed her the book.

  “I could take you there,” she wrote. “To see Ardani.”

  He snorted, put the notebook away again, and kept walking.

  Novikke sighed and fell into step behind him. It had been worth a try.

  At first, she’d thought the ruins were silent. But then she began to hear things. The rush of tree branches and vines in the wind. The occasional echoing chirp of birds from far away. Less cheerful sounds, like something scraping over the stone, as if someone else was there with them.

  She saw no one, but it was impossib
le to tell what could be lurking in the ruin’s many shadows.

  She forced her gaze away from the shadows on either side of them, and watched Aruna’s back as they crossed the square.

  His shoulders shifted in a steady rhythm that she had memorized by then, after hours, days, of following behind him. Left. Right. Left. Right. Left.

  Right.

  Left.

  Left.

  Novikke swallowed, blinking slowly. The air felt thick and close. Her head swam, and her limbs felt heavy.

  Maybe she could sense the magic energy here after all.

  “Hm?” she heard Aruna intone wordlessly.

  He’d stopped to look back at her questioningly. Novikke’s pace had slowed without her realizing it, and Aruna was thirty steps ahead of her now.

  She stared at him. Her mind felt like it was working slower than usual.

  It had to be the ruin. The place was tainted. It would be best to get out of it as soon as possible.

  She thought about asking for the notebook to discuss, then decided she was making too much of a small thing. They’d be on their way soon enough. She shook her head and kept walking.

  They passed through an archway in a wall between one section of the ruin and the next, and Novikke’s eyes widened. The ruin had been built on the edge of a cliff. The patchy stone floor stretched for another hundred paces, and then the ground opened up into a wide valley. She could see dark shapes of the trees below and hills farther off. The cloudless night sky had grown massive and open above them, dotted with bright stars and brighter moons.

  When she turned her gaze to the right along the path of the valley, she was surprised to see a group of man-made structures in the distance.

  And then she realized that she recognized the structures. Tall towers on the hill at one side, a grand palace lit with many tiny flames at the center, and a mass of shorter, close-together buildings near the Kokkino River, with a wall circling it all.

  It was Valtos. The capital of Ardani. Her home city. And it was no more than a few miles away.

  She’d had no idea they had come so close to it. She’d gotten so turned around when they were traveling that she hadn’t realized which direction they were heading.

  She glanced up at Aruna’s back, incredulous. If he found the proximity of the city to be of interest, he didn’t show it.

  From this distance, now that she knew which direction to go, she was sure she could make it there on her own if she managed to slip away from Aruna. She was less certain about what kinds of creatures or evil magic she might encounter on the way there, but that was a risk she was willing to take when freedom was so close. She could even see a road on the other side of the trees not far away.

  Her heart raced. She’d already lost her hope of escaping and resigned herself to her fate until right then. She had let go of the bravery she’d worked up in her previous escape attempts, and now she was having to dig it up again from where she’d buried it, deep in the bottom of her soul.

  And she was having to dig up her hatred of her captor, as well. With Ardani so close, she no longer needed him for protection. He was an obstacle again, and nothing more.

  She looked up at him again, feeling sick. He was still walking ahead with his back to her, looking out at the valley, oblivious to everything she was thinking.

  If she ran, he’d chase her. She’d have to fight him. You couldn’t hide from a Varai in the dark. There was no nonviolent way out.

  She closed her eyes. He was taking her to be tortured and executed. Even if he could convince them to show her mercy, which she doubted, they would never let her go home. She’d be a prisoner forever.

  She owed him nothing. A few small kindnesses didn’t make up for attacking and abducting her. They didn’t make up for lifetimes of evils.

  He was Varai. The embodiment of cruelty and darkness.

  Except, even as she tried to convince herself, she knew that wasn’t true. Whatever was true of the rest of his kind, she knew that he wasn’t evil. She could not lie to herself about that. She couldn’t relieve herself of her guilt over what was about to happen.

  But she knew what she had to do. The resolution was physically painful, a pricking of nerves in her chest and fingertips.

  She wondered if she and Aruna might have been friends if they had not been from opposite sides of the border. But that didn’t matter now. It had not mattered since they’d first met and he’d made her a prisoner.

  They kept walking in silence that had become heavy as lead. Every step became purposeful. Every breath she took seemed to be leading up to something. She felt every stone underfoot, and every echo of their footsteps was loud in her ears.

  They passed the skeleton of a building, and she paused to stare into the rubble in the shadows beyond the door. The back end of the building was gone, and she could see the forest beyond it.

  She caught up with Aruna and tapped his arm, then made a gesture like she was writing in her palm. He pulled the notebook from his pocket and handed it to her.

  “Need bathroom,” she scribbled, her hand shaking ever so slightly. What a stupid excuse. He’d never believe that. But it was all she could think of at the moment. Her thoughts were vibrating and simultaneously slowed by whatever the ruin’s magic was doing to her.

  A crease formed between his eyebrows. He took the book and the pencil from her. Novikke watched him write. It felt like it took a lot longer than usual.

  “Here?”

  She stared at him, waiting to see suspicion in his eyes. There was none. Surely he guessed that she would try to escape, with her city in sight?

  She shrugged. The movement felt stiff with her nervousness, but she couldn’t tell how much of it showed and how much was just in her mind.

  He waved her off, unconcerned. She hesitated, then turned and slipped into the building behind them. Aruna took the opportunity to set his pack on the ground and start adjusting its straps.

  Inside the building, she moved out of the doorway, out of his line of sight. Her mage torch cast a soft green glow on the pile of broken stones. Picking through them, she found a palm-sized rock with a sharp edge.

  It would be better to kill him now than to wait until he inevitably chased her down. He could see better in the dark—he’d find her if she ran. If she went back to him now, with the rock hidden on her, when he wasn’t expecting an attack…

  She had an overwhelming urge to throw up, and had to stand still, breathing slowly, until the urge subsided.

  She held the rock behind her back and leaned to look out at Aruna. He was standing a dozen paces away from the doorway, not quite looking in her direction, and—

  Novikke blinked. There was someone else with him.

  She thrust her light into her pocket and peered out from behind the door frame. The two were looking at each other, but not speaking. The stranger was a human woman, with hair that was messy from lack of maintenance, muddy boots, and travel-worn clothes.

  The woman slowly raised her hand and touched Aruna’s face. The tiniest of frowns crossed his face, as if in fear or confusion, but he was staring at her like he’d been hypnotized.

  The woman’s head tilted, and Novikke saw her face.

  She choked on a gasp.

  Aruna’s head jerked up at the sound. The woman turned to look in her direction, and Novikke was face-to-face with… herself.

  It was the most unnerving thing she’d ever seen. She took a quick step back and nearly fell into a pile of rock.

  Aruna’s eyes went wide with horror. The not-Novikke gave an inhuman screech and struck out at him with an arm that was swiftly growing long and dark and misshapen.

  A shade.

  Chapter 7

  A horrible thought struck her. She looked toward the end of the valley, where Valtos had stood out against the horizon.

  The city was gone. So was the road. All she could see were endless trees and darkness.

  It had never been there. It had all been an illusion.


  Instantly her mind was clear again. As the malaise disappeared, she recognized it for what it had been—the shade’s influence over her.

  Aruna tried to draw a dagger from his belt, and the shade fell upon him, knocking him to the ground. The dagger skittered across the stone and out of reach.

  As the shade grappled with him, it twisted and elongated until it was no longer not-Novikke, but a monstrous, dark shape, a thing that looked like a bad drawing of a human, all out of proportion with too-large teeth and fingers like claws, made of smoke and oil condensed into a semi-solid being. It screeched like a demon as it attacked.