Chapter 648: A Ploy

The thought clawed at Ther’Abella’s mind like rusted iron.

The Guard had not stayed away.

Captain Kaelith had felt it first, a wrongness in the mana of the roots that no amount of sweet wine could drown out.

By dusk she had gathered the squad at the foot of the great stairs.

"We are going back early. If I am wrong, I will scrub the vats myself."

None of them had argued.

...It was the best decision any of them had made in three centuries, and it had come exactly one hour too late.

’We shouldn’t have come back early,’ Ther’Abella thought. ’We shouldn’t be here.’

The sky above the World Tree was not blue.

It was a churning bruise of charcoal purple, weeping heavy, freezing rain that drummed against the bark with a relentless roar.

The rain was cold, but the liquid pooling around Ther’Abella’s boots was hot.

Drip! Drip! Splat!

Golden luminescent blood splattered against the pale stones of the central sanctum and hissed as it corroded the pristine masonry.

In the center of the terrace, Lady Eluned was on her knees.

Her green robes were torn to ribbons and soaked in her own radiant blood as a long blade of blackened ironwood protruded through the center of her chest, slick with gold.

A hand reached out and wrenched the sword free with a sickening wet slide.

Shlick!

Eluned gasped with a thin stream of golden ichor trailing down her chin.

"N-no..."

She tried to raise her hand toward the Viridian Guard, who stood paralyzed fifty yards away, but thick thorned roots dripping with purple miasma surged up from the fractured floorboards and coiled around her arms, her throat, and her waist, pinning her down.

Standing directly behind her, holding the dripping black sword, was Ellvi.

She was taller than her sister and far more heavily curved with her waist cinched in a corset of dark petrified thorn-bark.

Her emerald hair was almost black in the rain, and her eyes held a sharp malice that made Ther’Abella’s skin crawl.

She did not look like a woman acting in anger at all, to Ther’Abella, she looked like a woman who had rehearsed something for so long and was pleased to find that it fit.

In her left hand she held a scroll sealed with the World Tree’s own wax.

Behind her, a ring of grey-robed elders stood in a half-circle under the eaves, sheltered from the rain with their faces carefully composed.

Ther’Abella understood then that the elders were meant to be witnesses as Ellvi had not simply seized a throne... She had arranged a trial!

"By the authority of the World Tree," Ellvi’s voice rang out, carrying across the storm like a brass horn, "I hereby rescind your position as Spirit of the World Tree! For the murder of the Elven Overlord, a man we both called brother, committed through vile collusion with the dark rifts, your divinity is forfeit!"

She unrolled the scroll with a flick of her wrist and held it up so the elders could see the careful black script.

"Your own hand, sister... Your own seal... An order to open the rift beneath his war-camp." Her smile turned wistful. "It took me three weeks to master your penmanship! Your loops are atrocious, by the way... A goddess ought to take more care."

"Ellvi," Eluned choked out, her fingers weakly clawing at the black roots. "The roots. You have unsealed the—"

CRUNCH!

The massive roots twisted violently and pulled Eluned down into the gaping lightless chasm that had opened in the heartwood floor.

Ellvi leaned over the edge to watch her sister go, and then, with the tip of a polished boot, nudged a fallen star-lotus crown in after her.

"You won’t be needing that," she said. "I’m redecorating."

The World Tree shuddered with a colossal groan echoing from deep within its core as Lady Eluned was absorbed into the wood.

The instant she vanished, a tidal wave of golden-green mana erupted from the chasm and rushed straight into Ellvi’s chest.

Ellvi arched her back, throwing her head toward the stormy sky as the stolen power flooded her veins.

"Lady Ellvi!" Captain Kaelith shouted, stepping forward with her tower shield raised and her voice shaking with disbelief. "What is this?! How is this possible?! Release the Lady!"

Ellvi slowly lowered her head and looked at the eight shieldmaidens with venomous disdain.

She wiped a drop of golden blood from her cheek with her thumb, regarded it with distaste, and wiped it on the elder’s sleeve beside her.

"Good riddance," she sneered, in a cold purr. "For a thousand years her timid, saintly presence has been a thorn in my side... She held all this authority, yet she wept over dead leaves and refused to conquer the outer rings and you, Captain. I knew you would come back early... I planned for eight guards the way a gardener plans for weeds... A rest day was never going to hold you."

She smiled at the squad.

"Now. Why don’t you all die for me?"

She snapped her fingers.

BOOM!

A colossal dome of pressurized green mana exploded from Ellvi’s palm.

The shockwave hit the guards like a falling mountain, and Ther’Abella didn’t even have time to raise her polearm before the blast wave crushed her chest.

SNAP! CRACK! WHOOSH!

The force tore her arms from their sockets, shattered the bones in her forearms, and snapped her legs like brittle twigs.

The violent pressure ripped her off the sanctum platform and launched her body into the open sky above the canopy.

"A-ah..."

Spinning in the air, she caught one last glimpse of the terrace as her sisters were lifting their heads in the rain, and in their eyes, a sickly green light beginning to kindle...

Wind screamed in her ears and rain whipped across her face as she hurtled through the air toward the sprawling metropolis of the lower rings.

’Heal!’ her mind screamed through the blinding red haze. ’Circulate the mana!’

With a desperate ragged gasp, Ther’Abella forced her sluggish core to turn.

Green healing mana surged through her crushed limbs and dragged broken bone fragments back into place with sickening crunches.

She gritted her teeth until her gums bled, twisting her torso in mid-air to orient her boots toward the ground.

KABOOM!

Ther’Abella slammed into the center of a wide commercial plaza and blew a smoking crater into the granite pavers.

Stone fragments sprayed in all directions, shattering shop windows and tearing through awnings and Ther’Abella lay in the middle of the depression, vomiting blood onto the wet stone with her chest heaving as she struggled to push herself upright.

"Ug... Ugh... Help..."

’Lady Eluned,’ she thought with her vision blurring. ’Ellvi took her.’

The rain continued to hammer the plaza.

An amplified thunderous voice rolled across the entire district, echoing from the high towers along the bough.

"Citizens of Yggdrasil! The traitor Ther’Abella of the Viridian Guard has struck down our Lady! She conspired in secret with the dark forces that took our beloved Overlord a year ago! She is armed, dangerous, and carries silver hair and a moonlight spear! Find her! Bring her head to the roots!"

Ther’Abella pushed herself onto her knees with horror clamping around her throat.

’That will never work,’ she reasoned frantically, coughing up another clot of red. ’The people know us... They know Lady Eluned’s gentleness... They would never—’

"Officer?"

A soft hesitant voice spoke from the edge of the crater.

An elderly elven merchant in a leather apron stood at the rim and she recognized his kind face from her morning patrols.

He reached out a weathered hand and stepped down the slope of the rubble toward her.

"Are you hurt, child? Let me help you up."

Ther’Abella felt a surge of relief. "Sir, please, you have to hear me. Lady Ellvi is lying—"

The old man froze mid-step as his eyes went wide.

FZZZZT!

A sickly bright green glare ignited within his pupils and the welcoming hand did not grasp her fingers.

His fingernails lengthened into rigid wooden talons that stabbed straight for her jugular.

’No!’

Years of drills fired on instinct.

Ther’Abella threw her upper body backward and pressed her palms into the wet rock, and the wooden claws sliced through the air an inch above her nose, tearing the silver collar of her tunic.

Above the plaza, Ellvi’s voice roared from the towers, dripping with toxic command.

"IF YOU WISH TO LIVE, KILL HER! SHE KILLED YOUR OVERLORD! TEAR HER APART!"

Around the crater, dozens of elves, guards, merchants, and women carrying market baskets, turned their heads at the same moment.

Every pair of eyes ignited with the same unnatural green light.

"DIE!"

"TRAITOR!"

"AVENGE THE OVERLORD!"

They surged down the crater like a pack of rabid animals, pulling cleavers, iron ladles, and ornamental daggers from their belts.

A blast of wind-mana erupted from an incoming city guard and hurled a cluster of jagged stone spikes straight at her face.

Ther’Abella rolled aside, snatched her polearm from the mud, and watched the spikes obliterate the flagstones where she had been lying.

’They’re insane,’ she thought, scrambling to her feet. ’I have to run.’

She channeled wind-mana into her calves as a concentrated updraft blasted from the soles of her boots and launched her straight up out of the crater, over the grasping hands and onto the tiled roof of a three-story tea house.

Three enchanted arrows whistled through the downpour with their tips glowing with acidic green venom however she spun her polearm in a tight vertical circle.

CLANG! CLANG! TING!

The silver blade knocked two arrows into the rain gutters, and the third clipped her shoulder pauldron, hissing as it dissolved a layer of lacquer.

Down in the streets, hundreds of green-eyed elves poured out of alleyways and climbed the trellises and drainpipes with inhuman agility.

Spells of fire, pressurized water, and earth-spikes began bombarding the rooftops, blowing timber and ceramic shingles into flying shrapnel.

She sprinted.

WHOOSH!

Her boots slapped wet clay tiles as she leaped across narrow alleys, using small precise pulses of wind beneath her feet to glide between rooftops.

BOOM!

A bolt of lightning vaporized a brick chimney behind her.

She ducked under a sweeping wave of flame, cut a thrown cleaver out of the air with the flat of her blade, and vaulted a bunch of earth-spikes with a Gale Step that left a ring of shattered tile in her wake.

Behind her the mob grew by the minute, because the towers kept calling and the whole city kept answering.

Ahead stood an elite squad of the royal palace guard, blocking the massive suspension bridge that led toward the city limits was an officer in a shimmering mantle that warped the light around his shoulders, with the crest of Princess Selvanie embroidered along the hem.

’The Spatial Cloak,’ Ther’Abella realized. ’It belongs to Princess Selvanie’s private retinue...’

That cloak was an enchanted relic capable of short-range spatial translocation. If she could take it, she could bypass the city walls.

"STOP HER!" the officer shouted, drawing his rapier as his eyes flared green.

Ther’Abella didn’t slow down.

She leaped from the edge of the roof, wrapping her wind-mana around her body like a descending cyclone, and slammed into the center of the bridge.

Her polearm swept low with the haft catching two guards behind their knees and dropping them.

The officer’s rapier flickered toward her throat in three thrusts too fast to follow.

WHOOSH! WHOOSH! WHOOSH!

Ther’Abella turned the first with her haft, took the second across her cheek, and bent beneath the third, and before he could trigger the blade’s enchantment she closed the distance in one step, drove her shoulder into his sternum, and ripped the silver clasp of the Spatial Cloak clean off his collar.

"Traitor!" the officer choked out.

She threw the shimmering cloak around her shoulders, channeled raw mana into the hem, and pulled the hood forward.

VRRRRR-POP!

Space folded as the bridge, the screaming guards, and the rain-slicked roofs vanished into a silent blur of violet light.

’Take me out of here please...’

THUD!

Ther’Abella tumbled out of the spatial rift with her knees in muddy grass.

She was outside the city and ahead of her, rising against the dark, stormy horizon, were the colossal Outer Boundary Gates of Yggdrasil.

These were the dimensional portals at the very edge of the World Tree’s territory massive arched structures of ancient petrified wood intertwined with crystalline vines that hummed with a deep blue light.

They led outward, connecting the secluded realm of the elves to the wild sectors of the Sovereign Realm beyond and they were dying.

Because Lady Eluned had been torn from the tree’s core, the energy sustaining the gates was failing as the blue light sputtered, fading into a dull ash-gray, and the portals shrank and their edges contracting inward like burning paper.

’I have to cross,’ she thought, staggering to her feet and dragging her polearm through the mud. ’If I stay here, they will butcher me... I have to reach the Sovereign Realm, get stronger, and come back for Lady Eluned...’

She took three running steps toward the nearest archway.

THWIP-BOOM!

An explosive arrow struck the ground five feet in front of her.

The concussive force hurled Ther’Abella backward, and she planted her blade into the soil to stop her momentum, panting as she wiped the rain from her eyes.

Through the mist, seven armored figures walked forward and cut off the path to the gates.

Ther’Abella’s heart stopped.

Standing in a loose semicircle were the surviving members of the Viridian Guard.

’Why... why are they here...?’

Captain Kaelith stood in the center with her tower shield on her left arm and her two-handed battleaxe in her right with the stance she called the Hollow Oak.

Flanking her were Caelia and Evandra, the twin blade-dancers, their curved scimitars drawn and humming with pressurized wind.

Behind them stood the three elite archers, Althea, Nim, and Cheryl with their composite bows fully drawn, holding explosive arrowheads trained on Ther’Abella’s chest.

To the far right stood Moriel, the spear-master, her long crystalline lance held in a relaxed low guard.

It was the formation they had drilled ten thousand times.

Ther’Abella knew every angle of it, which was exactly why she knew she could not win.

Kaelith’s shield denied the center, the twins covered both flanks with overlapping arcs, Moriel’s lance owned the long middle distance, and the archers sat behind them like three patient stones, covering every gap the others left.

In drills, the youngest member had never once broken it because in those same drills, they had always held back.