The Night Forest spread across the south-eastern corner of Faer. It was ancient and weathered, deep and dark; the canopies of the great, gnarled trees were so thick that it was rare for even a glimpse of sunlight to penetrate their leaves.

The only source of light for the cities built throughout the forest were the veins of a glowing, glassy substance that snaked their way through the cracks in the bark. Their luminescence was reflected in the clear gemstones of myriad pastel hues that trickled from the base of the crystalline leaves.

It took these drops of sunlight years to reach the ground and settle into the delicate, glimmering mosaic rings inching glacially slowly away from the base of the trunks. Blades of grass shone, dust from the oldest gemstones clinging to them as they grew.

Opalescent threads of crystal were woven into everything, their mystic strength lending aid to the ropes that held the walkways and platforms suspended throughout the wood elven cities. The largest of these cities was Anu’ala, the seat of the royal family and home of the only academy of medical science that existed in the Twin Kingdoms.

The single tree that housed them both, Anu, was the greatest ever measured. The centre of the trunk was hollow, housing an assembly hall and a spiral staircase leading up to the classrooms and lecture halls and offices hewn into the natural wood. Narrow passageways between them led out to the external galleries that wound gently upwards to the Palace.

It was nestled in amongst Anu’s branches, partially concealed but still visible, an ovular pod with a peaked top comprised entirely of crystal thread. It gave the impression of an acorn woven from strings of diamond shining with the pale light of every colour, held aloft by a spider’s web of ropes. Elves and humans from all over Faer came to see it or study beneath it. There was truly nothing else like it in the world.

That was what Caera had been told, anyway. She sat with her legs crossed in front of her, the arms of her bow resting across her stomach. She fiddled idly with the patterns carved lovingly into the weapon as she stared up at Anu, her hazel eyes drinking in the great tree’s majesty.

She rested her head back against the Muds tree; a short, squat plant, easily a mile in diameter but barely as tall as it was wide. It was hollow, housing a large chunk of the common elves of the city in small, mud-walled apartments. Crystal threads twisted around the dirt bricks and bound them together solidly. The refugees from the wars - people like her - were stuffed in amongst them.

She was lucky to have a friend who lived in Anu’ala. Every day as she made her way between the makeshift infirmary in the centre of the Muds and his home, she picked her way through the shanty-town of tents crammed tightly between the concentric circles of apartments. The smell alone was enough to turn the stomach of most people, but Caera had been caring for the sick for as long as she could remember. She was inured against all the worst smells that a person could produce.

She left her bow resting on her stomach and raised her arms above her head, stretching the kinks out of her spine before she stood. She could manage a few more hours at the infirmary before she really needed to sleep. With one final caress of its carvings, Caera slid her bow into place over her shoulder.

Weapons were symbolic in the Night Forest. All adult wood elves wore them. Caera’s mother had told her it hailed back to a time when dark elves had been able to freely march north and attack them, when it was necessary for everybody of age to be ready to repel an invasion at a moment’s notice. She didn’t know how true that was, but leaving home without a weapon was considered as impolite as stepping out of the door without clothes on.

Caera stumbled over a scrap of loose bedding and cursed, landing on her hands and knees in the mud. She sighed and clambered back to her feet, wiping the palms of her hands on the front of her jerkin.

“Mama,” she heard a small voice say. “What’s wrong with that lady’s hands?” Caera turned to look behind her at the small child nestled into the tent beside her mother. She splayed her fingers and looked down at the milky streaks of pale skin that began at her fingertips and speckled across the backs of her hands. She had a similar patch around her nose and mouth, like a blot of white ink on her warm, brown skin.

“Shh!” the mother chastised, looking suitably horrified with her little girl’s tactless question. Caera smiled and folded up the piece of cloth she had tripped over, handing it back to the pair of them with a mumbled apology for muddying it.

When she was little it had bothered her. It wasn’t so much the markings themselves but the comments and sidelong glances, the whispered questions. Her mother had told her every single day that she was beautiful exactly as she was, even as all the other children lost their puppy fat, and Caera didn’t.

They got taller and their hair got more manageable. She remained a stubbornly short, round elf under a wild mass of curled hair that refused to do anything but exactly what it felt like doing. An elf with white patches on her skin that she had never seen on anybody else.

These days, when Caera looked into a mirror she didn’t see all the things that people said about her. She only saw herself and her mother’s kind, inquisitive, honest face staring back at her. She saw her Mama’s wild, bright eyes always sparkling with curiosity. Kathryna had called her beautiful every single day of her life, and on almost every day, Caera believed her.

It didn’t take her long to reach the infirmary. It was bustling with activity even in the dead of night, even in the absence of the human healers from Wolf’s Head. Caera hadn’t known that humans always slept at night until the war had come to Anu’ala and she had worked with some for the first time.

The light levels in the Night Forest didn’t really change this far from the edge. Wood elves didn’t have a regular, communal sleeping pattern. She paused as she crossed the invisible boundaries of the shanty town and into the infirmary at the centre, and closed her eyes.

Wood elves were not magical. There were a select few that could summon the power of the Druids they revered; the King and his family, a small handful of others. There were no Magi. There were Necromancers, but as soon as their powers revealed themselves they were quickly exiled or executed if they resisted. It turned Caera’s stomach to think about it, because she wasn’t sure if she was one.

She had always had some kind of power, but it didn’t seem like it was Necromancy. It wasn’t the explosive, chaotic magic that the other wood elves spoke of in hushed whispers. She could feel things that other people couldn’t; she could tell how somebody was feeling, or if they had experienced a great loss. She knew when the sick were going to die, although she couldn’t always tell how or when.

She knew when somebody was hurting. She opened her eyes again and let them fall on one such person, a small shape bundled underneath a quivering mass of blankets, and went to sit beside him.

He was a small boy, buried under the covers like they could shield him from the wars that inched ever closer, threatening the sanctuary of Anu’ala. His soul was pulp, ripped up like a sheet of paper sodden with blood. It was what loss felt like, to her. Something intangible had been torn out of the child and left nothing but a bleeding mess behind.

She reached out and rested her fingertips on the boy’s shoulder. She didn’t try and extract him from his hiding place. Instead, she opened her mouth and began to sing.

It was a simple lullaby that her mother had sung to her. It soothed her always, guarding her from nightmares and monsters in the wardrobe alike. She wove a thread of magic into each note she sang, feeling the power she didn’t understand softly whisper out of her with each word of the lullaby.

The boy’s shoulders stopped shaking, and before long he was asleep. Caera smiled to herself and straightened up, leaving the child to his much-needed rest.

Hours passed, and Caera worked her way across the infirmary to where her friend Rako was working.

She had known him for most of her life. He had travelled with his parents to her village once, although she had never known why. There was little there but farmland and her mother’s carpentry workshop, certainly nothing Caera had imagined could pique the interest of a family from the city.

He was her only real friend, and the only person she had ever spoken to about her magic. He had gone wide-eyed at even the mention of it and shushed her, looking around frantically as though expecting the city’s protectors to bleed out of the mud walls and arrest her.

She hadn’t brought it up again, but it comforted her to know that somebody knew. She didn’t like to carry secrets alone. She could always feel fear radiating from Rako, but never moreso than when she had told him about her gifts.

He looked over at her with a tired smile and she returned a bright grin. He was very different to her in most ways; quiet and nervous, self-contained and not at all curious about the world beyond the Forest. He most often seemed afraid of it.

He was tall and gangly, as though somebody had taken a normally proportioned elf and stretched him on a rack. He had pinched features, his chin sharp below thin lips that were always pressed together as though if he relaxed, he would say something he ought not to.

His eyes were dark and watery and quick. His skin was a few shades darker than hers, and his hair was just as much of a mess even though it was shorter and straighter. He was the kindest person she had ever met and an excellent, dedicated nurse.

She wrung out a scrap of antiseptic soaked cloth over a basin, listening to the splattering sound it made as the droplets burst against the surface of the water. She wondered if that was what rain sounded like. It was never heavy enough for much of it to make it through the canopies of the Night Forest but if she listened carefully, she was sure she could sometimes hear the gentle drum beat of water on leaves.

“Cae,” Rako said, breaking her out of her memory. He reached out for her shoulder but the stab of sympathetic worry touched her first and she was already turning to face him. Out of the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of what he was looking at.

Three figures moved through the infirmary. They were shrouded in dark hoods and cloaks that hid their bodies, but they couldn’t conceal their souls. Caera scrambled to her feet so quickly that she upended the water basin, sending the wooden dish skittering across the reed mats that covered the floor. It clattered into the leg of a table and a glass took a tumble and shattered before the dish finally banged to a standstill against a box full of supplies.

It was enough of a cacophony to be heard over the short distance between them, and the three figures all looked up at her at the same time. One of their hoods had slipped enough for the crystal-light to illuminate a wide jaw and the bone tusks jutting upwards from it.

“Orcs!” she yelled, at the top of her lungs, flinging her arm out sideways to grab at Rako’s sleeve. The infirmary burst into action, but too late.

The three orcs threw their cloaks to the ground, exposing naked, battle-scarred bodies. Strange paint markings were drawn on them, whites and yellows and blues standing out against their thick, leathery skin. Talismans hung around their necks, and she could feel the power radiating from them in fast pulses like a terrified, stammering heartbeat.

They let out a roar in unison, a sound that shook the foundations of the Muds tree itself. Claws tore out from their split, dirty fingernails and bristles of fur pushed through the pores of their skin. Their forms twisted in the blink of an eye and they threw back their heads and roared again with the rumbling growls of bears.

“Oh shit!” She took a step away from the shapeshifters and stumbled into the pallet bed behind her. Her bow flew out of her hand and she scrambled to reach it, feeling the tremors of the shapeshifters’ thundering gait through the mud.

She was almost to the weapon when a strange feeling tore through her like an axe, beginning in her stomach and ripping towards her throat. She raised a hand to her mouth because for a second she was sure she was going to throw up her stomach, but it passed. Silence followed, and she turned.

The bears lay dead in at Rako’s feet. He gripped his quarterstaff tightly, a walking aid as much a ceremonial weapon. He had always carried it in addition to his dagger because he had once broke his right knee and it was stiff in the cold. Her heart a pulsating lump clogging her throat, Caera cautiously moved towards her best friend under the eyes of every stunned nurse, guard, doctor and patient.

The shapeshifters’ heads were on backwards. All three of them were broken-necked, dead within an instant. Tentatively she raised her eyes to Rako, but he wouldn’t look at her. There were tears in his eyes because he knew as well as she did what was about to happen.

She could feel the weight of his heart, settled in amongst the fountain of magical power she had never felt gush from him before.

“Necromancy,” she whispered, voicing the thoughts of everybody else in the room.

“I’m sorry, Cae,” he said.

Then the guards were upon him, and all she could do was let them shove her out of the way as they bound him and kicked him, regardless of his compliance. They dragged him away to the jeering sound of the people he had saved screaming themselves hoarse: Burn the Necromancer! Burn the Necromancer!

Next Chapter: Chapter Eight