I take a long, lengthening breath. Someone touched the seal on the vault. Someone's curious, delicate fingers brushed over it.
I shift just a little. I have a vague memory of one of the lesser seals breaking just a bit.
Searching my inventory, I notice that I no longer have that pile of little ones safe in my vault.
A quick scan of my environs and I find two of them. One is banging away on a small piece of metal it's scrounged from who knows where, and the other is seriously reading a page purloined from some grimoire with suitable intensity.
It brings joy to see that they're guarding the rest that have yet to be born.
The one reading looks up suspiciously, black eyes blinking. It looks around before adjusting the roughly woven robe it wears. I speculate that its some sort of spider silk it's wrested away from its owner.
The banging abruptly stops. I withdraw my consciousness from that area lest I interfere in what needs to happen.
My scan only turned up a sky leopard and an ungodly number of rabbits of all sorts. It's been so long that the original bloodlines have mixed and mingled, producing all sorts of interesting combinations.
I see one dash by, pursued by others with a carrot of all things in its jaws. The carrot is blood red which is disconcerting.
A quick brush shows that one of the more active farming plots is planted with a field of the things.
It's set near the rabbit burrows and is a thing of contradictions until I see a larger rabbit lazily climb out of a burrow next to it and twitch its ears.
A small cloud materializes and rains itself out over the plot. Another rabbit, nearly as big crawls out of the burrow and stretches. Another twitch of another pair of ears and one of the carrots levitates its way out of the ground.
The two rabbits look at it for a long second before turning their attention to another row. The discarded carrot falls to the ground where it's snatched up by smaller bunnies and spirited away.
The two big rabbits don't even flick an ear. It must be a common occurrence then.
The thought of rabbit gardeners amuses.
I turn my attention to the transportation array. I frown at the scanty lights around it.
Surely so much couldn't have been destroyed while I slept?
It has even been set to being just one-way. That can't be correct.
I reach out just a little and set it back to being two-way with the caveat of having the mayor's permission. It hadn't mattered back in the old days; the permission rested with those the mayor had appointed.
I feel satisfaction even as the doing drains what little energy I've managed to save. I stifle a long yawn.
I'm so tired. Perhaps another, shorter nap is in order.
****
Arwen Woods turned out to be a girl. Well, an elf, but Andrea had never been one for such distinctions.
She was unlike any elf she'd met before, though. Her hair was a long waterfall of star-shot black, and her eyes a glittering blue. Her skin was a milky, creamy sort of brown, something midway between hers and Sari's skin tone.
Needless to say, Lori was fascinated. She'd been peppering the girl with enough questions that even Andrea was starting to believe that she was really a professor of some sort in real life.
Arwen was chained to the floor of her dirty cage with weird, rune inscribed chains. They gleamed in a strangely oily way when the light hit them. The skin it came into contact with held nasty, weeping red welts.
Andrea had been relieved that one of the keys they'd found had fit them. She had a feeling that trying brute force would result in the generation of more of that weird black stuff.
Andrea frowned at her hand. Her knuckle had been nicked in the previous fight and now she had a weird spot of black on her hand. It had started as pinprick size, but now it had spread over half of her knuckle like some weird liver spot.
"That's dangerous," Arwen's soft voice said from beside her.
Andrea glanced at the little elf. She was still disheveled, but the welts on her arms had started to fade away. Andrea was still pondering this when Arwen's hand closed over the affected knuckle.
There was a warm feeling like she'd soaked her hand in a nice bath. When Arwen pulled her hand away, the black spot was gone.
"Such an interesting thing," Arwen murmured, drifting away.
Missy arched one eyebrow. Andrea shook her head at her. She couldn't figure it out, either.
"Are you going to take me home?" Arwen asked, looking up from her cupped hand. She suddenly clenched a fist and let her hand relax. "I was captured on my way home. Most of my escort was killed."
"And where's your home?" Kali asked as she tried another key in the chest they'd found. So far, she'd gone through half. "Why are there so many keys?"
"Because they're keys for other things," Arwen answered. "One of them isn't mine, but I can recognize it."
This time Andrea and Missy's surprised look was shared with Lori.
"What does that mean?" Kali asked, her attention fully diverted.
"I can identify Keys," Arwen said. She proudly raised her head. "It's a rare and wonderful gift, but they really wanted me to anchor a major teleportation gate."
"A teleportation gate? Really?" Missy asked, perking up. "How do you do that?"
"Without my consent? By sacrificing me at the area where they want to build it," Arwen said. She frowned, sucking in a harsh breath. "That's where the missing are going, isn't it?"
"What missing?" Andrea asked.
"There have been cases of dark elves going missing. Sometimes it's an entire family group. No one knew what was going on," Arwen explained. She shivered. "Are they being used for gates?"
"Can all dark elves be used in that way?" Kali asked, her grip on the keyring tightening.
"Yes, but it's not something we tell everybody. I think only the royals of the light elves know it, and maybe it's in some old books somewhere probably?" Arwen shrugged. "It's like a thing of myth. Like Keys."
Kali stood up from the chest. She checked the keys on the keyring she held. Andrea and the rest had watched her slowly going through them trying to open the chest with varying levels of amusement, especially when each failure was accompanied by increasing levels of hissed words not fit for children.
When she reached the next to last key, it shivered and broke into a thousand motes of light. They watched as the cloud of light dashed out of the former bandits' cave and into the horizon.
"That was a Key; I guess the person it belonged to is dead," Arwen said with a clenched jaw. "That's the only reason it would break. The legends say that during the war, the Crossroaders found a way to keep them solid, but that's just silly."
Andrea opened her mouth to say something and found herself a bit speechless.
"Then, what exactly is a Key?" Lori asked.
"Oh, I can tell you that!" Arwen said, the shadows chased from her youthful face.
Andrea found a place to sit. She could tell that this might take a while.