MICA EARTHBORN
"Mica is tired of the Beast Glades," I said, knowing my complaining would irritate the elven Lance. "Mica is bored. B-O-R-E-D, bored."
Aya, who was meditating and refining her core, did not respond.
"Mica and her sisters wouldn't be here if it weren't for that awful boy," I grumbled, picturing the dark-haired Alacryan whose arrival had sealed our fate in Etistin, "with his dark fire and black metal…"
Aya twitched at my reference to her and Varay as my sisters, but didn't respond otherwise.
"Mica was just thinking about when Varay launched an entire glacier at the Scythe. Remember how it lifted up from the bay like it'd been thrown from a giant catapult?" I plucked one of the stone dolls I'd made from my bunk and mimed the glacier crashing into it, breaking the doll in half with my fist. "Mica thought that might do it, but the cursed black flames ate through the glacier like—"
"Like fire through ice?" Aya asked, her eyes still closed.
I fused the two halves of the doll back together. It was an angry, ugly little thing, modeled after one of my teachers at the Earthborn Institute. At least, that's what I'd been trying to mold. It looked more like a frowning, bearded potato.
I tossed the doll back onto my bunk where it rattled against the others, then ignited my core and reversed gravity on myself, causing me to float slowly into the air and hover a couple feet above the ground.
"You elves always have such a way with words. Mica thinks this is perhaps why you were so late in getting to Etistin. Writing poetry, maybe?"
Aya opened one eye to glare at me, then closed it again, shuffling on her behind and returning to her meditation. I drifted a little closer so that the edge of my gravity bubble made her hair float around her head.
"Mica and Varay had the saw-horned Scythe on the ropes until the heartless boy arrived. Had Lance Aya been slightly quicker to reach Etistin, perhaps—"
Aya's normally gentle eyes were cold as ice when they snapped open to glare at me. "If you think I'm going to sit here and listen to this again…Had I not arrived to aid in your escape from Etistin, you would be dead, you daft dwarf."
I raised one eyebrow—or lowered it, maybe, since I had rotated until I was floating upside down—and gave Aya a satisfied smile. "See? Mica said you elves have such a way with words." The purposefully irritating smile slid from my face as I thought of something else. "Hard to believe that Lance Arthur fought off both the Scythe and the dark boy at once."
"Supposedly," Aya replied, her eyes closed again. "Besides, he had a dragon at his side. Perhaps if Arthur and Sylvie had stayed at Etistin like they were supposed to, then things might have ended differently. He might not have died fighting by himself, for one."
I watched Aya carefully. Despite her meditation, the lines of her thin face were tense, her lips pursed so tightly they were white around the edges. Gone was the seductive pout the elven Lance used to distract the world from her strength, replaced by a constant frown. The betrayal of King Eralith and disappearance of Tessia and Virion had been hard on her.
But who would know better of what she'd been through than me?
Reaching out slowly, I poked Aya's nose with the tip of my finger, causing the elf's eyes to flash open. She attempted to unfold from her cross-legged sitting position and recoil simultaneously, resulting in her falling backwards with a grunt.
"What the hell are you doing?" Aya's eyes were wide, her mouth slack with shock.
Shaking my head in exasperation, I said, "Mica is surprised that an elf as pretty as Lance Aya is so unaccustomed to the physical touch of another. Surely Aya has had her share of—"
"Oh shut up," Aya snapped. "Don't be vulgar, Mica. Can't you just leave me alone so I can meditate?"
I only shrugged. "Mica is bored."
Aya turned thunderous as a buildup of angry mana flickered across her pale skin, but the far end of our little cave began to grind and shake, sending down trickles of loose earth from above and distracting us both.
We turned to watch as the dirt-and-rock wall separated and lifted up, revealing Varay against the backdrop of vibrant greens. The human Lance didn't even wait for the door to fully rise before she slipped beneath it so it would reverse course and grind closed again.
When closed, the door was invisible from the outside, and it would only open in the presence of a Lance, a precaution Varay had insisted on. It seemed like overkill to me, considering that we were deep in the Beast Glades, surrounded by vast tracks of unexplored forest full of S- and SS-class mana beasts.
Aya and I were silent as we waited for Varay to report on her scouting excursion, but the human Lance didn't address us immediately. She made her way across our small hideaway and rinsed her hands and face in the narrow spring than ran down the back wall.
The cave was also my creation. Three bunks molded from soft earth lined one wall, while a stone table covered with a rough map of Dicathen occupied the middle of the room. A counter with a sort of natural oven and a stone slab for meal preparation grew out of the far wall.
I'd carved into a natural spring in the back wall, allowing it to fall freely into a shallow basin for collecting drinking water and taking the occasional—very cold—shower. Varay didn't seem to mind this, as an ice-attribute mage, and Aya never complained about it either, but I was a refined dwarven lady and missed the hot mineral baths of Darv.
Throughout the tedious days after Dicathen's fall, building and refining our little hideaway in the Beast Glades had become my hobby. When it wasn't my turn to scout, I spent my time playing with the shapes of our beds, the type of stone for our tables, and the design of the oven. I carefully molded shelves into the walls, smoothed out the floors, and even grew cute little columns and arches that went up the walls and across the ceiling.
When remodeling grew boring, I turned to molding and shaping other things. I started with a bust of Aya, but it ended up looking more like my cousin Hornfels if someone shaved off his beard. Artistry wasn't really my thing.
After that, though, I tried making simpler shapes in the form of little dolls, which were now scattered across my bunk. The closest thing to a doll I'd had as a child was a target dummy for my spells, and I'd never seen the point of creating golems or simulacrum in combat, like my old partner Olfred had, but there was something meditative about molding and shaping them.
They seemed to annoy Aya as well, so I'd crafted dozens of increasing strange or creepy dolls, and regularly left them around the cave for her to find.
As we waited for Varay, I released my gravity spell and picked one up. Giving Aya an apologetic smile, I held the doll out to her. "Mica is sorry for interrupting your meditation. Please accept this peace offering."
The elven Lance glowered down at the doll. It was a particularly ugly one with a bulbous and misshapen head, a missing eye from a crack that ran from the top of its head down through its face, and a plump, lumpy body. It too, I realized, looked a little like an angry potato.
Aya put her fingertip against the top of its head and conjured an inaudible, vibrating sound into the crack, causing the doll to break in half with a loud snap.
Varay turned back to us and I gave her a scandalized look. "Varay, Aya broke my doll!"
The human Lance rubbed at her eyes and made a visible effort to ignore me before launching into her debriefing. "I have good news. The Wall still stands and is held by Dicathian soldiers, for now. I believe that its lack of strategic value has provided limited incentive for the Alacryans to take it. Additionally, they seem to have abandoned their presence in the Beast Glades, which bodes well for us."
"And?" I asked, impatient for actionable news.
One of Varay's thin eyebrows rose as she regarded me. "And I have found a target for you to vent your frustrations on, Mica."
Knocking the broken doll's hands together in a high five, I plopped down on my bed like a kid waiting for a bedtime story.
"There is a powerful Alacryan, perhaps a retainer, who is moving from city to city acting as a mouthpiece for the Vritra, announcing the Alacryans' victory and execution of our Council, and informing people that they are now subjects of the High Sovereign, Agrona. Their forces are still disseminating throughout Dicathen, and they have yet to reach many of the smaller, more rural settlements. This speaker's name is Lyra Dreide, and I've tracked the pattern of her movements. I believe her next stop will be a moderate sized trading village between Xyrus City and Blackbend named Greengate.
"My suggestion is that we go to Greengate and capture this Lyra Dreide. We can interrogate her to learn more about what the Alacryans are doing and how to best disrupt them."
"Yes," I replied immediately. Aside from a handful of small skirmishes, we'd avoided exposing ourselves since the loss at Etistin. I was tired of sulking in the Beast Glades, and more than ready to show the Alacryans that this war wasn't over.
Aya, on the other hand, was shaking her head. "It's a trap, right? Why else would this person make their movements so obvious? With their personal teleportation artifacts, the Alacryans could just teleport from town to town randomly to avoid an ambush."
"They think they've won," I said quickly, not wanting the elven Lance to change Varay's mind. "They think Dicathen is defeated, that there is no one left to challenge them. Mica wonders why they would go to the trouble of hiding their movements if there is no threat left to them."
Aya ignored me, meeting Varay's eye as she continued. "Do the Alacryans strike you as reckless? They've been three steps ahead of us at every turn. They've outplanned us and outfought us, which is why they won."
I opened my mouth to reply, but Varay held up a hand to stop me, then gestured for Aya to continue.
"We can't just throw ourselves into the first opportunity for battle we see. If they know we're still out here, then why wouldn't they try to lure us into the open? If they've foreseen we might try to interfere with the fledgling government they're installing, then dangling this woman in front of us like bait makes perfect sense."
Varay, who had become our de facto leader since the Council's fall, had listened thoughtful and carefully to the elven Lance, then was quiet for several frustratingly long seconds afterwards.
"I agree with you, Aya"—the elven Lance flashed me a victorious smile—"but there will be danger in any action, and inaction isn't something I'm capable of any longer."
Aya's eyes snapped back to Varay and her face fell. I smirked at the side of her head.
"Although this could be a trap, this is also our first opportunity to strike at a high-value Alacryan target. If we were ever worthy of the title of Lance, we can no longer hide here in the Beast Glades. It is time to act."
Varay's sharp eyes darted from Aya to me. I nodded. Aya followed suit a moment later.
"Good. There's no time to waste then. I think we should head for Greengate immediately and set up a base of operations."