They waited.The serpent was still chasing Elara, still gaining, still tracking, the head moving slightly with each of Elara's course changes the way a compass needle moves, always finding north."Elara." Asta called."Yes, still alive, still running, thank you for checking!""Go left in three seconds!""Why?!""Trust me!"A pause that had running in it."Left in three?!""Left in three!"She went left.The serpent's body adjusted, a massive lateral shift, the muscles along the full length of it engaging with the course correction, and at the midsection the shift pulled the overlapping plates of the dorsal section outward from each other, the gap opening.Mira went in from above.Asta went in from below.The axes drove down into the joint from the top, the solid flame concentrating at the tip of the blade edge, all of Mira's weight and arm behind it, focused to the smallest possible point. The sword went in from below, Asta's body weight fully behind the blade, driving upward throug

The movement was large and slow and multiple,not the quick movement of animals passing through, the deliberate movement of things that had been stationary and had decided to move toward something.Roderick turned.His voice ran out of words before he found any.Five shapes.Coming through the undergrowth,each one the size of the serpent they had just killed. Each one different in colour, the scales catching the forest's bioluminescent light and throwing it back in different hues. Deep blue. Forest green. Crimson. Sapphire. Obsidian black.Five heads.Five sets of pit organs, all oriented in the same direction.At them.Roderick stared at them.Flora looked at them.Then she said, in a voice that had a very specific quality, the quality of someone saying something that they know is going to be received poorly and are bracing for the reception…"Those are not full-grown." She said.Everyone turned to her."Those." She said carefully. "Are the offspring."Mira looked at the five enorm

Not in distress, in the specific gesture of someone who has arrived at an information gap they should have addressed earlier and is processing the fact of their own oversight."Flora." Asta said again."Yes."She said. From behind the hand."Do you speak Elvish?""No." She said."Do any of us speak Elvish?""No.""Did you know, before this moment, that the elves we were going to encounter in this forest would speak Elvish?"A pause."Yes." Flora said.Another pause."And you forgot to mention this at any point during our previous discussion about elves?""I was focused on the serpent." She said.Yuki, who had been standing quietly to the side with the expression of someone managing their reaction to the situation, said… "How do we communicate with them? If none of us speak the language and they don't speak ours,what are the options?"Flora lowered her hand from her eyes.She looked at the group.Then at the elves.Then back at the group."There are two ways to bridge the language

The path they took went deeper into the forest before it went anywhere else.Deeper meant darker, the canopy thickening overhead until the sky was a suggestion rather than a presence, the bioluminescent light of the moss and bark taking over from the daylight the way one conversation takes over from another when the first one runs out of things to say. The blue-green of it changed quality the further in they went, not brighter, richer, more layers to it, the kind of light that exists in old places that have been making their own light for long enough that they've gotten very good at it.The trees changed too.The trees in the outer section of the forest had been large. The trees in here were something different from large, they were the trees that large trees aspired to be, the roots of them visible above the ground and running for thirty, forty feet before going under, each root thick enough to build a house on. The bark was not brown here. It was the deep, dark, specific colour of

Roderick was already speaking before the door had fully closed behind him."Asta." His voice came through the wall, muffled but clear in the specific way that voices carry when someone is not trying to keep them contained. "You are kidding me. Right now. Tell me you are kidding."He wasn't outside yet. He was standing in the corridor just beyond the arch, and the words came back into the room with all the weight he had put into them still attached.Then his footsteps,heavy, deliberate, moving away."Roderick…" Yuki's voice.Then her footsteps, lighter, faster, following his.Then the sounds of both of them went further away and the room was left with the fire and the silence and the specific quality of a space that has just had something large happen in it.Flora turned to Asta.She looked at him the way she looked at things she was genuinely uncertain about, fully, without the academic remove she sometimes put between herself and situations that were difficult."Are you sure?" Sh