"The human does not ask where the boundary lies.
They simply walk past it.
Their mortal will is not a gift, but a wound.
It does not flow with the weave. It carves through it.
They do not hear the song. They demand it.
And in that lies the first profanity.”
— Elareth, High Seer of the Fold
(excerpt from The Obsidian Mirror )
The instant they crossed beneath the vaulting arch, not with sound or tremor but with silence bending sideways, the world betrayed them.
What had shimmered like still crystal from the overlook, the pristine towers, delicate spires, and moon-pale bridges locked in dreamlike sculpture, now shifted with each step like a cruel magician’s trick. Shapes wavered at the edge of vision, like moonlight rippling on disturbed waters in the still of night. Impossibly warped parabolas, bridges, delicate as spider’s silk, grew into the intricate fragility of glassine spires. Reflections in the glass didn’t match the world around them; some showed different skies, others echoed motions not yet made. All embraced in a cold silver lunar glow.
Dravis slowed his pace and blinked, a realm of the subtly familiar and yet intangible. Not enough to name and just enough to doubt. "This isn't the Elven ward we saw for the overlook. It was still. Beautiful...but static."Dravis muttered, glancing around him.
"You saw what the Elves wanted you to see, Kath'ire." Tagoth grunted, scanning the surroundings wearily.
Dravis's brow furrowed. "What do you mean?"
"The Elven… they control through the rule of perception. That is their true nature,” Tagoth said, gesturing toward the shifting city. “They fold realities here. Space, light, time, memory. The static wards, the embassies, trade halls, their outer cities… they’re masks. Fixed constructs. Interfaces meant for… lesser minds.” He glanced at Dravis. “Ours.”
"What we call architecture... It's just metaphors?" Dravis shook his head, frowning, "And yet they build it anyway."
Tagoths eyes lit up. "Ah, so you do understand Kath'ire." Shrugging, he waved his hands towards the spires ahead. "Elves love riddles, even if the riddle is reality. That's how they control, how they hold their power."
As they passed beneath an archway of thin glass ribs, Dravis paused, narrowing his eyes at a tall, fluted tower in the distance. It shimmered like silvered bone, marbled in a translucent lace. He blinked again, and it was gone, replaced by a fractal of smaller towers like a crystalline crown in its place. With each step, it shifted like an illusion, only to settle into its original form. An illusion holding onto its lie.
He let out a breath. "I swear when this is done, I will write a memoir of how I once spent the night in the fold and lived to tell with my sanity intact."
"Quoting Kvoth, Kath'ire?" Tagoth chuckled, bemused.
"A wise man's fear is the name of the wind," Dravis Smirked, playing along. "Isn't that what they say, El'Tras?"
"Truly dangerous things are beautifully subtle...Like naming magic, invoking powers beyond one's control can lead to the killing of kings and the return of things best left forgotten." Tagoth intoned, lightly. "Come Kath'ire, before you go naming things and summon those that do listen."
They began moving forward once more toward a raised square arbored in skeletal alabaster butresses like the claws of a specter converging. Even though the footing was solid as stone, even that felt unreliable. In the still waters of the roadside basins, the reflections defied the skies above, as if showing constellations alien to this realm.
"This whole place is a lie," Dravis said half to himself.
Tagoths voice came low from beside him. "Not a lie. Just a truth not meant for us."
Dravis looked around once more. "This isn't a ward." He said quietly. "It's a thought, folded in time and realities"
Tagoth nodded approvingly. "Good Kath'ire, you're beginning to understand the way of the Elven."
The square unfolded like a memory, the geometry of space shifting. One moment, tall alabaster spires of glassine shards, mirage-like and gloriously effulgent with spans like gossamer dewdrops in the moonlight. The next, a half-shattered arch of silver cracked glass. The Elven Ward breathed in and out, subtle, tectonic. Always shifting.
The center of the square revealed itself. At its center, a crystalline monolith suspended over a dias inscribed with slow-turning runes. Its surface rippled like frozen sound across the waters on an icy winter's night. Its facets bending light into unreadable sigils. Like a living thing, the Elven script coiled across the stone. Delicate loops and spirals, half-formed letters, rewriting themselves, dissolving into new shapes before their eyes could even trace them.
Dravis watched the glyphs unfold into graceful arcs, never settling, always changing into something else like the flow of music over a staff. He reached out instinctively, but the letters seemed to recoil, reshaping before his finger could reach them. Their shimmering silver-blue lines flickered like a candle's flame in a breeze.
Tagoth observed his voice low and reverent. "The Fold… its memory rewrites in an eternal dance. A symphony of time and keys, always shifting. Never still. Indifferent to our understanding."
Dravis narrowed his eyes. "The Elven script at Forest Crown has always been static. Unchanging.
But this… it moves." He looked up at Tagoth, his voice wavering, almost uncertain. "How do you read it?"
Tagoth's gaze didn't leave the flowing glyphs. After a pause, he finally responded. "You don't. They aren't meant for us. At Forest Crown, they make what they want us to see."
A pseudomotion. Dravis glanced upwards and staggered. The sky, its stars removed. A glowing wisp of crimson and teal drifted lazily overhead. "The sky! Did it just change?"
"No," Tagoth exhaled slowly, "We did," his eyes gestured toward the dias.
Something shimmered moving through the square beyond, reflections like dreams of smoke. Faint. Elegant. Elves. Not the stiff formal ones that visited the University, of the severe highborn at the embassies, like Forest Crown. Real ones, who lived in the Fold.
"Ghosts" Dravis whispered.
"No kath'ire," Tagoth replied, watching the specters silently go about their business. "Reflections."
"Of the past?" Dravis questioned.
"Does it matter?" Tagoth responded, his tone flat. "Neither welcome us."
Without warning, a blanket of black, like a wave crashing from above, fell over them. Not shadow. Not night. Just absence smothering them like wet silk. They emerged into a new Fold like divers shattering the surface of oil-black water, and this time the ward did not shift. No echo, no shimmer, no impossible geometry on the edges of their vision. Just silence. Heavy and anchored.
They stood in a plaza of obsidian and old basalt. Here, everything was solid. The Fold didn't flow. Instead, it bent around it like detouring a wound, like water rushing around a boulder in a river.
Tagoth stopped short, his expression tightened. “By the chords…” he muttered. “An anchoring node.”
Dravis looked around, frowning. “You mean the University kind? For containment studies?”
Tagoth stepped forward, half-unbelieving, and gestured around him. “Yes. But this...this is no training seal."
Dravis kneeled and pressed his hand to the stone. "An anchoring node," he whispered, almost half to himself, having never experienced one before at the university. "So the magic here...it's committed?"
Tagoth nodded. “Exactly. It obeys only the command written into it. The best of our professors could craft a training node, maybe three spans wide. A safeguard for advanced students to learn more dangerous arts in a contained environment... But this?” He shook his head, wonder and unease threading his tone.
Dravis let his hand hover over the surface. A faint hum vibrated through the air. "Why would the Elves make this?"
"They didn't," Tagoth crouched down beside him and ran his hand along the stone. "The Elves never mastered this ability; it would be blasphemy to them anyway." Tagoth stood up, his eyes fixed on the current of the fold bending around them.
'Ber'odin?" Dravis questioned.
Tagoth grunted. “Yes, Kath'ir. He didn’t just build a containment node. He made a lock inside elven magic. He arrested it. Forced the Fold to stop moving. Only Ber'odin could have produced this.”
Dravis stood up and murmured, “High Mages at the University whisper about things like this. Subverting the Fae, Unwriting Elven works. Most say it’s impossible.”
Tagoth looked up sharply. The Fold beyond trembled as if offended by their presence. "For anyone else, it is."
In the distortion outside the node, along one of the curved walls, Elven script, etched like frost on glass, shimmered. "Vael’Sirael" Dravis mouthed as he read. "Song Crime?" He looked at Tagoth questioningly.
“That’s what the elves called this. A crime against the Song. Profane and blasphemous.”
Dravis gazed past the barrier of the stillness into the Elven ward. “Then Ber'Odin wasn’t just defying them. He was rewriting their god." He paused, his brow furrowing, as realization settled in. “I suppose all humans do, then… just by existing. Our nature itself, our very way of touching magic, is an affront to their faith."
Tagoth snorted, but his tone was almost reverent. “Aye. And they’ve feared us for it ever since.”
The air itself seemed to shimmer, threads of light unraveling from the edge of the node, leading into a narrow passage that hadn’t existed moments ago.
Dravis motioned, “The Fold’s responding.”
The passage from Berodin’s node opened like a wound into light and into a vast circular chamber, depending on how you looked, faceted like a hall of mirrors. It didn’t have walls in any ordinary sense; instead, it was made of layers, translucent planes of light folding in on themselves, each surface reflecting another version of the same place, another when.
"A folded memory." Tagoth whistled. "Never shown outside the Elven high courts."
Dravis watched the layers move. “So… this is how they remember.”
“No,” Tagoth said grimly. “This is how they make sure we don’t.”
The nearest layer flickered and resolved into an image of a grand hall lined with banners of white gold. Elven figures stood in perfect poise, their speech resonant and musical. Across the table sat dwarves, stone-faced and weary, their words heavy with warning.
“Etar'Das grows unstable,” one dwarf said. “The stone hums too tightly. The humans will feel it first.”
“They lack subtlety,” an elf replied, smiling thinly. “They will not notice.”
Tagoth stiffened as the hall erupted in layered echoes, shifting violently. Elves arguing, dwarves shouting, fae voices whispering. The vision fractured into another echo, the same scene, but the elves standing alone, the dwarves gone, the fae absent.
The light fractured once more into another memory, sharper, closer. At the center of the chambers dias, slumped a highborn elf, robes torn, his poise wilted under exhaustion.
Berodin stood before him, his eyes burning with impossible calm. No weapon in hand, only the faint shimmer of magic that moved around him, distorted, like heat bending light.
The Elf looked up and spoke, “So,” the highborn rasped, “the heretic comes to gloat.” his voice venomous. “You twist the Song to your will. You tear at the harmony that binds us all.”
Berodin’s reply was soft but cut like steel.“You bound the Song to yourselves and called it harmony. You named it divine so you could own it. Caged it. I only reminded it that it was free.”
The elf flinched, as if struck.
The vision collapsed, shattering into motes of light that drifted upward like ash.
Dravis looked at Tagoth, who gave a grim half-smile, his eyes resolved into a grim understanding.
The shimmer of the Archive faded, folding in on itself like a sigh. Once more, they were standing in the ward square, translucent spires aglow in soft blue silver, as if kissed by moonlight surrounding them. For a moment, the two stood there in the quiet stillness of the ward until the Sky Pebble pulsed insistently in Dravis's pocket.
He lifted it, and the small stone quivered in his palm like a trapped bee. A thin thread of light drifted outward from his hand and wandered off beyond the node like a curious hound following a scent. It wound through the boulevard and ascended a pellucid viaduct of glass, ending before twin arched doors whose tympanum bore the reliefs of an elven myth. One Dravis could not name.
Tagoth squinted up. “That’s his trail,” he said. “Berodin passed this way.”
Dravis frowned. “Through the ward itself?”
“Aye Kath'ire, Straight through the heart of it. Into that tower.”
They crossed the suspended walkway through a forest of luminous pillars. Elven dwellings and towers. Beneath them, the ward dissolved into haze, where stars and nebulae drifted like pearlescent phosphorescent clouds. As though the footpath had risen beyond the world and into the heavens themselves.
Dravis trailed his hand along a railing that felt as smooth as melting ice under his fingertips, his other hand holding the Sky Pebble aloft, watching as the thread tightened into a line that guided them toward the spire's great doors.
Tagoth followed closely behind, his eyes wary for movement; once or twice, he was certain he saw something pass behind one of the tower windows.
“This whole place feels like it’s fighting itself,” he muttered. “Careful, Kath’ire. Mind your Seeker Dial. I’m not certain the elves ever truly left this place.”
Dravis glanced back. “What do you mean, ‘never left’?”
Tagoth’s gaze swept the upper tiers of the spires, scanning the windows. “Aye,” he said quietly. “Their presence may linger on, even without them. The shadows here may not be what they seem. Remember the Dwarven ward. There the shadows moved too.”
Dravis frowned, looking again toward the dark windows, and for an instant, swore he saw a figure watching them before a tendril-like wisp of nebular smoke wandered across the glass, curling with uncanny intent, as if the Fold itself conspired to veil the lie.
They approached the base of the great doors. Dravis and Tagoth craned their necks to look; the ornate reliefs carved along the arch of the lintel were too intricate. Too proud.
Inside, the air felt heavy. It hummed with a latent resonance. The chamber before them was vast. Tiered balconies ringed a central floor, a ghostly light lingered as if a representative of what had transpired before. And then it began.
The image coalesced into a council hall, pristine and unblemished by the ruins of the fall. Overhead, gleaming banners of the Accord hung from the ceiling. Elves, Dwarves, and Fae sat at an enormous circular table animated in debate.
Dravis leaned forward as the voices rose.
A dwarven emissary, broad-shouldered and iron-voiced, spoke first:
“Etar’Das must remain a safeguard. Nothing more. It reins the human resonance where it frays the fabric, no farther. Magic’s their birthright, same as breath.”
A fae presence shimmered beside him, its voice like bells in the wind:
“We ask only that the weave of the living world be left unscarred by their unnatural dabblings.”
The Elven High Voice inclined her head, serene and composed.
“Of course,” she said sweetly. “Etar’Das will mend the fray. Nothing more. Harmony, as we have all agreed.”
Her tone was flawless. Too flawless.
Dravis’s stomach turned. “She’s lying.”
Tagoth's face darkened. The scene shifted again, the Dwarves and Fae gone, only the Elven delegation remained. Their posture changed. Poise dissolving into disdain.
“Children playing with hammers and leaves,” one elf muttered.
"Etar'Das must do more than mend," said another.
The High Voice, the one who spoke so sweetly, smiled faintly. "The Dwarves need not know."
Dravis turned toward Tagoth, a look of concern washing over him. “Tagoth… what exactly are we looking for here, in the elven ward?”
Tagoth’s gaze lingered on the broken spires ahead. “The truth,” he said simply.
This was a difficult chapter to write. I had a clear vision in my head as to what I saw, but found it VERY difficult to put into words. A lot of jotting down mental images and then trying to place them into words and sentences. I feel this lended to a more flowery and ethereal language for this chapter. Complex concepts of Elven existence not like humans or dwarves. supernatural, truly alien to our perceptions. Not living here, or there, but in between. Hopefully I was able to communicate what is going on. I also fully intended to end the chapter, leaving you with more questions than answers, but moving closer to the truth at the same time. The elves, etar'das, the accord. What was it all about.
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All images are AI where I took excerpts from my writing and said "depict this scene!" The art rendered gets close although is not exactly what I envisioned. So if it doesnt match with what youre picturing then whatever, you imagine is correct and how the Elven ward should look!.
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This is the 4th Chapter of the series. If you wish to start from the beginning or read prior chapters. Please see the list below placed in chronological order.
