For a heartbeat, nobody moved.

  The fire snapped and hissed. Horses shifted on their picket lines, leather creaking. The night leaned in around them, full of insect noise and the far hiss of wind through grass.

  Seven men stared at the ethereal, ghostlike woman whose height defied all they knew. She stood just outside the ring of firelight, bare feet in the grass, pale hair hanging in loose waves. Her green eyes shone, reflecting the flames.

  Every muscle in the boy’s body went tight.

  His hand moved before he thought about it.

  The Colt was in his grip in an instant, his body moving before his mind could make a decision for him. Thumb on the hammer, he brought it up in a smooth, hard motion. The iron sights cut a little notch of black against her face. Centered between her eyes.

  Around him, the others came up like parts of the same machine.

  Tsen’s bow creaked as he drew, arrowhead fixed on her chest. Doyat already had his string half?back; now it came to his ear. Nantan swung his rifle up from where it had rested across his knees, cheek settling to the stock. Kanii’s bow followed. Tavo’s lance came up from where it had leaned against his thigh, point at a rough line with her throat. Rojas scrambled to his feet, dragging his carbine with him, the steel of the barrel glinting.

  The fire painted them all in red and gold. Shadows jumped on their faces, on the feathers in their hair, on the brass buttons of Rojas’ coat.

  The elf looked between the weapons with a small frown.

  She did not raise her hands. She did not flinch. She regarded the dark mouths of the rifles, the pulled bowstrings, the Colt’s little round hole, like she didn’t know what they were–with curiosity, rather than fear.

  “Easy,” the boy said, though his voice came out tighter than he liked. “Don’t take another step.”

  Her gaze came back to him.

  Up close, her eyes were wrong in a way he didn’t have words for. Too bright, catching every fleck of light. The paleness in them was the powdery white hue of the moon on a black night, not anything he’d seen in a human face.

  “You are afraid,” she said. “That is… reasonable.”

  Her accent flattened some words, stretched others. “I assure you, I mean you no harm. I only—”

  She stepped forward.

  The boy pulled the trigger.

  He didn’t aim for her head. Not quite.

  The Colt boomed. The night jumped.

  Fire spat from the muzzle, bright and brief. The ball hit the packed earth a hand’s breadth in front of her toes. Dirt spat up in a little fountain. The sound cracked off the empty land, rolled away across the grass.

  The elf shrieked, a raw, startled sound that ripped out of her and cut off as she stumbled back, cloak flaring. She clutched at it with both hands like it were all that kept her from falling. Her bare toes dug into the dirt where the bullet had struck.

  Smoke drifted past the boy’s face. The smell of burned powder wrapped around his head, sharp and metallic. His ears rang in the small quiet that followed.

  The others had flinched too. Tsen’s arrowhead dipped, then came back up. Tavo swore under his breath in Comanche. Rojas muttered something in Spanish and got the butt of his rifle firmer to his shoulder.

  The elf stared at the little crater in the ground.

  Slowly, she raised her head to look at the Colt.

  “What,” she said, very carefully, “was that?”

  The boy kept the sights on her eye.

  “Bullet,” he said. “Goes where I point it. Fast. Next one goes through your skull if you take another step without sayin’ real clear why you’re here.”

  A shimmer of something crossed her face—not just fear. Calculation. Curiosity. Her gaze flicked from the pistol to Rojas’ rifle, to Tsen’s bow, then back.

  “This small… thing,” she said, nodding at the Colt, “made that noise. Threw that… metal?”

  “Led,” Rojas muttered. “Lead.”

  Her eyes snapped to him.

  “Lead,” she repeated. “You… you carry thunder in your hands.”

  He saw it hit her then, a sharp realization in her widening eyes, something between fear and respect. She drew in a long, slow breath.

  “I have never seen such a weapon,” she said softly. “Not in any of the Courts. Not even in the oldest ruins.”

  Her hand twitched, as if she wanted to reach toward the Colt and had to stop herself.

  Around the fire, the bows stayed drawn. The rifle barrels stayed fixed.

  “On your knees,” Tavo said suddenly. His voice was flat. It carried a kind of authority that came from long rides and hard decisions. “Hands where we can see. Or badger boy here will put bullet through your brain and scatter your skull all over the plains.”

  The elf’s mouth tugged at that—just a fraction. She must have understood enough of what the guns were capable of.

  She looked at the ring of weapons one more time.

  Then, with a slow, controlled motion, she bent her knees and sank to the ground.

  Her cloak flared and settled around her. The grass stirred. She set her hands out from her sides, fingers splayed on the dirt, palms empty.

  “There,” she said. “Is this better?”

  Her chin lifted a notch. “I swear, by my name and by the Lineage of Athranuil, that I mean you no harm. I have come to talk. Not to fight.”

  “Words mean little,” Nantan grunted. The rifle didn’t move from his shoulder. “You bleed same color as any demon?”

  She hesitated.

  “Yes?” she said, not quite understanding the question. The boy inwardly admitted that he didn’t quite get it either. “Red?”

  “Look,” he said. “She’s down. She’s not… shapeshiftin’ into a snake. Maybe we hear her out before we scatter her brains across the prairie.”

  The boy did not take his eyes off the elf.

  “She’s some kind of monster,” he said. “The System put a word in my head when she walked up. [High Elf]. That ain’t any kind of person I’ve heard of. You wanna invite that to supper?”

  “I heard it too,” Rojas said quietly. He tapped his temple. “She’s… people. Some kind. Not like greenskins. Not like those dead things. We shoot first, we don’t get to ask which side she’s on.”

  Tsen said something in Kiowa, low and fast. His eyes never left the elf. Doyat replied with one word. Both men kept their bows at full draw.

  Narua wasn’t here to translate, but the boy caught enough from tone and gesture. Tsen didn’t like having a creature out of the System in their firelight any better than he did. Doyat claimed nothing good walked into a camp without invitation.

  Tavo clicked his tongue.

  “Peta says System put many new things in this world,” he said, eyes on the elf. “Some eat you. Others kill you and then eat you. This one has not tried to eat us yet. That is already more polite than green demons.”

  Kanii, who had watched it all with his usual flint?quiet, nodded once.

  The boy’s finger tightened a hair on the trigger.

  Hargrove’s last words stirred like embers. Put that gun wherever it hurts ’em most.

  He wasn’t sure yet if this one needed hurting.

  He let out a breath through his nose.

  “Any tricks,” he told the elf, “any fancy gestures, any damn thing, and I blow your head off. You believe that now you’ve seen what this can do.”

  Her throat bobbed.

  “Yes,” she said. “I believe.”

  Slowly—slow enough that every man there could have shot her three times before she was halfway up—he eased the hammer of the Colt down with his thumb until it rested in the notch. The pistol came off full cock. He lowered the muzzle. Not all the way—just until it pointed at the ground in front of her instead of her face.

  The shift was small. It changed the shape of the night.

  Tsen let his bowstring slacken, though he kept the arrow nocked. Doyat followed a heartbeat later. Nantan lowered his rifle, resting the butt on his boot. Kanii’s bow came down. Tavo tilted his lance away from her throat. Rojas sighed and eased his carbine’s hammer back to half?cock.

  The elf watched it all with bright, measuring eyes.

  “Sit,” Tsen said abruptly, jerking his chin toward the fire. “If we talk, we talk where I can see your hands.”

  She looked at the bare patch of ground he indicated, the rough circle of men, the little flames licking at blackened wood.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  “I have not sat with humans around a fire in…” she began, stopped herself. “In a very long time.”

  She rose carefully from her knees, making a point of keeping her hands out where they could see them, fingers spread. Her cloak rustled. The strange leaf?cloak seemed to shiver, as if the leaves on it were alive and real.

  She stepped into the ring of firelight and lowered herself to the dirt between Tavo and Rojas, across from the boy. The flames threw gold across her face, picked out the tiny metal leaves hanging from her ears, the fine embroidery on her clothes—vines and berries and little spirals.

  Up close, she looked… tired.

  There were faint smudges under her eyes. Strands of her hair had escaped the braids, sticking to her cheeks. A thread had come loose at one cuff.

  It made her seem more like a person and less like the knife?sharp thing that had stepped out of the dark.

  Still, the boy did not holster the Colt. He sat where he’d been, knees crossed, pistol loose across his thigh, hand never far from the grip.

  “Talk, then,” he said. “You said your name. Imrahil. You said you’re a… princess?”

  Her mouth twitched again.

  “Yes,” she said. “Second daughter of High King Thalanil, of the House of Thornlight, in the Kingdom of Athranuil.”

  She said it like it was something that should have meant as much to them as “President” or “Queen” might to others. The boy was vaguely aware that there was a president of the United States, but he didn’t know more than that. When their faces stayed blank, she let out a breath.

  “In my world,” she added.

  Rojas raised his brows.

  “In your… what now?” he asked.

  “World,” she repeated. She saw from their expressions that the word was not landing quite the way she meant. She turned a hand in the air, searching.

  “Realm,” she tried. “Sphere. Land under the same sky. There are many.”

  She tipped her head back, looking at the stars. “So many you cannot count them. Each its own place. Each with its own peoples. Its own rules. Its own System.”

  The boy watched her.

  “There’s only one world,” Rojas said flatly. “Sky, ground, water. Some folks say there’s other lands beyond the sea. Mexico. France. China. That sort of thing. But that’s all one place.”

  She smiled then, a little sadly.

  “My grandmother said something similar, once,” she said. “When she was a girl, she had never seen beyond the forest of Athranuil. She thought the whole of existence was trees and rivers and our white towers. Then traders came from the sea with shells she had never seen and spices that made her eyes water. Her world grew that day.”

  She traced something on her palm, an absent?minded motion, as if she were drawing sigils only she could see.

  “You would say,” she went on, “that the stars you see above you are… lanterns? Holes? Fires?”

  “The Great Spirit’s candles,” Kanii said quietly. “Put up so we remember He is there.”

  She inclined her head, accepting that.

  “In my sky,” she said, “our wise men say each star is another sun very far away, with its own lands and seas spinning around it. Not all of those suns have lands. Some are empty. Some are home to things that never… grew minds. Some are like yours, full of men and women and… other things like me.”

  She touched her chest.

  She looked back down from the stars.

  “You might call each such place a world,” she said.

  The boy chewed that.

  “What’s that got to do with you strollin’ into our fire?” he asked.

  Her expression tightened.

  “Everything,” she said. “Because my world is dying. And we tried to leave it.”

  She folded her hands in her lap then, fingers lacing together, as if keeping them still would keep her story from shaking.

  “In Athranuil,” she said, “and in the other Elven Kingdoms, the System has been with us for as long as our stories reach. Thousands upon thousands of your years. We are… old. Not just in flesh. In Levels. In power–or, at least, we used to be.”

  A faint thread of pride crept into her voice and then faded. “We built cities that climbed the sides of mountains. Bridges that hung from nothing. We made pacts with dragons and drove back things that crawled up from the Deep Woods and tried to eat the sun itself.”

  Tavo’s mouth twitched skeptically at that, but he said nothing.

  “We grew strong,” she went on. “And the System rewarded us. Levels. Classes. Titles. For every demon we slew, for every beast we bent to our will, for every spell we spun that made the world less wild, it poured more numbers into us.”

  She looked at the boy.

  “Do you know what happens,” she asked softly, “when you feed a fire for too long?”

  He thought of the howitzer’s barrel, glowing faint red in the dark. Of the way Hargrove had ordered the crew to stop firing or risk bursting it.

  “Burns out,” he said. “Takes the stove with it, if you ain’t careful.”

  She nodded.

  “Our world burned out,” she said. “We chased the beasts to their lairs. We sealed away the old gods. We cut down the forests that grew teeth. There was nothing left that could touch us, only each other. And some of my people decided that if there were no monsters left, they would make some from among their kin. They began to create twisted things. Small things at first, here and there–new life forms to fight in our coliseums, new monsters to hunt for sport. Others began creating more deviant things, hoping to manufacture crises for the sake of excitement and entertainment. They flew too close to the sun. Plagues… strange illnesses that did not touch the highborn much but swept through the low, through the humans…”

  She stopped.

  The fire hissed. Somewhere below the rise, a night bird called, single and plaintive.

  “You had humans,” Rojas said slowly. “Like us?”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “Just like you. Only… less.”

  She swallowed.

  “Long ago, before my grandfather’s time, humans were many,” she said. “They built cities along the coasts and at the edges of our forests. They traded with us and with the Dwarrow under the mountains. They fought us, too, sometimes, when kings grew foolish.”

  A ghost of a smile. “They were… messy. Mortal. Loud. But they were beautiful in their own way.”

  Her hands tightened involuntarily.

  “Then one of the plagues came,” she said. “A wasting sickness. It passed over those with strong [Vitality], those with certain traits. It fell on human villages like a shadow. Within three cycles, they were almost gone. A few clung on in back valleys or in our service, but…”

  She shook her head. “We could not bring them back.”

  The boy felt something cold settle in his gut at that. Mary’s words came back with nasty clarity.

  You’re all we got now.

  Was this… creature even telling the truth? Why was it telling them all this? What did it want? What did she want? Something didn’t seem quite right. Her story was too fantastical, but then… so was everything that’s been happening the last few days.

  “So your folk killed all humans in your world,” he said. “And when you went lookin’ for somewhere else to be, you figured no one like us would be there.”

  “Yes,” she said bluntly. “We were wrong.”

  “How’d you even go lookin’?” Tsen asked. “You ride that sky horse?”

  He jerked his chin at the stars.

  “No,” she said. “We asked the System.”

  “Our wise seers and arcanists gathered alongside our most powerful sorcerers and mages,” she said. “We had grown tired of watching our forests die and our cities empty. The soil itself had begun to sour in places, where too many battles had spilled blood, where too much magic had burned. We could feel the world… thin under our feet. Even after the Week of Nightmares, when all those who brought depravity and malice and ruin were executed for their crimes, it was too late to heal our world. So the kings and queens of the Elven Kingdoms called a council. They brought out the oldest relics, the first books, the shards of the stones we had carved our earliest Runes into. They began a great working.”

  She spread her hands, as if laying something wide over the ground.

  “They made a bargain with the System through a ritual,” she said. “We would surrender our Levels. Our Classes. Our accumulated… Weight. All the power it had ever poured into us, we would give back. In return, it would open a path to a new world. One that was not yet… full. Where the Rules were not worn thin. Where we could begin again, weaker, perhaps, but alive–be bright, eager children once more.”

  “And it agreed?” Nantan asked skeptically. “This… voice we all hear now said ‘yes, of course’?”

  “It never says such things that plainly,” she said. “It spoke in its usual riddling way. But it set a [Quest]. It showed us a progress bar. It gave us signs. Our arcanists watched the flows. They were certain.”

  She let out a low breath.

  “They lit the ritual fires,” she said. “The towers of Athranuil burned with green flame for seven nights. The seas rose. The very stars in our sky shifted. We felt ourselves… uncouple. The System’s weight drew away from the land like the tide going out.”

  Her fingers curled.

  “And then,” she said, “something went wrong.”

  The fire popped. A spark jumped, winked out in the dirt between them.

  “We had expected to… step,” she said. “To find ourselves standing in a new land, under a new sky, weakened in some ways but free in others. Instead, it reached for another world. This one.”

  Her eyes went briefly distant, as if seeing something else. “It took your… lines of fate, your little threads, and began to twist them with ours. A… merging.”

  “Merging how?” Kanii asked. He said the last word carefully, like it was a stone in his mouth.

  “At first,” she said, “only the System itself bridged the void. Your people heard the Voice. You saw numbers where you had not before. You felt strength fill you, as we have always felt. The monsters came afterwards, crossing the bridge into your world. They are creatures of my side of the loom, pushed through the thinning cloth into yours.”

  “It’s goin’ to get worse, isn’t it?” he said quietly.

  “Yes,” she said. “As more of you Level, as more of you take Classes, as more of you complete the little tasks the System dangles, the two worlds come closer. At first it is only the beasts and the dead things that slip. Then the land begins to bleed through. Forests overlay forests. The sky itself may change. In the end, there will not be two worlds. There will be one new one, stitched together from both–your world and mine. In a few years, you will not recognize the land around you.”

  There was a silence after that that seemed to go on longer than it did.

  The boy could almost hear the grass outside their circle growing, the tiny creak of it in the cool night.

  “You did this,” Tavo said finally. His tone was flat again. “Your people.”

  “Yes,” she said. “We did.”

  “You talk as if the System has a will of its own–as if it’s a person… or a god.” The boy said.

  “It is not a god,” she said sharply.

  “We have those. Had those,” she corrected herself. “Old powers that woke and slept, that rose from rivers and forests. The System is not like any of them.”

  She lifted one hand, palm up.

  “The System is like…” She groped for a word. “A weather. A… law. It is there in every moment my people have walked. The numbers may be different. The Classes. The Quests. The little Achievements it likes to hand out like candies to clever children. But it is always there. We do not remember a time without it. Even our oldest tales, carved into stone before we learned to write on bark, speak of [Strength] and [Magic]. The System was there, perhaps, in the shaping of our very world.”

  The boy frowned.

  “If it ain’t a god,” he said, “what is it?”

  She looked at him.

  For the first time since she had walked out of the dark, some of her composure cracked. Not all the way. Just enough that he saw a tired, frightened girl underneath the pale eyes.

  “I do not know,” she said.

  The honesty in that hit him harder than any lie would have.

  “Our wisest have argued for ages,” she went on. “Some say it is the mind of the universe, grown out of the sum of all living things. Some say it is a parasite that crawls from world to world, feeding. Some say it is simply… there. The way mountains are there. The way the sea is there. A thing too big to think about for long without going mad.”

  “How do you know it has a will, then?” Nantan asked quietly. “You say it wanted you to fight beasts. Now you say it wants… somethin’ else.”

  Her lips pressed together.

  “Because it sets things in motion that have no reason to be except that they make… better stories.”

  “You’re tellin’ me,” he said slowly, “that everything that’s happened is some kind of… game. For a thing that ain’t even got a face.”

  She drew in a breath, let it out.

  “The System is many things,” she said. “But above all else?”

  She looked back at the fire. Its light danced in her eyes, turning the green to molten gold.

  “Above all else,” she said quietly, “it desires to be entertained.”

  The boy’s eyes narrowed. Something didn’t feel quite right about all of this. His instincts were screaming, shouting at him that this entity was not to be trusted. He didn’t know if her words were true or not, but–

  Something stirred in the dark. The Elf grinned and began laughing. “Ah, took them long enough. I was running out of things to say.”

  The boy raised the Colt as arrows began raining around them.