The butterfly carried them right into one of the rays and immediately Telgra felt the sun warm her skin. The brightness of the Giver’s light forced her to look anywhere but up. They fluttered ever upward in tight circles that kept them in the warm, pleasant ray. Soon Telgra saw the tops of the trees below her. Great slab-like leaves flickered on the breeze, each a different shade of green. It all shimmered as she was carried even higher. Below, the mosaic of the leaves seemed to blend into a rolling sea of emerald and teal. A gust of wind buffeted them sideways. Telgra looked up to see that the forest they had just left was surrounded by the white lace of a crashing shoreline. The butterfly, which no longer seemed as big as a horse, fought the wind and turned them into it.
The delicate insect carried them beyond the land. For a very long time only the glistening cobalt expanse of ocean spread out below them. Eventually a mass of land appeared to the south, an island. How big it was she couldn’t guess, for she had no true sense of how big or small she herself really was.
As they flew above she saw a dark thing take flight from a clearing in the black forest that covered most of this other island. From somewhere farther away she heard a howling scream. It was followed by the sound of sobbing. Over the menacing island, in a clearing, she saw a circular hole in the earth. Around it, men in robes of bright crimson danced and chanted. As the gusts carried her butterfly haphazardly over the hole she felt a powerful sense of fear. A horrible, rotten smell filled her nostrils and made her stomach roil. She chanced a look down into the depths and froze in terror. A great toothy maw came shooting upward. Behind yellowed teeth, demon-red eyes glowed so brightly that they seemed to outshine the sun. The butterfly tried to turn away, to evade the closing teeth of the fiend coming for them, but it couldn’t move fast enough.
Telgra cried out in fear as the fetid mouth of the monster closed down over her. Just as it would have swallowed her, a flash of magical blue light flared and the monster roared out in pain. Telgra looked around to see a man in silver chainmail riding a winged horse made of flame. The man’s sword was glowing bright blue. His wavy golden hair fluttered behind him as he swooped back in to attack the beast a second time.
The butterfly was knocked through the air by a scaly limb. Telgra screamed as she began tumbling down toward the open hole. Faster and faster she fell, until the world and all its colors were soaring past in a great blur.
Suddenly, she felt a cold hand patting her gently on her cheek. Her eyes fluttered open and she expected to find herself lying at the edge of the copse of fiery trees, but that’s not where she was. A statue of a boy was… was… was doing what? A statue of a boy was patting her face and looking down at her with an expression of deep concern.
“Are you all right, m’lady?” the statue asked.
The deep, grumbly voice of someone low to the ground barked out irritably, “That girl is an elf! She’s a fargin elf maiden!”
“Lady,” the statue said, with a smile forming on its ever stony face. “Let’s get you up now.”
Telgra’s world spun again. She felt herself falling backward through something. Maybe trees?
“Come, m’lady,” a soft, nervous voice spoke.
She fluttered her eyes open again and tensed as the sensation of weightlessness came over her. “Where?” She mumbled the question feebly.
Telgra relaxed when she saw that one of the monks of Salaya had her in his soft, chubby arms. The morning sun was bright, but he was purposely keeping the shadow of his round head in a position to shade her eyes. His smile grew as he felt her fear slide away.
“You fell asleep in the grove, lady,” the man carried on. “Your father would turn us all into frogs if we hadn’t found you. Oh how the town would talk about that.”
“I was dreaming,” she said, returning his smile. “The dream was so, so real.”
“The trees do that to you, even when they aren’t in bloom.” The monk’s voice grew serious. “I hope they were good dreams.”
The look in his eyes piqued Telgra’s curiosity. The memory of the fear she’d felt when she looked down into that horrible-smelling pit came to her for an instant.
“What if they were bad dreams?” she asked.
“The dream of the fairy trees helps us to have visions of the future, or glimpses of the present elsewhere.” The monk stopped and let Telgra down to her feet. After he looked at her a moment he paled visibly.
“Are the dreams always prophetic?” she asked. “Do they always come to pass?”
“I’m afraid so,” the monk replied.
“Then something must be done about the island to the south of here. If it wasn’t a vision of the future I saw, then we might already be too late.”
Chapter 2
Word that the human’s great war had finally come to an end made its way to Salaya by trade ship. The news came the same morning that Telgra had her dream in the grove. This information, the monks explained to the elven delegation, came to the island in the form of sealed scrolls from the High King of men; it wasn’t gossip.
The slave master king of Dakahn had been bested, and the tale of the deed was so fantastic that it overshadowed Telgra’s dark vision. For days her insistent warnings were dismissed as foolish attempts to draw attention to herself. Other tales of wizards and kings battling the slaver, and of the dragon queen and her acid- spewing wyrm, were told and retold over her. She pleaded with her father to at least look into the matter, but the stories of how the great red dragon that used to guard the seal to the underworld had come to aid High King Mikahl and his wizard were more intriguing. The huge, winged worm had torn down the walls to King Ra’Gren’s castle and cleared a road for the High King’s armies to march in. Tens of thousands of slaves had been freed. The dwarves had come back to the surface from their underground cities to aid in the battle, too. Telgra’s premonitions weren’t taken seriously at all.
Her only ally in the matter was the monk who had found her after she’d dreamt. His name was Dostin. Dostin was what the other monks referred to as simpleminded. He was slow, and not always clear with the meanings of his words. He was clumsy and easily pleased or distracted. His pleas to the superiors of his order were taken even less seriously than Telgra’s.
Another ship arrived bearing news that the High King was marrying the Princess of Seaward, and that the dwarves had pledged to build a new palace in the new seat of the unified realm of men, a city called Oktin.
After enough badgering, Telgra’s father finally conferred with the monks about his daughter’s dream. They explained to the elves that dreams in the fairy grove are truly prophetic. Telgra hadn’t fallen asleep in the grove. She had been found by the simpleton lying at the edge of the tiny copse. They didn’t doubt that she dreamed what she said she did. The dreams of prophecy only visited those who slept in the heart of the grove, and even then the revealing visions only found their way into the sleep of but a small handful.
A full turn of the moon after the ordeal, Telgra was standing near the copse where she’d fallen asleep. She was enjoying the cool, salty air as it swept across her skin. The sun had just recently set and the sky was a brilliant sheet of pastel blue that exploded into a reddish copper band before it disappeared beyond the sea. Stories of the High King’s fantastic wedding had made it to the island, too. Telgra found herself envious of young Princess Rosa. The High King had been the one who’d ridden the flaming Pegasus in her dream. Unfounded tales of a hole in the earth similar to the one she saw were being told. Only this hole had been in some Westland castle’s bailey yard. Great winged demons had supposedly escaped the hells there. She tried not to think about the dark things. She envisioned herself in a fancy flowing dress of silk and lace standing before an elven hero. Only her hero had no face because a true elven hero hadn’t lived for ages. There was Vaegon Willowbrow, the elf who’d helped the High King and the fabled wizard Hyden Hawk. But Vaegon had been killed. His younger brother Dieter was cute, though, she mused. And the Willowbrow family were well-respected hunters.
Her pleasant thoughts were suddenly rocked away when the foul smell hit her full in the face again. She fought back a reflex to gag, and with a determination that only an elven woman can muster, she went to find her father. The smell, this time, wasn’t faint. It was thick and horrible. She was worried, but wanted to show the others that she hadn’t been just a silly girl wanting attention, too.
She found her father studying specimens at a well-lit table full of fiery tree deadfall. His yellow eyes, when they met hers, seemed distant, sad. He smiled and the look passed from his amber gaze until he saw her
