Yet I was about to get a lesson in the magical equivalent of quantum field theory.
The scientifically-minded people of the world figured out a long time ago that every “complete” system was actually a node manifested out of the finer grains of another larger, more complex system. Such was how the universe made itself.
Magic was no different.
The elves were part of the universe. They were an important part, a strong part that had coalesced as a self-sustaining magical ecosystem. The elves who had been born of the Nordic pantheon had found a way to become fertile. They birthed babies like their mundanes, but they also wielded the magic of their gods.
There weren’t many truly self-sustaining magical groups. The elves. The kami. The fae. Most of the others were spirits that manifested. They weren’t born. They could sometimes make babies like Akeyla, but they were much more dependent on their mundanes rubbing against the natural world than the elves were.
There were other elf-like magicals out there. Small groups in the Middle East, Africa, India, and in pockets of Oceania. A few still walked the world in South America. Arne once told me the loa were the only group who protected their witches. Rose may have been loa-born, as had the woman I’d faced in my suicide-by-witch attempt in Louisiana.
The power of magic arose from the rubbing of humanity against nature. That rip, that spark, made eddies. And sometimes those eddies, if strong enough, tighten into life magic. Or if those forces happen on the other side of the dominion veil, death magic.
Vampires. Demons. Gods of the dead.
This I knew. This much was as obvious as gravity.
But I’d met other magicals.
The fire heated the air inside the cottage. Outside, wind howled and ice pellets bounced against the window. The ice added a high-pitched tinkling to the log’s lower crackle in a strange, semi-rhythmic cadence. The world breathed as if startled, in quick icy inhalations and lower, halting pops of warmth.
Ellie, though, breathed slow and steady in her sleep. I did, as well. I dreamed lucidly of this place, and its library—there was a library here, somehow out of sight in a space that was half the size of my own cabin. It was here, real, yet unavailable and unseen until the cottage said so.
I had to learn, first. I had to understand.
The cottage’s magic wafted in the fire’s updrafts as a thick sturdy column of earthy browns. Blues and greens wavered like the rustling leaves of a tree.
A tree I knew.
The world had other spirits.
Raven was more than the sum of her corvid mythologies. The World Wolf was more than the sum of its weres and its wolves. There were others. A cat. A raptor. A snake and a stag. World spirits of sea, air, and land.
Whoever built Ellie’s cottage had called on more than fae magic. She’d pulled on the shadows of the dark forests and beasts that shelter under those limbs. Yet Ellie shimmered like the sun herself.
Why? In my dream state, I did not know. But the cottage did, and she touched the tattoo of Yggdrasil that coiled along the side of my head.
The parts that still burned from St. Martin’s magic healed. That pain, at least, left my body. The World Tree gave me this boon.
And I think, in the dream, I understood. It wouldn’t matter in the morning. That “understanding” would vanish under a layer of articulation that did not connect the correct words to the concepts I’d just learned.
But it would be there, deep in my sturdy bones and my strong tall limbs. And the World Tree was satisfied.
Marcus Aurelius had always been a polite hound. He never barked to wake me in the mornings. He didn’t claw or jump on the bed. My dog laid his head on the mattress next to my pillow, his big puppy snout as close to my face as he could get it, and let out a small, concerned whine.
I always wondered if he thought I was truly dead.
This morning, instead of the whine, he licked my nose. I went from the darkness right at the boundary between the dream world and waking, to a sudden awareness that my dog had needs.
I wasn’t in my bed. I wasn’t in my house. There’d been an elf and I’d trekked…
I rolled over.
Ellie slept on the other side of the mattress under a mountain of blue and green blankets. Only a little of her skin was visible inside her cocoon of warmth, mostly her cheek, and strands of her auburn hair pooled just under the bone. She sighed, and her eyes twitched. She was sound asleep.
I was in Ellie’s bed, in her cottage somewhere in the woods near my lake. In her fae-magicked home. The same place that last night had hit me with fae drunkenness. And a primal, magical dream.
I was supposed to understand something I didn’t remember. But of course I wouldn’t remember. Fae magic was all about the gut and the limbic system.
Ellie smacked her lips and sighed again.
I was close enough I could thread my hand under that mound of blankets and set it on the roundness of her hip. I could move close and stroke those strands off her cheek and whisper “Good morning.” But I was cold.
Ice cold, to the point that I was well aware of my own chill. I’d been out in the snow before I came here and hadn’t had time to warm in front of the fire before the cottage knocked me out for its late-night magical light show.
Ellie didn’t need to be touched by an iceberg.
I gently rolled toward my dog. He sniffed at my face, then lifted his head as if to look over my shoulder
