Elfhome

“I was not the first to fall. The earliest ones were caught fast by their bodies, their minds free to seek out help. They bore stories of a growing evil, covetous of our powers, which sought to take them for themselves. This evil rendered down our helpless brothers, tearing them asunder and gifting their slaves with tattered pieces of our souls.”

“Still, we did not understand our danger. We simply put this world under edict, and left it to its own fate. We felt it was not our place to act, as it was not the world we were born to. But then the evil branched out to Earth, like a growing cancer, and this time, we attempted to check its spread. We searched out bridges to Onihida, the next world in harmony with this one, and eliminated them. To our horror, we soon realized that we were too late. All we had done was seal the evil on Onihida.”

It sounded like her theory was right. “So the greater bloods are elves?”

“This evil has had many names across many worlds. We did not witness the start of their rise. We do not know where from whence they came nor what they were at the birth. They still seek what they have always sought — to become gods. They want what we have by natural right. They grow more and more powerful, stolen piece by piece.”

Sparrow had claimed that the Skin Clan had been one step below gods. She had claimed that the elves were stagnating. She had wanted to go back to the old ways, so the elves could once again “advance.”

“Long I have watched over my tengu,” Riki/Providence said. “It is my shame that I am the cause of their misery — for the evil came searching for me and caught my body and laid siege to my mind. I asked of the tengu to commit the ultimate of blasphemy, to slay their own god to free me from my captors. As punishment for that deed, they were merged with crows and yet left bound to earth.”

“But they were here first, on Elfhome, as elves?”

Providence nodded his great head. “They gave your father’s people our intelligence. They gave your mother’s people our sight. They gave the warriors at your back our morality.”

“Eons have come to a balance point on this moment, like great rocks pressing on fractures of the earth. The time is at hand for pressure to cause a shift and all the worlds be rewritten — not only this world but all the worlds in harmony with it.

That didn’t sound good. “What’s going to happen?”

Providence gazed down at her with gleaming eyes. “All is at hand for the evil to achieve their goal.”

27: On Track

Tommy was starting to think he was wrong. With Spot tucked behind him on his hoverbike, he’d followed the railroad tracks out for mind-numbing hours. Beyond the Rim, the tracks were the only sign of civilization. They cut through a virgin forest of towering ironwood trees. On either side of the iron rails were spell lights to keep down the ambient level of magic that would otherwise snare and tangle on the metal. Beyond the graveled embankments, he could pick out wards on stone posts, to keep everything from black willows to rabbits from wondering onto the tracks. Still, every few miles, there was a massive skeleton of a saurus that managed to blunder into the path of the train anyhow. For the first time, the massive axe-like nose on the Elfhome engines made sense to Tommy.

There wasn’t, however, a single sign of the oni.

Hoverbikes had amazing gas mileage since half their power came from magic. He’d filled his tank and strapped on a extra can behind Spot, but he was nearing the point where he would have to turn around, or not be able to get his hoverbike all the way back to Pittsburgh.

Spot beat on his shoulder and pointed behind them.

Tommy skid to a stop and looked back, the hoverbike rumbling loudly in the forest silence. They were running along side a shallow river, the train tracks cut into the shoulder of a hill above the flood plain.

“Here?”

Spot didn’t answer but his nose was working, trying to catch whatever elusive scent that made him stop Tommy.

Tommy turned the hoverbike around and slowly made his way back toward Pittsburgh, eyeing the landscape closely. The oni had been careful, but years of use had left small indelible marks on the landscape. He hadn’t noticed them at fifty miles per hour, but at a crawl he could pick them out. The rocky embankment was bare of vegetation all the way down to the river’s edge. On the far side of the shallow water, there was a break in the brush, too wide to be a deer trail.

Tommy pulled up against the cliff, just in case a train came through, and shutdown his hoverbike to conserve gas. The forest quiet pressed in on them.

Spot swung down off the hoverbike and pressed nose to soil.

“Is it the same group?” Tommy checked his pistol to make sure it was loaded, not that a dozen shots would help much if they were jumped by an entire platoon.

On hands and knees, Spot crisscrossed the embankment sniffing and then nodded.

“Do they still have the elf female?”

Spot nodded again.

“Is the kitsune with them?”