“How do we fix it?” I ask as Ilryth collects his composure.
“No one knows of this on the surface,” Ilryth says weakly. “We had no idea.”
“Because you no longer listened,” Krokan says with an almost thunderous growl. “When she screamed, you did not listen. When she whispered, you turned your backs.”
“It was not our intent!” Ilryth pleads for the old god to understand.
“Your kind continued to demand more, more andmore, magic and life your world sapped until there was nothing left of her!”
“How do we fix it?” I cut through the two men with my own ferocity. “It doesn’t matter any longer how we got here. Fighting over the past won’t help her. What do we do now?”
Krokan stills, his emerald gaze swinging back to me and turning more thoughtful, though still intense.
“Within three years, the Blood Moon will rise, and with it the last chance to bring Lellia back to the realms of the eternal. You must free her before this happens. For after, the Veil will thicken once more; it will be impossible for ones such as us to cross, then. We must leave during this time of thinning, no later than the night of the Blood Moon, for after we shall be trapped in this realm for another five hundred years. A length of time my beloved will not survive again.”
And with the sirens sending an offering only once every five years…there will not be any other to come to the Abyss after me, and Ilryth. We are her last chance.
“She will not survive…” I echo, paying close attention to his choice of words. “Why? What is hurting her?”
Krokan shifts, giving life to the waters around us. “She, like myself, was not made to be in this world when the time of mortals came—when the Veil closed us off to the primordial essence of the cosmos. Our brethren left long, long ago but she wished to remain, to look after the fledgling life that was here.
“I stayed with her, caring for her, watching after her and her creations as much as I have been able. I crossed the Veil and brought back power from our kind on the other side… But this could only sustain her for so long.
“The first Elf King promised that once our powers were anchored into this world, a new keeper would be appointed from among his worthy mortals to oversee the anchor of life in this world that her tree has become, so that we might leave. But there are none. There never have been. Now she is withering and dying; my lady will not survive many more decades.” His pain and anguish split through my skull, rippling. I try to hide my wince.
“Is there a way to fortify her?” Ilryth asks. He’s also struggling to speak. Our minds weren’t built for this. It is no doubt due to the protection of the anointing—and perhaps Krokan’s will—that our consciousness has not shattered.
The tentacles close further around us, agitated and angry. “Do you presume to think that you might find a solution for a divine problem that I could not, mortals? That you hold the might of the first Elf King, a young mortal, he who treated with gods?”
The pressure is suddenly overwhelming. I swallow physically, trying to catch my breath, to expand my chest so that I can generate enough space to think logically once more without moving. It’s as though the old god has me in a chokehold without touching me. Krokan must sense it, because he eases away.
“I know,” he says softly, almost apologetically for his temperament. Ilryth breathes a sigh of relief as well. “There is no other way, no other path to saving her. She must be freed from the Lifetree or she will die and take this world with her. Life needs her power to exist. But if she stays here any longer, with the life she made, it will be the end of her.”
No matter what, the world will lose the goddess of life.
“Let us return. Grant us safe passage, and we will see her freed.” Taking a step forward, I reach out my hands, pleading with him to understand the ways of mortals. How can I make a god comprehend how short our lives are? How brief it all is and how little we know as a result? Truth among mortals falls as effortlessly as grains of sand through the hourglass of time, lost among the ages. “As my love said, they don’t know any of this above the Abyss. But we can be the messengers if you will bless our minds and bodies with your protections and grant us safe leave.”
Krokan stills, as if considering it. “I have tried to reason with every one of their ilk,” Krokan says with disdain. “The holy men, as they call themselves. To them I have tried to convey what must be done.”
I was right. Duke Renfal was communing with the old god for longer than he let on. But there was more to it…
“Duke Renfal was trying to kill the tree,” I whisper.
Krokan lets out a hum that sounds like ayes.
“What?” Ilryth gasps.
I face him, briefly, to explain. “He knew there was no way the sirens would abide cutting down the tree to outright free Lellia. So he began weakening it as he was able while Lord Krokan tried to free her as well with the rot. Because of what we knew as ‘Lord Krokan’s rage,’ Renfal had an excuse to weaken the tree enough that maybe she could break free.”
Ilryth considers this and turns back to Krokan. “If we free Lady Lellia, what will happen then?”
“I will take her into my embrace—as is the natural order of life and death—and then, together, we will depart this world,” Krokan says with little emotion. As if he is not somehow damning us.
“You said life needs her to exist. If she’s removed, what happens to life here?”
“Life is a cycle. Death is an inevitability. We do not concern ourselves with such things.”
“But we mortals do,” I blurt out. “We want to live, to thrive. To have an opportunity to build the best life we can afford ourselves. You know she wants that, too. It was why she didn’t free herself from her cage. Even when weakened and rotting, even when she knew what path she was setting herself upon…she wants to see us tended to.”
