Chapter 17, decoded

Another dwarf head poked around the corner from the street, and Elise knew she needed to move. Since her stealth had already been blown, she saw no reason to remain landbound anymore, and summoned her wings and flew upward. The dwarf in the window grabbed at her as she ascended, but she was already out of his reach.

She floated in the air for a moment, trying to figure out what was happening. The alarm wasn’t for her, was it? The timeline didn’t make sense if it was. The guards or Greta would have had to notice her escape almost immediately, and then gone all the way back to the castle, notified other guards who would notify the king, who would then sound the alarm bells. Except the king wouldn’t sound the bells if she disappeared, and only he had the power to sound the bells when there wasn’t an emergency, which her disappearance certainly wasn’t.

That meant that there must be an actual emergency happening somewhere else, and she just had unfortunate timing. She flew up a bit higher, and her suspicions were confirmed. There were armored dwarves marching in formation down multiple streets toward the far side of the cavern, and a few more lining up in front of all the main exits. 

Elise had no idea what could possibly have happened, but it had utterly ruined her escape attempt. Getting out the main exit toward the lake had already been a daunting task, but with the added security, it was now impossible. And if she kept trying, the small crowd of angry dwarves below her would only grow, and she might end up causing just as big of a commotion on this side of the city, which would be no good. 

She flew down behind some houses, out of sight of the small mob and then made her way back to Greta’s house. If they hadn’t noticed her disappearance yet, they certainly would soon. They had probably burst in when the alarm sounded, only to find Greta asleep and Elise nowhere to be found. She needed to get back quickly before she caused a panic.

She was almost too late. When she made it back to the old woman’s house, the guards were huddled outside it, and the youngest of the bunch, Baldur, was standing on the edge with his toes pointed outward, as if he was about to take off running. 

“Wait!” she called. “I’m here.”

The dwarves looked up at her, first in awe, then in anger.

“Where the hell were you?” said the leader, Jonas. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” said Elise. “I just went out for a walk, and then suddenly the alarms went off.”

“How did you get out without us noticing?”

“That’s not important right now. We need to get back to the castle.”

“No, tell us how-!” started Jonas.

“She’s right,” said the second in command, a woman named Sandra. “It’s more important to get back to the castle right now. We can worry about the details later.”

“Fine. Let’s go.”

They did not bother with the usual detour, instead running straight for the front gate, which was already flung wide open as soldiers and messengers filed in and out. A servant rushed to give word to the king when they returned, and a few minutes later, they returned with a message from the king telling Elise to come to the Council chambers. 

Elise had only been in that room a few times, during the early days of her stay when the discussions about her were most heated. Her memories there were not fond, as she had been cursed at and had things thrown at her multiple times during her brief visits. 

The room was small compared to the throne room or the banquet hall, but it was much bigger than her own bedroom. The majority of the room was taken up by a large circular table with a magical map in the center. Currently, it was showing a map of the entire city with a lot of glowing blue dots representing what she assumed to be allies, and a few red dots in the middle of them all. 

Only about half the Council was present. Most of the members were old, and did not live in the castle, so getting there in the midst of a crisis was not always a quick process. Hallbjorn was there though, sitting at the back side of the table, staring down at the map. 

“Elise!” he said. “Did anything happen in your area?”

“No. What’s going on?”

“What’s that thing doing here?” said another voice.

The speaker was Josef, a [Council Elder, lvl  ???] and the leader of one of the two anti-Elise factions. He was short, even by dwarf standards, and almost as wide as he was tall, with a long gray beard that he was proud to say scraped the floor when bent his head down. He was dressed in a set of purple robes that looked more like nightwear than outerwear, probably because it was. Josef was known for sleeping in, so he had probably gotten out of bed and immediately headed straight for the castle.

“Not now, Josef,” said Hallbjorn. 

“Your Majesty, this is the Council chambers! We can be having vermin-”

“I said not now, Josef,” said the king in a commanding tone. “We can discuss this later. We have more important things to worry about.

“To answer your question,” he continued, turning to Elise. “Ghouls. We caught a few snooping around the edges of the city, and there are a few more that are trying to escape. We have no idea how they got in. It should be resolved shortly though. Thankfully, it was just a scouting party. Nothing especially dangerous. A few of my men are in the infirmary, but the poison is a known one. They should make full recoveries.”

“That’s good.”

“Indeed. However, this was the easy part. I’m sure the investigation will take at least another week before we get answers. Or at least it would, ordinarily. That’s where we were hoping you could help.”

“Me? How?”

“Yes, I would like to know as well,” said Josef.

“You are a Fey, and the ghouls practically worship the Fey.”

“Yes,” replied Elise. “And?”

“How good are you at acting?”

***

An hour later, Elise found herself chained up in a small cell in the castle dungeon, awaiting the next part of the plan. According to Hallbjorn, it was nearly impossible to interrogate the Drow. The first few times they captured them, they simply bit down on poison capsules in their mouths, killing themselves before they could give away any answers. Once the dwarves figured out how to prevent that, the Drow changed tactics, and instead fed their scouts a poison before sending them out. Only upon their return would they be able to receive the antidote, and the poison was too potent for any of the Dwarven healers to cure. That meant that no matter what the dwarves did, the Drow would die before they could get any answers. 

It might be different, however, if instead of a dwarf, they had Elise asking the questions. However, if they saw Elise working with the dwarves, they would be understandably suspicious, so Hallbjorn had a different plan. She would instead pretend to be a captured Fey, and she would be left alone with the Drow in order to talk with them and get answers. 

Elise had had a few reservations about the plan. The first was that she did not speak Drow. They said that would not be a problem, since all the Drow scouts had learned Dwarvish to better spy on their targets. Elise pointed out that it would still be suspicious if a Fey spoke Dwarvish and not Drow, but they assured her that she was young enough that they would not find it odd. If they had captured her shortly after her spawning, it would make sense. 

Her second was that every story she had heard painted the Drow as mindless killers who hunted dwarves for sport. She still wasn’t fully comfortable with meeting them, but even Josef had corroborated that the Drow would never harm a Fey, even if their life depended on it. She wasn’t looking forward to talking to these mindless killers, but she at least trusted that she wouldn’t be in any danger.

Her third main concern was that she was not, in fact, good at acting. She had done a couple school plays in elementary and middle school, but she had always played the characters who had as few lines as possible, and by no means could her delivery of those lines be considered good. The king had decided to ignore this, and go ahead with the plan anyways, saying she didn’t need to be good, as long as she looked the part.

And therefore, she was chained up with manacles that she could slip out of with some effort, since they didn’t have any rabbit-sized ones, and in a cage designed for wild animals. They had even smeared dirt on her gorgeous fur to sell it more. It was a bit uncomfortable, but they had assured her that the prisoners would be in shortly, or at least the first batch of them would, so she wouldn’t have to maintain her guise for long. 

They arrived a few minutes later, and Elise was so shocked that it was a good thing the character she was playing was supposed to be scared of dwarves, or else her awed silence would have given her away. The Drow were not at all like the dwarves described them. She had been expecting hideous, goblin-like creatures with claws on their fingers and anglerfish-like teeth, but what she saw was just gray-skinned elves. 

There was nothing monstrous about their outer appearance at all. In fact, she would go as far as to call them beautiful. The two captured scouts were both women, and while they were not as tall as humans, they were taller than the dwarves, and far more slender and lithe. They wore heavy manacles around their wrists and ankles, but even so, they held their heads high and looked down their noses at their captors. 

The one in front had her black hair cropped short like a boy’s and green eyes, and the other had shoulder-length white hair and blue eyes, so she mentally dubbed them Black Hair and White Hair to keep them mentally distinct. Both showed as [Shadow Scout, lvl 9] when she used {Inspect}. 

“A fey!” exclaimed Black when she saw Elise. “You monsters! What have you done?”

“Silence, ghoul,” said the dwarf guard, punching her in the stomach with a gauntleted fist. 

The Drow woman doubled over in pain, while the other strained against her restraints, trying to attack the guard. A second punch knocked the wind out of her as well, and the two were tossed into the cell across from Elise’s, just as planned. 

“Be quiet and wait for your deaths, ghoul scum,” said the guard dwarf before exiting the dungeon and slamming the door behind him. 

As soon as he was gone, the Drow straightened themselves out, as if they had never been punched, and crawled up to their bars, staring straight at Elise. 

“Oh great fey, what have they done to you?” cried White.

“They will pay for their insolence!” said Black.

“I-I’m sorry,” said Elise, doing her best to sound scared. “I don’t know what you’re saying.”

Both Drow made simultaneous sounds of incredulousness and anger. 

“This is unforgivable!” said White. “What have they done to you, O Great Fey? For how long have you been imprisoned here?”

As she spoke, Elise noticed that their accent was odd and oddly familiar. The dwarves had described it as a horrid, guttural sound when they spoke, but what Elise heard sounded far more elegant. It was only on their r’s that it ever sounded strange, and even then, they only sounded like French r’s.

“I-I’m not sure,” said Elise.

“The invaders will pay for their insolence!” exclaimed Black. “They have gone too far! O Great Fey, this insignificant one is called Marie, and my companion is Claudia. May we know your name?”

“My name is Elise.”

“What a beautiful name,” said Claudia. “A name befitting of your status. The invaders may have marred your fur, but they cannot mar the beauty and grace that is innate.”

If Elise could, she probably would have blushed right then. She had not known it until that moment, but she was weak to flattery. It wasn’t something she got much of back on Earth, so she wasn’t sure how to handle it, especially when it was as sincere as theirs seemed. It was almost enough to distract her from her mission, but she managed to pull herself together before she could say something stupid.

“Thank you,” she said meekly. “How did you get here?”

“The Envahis – pardon me, the Invaders– captured us,” said Marie. “It was our own mistake. We were sloppy and overconfident.”

“The Invaders?” asked Elise.

“They call themselves the Dwarves,” spat Claudia. “They arrived one day many years ago and killed our people and stole our homes. This cave we are in used to be the home of our princess, but they came and turned it into this- this-”

“This abomination!” finished Marie. “You cannot even tell that this was once our home. They have destroyed everything, and turned it into this hideous affront against Nature. They even killed the Sister Tree!”

“And as if that wasn’t enough, they have the nerve to call us the monsters, and get angry at us for retaliating,” said Claudia. “What little suffering we have managed to inflict on them is nothing compared to the pain they have inflicted on our people.”

“How horrible!” said Elise.

She did not even have to act that much on that. The fear and apprehension she had initially felt toward the Drow had all but vanished, and was replaced by disgust for herself. The Drow may not be perfect, but they were not the mindless monsters she had been imagining them as. And the dwarves were not as innocent as they had portrayed themselves. She was disappointed in herself for believing them so blindly.

“Horrible does not even begin to describe it!” said Claudia. “The invaders are monsters without consciences, and soon they will cease to exist in our lands!”

“What do you mean?” asked Elise.

“Their days are numbered,” said Marie. “It has been prophesied. Within one year, there will not be a single living dwarf left in these caves. We have prayed to Titania, the Seelie goddess, and she has heard and answered our prayers. Salvation for our people will come.”

If it had been a three months ago, Elise might have brushed off their words about a prophecy, thinking it was nonsense, but between the dwarves’ believe in her Rune of Fate and the Drow suddenly receiving a prophecy about the future of the dwarves, it all seemed too convenient to be coincidence. 

“So you are here to try to eradicate the dwarves?”

“Yes,” said Marie.

“No,” said Claudia.

“Claudia, what are you-?”

“We are not here to eradicate the dwarves,” explained Claudia. “We are just scouts. The real plan is being carried out by our superiors. We simply report the progress.”

“The progress of what?”

Claudia glanced around. “Forgive me, but I cannot say it in Dwarvish. They are listening.”

She was correct. The guard dwarf had made fake stomping noises away, but was actually pressed against the door, and was listening to their every word. 

“That’s alright then,” said Elise. 

She was sure the dwarves would have wanted her to press further, so that she could get information, but she decided against it. Maybe she could have gotten them to say it anyway, but she thought it better to maintain the trust a little longer. Besides, she wasn’t entirely in the mood to do exactly what the dwarves wanted of her. 

“How could you tell I was a Fey?” asked Elise.

“How could we not?” asked Marie. “If we could not recognize a Fey when we saw one, could we even call ourselves Drow?”

There was some silence after that while Elise was conflicted on how else to continue the conversation. After talking with the Drow, she was much less trusting of the dwarves than she had been, but the fact remained that the Drow wanted to exterminate them, and she had gotten to know the dwarves too well to be alright with that. She didn’t want the dwarves exterminating the Drow either though. 

She found her mind returning to the prophecy the Drow had talked about. They had said that “Within one year, there will not be a single living dwarf left in these caves.” It sounded like it was a prophecy of genocide, but something about the way it was worded stuck out as strange to Elise. Rather than saying “the dwarves would be exterminated” or “the invaders would be killed, they had gone out of their way to specify that the dwarves would not be in the caves. Did that mean that the dwarves might still be alive outside the caves?

If that was the case, then there was almost definitely room for negotiation. However, as she thought about it further, she started to get a headache. The hatred was clearly rooted far too deep for there to be any productive negotiation in the one year time limit given by the prophecy. Even as rational as he was normally, Hallbjorn would likely not listen to reason when it came to the Drow. That meant that the dwarves would need to move out of the caves on their own.

That was what Hallbjorn was hoping for, and it was something that the Drow might be perfectly fine with, but the lack of communication would be the downfall of both species. If the Drow started attacking in earnest due to the prophecy, the dwarves would likely delay their plans to return to the surface until it was dealt with, which would probably mean an all-out war would ensue, and one or both races would end up exterminated. 

Elise was filled with dread as she started to get an idea of what was going to happen. She was the only one who could talk with both sides without being killed. If they were to resolve the situation even semi-peacefully, she would have to be the one spearheading the efforts. This was exactly what she was hoping to avoid by running away from the Dwarven city, but now she was caught right in the middle, and there was no way she could turn a blind eye to the situation.

“Bragi!” she called.

“Bragi?” asked Marie.

The door to the dungeon opened and Bragi, the guard who had delivered the Drow appeared. He seemed confused, but he was under strict orders to retrieve Elise when she called, and he was not the type to disobey.

“Elise, what’s happening?” asked Claudia as Bragi freed Elise from her cage.

“I’m sorry,” said Elise. “I’ll be back.”

“Where are you going? What’s going on? Are they threatening you?”

Elise wanted to respond, but held her tongue. She could not say anything more without Bragi getting suspicious. She did her best to look away from the Drow as they watched her leave with eyes full of confusion and a hint of betrayal.

“What happened?” asked Bragi once they were out of the Dungeon. “I didn’t hear much information of value.”

“I got enough,” said Elise. “Take me to the king. I need to speak with him.”