The descent from her cave was a quiet, deliberate test of her mended body. Valeriana moved not like an injured creature, but like a ghost. Her elven nature, suppressed by the initial shock and pain, was reasserting itself.
In Elysiuma, she had moved through forests by listening to the Song, her feet finding purchase as the earth and roots guided her. Here, there was no guidance. There was only physics. But she was still an elf. Her balance was perfect, her body light, and her grace innate. She moved from stone to root to patch of moss with a preternatural silence, her footfalls making no sound. The forest floor was a complex equation of weight and pressure, and she was a master at solving it.
Her left arm, strapped securely to her chest, was a dull, throbbing ache—a constant, annoying variable—but it was functional. Her good arm was strong, and her legs were sure. The chaotic noise of the forest, which had been an assault days ago, was now just data. She could hear the snap of a twig a hundred yards away, the rustle of a mouse in the leaf litter, and the call of a distant hawk. She cataloged each sound, her senses, now purely physical, honed to a razor's edge.
She circled the ridge, a journey of more than an hour, moving through the thickest parts of the woods, always keeping the wind in her face, just as she had observed the local predators do. Her goal was to approach the smoke plume from downwind, giving herself every advantage.
She smelled it before she saw it.
The scent was alien and thick. It wasn't the clean, fragrant burn of enchanted Silverwood hearth-logs, nor the civilized, distant scent of an Elysiuman human village. This was a crude, greasy smell. It was woodsmoke, yes, but it was mixed with the pungent, musky odor of unwashed bodies, the sharp tang of animal waste, and something else... the smell of uncured hides and spilled ale. It was the smell of crude, physical life, and it was overwhelming.
She slowed, her movements becoming even more deliberate. The forest thinned ahead. She could hear new sounds: the rhythmic thud of wood being split, the distant, guttural sound of voices, and the barking of some kind of animal.
She found her vantage point. A small, rocky rise about fifty yards from the edge of the clearing, completely overgrown with a dense thicket of ferns and brambles. It was perfect. She slipped into the shadows of the bushes, her grey-green cloak blending perfectly with the dappled light. She was invisible.
With her good hand, she slowly, silently, pushed a single fern frond aside. Her heart, which had been beating with the calm rhythm of the hunt, gave a single, hard thump.
She saw it—the village.
It was a cluster of perhaps twenty round, crude huts. They weren't built so much as piled. The walls were a rough basket-weave of sticks—wattle—smeared thick with mud and dung—daub. The roofs were heavy layers of dried straw and reeds. A rickety-looking fence, made of sharpened, upright logs, formed a crude circle around the settlement.
And then she saw them. The fire-makers.
Her breath caught in her throat.
They were human.
She recognized the species instantly. The same biological structure as the humans of Elysiuma. Two arms, two legs. The same basic height, the same shape. The Magi's notes were not just incomplete; they were wrong. He had missed the most important variable of all.
But the shock of what they were was instantly replaced by the shock of how they were. These were not the humans she knew. The human villages in Elysiuma, while simpler than elven cities, were still places of magic. A human farmer there would have a song, a bright, fast-burning aura. They would use simple cantrips to mend a fence, a light spell to work past dusk, or an herbalist's charm to bless a crop.
Here, there was nothing.
A large, heavily bearded man stood near the center of the village, splitting logs. He was a mountain of muscle, dressed in a rough, sleeveless leather jerkin. He would raise a heavy, crude-looking iron axe, grunt with the physical exertion, and bring it down with a whump of pure, brutal force. He was sweating, his face red with effort. He was not using a cantrip to bless the blade, nor a simple spell of strength to aid his arms. He was just a man, using his own physical, finite power to break a piece of wood.
Further off, two women knelt by a large, flat stone, grinding grain. They were pushing a smaller stone around in a circle, their movements a repetitive, laborious ritual of pure muscle and grit. Their tunics were coarse-spun wool, dyed a simple, dull brown, and their faces were smudged with dirt.
She watched, fascinated and horrified. This was what life looked like without the Song. It was harsh. It was work. It was an endless, physical struggle against a world that did not help, that did not sing back.
She closed her eyes for a moment, pushing past the sight, and tried to feel them, as she would any human in Silverwood. She reached out with her elven sense, the one that should have shown her their bright auras, the color of their spirits, the hum of their life-force.
She was met with nothing.
A cold, black, silent void. The same as the trees. The same as the rocks. They had no light. No song. They were just… bodies. Biological machines, living and breathing, but utterly, terrifyingly muted.
Her theory was correct. This was a Muted Humanity. They had survived; they had lived for millennia, completely cut off from the very energy she'd considered the definition of life.
A guttural shout broke her concentration. It was the man with the spear. He was yelling at another man, and she couldn't understand a single word. She recognized the root of the language—it was a bastardized, devolved form of an ancient human dialect she knew from the Elysiuman archives. But it was so corrupted by time and isolation, so thick and crude, that it was utterly incomprehensible. She would have to learn it from scratch. Another new, monumental task for her logbook.
She was so absorbed in this new linguistic challenge, trying to parse a single word, that she didn't register the new sound at first.
Ruff. Ruff. Bark!
A mangy, wolfish-looking dog, its ribs visible beneath its patchy fur, had been sleeping near the village gate. Now, it was on its feet. Its head was up, its black nose sniffing the air, its gaze fixed directly on her thicket.
Valeriana's brow furrowed. It was not a feeling of terror but one of profound, academic annoyance. A dog. A crude, physical animal. Her elven stealth, which was designed to fool the eyes and ears of sentinels, had been defeated by a sense she had completely forgotten: smell. In her cave, tending to her wound, foraging—she was an alien biology in this forest. Of course, she had a scent. It was a new, frustrating, and humbling variable.
The dog let out a sharp, aggressive bark—a raw, animal alarm.
"Hush, curs!" The guard's voice barked back. The tall, bearded man with the spear walked to the gate. He kicked at the dog, but the animal just danced back, still barking at the woods.
The man stopped. He looked at the dog, then followed its gaze. His eyes, sharp and suspicious, scanned the exact patch of forest where she was hidden. He couldn't see her. Her elven stillness and her grey-green cloak made her nothing more than a shadow within shadows. But he was looking. He tilted his head, listening.
The dog barked again, a frantic, high-pitched sound, and took a few aggressive steps toward the forest line.
The man gripped his spear tighter. He shouted something to another man, then took a single, menacing step toward her hiding spot.
Valeriana's heart, which had been calm, gave a hard, steady thump. She was not terrified, but she was alert. She was an unarmed scholar, and he was an armed man with a very sharp piece of iron. Her arm was still injured. The risk was not worth the data. This observation was over.
She did not run. Running made noise. Running meant breaking branches and rustling leaves.
She melted.
In one fluid and utterly silent motion, she drew her legs under her and began to move backward, foot over foot, into the thicket, not away from it. Her elven body moved with a grace that was as much a part of her as her bones. She did not snap a single twig. She did not rustle a single leaf. She was a wisp of smoke, a trick of the light. The man took another step, squinting, his eyes trying to pierce the shadows. By the time his eyes had tried to focus on her position, she was already ten feet deeper into the forest and still moving.
She did not stop until she was a quarter-mile away, her back pressed hard against the trunk of a massive pine. Her heart was hammering, not with fear, but with the last traces of adrenaline.
She had her data. It was the most important discovery of her life. They were human. They were Muted. They were primitive, organized, and sharp.
And they had animals that could smell a ghost.
Her mission parameters had changed once again. She was no longer just an observer. She was an infiltrator. And she had to be better.