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By Root 670 0

in green leaf while half blazed with a fire that never consumed the branches nor did it go out—the beacon that marked the boundary proper between the lands he’d made for his brother’s Dark Court and those he kept for his own, the Bright Court. Once the beacon lay behind him, he could relax his guard. As he rode, he thought of his daughter, who had chosen to leave this less than real, more than imagined place and take on flesh in a solid world, one that endured without dweomer to feed it, but one that promised pain. She would be born to a human mother soon, would Elessario, and take up the destiny that should have claimed all his folk. If she were to be safe, there was much he had to do in that other world, the only one that most sapient souls know. What happened to his glamoured lands, or the images of lands, that he had spent an aeon building up no longer much concerned him. Without his concern, they dimmed.

All the green plains, dotted with glades and streams, had turned misty, billowing as he crossed them, as if they were embroidered pictures on a coverlet that someone was shaking to lay out flat upon a bed. The distant towers and urban prospects fluttered and wavered as if they were but banners hung on a near horizon. Only one particular river and the meadows round it remained real, the gathering place for his court, and it seemed to him that they too had shrunk into themselves, turned smaller, fainter, flames playing over a dying fire.

Yet still they were a beautiful people. Since they had no proper bodies or forms of their own, they’d taken the form of the elves that their leader loved so much, with hair pale as moonlight or bright as the sun to set off violet eyes, gray eyes, and the long delicate curled ears of that earthly race. For the most part their skin was as pale as milk, just touched with roses in the cheek, but some had seen the human beings of the far southern isles, and those who had wore a rich, dark skin like fresh-plowed earth under a rain. They clustered in the golden pavilion, listened to sad songs played by indifferent bards, or sat in the pale sunlight, merely sat and talked in low voices, their dancing, it seemed, all done forever.

Whether their numbers had shrunk as well, he couldn’t say. Counting the court lay beyond him or any being, truly, because most of them were like shapes half-seen in clouds or flames, at times separate, at others merging into one another, rising into brief individuality only to fall back to a shared mind. Only a few had achieved, as he had, a true consciousness. One of these, wearing the form of a young page, ran to take his horse as he dismounted. Although the boy stared at him, hoping for a few words, Evandar merely shrugged and walked away. As he hurried through the scattered crowd, faces turned toward him, eyes came to life, hope bloomed in smiles that he would save them as he had before. He doubted that he cared enough to try.

Down by the river, flowing broad and slow between rushy banks, sat a woman with steel-gray eyes and silvery-blond hair that tumbled down her back. When she rose to greet him, he abruptly saw her slender body as a shaft of granite, hard and cold and real among the shifting forms of the Lands. Round her neck she wore a tiny figurine, seemingly carved from amethyst, that echoed her body in every detail. It actually was her body, in fact, once physical meat and blood and bone but transformed by his magic so that she could live in his country. Dallandra was one of the truly-born, a member of that race called elves or Westfolk by men and the “Children of the Gods” by the Gel da’Thae, though they called themselves simply “the People.” She was also a dweomermaster of great power, though no human or elven sorcerer could ever match Evandar’s skill.

“What did your brother want?” she said.

“To blame me for letting his territories fall into disrepair. Let him build his own, if he wants them as badly as all that. I’ve no time to waste upon his snouted, hairy pack.” He walked to the riverbank and looked into the astral water, thick and silver, oozing