11 YEARS BEFORE THE WAR

For the first seven years of her life, Lotte lived in silence.

She heard. She heard it all. Even if she didn't wish to.

She could not speak. The words, broken, disfigured, were locked inside her. Everything entered, she was as absorbent as a dry sponge, but Lotte's mind was a whirling prison from which nothing could escape.

Lotte's first memory was standing in a stuffy room with two women. She was scarcely more than a toddler then. They spoke above her head as if she wasn't there, calling her an "it" and "this Lotte". They wished to throw her outside, to the streets of Raidox and its ill fates. They didn't in the end. They were somehow forced to keep her.

She stood below their noses, gazing from one to the other. One woman was round, but sturdy and the other had narrow eyes and a wrinkled mouth. Neither was familiar.

She had no memory of anyone before them. No yearning for a mother, no ache of separation.
"You must forget me," someone had said. And after that Lotte was new, with no past.

She was in a small boxy room with drab grey carpeting and a low ceiling. Lotte looked towards the window that overlooked a small round courtyard overgrown with weeds.

There were children there. She knew that they were human and that she was...not human. But how this knowledge came to be inside her she couldn't remember.

Later, she learnt that the place was an orphanage. One of Lord General's failed attempts to appear humane. The round woman was Mrs. Hummund, who taught the children how to read and write and make small sums. The other woman, the one with slitting eyes was only ever known to Lotte as House Mistress.

The children feared House Mistress's cane. She always found reason to punish them, especially Lotte. House Mistress punished Lotte just for existing. And she bore these beatings like everything she did—in silence.

Mrs. Hummund, in contrast, liked Lotte best. Lotte listened and obeyed and never spoke at all, especially not out of turn.

"If only they were all like you," Mrs. Hummund would say with a sigh. She didn't much care whether the children learned during her lessons, only that they would remain well-behaved.

But Lotte did learn, ravenously.

When Mrs. Hummund taught the shapes and sounds of letters, and the words they formed, Lotte hoped that she could write them, and ease the tension of unsaid things. She learnt to read with ease, silently moving her lips for every sound until letters became words, words became sentences, sentences turned to paragraphs and pages and books. Stories became her knowledge.
Lotte drew every letter perfectly, as crisply as Mrs. Hummund herself, but when she tried to form them into words, they would shatter on the page. Whether short words or long, she knew what she wanted to write, but none of it was legible. Everything was still trapped just the way it had always been.

Hours upon hours, Lotte spent trying to break free, her vision blurred by hot, angry tears which she didn't dare to shed. The papers were worn thin, her pencil turned to a stub.

"You can't be so wasteful with our writing equipment," House Mistress had scolded before letting the cane taste Lotte's skin. The pain was indistinguishable from the cramped feeling in Lotte's chest.

Once a week, the children were given brushes and colours and told to paint. Lotte had never cared much for this. The paints were weak and runny, they smelt like chemicals and all she ever managed to make was a mess. On the day everything changed, she entered the class late, walking gingerly after a "meeting" with House Mistress and her cane.

There was an apple on each desk. "We're drawing still life," Mrs. Hummund informed her tartly before pouncing on Amun who was spilling his paint water over the watercolour pan. "It's not done like that!" she bellowed.

Lotte approached the desk and picked up the coarse paintbrush. It's bristles were bent out of place from another child's rough handling. She wetted it in the water and then touched it to the pan. The pan was filthy, red smudged on the yellow, black on the green, the orange a rainbow of mess. She wet every colour, wiping off the murk with her rag and was happy to find that the colour beneath was clear and vibrant. Mrs. Hummund had sneaked onto Lotte's desk one of the good pans. There were more than just the basic colours. She had pink and purple too as well as a deep mustard-y gold, dark green and indigo. She cleaned her brush in the water, wiped it down and wet it again, bringing it to the pan. She stroked and stroked the red pan, watching the wakened pigment swirl and cling to the broken bristles of the brush. Then, absent-minded, she took it to the paper and drew a furious red line, like the ones House Mistress's cane created along Lotte's pale arms.

She looked from the paper to the apple on her desk.

Something inside her whispered and her thoughts became a train crashing down a rocky hill without tracks. She lost touch with her eyes and her hands, with the torment of silence and loneliness. There was the apple, there was the room, and the paints, and water. Nothing else existed.

She was only called back to the present when Mrs. Hummund exclaimed in her ear. "Nine gods! I can't believe it!"

The children all scrambled to see, crowding behind Lotte's chair.

Lotte blinked several times as her drawing came into focus. The apple on her desk had been transported to the paper. It was paler than reality, the pigments were too weak and dwindled with the water, and there were not enough shades—but the likeness was phenomenal. The blush of red that gave way to yellow and a tinge of green, the tiny little black dots that were visible on the lighter side of the apple's face, like freckles on a cheek. Even the bruise on the lower left side of the apple had made its way to Lotte's painting.

But it didn't stop there. The apple was the focus, but beyond it, she had captured the desk upon which it sat, next to her pans of paint, and the room beyond it where children, armed with paintbrushes, had their heads bent over their work. Life and motion frozen to one single frame.
It was all there as it had been and Lotte could scarcely recall it even happened.

Mrs. Hummund was a mixture of agitation and excitement when she snatched the painting from Lotte's desk and rushed out of the room.

The next day, Lotte's painting hung framed in the lobby so that any visitor could see what marvels the children of Lord General's orphanage were. A card underneath written in Mrs. Hummund's hand read: Drawn by L, 6 years old.

While looking at it, Lotte felt something she had never felt before.

She puzzled over the feeling for many days until she finally realised:

It was pride.
***
PRESENT DAY

The enchantment gave way just as Lotte was floating over an air ship.

She could feel herself slowing a little before that. Night crept over the wintry city when Riadox clocks chimed 4:00. She had decided to risk flying closer to the ground in case her enchantment ended abruptly.

But she didn't make it close enough.

The vellum under her shirt gave a sudden lurch, as if wringing out the last of the magic and that was the only warning she got.

She instantly lost all bouncy and began plummeting through the sky.

She was lucky that the airship rose underneath her and the domed, leathery balloon cushioned her fall. She clung to the thin ridges of metal that passed between the sections of the airship cells, fretfully wondering if someone might have heard her hit it. She was too high up to let go of the airship and fall into Raidox. There was nothing she could do but cling to the metal and wait.

"Experienced enchanters can tell how long an enchantment will last," Poe's voice rang in her mind.
Well, she wasn't experienced, how could she be? Poe refused to let her dabble in too much magic. He said that she needed to keep a balance. Enough magic to keep herself alive, but not so much it would kill her. It was the iron in her blood, Poe said. Iron and Leilan magic didn't mix.

"Logically, you shouldn't even exist," he always said. "You're at war within yourself."

And now that same war was happening outside of her.

She shouldn't even exist. Poe loved reminding her of this. He loved the irony of her predicament and then laughed at his own pun. Yomi elves—or day elves as humans called them—had no problem mixing with humans, they had been doing so for generations. But Leilan blood—the blood of night elves—was toxic to humans, and human blood toxic to Leilans. A child such as her had never been conceived.

Lotte's fingers were growing numb on the metal brace she held onto. It wasn't that the airship was moving very fast, but the dome she sat on was so rigid and round, there was really no balancing on it. If she let go, she was almost certain she'd slip off.

Glimmering blue lights in the sky all around her told her that she was riding upon one of many such airships. Angular, elongated monstrosities swimming like a pack of sharks towards an unknown destination.

The land below was nothing but blackness. There were no lights, no towers, no smoke. With a start, Lotte realised that they must have left Raidox behind.

Sure, she had to find a way to get off this air-ship without being spotted, and that would only be possible if she could hang on, but she had successfully managed to leave Raidox.

The hope she had, it was still there.
But where was she going? She'd never seen so many airships all flying together.

Her fingers eased on the metal ridge she was holding. At first it felt like she was slipping off this thing, but as often happened, Lotte found balance. She sat up, folding her legs into a more comfortable position.
Fintan instantly nipped her ear.
"Ouch! What was that for?"

He fluttered by her head, the red glow from her eyes reflected in his silvery-blue scales. Then he dived down, towards the darkness below.
Lotte looked down, puzzling over what the little dragon was trying to show her.

"You want me to jump off?"
The little dragon nodded.
"But it's..." She shot another downward glance, squinting to make out what was below. There was something scraggly... fuzzy, misshapen. It looked familiar. She gasped when she realised what she was seeing. "It's a forest..."

An elven forest of Solles trees, created by the Yomi elves during the day to protect the Leilan elves at night. In truth, only when they mixed with human was the distinction between the two types of elves genetic. They were all a single species, according to Poe.

The trees could cushion her fall, or she might just fall between them and die. How high were they flying? She couldn't tell in the dark.

Fintan chirped urgently. She needed to jump now.

How had an elven forest crept so close to the city? This was doubtlessly part of the war. These airships, they were...

A strange sense of calm fell over her. She let go of the metal brace and, on the count of three, slipped over the side of the airship.

Twigs snapped and snagged her clothes. Branches and leaves dug into her skin like gnarled fingers, but she managed to grab hold and regain her balance, bobbing on a treetop. The airships, whales of darkness against the grey night sky—whirring and clicking whales—swam overhead seemingly close enough to touch.

There were...so many. Ten? Twenty? One hundred? Lotte couldn't count them all.

Fintan chirped anxiously in her ear.
An airship—the airship she had just been on and was closest to her—suddenly dropped...something. An assortment of shapes fell from its belly. Were those people jumping off the ship?

No, not people.

The explosions began. They rocked the earth, making the tree Lotte hung onto tremble and lit the darkness with billowing red mushrooms of flame.

And then something else pierced the darkness of forest. Hundred, thousands of pinpricks of red light.

Eyes.

The Leilan elves—the night elves. Thousands of the hiding among the trees. Their eyes became ribbons of redness, streaking through the night. They moved so quickly, she could barely follow, arcing up and up through the air, dancing, slashing, silent, deadly.

She could feel the intent behind their magic.

Five airships exploded, the gases keeping them airborne burning in an angry ball of blue-green flame before dissipating.

Lotte had escaped Raidox, but ran right into the war