39.
PRESENT DAY
What was spending years learning enchantments with Poe worth if all the enchantments she needed were ones that didn't exist?

Poe would've said it was about mastering principles and putting different elements to use. He would've reminded her that without study you couldn't understand the exchange that happened whenever one performed a feat of magic.

When Lotte set to the task of locating Poe, she could feel the physical press of the mark on her shoulder. It hummed inside her, making pinpricks run up and down her right arm. In her mind's eye, she could see the swirl of the Sky Dragon in front of the Rugar.

But then the Rugar fell away, and the wastes, and the world. There was just a circling dragon in blackness.

Her brush started to move.

On the workshop was a heavy iron key she had taken out of the door that led to the veranda. Her strokes were precise, and the light blue ink she mixed was luminous against the black coating of the key.

Yuralar made an odd noise behind Lotte.

"Are you alright?" Lotte asked without looking up from her work.

"I didn't want to believe it." Her voice was low and grim. "There's a reason why someone like you shouldn't exist. Enchantments like that... they can destroy the world."

Swish, swish, she gave her dragon a fearsome snarl and twisting horns. "That's why we're here right now, doing this. You don't have to worry about the world if the virata can't curse me. I'm not destructive by nature."

"I can't help but wonder, where did he find you?"

"He didn't want me to know," Lotte said, dipping her brush into the ink again as she began to gently accentuate the dragon's scales. "He said I was better off not knowing."

"Hm..."

"Enchantress," Lotte said. "Do you know what I heard before the war started? About the Talmil and the Lord General."

"That was a long time ago..." Yuralar said and then the silence became heavy. The elf behind Lotte drew several deep breaths.

"I heard he someone snuck in an assassin to the Talmil," Yuralar said. "I was there. Called in with the other enchantresses to perform healing enchantments. He slashed her up..."

Lotte didn't speak as she added the finishing touches to her enchantment. "He slashed her up, where?"

"We never found him," Yuralar continued, ignoring her question. "We don't know how he even got in. There was the scent of human blood—"

Lotte blew on the ink, willing it to dry as she hooked a silver chain through the ring on the top of the key. It was an enchantment that would take her to whomever she wanted it to take her.

"They're here," Yuralar said.

Lotte hung the chain from her neck, the iron key heavy against her chest. Find Poe, she tried to tell the enchantment in her mind. Find Poe. Find Poe.

But nothing was happening.

Lotte gritted her teeth. A knock came from the door. "Madame Yuralar," Lady Briaad's voice called from the other side. "Why is this door locked?"

"Find Poe, find Poe, find Poe..." Lotte whispered under her breath.

"His name, you fool, use his name," Yuralar snapped.

"Vanshu!" Lotte cried.

The key lit up, glowing bright blue and rising to the air before Lotte's face. She grabbed it by its long stem-like neck as it jerked towards the window, pulling her into the air after it.

The iron latch holding the window shut exploded, shattering glass, splinting the wooden frame. The icy winter morning blew into Lotte's face, as she was sent rushing over the palace, narrowly dodging towers and turrets, blasting through metal gates.

The blue glow that surrounded the key surrounded her own body as well. Behind her, the sound of wingbeats cut the windy silence.

She could see several shady shapes on her tail, flapping against the morning gale.

The key was taking her somewhere away from the palace. She passed over a bustling city with low white buildings. Briefly, she managed to see a grid of straight, wide streets with thousands of white-clad people standing to the sides as a procession moved down the empty roads.

For a split second, she glimpsed the body of the marble Dragon King lying on a floating altar.

And then she was above the sea, the grey-blue waves churning and frothing below. She shot towards what looked like a black rock rising out of the water. Positioned precariously against its jagged peaks, aligned with cliffs from all sides, was a grey fortress.

There was iron everywhere, bars on windows, a fence of sharp iron spikes with barbed wire twisted on the top.

Even the stone walls of the fortress itself were fixed with iron bolts. Everything situated to withstand magic.

But not Lotte's enchanted key. Iron shards blasted into the air as she passed. Whatever the force that powered this enchantment, it was tremendous.

The pinpricks that had started on her right arm in Yuralar's workshops now became stabs of pain that ran from her fingers, up to her shoulders and into her chest.

As the key broke forwards, it was harder to breath. Lotte heard shouts, and flapping wings. Arrows made out of bright white light streaked towards her, only to shatter against the blue glow of her enchantment.

Vanshu. Vanshu. Save Vanshu. She thought desperately, fighting to hold onto consciousness while the key shrieked forward. It was a jail, this fortress, and there was so much iron present. Iron shackles, iron bars, iron doors. All rusty hinges and corroded surfaces. There were prisoners here, maybes hundreds of them. They banged against the iron bars cheering as Lotte flew onward.

The key was hungry now, and the massive hall she passed through exploded all at once. Cheers turned to cries of agony as iron shards mixed with drops of red blood.

Lotte couldn't cry out. She could barely fathom the horror that was happening all around her. Blood sizzled over the blue glow of her enchantment. The pain in her arm ebbed down as the chaos around her fed into her Leilan magic.

This key was too strong. How hadn't the enchantment burnt out yet? The intensity of the power was alien and sinister. This wasn't her magic.

It was too much.

She tried to let go of the key, but it was as if her fingers were welded with the metal.

She was rushed down a dark staircase that led her into the depth of the rock. Underground, there was a moment of stark silence after the roar of the prisoner hall. It was dark save for the red light of her eyes and the blue glow of her magic.

And then she came upon a round cage—like a bird's cage, but gigantic—that housed a wooden structure.
And there stood Poe, looking towards her through a window in the structure.

"GET DOWN!" Lotte screamed before the iron cage exploded with Poe inside it.

***

5 MONTHS BEFORE THE WAR

Maybe Lotte should've listened to Mr. Henri about the war. At the time, it seemed like something that could never happen. History books were filled with wars, stories that were devastating and morbidly fascinating.

A war? Now? In this day and age? Impossible.

As Lotte lived every day the way she wanted to live, and grew, feeling more and more comfortable with herself and her independence, it was just so hard to believe that the world around her would succumb to something like war.

But then, one night, she was woken by a knock at her door.

"Lotte," said a soft voice on the other side. "It's me."

She sat in her bed for a long moment. It had been two years since she had last heard that voice.
She ambled across her small room and turned the key. The door opened with a loud metallic screech and there stood Poe.

Lotte didn't know what to feel. This all felt like a kind of dream. There he stood, back against the dark night sky and auburn ponytail whipping in the breeze like a flag.

Was she angry? Hurt? Happy? It was odd. All she felt was empty.

"Disan tulla, Lotte," he said, his mouth a grim line. Lotte? She wasn't 'sylvarnan' or 'sulsylnan' anymore?

She rubbed her nose in irritation. Maybe it was fitting. They had lived together all those years as if they were a family. But in the end, it was a phase. There had never been any real love between them.

"Why're you here?" she asked.

"A war is coming, Lotte," was his reply. His grin made him look sad rather than happy. "May I come in?"

She moved aside, letting him through. He examined her room while she closed the door behind him. He curiously browsed through her brushes, staring intently at the paper enchantments she hung to dry from pegs on the clothes line she had by the window.

She remained standing by the door. She was exceptionally stiff, her insides as dry as sand.

He looked at her over his shoulder. He was so tall, he had to hunch slightly to stand in her room. "We need to arrange for you to leave this country before the war breaks out."

"You've come because of that? You shouldn't have bothered. Mr. Henri said he'll—"

"When was the last time you spoke with Henri Treebald?"

Lotte had to think. It was a year ago, maybe more, when Mr. Henri had suddenly appeared on her street corner.

Poe sighed. "He meant well, I'm certain. I thought it would be simpler if he could help you. But Henri Treebald, it seems, decided to leave. He boarded a ship to New Astra some months ago."

"New Astra?" Lotte exclaimed. "That's....that's on the other side of the world."

Poe nodded. "I don't have the power to send you that far. I'm sorry." His jaw tightened and he looked away. "Despite my years, Lotte, I don't have much power at all."

"Is that why you left so suddenly?"

"I won't ask you to forgive me," he said. "I won't ask for what I don't deserve." He took a paper folder from his pocket and laid it on her desk. "Serades," he said. "That's all I could manage."

"Serades? You want me to go to Serades?"

"Want? No. The situation there is tremulous. Serades is not what I want for you."

"Then why did you say—"

He looked up. There was something odd about his gaze, something Lotte had never seen before. Or if she had seen it, she had glimpsed it very briefly. She suddenly recalled what Mrs. Herbert said about Poe getting angry in the orphanage at the House Mistress for losing Lotte all those years ago.

Poe was a Leilan elf, and true to his nature, he had an affinity to violence. But what was he mad about? It wasn't her.

"Soon, even Serades will become preferable to here, Lotte," he said. "I want you to survive this, even if I can't control the trajectory of your survival. Even if I can't see what lies ahead, I can't stop feeling hopeful for you. You're of nowhere. You're of nothing. You belong to no one and thus free to make your own destiny."

A drop of emotion fell onto the parched stone of her heart. From all the responses that tried to get out of her mouth, the only one that won was silence.

"I've gone and made the initial inquires, but now you have to write to them yourself. The Dragon King is interested in you. He'll invite you once you contact him, but it has to be you in the correspondence for them to trust that you're real."

"Why is he interested in me?" she asked.

"It worries me that I do not know," Poe replied. "They employ a Yomi Enchantress, Yuralar, she is called, but they haven't got a Leilan one. I hope that's all there is to it."

"You hope?"

"That's all I can do, Lotte. Hope is all I'm left with. For myself, for you, for the alessi and humans. Even if it's too late, I hope it isn't."

She shut her mouth and looked down. She felt cracks forming in the shell she was hiding behind. A soft touch on her shoulder made her look up.

Poe's stare was a long dark tunnel, its walls made of despair. "If I survive this war, I'll tell you everything you wish to know, Lotte. Even what I can't bear to speak of, I will tell you if you ask me."

"What do you mean, if you survive the war?" Her voice trembled when she asked.

He sighed and patted her head. "I always found you admirable. Even when you were almost too small to be alive, your soul , which I saw through your eyes, captivated me. I have lived a quarter of a millennia, and yet from you I've learnt more than I did in five hundred years. Isn't that remarkable?"

Lotte couldn't find anything to say to him. She just felt like crying, but how would that help?

He offered her another sad smile and opened the door to leave.

"Wait," she said in a tiny, strangled voice. "Where will you go?" Was he really going to fight in this war? If Lotte could run away, didn't that mean Poe could too?

"It's better that you don't know," he said.

She tried to swallow around the lump in her throat, fighting the urge to beg him to go with her to Serades, or wherever it was she'd have to go.

He seemed to read what was going through her mind. There was that melancholic smile again, his red eyes shining with unshed tears. "I'm sorry, Lotte," was all he said before he left her there.