“I like the Eletian name better.”

Telagioth smiled. He then spoke entirely in fluid Eletian, ending in a flourish with, “Vien a lumeni Celes As’riel!”

At his words light ignited along the edge of the road from behind tangled vegetation. Swords rang from sheaths and Grant and Porter charged toward it with shouts.

Roused by the commotion, Karigan extended her cane to staff length and took a defensive stance. Yates and Ard bared their swords. The Eletians simply looked on in amusement, especially when Grant’s sword rang against what sounded like stone.

“Damn! I notched my blade!” He came back hacking away at vegetation.

The rest of them crowded to the side of the road and peered through brush only to come face-to-face with a statue. Carved of stone, one of her arms had broken off and weathering had scrubbed away much of her features, but her graceful lines remained beneath snaking vines and clinging black moss. She held in her remaining hand a large, cracked orb fogged by age and dirt through which light glowed.

“What is that thing?” Grant demanded.

“It is what you would call in your city a lamppost,” Graelalea replied. “We call it lumeni.”

“But ... but how did it light up?”

“Telagioth used the words of lighting. Such a command may have lit the lumeni for quite a distance, alerting, I fear, any and all to our presence.”

Telagioth bowed his head. “Forgive me. I did not know after all this time the lumeni would light.”

“No need to ask forgiveness,” Graelalea replied. “The action was, perhaps, imprudent, but it is a joy to know Eletians have not been forgotten in this land. And why shouldn’t Eletians walk proudly in their own realm instead of in secrecy?”

“Because the current residents are hungry,” Lynx said, hand to his forehead. “And now they know exactly where we are.”

HUMMINGBIRDS

“Imprudent?” Grant demanded of the Eletians. “You’ve let everything in the forest know we’re here and it’s just imprudent?”

“Your shouting,” Graelalea replied, “will only serve to attract further attention.”

“Oh, so you lower yourself to speak to me now?”

Karigan couldn’t help but smile seeing someone else bridling at Graelalea’s haughty ways. She turned away from the discussion, gazing down the road into the forest. She spotted the glow of another of the lumeni many yards away, on the opposite side of the road, its light ghostly in the mist.

Yates joined her. “Barely into this thing and they’re already trying to start a war.”

Behind them, the discussion had grown sharper, louder, with Lhean joining in with exhortations in Eletian, his derisive tone unmistakable.

“I hope not,” Karigan replied. “We need each other to get through this.”

“Look,” Yates said, pointing.

Karigan heard it before she saw it, a buzzing sound like a bee. It was not a bee, however, but a hummingbird flitting in front of them, its rapid wing movements creating the drone. In the light of the lumeni, its green feathers shimmered with iridescence, a ruby patch at its throat. It looked just like the hummingbirds back home.

“I wonder if it’s lost,” she said. If creatures from Blackveil strayed into their world through the breach, then surely the reverse occurred as well.

“Look, another,” Yates said.

A second darted at the first and chased it away. Karigan wondered what it was being territorial about since there were no flowers in sight. A nest or a mate, maybe?

As the hummingbirds zipped around the group, a third appeared and hovered in front of Yates’ face.

“They’re like little jewels,” he said, mesmerized.

A blur of pearlescent motion, an Eletian moving faster than the eye could follow, swept his sword before them neatly slicing the bird in two in the air. The halves dropped to the ground. Karigan and Yates gazed in shock at what remained of the hummingbird, its blood trickling between the cobblestones.

“Five hells!” Yates exclaimed. “What did you do that for? It was a hummingbird!”

“You cannot trust anything here,” the Eletian said. It was Spiney, the lumeni sparking a silvery glint in his eyes.

“But—” Yates began.

A droning grew in the forest around them, grew in a crescendo into a deafening roar that throbbed through Karigan’s body. The limbs of trees vibrated with it, causing the collected rainwater to shower down on them.

“What is it?” Grant demanded.

“Prepare yourselves!” Graelalea cried.

A shimmering cloud of hummingbirds emerged from the woods and hovered around the company, their wings working furiously, the noise of it overwhelming. They skimmed overhead and darted between them. There were hundreds—no, thousands of them.

Ard screamed. Karigan whirled to see that a hummingbird had impaled his shoulder with its long beak, wings fluttering to drive deeper. Its throat pulsed as it drank, the ruby patch on its throat deepening to a dark crimson.

Graelalea swiftly yanked the bird out of Ard’s shoulder and smashed it onto the road where it remained limp and unmoving, blood streaming from its beak.

“It is not nectar they seek,” she said.

The hummingbirds attacked. Beaks pinged on Eletian armor and pinned Sacoridian flesh, yielding cries of pain. Swords flashed through the air and birds were cut down simply because there were so many of them. Otherwise they were too quick, their movements too erratic, to be fought off. Only the Eletians seemed able to cleave them out of the air with intention.