ELRED VALKALIN IS ON THE RUN. After narrowly escaping the Synketros prison, she finds herself in the scent trail of two notorious communities miles below the island's surface. When she stumbles upon a hidden gathering of fairies from different races...
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2412, Crescin 10, Daleth
Elred craned her neck up at a gaping slab of rock blocking their way. Beside her, Argyll's frown matched the dour creases of her cloak. "That doesn't make any sense," the banshee tapped his chin, glancing from his hand-drawn map, courtesy of their resident earth sprite and maze expert, Gurye. "The opening should be right here."
She glanced at their small party of five, composed of one renegade, one from the Entobern clans, and lastly, a former Synketrian soldier named Kodra. The days-old council of underground groups had maintained the scouting teams to be composed of an equal number of representatives—an allusion to their unity what-not she might have been responsible for.
"Do you say we go back?" she prompted.
"And waste the time it took for us to get here?" the renegade challenged. She propped her hands on her hips, her dark hair swaying behind her. "We could just blast through. I'm fairly versed in rysteme explosions."
That's wrong on so many levels, but Elred didn't have the heart to tell her. "We need to be discreet," she said. "Especially when we don't know for sure what's behind the fluctuations."
The news came a few days ago, in the middle of another impromptu conference about what they should do with their temporary truce. The Ionarai were surprisingly adept at handling negotiations and making sure no one leaped across the table and decapitated each other. Even Tarmis, the elusive leader of the Peltran renegades, managed to attend and agreed with most of the council's decisions. Then, one of the scouts returned with the intel.
Wild disturbances in the magic fields were occuring in what the Ionarai referred to as the Detached Region. When Elred asked why it has that name, Argyll shrugged and answered with nonchalance to rival a sleepy pelgar. "It's a point in the underground we can't get into, no matter how hard we try," the banshee explained. "We simply gave up when none of our scouts could figure a way in."
Which went to say that the Ionarai had explored almost all of the underground structures and even managed to create a semi-detailed map of it. The renegades weren't happy when they realized their existence might not have been as hidden as they thought. What's more, the map also betrayed to Elred the existence of illegal mines, active cartels, and most of the Synketros' sleeper troops' activities. So, that's where they're hiding all along?
"Which territory is directly above the Detached Region?" Elred remembered asking the Ionarai at some point of her stay with them.
One of the half-bloods in charge of whittling pretty flutes from pink stalks looked up with a shrug. "Penleth."
Penleth. The Brownies' livelihood territory. Elred always wondered how come the peaceful inventors got to have two territories for themselves, but she had a hunch which latched itself at the back of her mind since then. There might be something more hiding in Penleth, or more precisely, below it.
