Finding Elora

Chapter 8

I refuse to expose her.

"Abby," I say, purposefully leaving out my last name.

There are millions of Abby's in the world, and he won't be able to find anything with that. Especially if he doesn't know exactly where I'm from.

Samuel nods, and I practically jolt out of my seat when the center of the table lifts. A circle the size of my open hand raises about a foot in the air, and it continues upward until another platform with menus appears from underneath and fills the gap.

Nothing connects the two platforms, and my jaw drops as I watch the first one continue upward to the ceiling before smoothly sliding away.

Is it tied to a string? I don't see anything, and I scrunch my eyebrows before swiping my hand over the new platform. There's nothing there.

Samuel remains silent as he watches my shock but doesn't say anything about it as he grabs a menu.

It's a small slip of paper, and I force myself to relax as I grab the second one. Samuel and I don't speak as we read over the options, and I spend the entire time thinking through the questions I want to ask. I need to learn a lot in a short amount of time, and I need to do so without making Samuel any more suspicious of me than he already is.

An easy task.

"Where is Janta?" I eventually ask, setting the menu in front of me.

Samuel said several vehicles would be traveling between there and Elora next week for something called Praxis.

"And what is Praxis?" I continue.

Samuel peers at me over the top of his menu before reaching into his pocket and pulling out a shard of glass. It's frosted and about the size of his palm, and I cock my head to the side as he sets it on the table between us.

He then taps the top twice. The magic flecks around us begin to swirl and funnel into the glass, and I blink several times to ensure I'm not hallucinating as it glazes over and turns black. The blackness spreads, continuing until it takes up a decent portion of the table, and then it shifts upward to form a terrain.

I've never seen anything like this before, and to say I'm in shock would be an understatement.

"I need to get one of those," I mumble.

Samuel lets out a quiet laugh.

"Humans can't yield magic. This would be of no use to you," he explains.

I hope that's not going to be a common theme here. It makes sense that faeries would have much of their technology centered around the magic surrounding them, but that doesn't bode well for me.

Humans do exist here, though. They've got to have some things we can use.

"This is where you are now," Samuel says, pointing to a spot near the bottom of the map.

The land below it is flat, and I assume it's where the prairies I landed in and traveled through are. The town we're in now is relatively flat, too, but that changes almost immediately north of here. What looks like giant mountains and ravines stretch up the map, continuing until they reach what appears to be a massive city.

"That's Elora," Samuel explains, seeing where my gaze has fallen. He then directs my attention to another small town right above the one we're currently in. "And this is Janta. It's about a day's walk from here."

Oh. The walk to Janta doesn't look too bad, but there's no way I could get to Elora on foot. It's too far.

"This is the Elora forest," Samuel says, gesturing to the wild terrain between Janta and Elora. "It's swarming with trolls and wild shifters. You have to go around."