The Right Time

Her tribe, together with their spotted swiftcats, hunted their prey by speed and distance-weapons, stalking hoofed beasts until they were close enough to chase and shoot. Despite their names, Windveer and her brother, Shatterflint, excelled at archery. Her parents had laughed at Windveer's long streak of bad fortune with the winds, but Shatterflint had always been impatient with the hammerstone. The family was a rarity, as their tribe was more accurately a number of individuals sharing common ancestors and a taste for solitude. They met only to mate or exchange vital information. But Night-touch-day and Furgreaves had spent much more time together than was necessary to raise their children, and their children remained with them long after they might have become independent.

However, one of their reclusive tribe sought them out one day. He showed them why: a thin knife and a handful of hard, sharp arrowheads.

"They are from the mountains in the direction of the fixed star," he said. Lumpy beings had given him them in trade for merely a brace of hares. "These trolls," the stranger explained, "live underground where they cannot hunt, but make wonderful things such as these." But the meat is soon gone, while the metal lasts forever, so they had asked him to send any other elves he could find to them for trading. He said they were easy to find. "After you have travelled through the foothills for a day, there is a metal door set in the ground to knock on."

Shatterflint was eager to go after he had handled the arrowheads, although the whole family agreed readily. They travelled to the foothills, and the door was as easy to find as promised. Furgreaves' knock made it ring sharply. It cracked open, then swung wide to display the ugliest creature Windveer had ever seen. She thought its eyes bulged nearly from its head with greed. Eyeing his bulging pot-belly, she wondered why he was so eager for meat, fresh or no.

"Come in! Come in!" the troll said. They entered. As soon as the door was shut behind them, two other trolls stepped menacingly from the darkness. "Quickly! They are four!" cried the door-troll, and one of the large trolls grasped Windveer's arms. She struggled, but he pushed her to the ground and sat on her as the other two made for her family. Shatterflint lunged for her captor with a snarl. The troll swung a wicked mace at him and he fell to the ground and lay still.

She sent and sent to him in shock, with no response. By the time she could take her eyes from his face, the other struggle in the close quarters was over and her parents lay on the ground as well.

"You cursed fools!" the door-troll howled. "We might have had them all! Why didn't you play along until we could get more help?!?"

"You liars!" Windveer screamed. "You need meat less than a jumpdeer!"

"I didn't lie," the door-troll said, drawing himself up. "I have my pride. I merely gave that fool point-ears the better end of a deal and suggested I'd like to see more of his folk. Didn't think he'd send the whole shivering race." He and the other troll guard took her into the tunnel. "It isn't meat we need, it's gold, and maybe you can help us get it!" His cruel laughter echoed down the corridor.

The troll wasn't laughing later when he dragged her down another tunnel. Maybe the old wife-tales were wrong, and no elf could mold stone by laying hands on it. He had believed it most out of all the young mumps, but now he was beginning to think it was all batdung. With a curse on the gold that this elf was not going to bring him, he kicked Windveer into the cell and shut the door.

She lay still for a while, recovering and licking her wounds. Presently, she became aware of another in the room. Sitting up, she perceived an elf, giving her polite attention.

"Those crazy stinkers," Windveer attempted. "They thought I could mold stone like clay, and were quite disappointed that it remained stone. Whoever heard of such madness?"

"Such powers exist, young one," the elf replied. "Such was my power, in the past." In a voice long unaccustomed to speech, she told her story. She remembered nothing before working for the trolls. The aged rockshaper had been the slave that tunneled the trolls down to this region, namelessly, mindlessly doing their bidding and enduring their ill treatment. After High-Ones-know how long, her soul crumpled, and her power left her. Surprisingly, she was not killed, but shut up in this damp dungeon where the cold stone walls were restrictions rather than raw material. The quick generations of trolls forgot she had ever had a power, or a reason for being in the cell. They fed her sustenance out of habit, and their abuse of her body became more perfunctory and less frequent. (It was only at this point in the telling that Windveer noticed her companion lacked both legs. Merely the loss of a finger had been necessary to convince the trolls she was useless, and suddenly Windveer became aware of how much worse it could have been.)

After some time of this relatively gentle life, her powers had begun to return. Her spirit healed enough to require a name, and she named herself after the most wonderful thing she could imagine: Heat. She had been deprived of it in the cold confinement, and now she longed for it; now she could imagine it shimmering around her, suffering the damp from the squalid cell. She waited for the right time.

"The right time is now," Heat concluded. "What is it you would want most of all things, were you out of this place?"

Windveer replied, "Revenge on those who killed my family."

Heat leaned forward. "I mean a pleasure-thing. What would you do to feel good?"

Windveer, out of respect for the aged one, suppressed the bitter thought that only revenge would be pleasant. "I suppose I would just like to be out in the free-blowing airs instead of this stinking dungeon, and smell the sweet blossoms of the orange-fruit trees."

"Then I will call you Sweetwind, and now we will go out into the air and the light." She raised a finger, and the stone cell wall flowed, indeed, very much like liquid clay, much to her companion's surprise. She worked efficiently, her hands now remembering eights of years of skill. "Into the air and the light" was not quite accurate; Heat carried them in a bubble of air through the stone, as far away as she could from the busy troll warren, but when the granite vein turned to soil they were still slightly belowground. Sweetwind dug upwards while Heat lay back, exhausted. Eventually they broke out into the cool night, the archer hauling the rockshaper up.

Sweetwind would have liked to return immediately to her family's campsite to recover her second-best bow and devote its arrows to the throats of trolls. But she felt the fragility of Heat's body, and remembered her handicap. Her first devotion, then, must be to take her liberator far away from troll territory.

Heat chose a path towards the setting sun, and Sweetwind acceded. After several days' travel, Sweetwind was relieved to see plains from a mountaintop, but when they had reached the base of the mountain, Heat stopped her.

"This is my destination. Here I shall live, and you are welcome to stay with me."

"But why?" Sweetwind asked.

"There is great heat in this mountain. It is dormant now, but I can call it up." Call it up she did. For the next two eights-of-eights of turns, she shaped a cavern in the mountain's base into a main hall with a series of pools. They varied in temperature according to some plan of her own. Sweetwind could hardly put her toes in the hottest one, while the mildest one was cool. During this time, Sweetwind took many trips back to the troll's mountains and waged war on them -- quick, deadly assaults, merely stalking, loosing swift arrows and retreating. But something brought her back to the old one's mountain time and again. Eventually vengeance lost its flavor, and, leaving troll-traps in final memory of her family, she left the plains of her tribe forever.

For a time, life in the mountain was good. Heat's health continued to improve, and she was industrious. She and Sweetwind were lovemates, briefly, and the sudden end of that made Sweetwind aware of the change in Heat. She had apparently finished whatever plans she had had for the mountain. Like a slow addiction, she began to lay in a trance state in her pools. She would stay that way for longer and longer periods. Sweetwind took longer and longer hunting trips into the plains, yet often found her in the same position as before.

Sweetwind would weep for loneliness beside her immobile companion. She did not know that Heat still heard, and was brokenhearted at every tear.

One night Sweetwind was awakened by Heat's hand stroking her forehead. There were tears in the old rockshaper's eyes, but her face was more composed than it had been recently.

"Why are you gone from your body so much?" Sweetwind asked.

"There are things one searches for or strives for, such as creating this place. But there are also beings and doings which are ends to themselves, and maintaining the pools is to be mine. This mountain has called me. I will guide the hot waters and the cold waters through the mountains and mix them ... Anyone who wishes for heat may enter and enjoy my springs."

"I don't want your springs! I want your friendship!"

"I must become what I must become. But, just as I waited in the cell for the right time, I have waited now. The time has come for me to go because I have found other friends for you. You cannot feel the DreamCall, but I think if you travel far out into the plains, towards the fixed star and the setting sun, your longing will guide you."

"Guide me? Toward what?"

"There is an elf who has lost her last friends, and her need is as deep as that of yours and the others who have answered. Go now. Follow your longing.

"Follow your dreams."