My knees hit the earth hard.
The *Wind Transformation* didn't simply disappear; it shattered. The brilliant, ethereal white lines etched into my skin flickered like embers caught in a storm, hissing before turning into wisps of cold smoke.
The moment the light died, gravity crashed down on me like a falling anvil.
The pain returned all at once. My muscles screamed, tearing themselves apart from the inside out. My lungs, which had just been breathing the storm itself, now greedily gasped for the toxic, dusty air of the ruined forest. Exhaustion hit me like an avalanche, burying whatever adrenaline I had left.
A heavy, metallic thud sounded a few steps away from me.
Sillys collapsed onto her knees in the mud. The wind spear slipped from her trembling fingers, falling to the earth with a dull clink and dissolving away. Her breathing was ragged, and her pristine white hair was plastered to her face by sweat and soot.
She stared at the flattened plain. She stared at the mountain of dead flesh that was the Taranpus Queen. The aberration that had decimated hundreds of her soldiers over the years. The nightmare that haunted her command in the Black Forest and kept her from focusing on the throne was over.
The goddess's shoulders trembled.
Sillys lowered her head, and for the first time, I saw her cry. They weren't silent tears. They were heavy, ragged sobs loaded with years of guilt, grief, and torment. She buried her dirty face in her hands, her entire body shaking as the weight of the world finally lifted off her back.
My entire body begged me to pass out right there in the mud. My vision was blurry, and my spine felt like it was made of broken glass. But seeing her like that, I refused to pass out.
She was no longer just an elven commander using me as a weapon. She was my general. And, more than that, she was my friend.
Ignoring the hot blood seeping from my wounds, I dragged myself across the destroyed earth, forcing my knees to carry me over to her.
I stopped by her side and, with a heavy, trembling arm, wrapped it around her shoulders, pulling her into an awkward, blood-stained embrace. She froze for a millisecond, unaccustomed to any touch of comfort, but soon yielded, resting her forehead against the broken metal of my breastplate.
"You can breathe now," I murmured, my voice hoarse and broken, squeezing her shoulder. "It's over. You avenged them all."
Sillys took a deep breath, letting out one last strangled sob, and then I forced a tired smile.
"Besides... save those tears," I joked, coughing up a bit of dust. "Crying on your knees in the mud doesn't suit the arrogant queen I know at all."
She let out a wet, breathless laugh. She pulled back slowly, wiping her face roughly with the back of her armored forearm.
She turned her face to look at me. Through the grime, the blood, and the fresh tears, her lips curved into that unmistakable crooked smile—a chaotic blend of absolute disbelief and immense, arrogant pride.
"Suki..." she panted, regaining the firmness in her voice as she looked into my eyes. "What you did..."
I let out a weak laugh, tasting the copper of my own blood on my cracked lips. Every bone in my body ached, but I held her gaze.
"Even I don't know for sure, but in the end, we both made it, didn't we?"
I held out my mud-stained hand.
My arm trembled under the weight of its own bone, but I kept it steady. Sillys looked at my outstretched hand for a second, the proud smile still playing at the corner of her lips, and grabbed it tightly.
I pulled with whatever energy the adrenaline allowed me.
Together, stumbling and letting out muffled groans of pain, we pulled ourselves to our feet. The world spun for a moment. My legs threatened to give out and toss me back into the pool of blood, but Sillys's shoulder met mine.
Neither of us was in any condition to take a single step alone.
I slipped my good arm around the waist of her dented armor, and the Elven queen draped her arm over my shoulders. Without orders or formalities, we morphed into a single, hobbling, exhausted creature, using each other's bodies as a crutch so we wouldn't collapse.
"Don't get used to this, Suki," she grumbled, panting with every tortuous step we took out of the colossal crater.
"Relax. You're way too heavy in that armor for me to want a repeat," I shot back, panting and feeling a sharp sting in my ribs.
Sillys let out a sigh that sounded almost like a nasal laugh, but said nothing more.
We didn't need to.
The sound of our boots dragging in sync across the dead earth was the only soundtrack to our crossing. We walked in a heavy, complicit silence through the rubble of war, stepping over destroyed roots and puddles of acid, supporting each other's weight across miles of devastated forest.
The march back seemed to tear the last threads of life from my muscles.
The winds blowing through the dense canopy no longer carried the acidic stench of the nest; they only brought the bitter smell of scorched earth, ozone, and old blood.
When the imposing wooden gates of the hidden elven village finally appeared on the horizon, they opened slowly. The grinding of the heavy gears sounded like a lament, protesting under the weight of our war's aftermath.
I crossed the village threshold, but I wasn't alone.
Sillys and I walked through the gates side by side.
My arm was still wrapped firmly around the waist of her ruined armor, and her arm rested heavily on my shoulders. We crossed the entrance not as a queen and her soldier, but as two halves of a broken god, using each other's bodies as the only anchor keeping us from collapsing to the ground.
My own body was a visual nightmare.
I was covered in a thick, foul-smelling crust of black monster blood and hardened mud. Sillys, beside me, had her white hair stained with soot and her pale face marked by extreme exhaustion, but she kept her chin held high with absurd stubbornness.
Behind us, the shattered remnants of every platoon we found in the middle of the forest marched in a funeral procession, carrying the bodies of those who had fallen.
Laura emerged from the tree line shortly after. Her silver claws were retracted, but she looked like she had taken a bath in a slaughterhouse; her face and hair were painted with a crust of dried crimson. She staggered from exhaustion, but a dangerously satisfied glint danced in her red eyes.
A little further back, bringing up the rear of the vanguard, came Arthur.
He walked heavily, but he was completely alone. There wasn't a single elf from his platoon marching behind him. The support squad had been decimated in the forest, and he maintained the farce of the tragic "sole survivor" with a terrifying coldness.
Arthur was an unshakeable monolith.
He advanced in a tomb-like silence, bathed in the blood of his own allies that everyone would readily assume was monster blood. His green eyes were absolutely unreadable, sweeping the crowd calculatingly. His imposing figure cast a long, dense, dark shadow that seemed to swallow the light around the returning troops, carrying the weight of a perfect lie through the gates.
When the hundreds of villagers huddled in the square saw our vanguard emerge from the shadows of the forest, a dense, suffocating silence fell over the village.
For a long, agonizing second, no one breathed.
Time froze.
The women, the elders, the anxiously waiting children—they all just widened their eyes, paralyzed.
The sight of the untouchable Goddess bleeding, dragging herself through the gates supported by Suki, who was covered in guts, was too great a shock for them to process immediately. We were the personification of carnage.
And then, the dam simply broke.
They weren't just screams of relief; they were guttural howls, gut-wrenching sobs of despair, and tearful applause, all mixed into a single, overwhelming chorus that tore from the village's throat.
The crowd broke the line.
Elves ran desperately toward the survivors. Some crashed into their husbands and daughters with such force that the metal of their armor clattered, hugging them as if trying to fuse their bodies together.
But for every embrace, there was a void.
Others simply fell to their knees in the packed dirt, tearing at their own hair and screaming to the sky the names of those being carried in dead on the soldiers' stretchers right behind us.
An elf with a time-worn face grabbed his teenage son by the shoulders, inspecting every inch of the boy before pulling him into a desperate hug, sobbing loudly like a small child. Children ran disoriented between the legs of the adults, their wide eyes frantically searching for familiar faces among those ranks of broken soldiers.
I felt Sillys's fingers squeeze my shoulder hard.
She took a deep breath, pulling in an absurd amount of air, and then let go of my body.
I stumbled to the side with the sudden loss of support, but she locked her own knees. Through pure, raw, and unyielding willpower, Sillys straightened her spine, ignoring the pain of her cracked bones, and assumed the unshakeable posture of a commander.
"Make way!" her voice echoed above the collective weeping, sharp as a whip. "Bring the healers to the center square! Move!"
The command snapped the village out of its shock.
Elven women in flowing green tunics rushed forward like a flock of birds, carrying bundles of broad-leafed herbs, basins of crystal water, and rolls of enchanted bandages that glowed with white magic.
In a few minutes, the metallic, sickening, and rotten odor of the battlefield began to recede, masked by the soothing, earthy perfume of healing leaves that were quickly set ablaze in heavy silver bowls around the square.
The wounded warriors were supported and quickly taken to the large medical tents pitched on the sides.
Without her weight to keep me focused, gravity finally defeated me.
Without speaking to anyone, I dragged myself away from the chaos, stumbling to the cold stone edge of the village's central fountain, collapsing to my knees as the entire world began to spin.
I plunged my hands into the crystal-clear water, watching the dark blood swirl and dilute. The reflection staring back at me on the rippling surface looked older. My face was pale, my eyes heavy with dark circles, but there was a faint, lingering sharpness in my gaze. I looked... different.
The *Transformation* still echoed in the back of my mind.
I couldn't forget it. The absolute lightness. The intoxicating sensation that the atmosphere wasn't just around me, but that the world itself was breathing *with* me. But anchoring that divine euphoria was the crushing, heavy reality of the corpses I had just carried home. I had touched the sky, but I still couldn't save everyone on the ground.
A group of elven children ran past the fountain, completely oblivious to the heavy atmosphere around them. They wielded broken wooden branches like spears, acting out a battle they hadn't witnessed with their own eyes, but that the entire forest had felt.
"Did you see the size of those kilometer-long trees flying into the sky?!" one of the boys yelled, his eyes shining with pure hero worship as he spun a twig in the air. "The ground didn't stop shaking all day! I bet Suki turned into a giant hurricane and threw the monster up along with the mountain! *Whoosh!*"
"Liar, he's not that strong! It must have been a combo attack with Commander Sillys!" a little girl retorted, jumping off the stone bench and mimicking a spear thrust.
I closed my eyes, listening to the innocent, heated argument fade across the square. I let the cold, crystal water drip from my soot-stained chin and let out a sigh, letting a small, tired smile escape my cracked lips.
On the other side of the square, I watched Sillys approach a frail, elderly elven woman.
In her hands, the queen held a shattered, bloodstained infantry helmet. Sillys didn't hand it over like a commander; she offered it with a deep, respectful bow.
The old woman's hands trembled violently as she reached out. She traced the dented silver metal with her thumbs, tears silently falling down her wrinkled cheeks.
"He died serving you, Majesty..." the mother whispered, her voice breaking. "Exactly as he always dreamed."
Sillys offered no empty words of comfort; the goddess simply closed her eyes, bit her lower lip, and let a single, silent tear trace a clean line through the soot on her cheek.
When the sun finally sank below the horizon, painting the sky in bruises of purple and dark blue, the entire village gathered around the tree in the middle of the camp.
A massive bonfire crackled in the center of the clearing. It wasn't a fire of celebration; it was a beacon of memory.
The village elders sat in a circle, strumming the strings of crystalline instruments. They began to sing an ancient, melancholic melody, a song about a time when the wind danced freely between the branches, long before blood had stained the roots of the world.
Elven archers stepped forward, aiming their bows at the night sky. They fired volley after volley of enchanted arrows. When the projectiles reached the clouds, they exploded not in fire, but in gusts of ethereal, glowing wind—tiny floating auroras that illuminated the darkness before gently fading away.
The warm aroma of roasted meat and spiced broth mixed with the soft music. Looking around the bonfire, I saw smiles... and I saw tears. The suffocating weight of the war hadn't vanished, but for tonight, shared among thousands, it felt bearable.
I sat on a thick tree root, slightly away from the heat of the main fire.
A new song began.
The tempo was slow, deeply melancholic, dictated by the gentle pluck of the elders' crystal harps. It was an ancient hymn about the Goddess of the Winds, an ancestral entity who, according to the sung legends, used to disguise herself among mortals, walking in common skins just to spread life and healing in places where tyranny and destruction had triumphed.
The voices of the elder elven women rose in perfect harmony, echoing through the leaves of the Sacred Tree:
*"From the starless sky, she descended in secret,*
*Hiding her glory, embracing our fear.*
*Walked among mortals with footsteps of a breeze,*
*Where the earth wept, her touch brings peace...*
*Oh, child of the storm, lost on the ground,*
*Fear not the winter, fear not the lonely sound.*
*For the breeze blowing in the endless night,*
*Is your mother's voice, still singing out of sight..."*
The words pierced right through the center of my chest, cold and sharp as an ice blade, yet strangely comforting. The fire of the bonfire seemed to blur before my eyes. It wasn't just an elven song; to me, in that moment of exhaustion and silence, it sounded exactly like a distant whisper from my own mother.
A soft rustle of leaves announced Laura.
She sat down next to me, her right leg heavily bandaged, holding a delicate crystal goblet of elven wine. The orange light of the fire danced in her crimson eyes.
"You've been quiet for hours," she noted, her voice devoid of its usual sharp, predatory tone.
"I'm just..." I sighed, resting my elbows on my knees. "Trying to remember everything, you know, that feeling and all." I looked down at my open palms. "That transformation... I felt different, Laura. It wasn't just brute strength. It was... freedom. It felt like the whole world was breathing in sync with my heartbeat."
She took a slow sip of wine, her eyes fixed on the flames. A genuine, almost gentle smile touched her lips.
"That must come from your mother's bloodline," she said softly. "Transformations like that are very complex, Suki. You should tell the master about it when we return to Lavinsk." She looked at me from the corner of her eye. "But... from what I heard from that bunch of awestruck elves who felt the atmospheric pressure drop from afar, it must be a beautiful sight to witness from the outside."
"Shame that where I was, there were only trees and more trees," I replied.
A sudden, strange discomfort twisted in my stomach. A chill that had nothing to do with the wind.
Laura noticed a slight shift in my posture. She pushed herself up gracefully from the root, favoring her injured leg.
"I'm going to rest a bit," she said, her tone returning to a casual purr. "You should do the same, airhead."
She limped away toward the shadows, leaving me alone once more.
The fire burned down to glowing embers, and the songs faded into quiet, respectful murmurs.
A little elven girl, no older than six, wandered away from her parents and stopped right in front of me. I was almost asleep when I noticed her.
She tilted her head up, her large pale eyes reflecting the dying fire, and gave me a toothless smile.
"Thank you, Suki!" she whispered.
I reached out, gently ruffling her white hair, and smiled back.
"Thank Queen Sillys, she was even more amazing than I was," I replied.
Much later, when the clearing was nearly empty and the cold night air had fully settled in, Sillys found me.
She sat down heavily on the root beside me. She had finally taken off the ruined armor, wearing a simple linen tunic. Her eyes were exhausted, carrying the weight of a queen who had just buried her soldiers, but they were undeniably alive.
"You did well out there, Suki," she said in a low voice.
"I still don't completely understand how I triggered it," I admitted, looking up at the stars.
She followed my gaze. "I believe that in your desperation, you must have awakened something of your divinity in there." She turned to look at me, her expression turning deadly serious. "But if you want to survive storming Elfhing's marble castle, you'll need to learn to invoke that form without needing death breathing down your neck."
"Are you going to help me?" I asked.
Sillys stood up, stretching her aching back. She offered me her hand, that unmistakable arrogant smile finally returning to her face.
"It's my first time seeing someone use the transformations outside of a book, but I can try to force you to understand it."
"Tomorrow is the funeral, and I also want everyone to rest in peace after that, so the day after tomorrow at dawn, on top of the highest hill," she declared.
I watched the queen's silhouette disappear into the darkness of the tents, leaving me alone with the crackle of the dying embers and the monumental weight of her promise.
That night, sleep came very easily. Exhaustion crushed every bone and muscle fiber in my body. My mind was still trapped in the center of the storm, echoing the sound of the winds and the spilled black blood, but I slept like a rock right there on the ground.
At the first light of dawn, the air at the base of the tree was freezing and crisp.
I saw everyone forming a circle a few meters away from me, and then I quickly got up, ran, and slipped into the middle of the elven crowd for the funeral.
The bodies of the fallen warriors had been prepared.
They lay in perfectly straight lines, each covered from head to toe in the bright, golden leaves from the trees far to the north. Their weapons—swords, bows, and spears—rested on their chests, as if they were still standing guard over the forest in their eternal sleep.
A magical, smokeless blue flame was lit at the base of each body. It was the ancient elven ritual of passage, the fire that frees the soul with absolute honor.
Sillys stood at the front of the assembly. She wore no armor, no crown. Just simple mourning clothes, with her silver Commander's brooch pinned over her heart.
"Today... we weep." Sillys's voice rose over the destroyed valley, cutting through the silence of the survivors like a blade of ice. "But we also remember."
Her pale eyes slowly swept over the ranks of wounded warriors, the broken armor, the bodies covered by the cloaks of the forest.
"Every single one of those who fell today knew the horror before us, the fear, and acknowledged the possibility of death." She closed her eyes for a brief moment. "And yet... they marched."
The wind blew through the valley in a low, endless lament.
"They fought not for glory, nor for songs, or recognition." Her hand slowly tightened around her own spear. "They fought so our children could still see the sunrise through these trees, trees that stand peaceful today."
Silence.
"May the wind carry their names beyond suffering." Her voice broke for the first time. "And may, wherever they are now... pain never reach them again."
Then Sillys slowly lowered her head.
In unison, thousands of elves bowed deeply before the dead.
Only the sound of the wind remained. The metallic *clack* of hundreds of spears being driven firmly into the soil echoed in unison.
The blue flames danced and crackled, consuming the golden leaves, casting long shadows through the trees. A soft, hauntingly beautiful choir began to rise, the voices of the elder women weaving an ancient harmony that sent shivers down my spine.
I closed my eyes.
A gentle, unusual breeze swept slowly through the clearing. It didn't shake the trees wildly; it passed deliberately, caressing the face of each fallen warrior, ruffling our hair, and drying the tears on the faces of the mourning families.
It was as if the spirits themselves were whispering their final goodbyes.