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I return my eyes to hers, trying not to get lost in their emerald sheen. “Is it wrong of me to protect you after what just happened? Wrong of me to want you to keep you safe after you nearly died?”
“Oh, nonsense,” she says. “There’s no evidence that could have killed me. It was a migraine at best.”
“That was no migraine,” I argue.
“Either way, I’m safer with you, so I’m coming along. If magic is one of your weaknesses, then I need to be by your side.”
Eventually, after enough back-and-forth, she tires me out. Perhaps she is safer by my side than hanging back, but it seems like she only gets hurt when she’s around me.
“So this is where you found it?”
I take her back to the spot where I think I found the red crystal shard, hoping that it might give us some clue.
“You said something after you took me back,” she says. “You think that somebody didn’t want to be found?”
“It was just a guess.”
“Right. A guess based on what exactly?”
I try to gather my thoughts as best as I can. “That thing you ran into, it felt a bit like a trap.”
Having dug around on the ground, she finds the free-standing crystal shard. I want to tell her not to touch it, but it seems its magic is completely inert.
She closes her eyes, holding it tight. “Well, you’re right,” she says. “This is a trap.”
“But was it a trap designed for you or for me?”
She runs her fingers over the tiny gem in her fingers. “It doesn’t seem like it’s localized to anybody,” she says. “But this was meant for somebody magical. So it could be you, or me, or literally any dark elf in the area.”
“That doesn’t exactly narrow it down.”
She ruminates some more, seemingly deep in meditation.
“And since this wasn’t targeted,” Annette says. “Anybody could have stumbled on it. I think it’s fair to say that it’s hiding something. You said it was attached to something? Do you remember where you pulled from?”
I move low to the ground, trying to find the attachment point. It felt almost like it was tied to something by string, but there was no visible string anywhere. Remembering the best I can where the gem was as well as where it was tied, I find myself staring at a seemingly innocuous tree.
“Is there anything special about this tree?” I call out to her from where she sits, several feet away.
“Let’s have a look, shall we?” She approaches the tree, then begins rubbing her hands over its trunk.
“Hmm… an ordinary-looking tree…” She takes some of its sap, then begins uttering several strange words, rubbing the sap on the bark.
“This tree is strange,” she says. “But in completely different ways than I was expecting.”
I watch as she roams the full width of the tree, moving her hands up and down its bark. It seems as though she’s looking for something.
Her hand grips onto a thin branch, and she pulls. A swirling mass of light appears suddenly in the tree’s hollow.
“What is that?” I’ve seen many magicks, all of them secondhand, but this seems unfamiliar to me.
“This is a portal,” she says. “I never thought I’d see one, either. They require huge amounts of energy to generate… energy well beyond the limits of most of us humans.”
Hesitantly, she reaches her hand toward the magical swirl. “What are you doing, Annette?”
“If we’re going to figure out where this leads, there’s only one thing to do. And that means taking a bit of a risk.”
I try to protest… try to pull her away. But as soon as her hand is close enough, the portal sucks her in, and her entire body disappears in the tree’s hollow.
