Page 13 of Prince of the Sun

At the sound of his nickname, Saechon seems to soften. “Then tell me.”

“I’m not positive that it is what I think it is. I need more time to investigate. But I’ve made all the arrangements, and—”

“Daerios,” Saechon interrupts. “You need to be absolutely sure. More than absolute—you need to be willing to bet your life on it. You remember what happened to the last elf who claimed to have found it.”

Neither speaks. The chill rising between them seeps out the window and settles over me too.

“I will be,” Daerios says at last. “As I said, I’ve made all the arrangements. I won’t come forward until I’m absolutely certain.”

“Good. Keep me updated with regular status reports. Same method as always.”

“I’ll send word with Râd.”

Râd?I’ve never heard of him. Or her, or them—dis a gender-neutral ending to a Lukkarin name. I needed to figure out who they are. If I can identify their messenger, I might be able to intercept them.

“I’m off, then,” says Saechon. “I need to stop off at Yale before I head back overseas.”

“Send my love to Lûthie.”

I press a hand to my mouth to keep from laughing. Did I truly just hear that?

“I will.”

The muffled clap of a hand as it grabs onto a wrist, then a second as the other brother returns the favor—the elvish version of shaking hands. I can picture them: face-to-face, grasping each other’s wrists.

“Naválaev,brother.”

Be well.The most common Maevish farewell.

“Naválaev.”

And with that, my first real chance at learning the elves’ secrets rides off into the night.

The next morning, I head to the coffee bar inside the Science Center. I select a table squeezed into the back corner and set my laptop up with the screen facing away from the crowd. Then I spread a variety of textbooks and worksheets around the computer, for effect.

I’m supposed to be studying the evolution of language. We have a quiz on the diachronic phoneme analysis next week, and I’ve barely started reviewing language interaction or emergent grammars.

Instead, I’m reading about the elves.

I do this every week: set aside a few hours to comb through Harvard’s various online databases, looking for any piece of literature I can find on the elves. I take four courses each semester, but privately, I think of this as my fifth. I took it freshman fall and freshman spring. I’ll take it sophomore fall and spring. I’ll take it every semester until graduation, if I have to. And if I don’t find the answers I seek before then, then I’ll apply to graduate school and then do a secret PhD in Elvish Infiltration.

I open LexusNexus and type in my usual keyword:elaërion.I hit enter and scroll straight to the bottom, clicking through the page numbers until I reach page seventeen, where I left off last week.

I love studying. I know that’s an unpopular opinion, but it’s true. To me, there’s something about opening a book, spreading out my papers, plugging in my headphones, and giving all of my attention to just one task. It sucks me in. Takes my mind off stress, or anger, or the elves, or my half-broken family, even if just for an hour or two.

The first link is purple, which means I must have looked at it last week. I click the second one and wait as a PDF of a newspaper clipping from 1977 slowly loads onto the screen. The headline reads:KING VARITH REVEALS JUICY NEW DETAIL IN ANNUAL ADDRESS.

I’ve seen enough sensationalist headlines like this one to know that the “juicy new detail” in question is probably something like:the sky on Elaërion is blue.

Elaërion is the elves’ home realm. The place they left and to which they have not returned in over a century.

No human brings up Elaërion to the elves. It’s an unspoken rule. To do so is to pry into their past, into the reasons why they left to come here. But when it comes to academia—and to the far more unregulated depths of the internet, like Reddit or ElfWiki, their fandom database—the subject is fair game.

I zoom in on the PDF and start to read.

Thanks to my childhood obsession with the elves, I came to Harvard with the basics of elvish history already committed to memory.

Once upon a time, ten species of elves coexisted on Elaërion: Sun Elves, Air Elves, Fire Elves, Shadow Elves, Snow Elves, Wood Elves, Water Elves, Wild Elves, Nymphs, and Dryads. For millennia, they lived separately, in tentative peace, but at somepoint—most sources say around a thousand years ago—a war broke out. The Elemental War, it was called. It lasted for over a hundred years and was ultimately won by the Sun Elves, under the leadership of Varith Ariar and Adan Meldë. At the close of the Elemental War, the leaders of each species signed the Treaty of Ten, which established the Sun Elves as Elaërion’s leaders, elevating them to the status of High Elves. Certain individuals or families from other species were also chosen to rule, sitting on the High Council or overseeing certain aspects of governance, as a way to foster lasting peace between the species. All Sun Elves are High Elves, but not all High Elves are Sun Elves.