The Elf

The court fades, leaving you at the table. Looking down, your own shimmering silver form begins to firm together, the complexly decadent body of a regal elven woman rising from the mist. You're wearing long dark robes, featureless in everything but how they hug some areas and give room in others. The other people at the table begin to fade and diffuse into the air, melting away toward their cores, leaving only balls of multi-colored light where they once sat. All but the elf, who looks at you down her nose, domineeringly. The table begins to shrink, leaving only the two of you and the judge.

"So it is, the possession of this new body falls to the pair of you."

The table shortens and folds inward on itself, making the room ripple and readjust. The **** pulls you and the elf together, melting her form with your own. An easy feat, considering the body she has chosen for you was essentially a copy of her own, at least at a glance. You remain in front of the judge, just one person surrounded by the balls of light. Each of them slowly draws in, crawling into your ears with tingling electricity. When you and the judge are all that remains, they nod.

"So it is."

The room cracks, the sound of rushing water seeming to fill the cabin with the torrents of an ocean. The judge shimmers silver one final time, giving you a flash of the image of a great dark figure, writhing with an unknowable amount of tendrils. It fills you with terror beyond imagination, reducing you to an insect in the face of a god.

You wake in intense fright, feeling the ground come up to meet you as the room falls up and away. It takes a moment to piece what is real together again, but the sight of the castle looming on the cliffside helps bring it back. That and a different kind of fear.

The sun has begun to rise over the forest across the lake. Behind you, the castle looms silently. Most of its visage is obscured by the black soil of a sharp cliffside, the looming overhang of earth making the whole thing seem to look down on you sharply. On your sandy shore outside of it, the outlet of your passway from the inner chambers spits water continuously, pinpointing in your ears where the dream flood began. The water from the passway forms a small stream that feeds into the lake, the dark amber of the water showing a certain taint and corruption to the lake you had not noticed before. Still, the lake seems to hold out a certain cleanliness in spite of it. Some of the woodland animals drink from it in the cool dawn. The day is young, peaceful as the world starts to wake. You pick yourself up, dusting yourself off and looking around.

You hadn't noticed your body before collapsing, to see it now you see a perfect mirror of what the elven woman had told you. You have long hair, black as pitch but crusted somewhat by the golden sand that served as your pillow. Some of it clings to the coal-colored skin of your face as well, causing you to raise a delicate hand to your face to brush it away. The long slender fingers and the black-on-black of your features and clothing make you stand out in the daylight.

"It is why my kind were often nightwalkers, the sun was an ally to few."

You freeze for just a moment, the smoke and texture of her voice paired with the regal flair of her accent makes her words cut through the silence like a surgical knife. Her voice is hard to separate from that of your former mistress, but it sounds far livelier. When she perceives your reaction, it seems like you can even hear some humor in her carefully-spoken sentences.

"So soon you would forget the pact you made when you chose me, do not tell me that you forgot the body you chose as well? I would suspect it was your choice because you knew the power and desires it could grant you. Perhaps now to carry the weight of it dampens the fun?"

You curl and uncurl your fingers, the weight of your body starting to set and match the shape. You begin to feel outward through the meat of your form, feeling flowing into long limbs and longer fingers. Your hand is delicately thin, spiderlike in appearance with spindly fingers. The skin of them is soft, delicate. There are curves hidden in your robe that are nothing short of decadent. Between your legs...

The woman chuckles, "Yes, it would do you well to become familiar with the weight of it. The heat of it. It will be a constant ally and enemy alike. Many of the noble line fell to hedonism by that weight and that heat."

The tool hanging between your legs is anything but womanly. On any common man, it would look oversized. On the slender and tall frame of your new body, the size of it is just as outlandish as the voluptuous curves that surround it. You sink a hand between your legs and grip it through your robes, the heat radiating off of it is downright intense.

"You needn't become that familiar with it," The woman mutters. "There will come time when I can show you the pleasures it can bring. I can also show you how to silence its barking voice when you need to control yourself. I shall not do either in the shadow of this castle."

Where would you even go? An incomplete map of the area starts to fill out in your head. The elven woman grimaces.

"Then it is true, the empire of the stars has fallen?"

There's a quick surge of memories. The elven woman wreathed in magic, the world becoming blurry around her. It was the height of the empire, it was her day to celebrate. She couldn't go yet, not for something so minor! She just needed more time. Then the Duke, pursuing the last of the empire's once-great amazons across a plain. A lifetime or several apart, two different worlds. The jester remembers watching the queen go up in blue light at the height of the empire, calling her name that he was forbidden to speak. At last, the mage remembers studying tomes of their reign. The remaining elves are a rarity, perhaps the crusaders went too far in service of their god. The crusader remembers not going far enough.

You shake your head, if you keep letting each voice get their two cents in, that's a hole you might never crawl back out of. The mage's memories seem the most relevant. The empire of the stars, an elven name for that Ghaniman Empire. Reigning from the dawn of recorded history to the **** of queen Sabiha around three thousand years ago. After which, the empire suffered a series of despots, ending properly around three hundred years ago. Wait, three thousand? Three hundred??

"Time moved for me but yesterday, as I experienced it..." The elf laments. The name Sabiha rings for her, deep magic in the utterance, should the right person use it. That's why she doesn't identify by it, why the man-pets were to call her Sabba. Why you are expected to call her Sabba, even with an elven body.

There's a complex twisting web of histories in your head, so far as you can tell, hers is the messiest. It starts the earliest, but some others overlap it. Her own history is centuries-long, even untangling the parts she remembers and not the three thousand years she hasn't experienced would be a feat. It is enough to start to understand that one day she ruled, the next she vanished. Filled with flame, pulling apart by the edges.

"I... would like time. Time to see what the world has become."

Where to start? You're not sure you have several hundred years to walk the earth to piece together the lamentations of an old soul.

"To the capital, ideally. Let me see where my kingdom once stood. Let me soothe the soul with the senses."

Unfortunately, you don't really have a map to an empire that fell over a thousand years ago.

"I walked these lands once, even this sty we lie in now. Let me feel the strengths of this body, let me push the muscles to move."

You settle back, allowing her to surge control through you. You close your eyes, ready to feel yourself propelled by her movements.

And nothing happens.

You wait long enough for it to get awkward, you consider saying something, but she spares you the trouble.

"This... isn't working. Why isn't it working?"

To move your hand is an effortless task, for her to do it seems an impossible one.

"It seems that for now, I can assert no control. That we truly are stuck together."

Her voice betrays that she didn't expect that to be the case. You have no doubt in your mind that she would have gladly overwritten your control and walked off with your body, your consciousness in tow. As much as she is not a "friend" to you, you remind her that you have no actual plans with what to do with your life. You need guidance from her, in more ways than one. Should she want to go to the capital, she need simply to tell you the way.

"Thank you," She mutters, it's the first time any of her words have sounded sincere. "Let us get out of the shadow of this place. The road ahead is long."