Alphiriel solitaire

Nick and Ev wanted to know what happened in Alphiriel's solitaire turn and then I absolutely forgot that I wrote this, so here it is, several months after the fact. 

It can hardly be called a real Thornwallow family dinner unless someone loses their temper, can it.

“Useful? In what possible way?” says Elerith, tilting his chair back on two legs, which Alphiriel knows their mothers both hate. A human sort of gesture, thought Elerith would never admit it. Impossible not to pick up a mannerism or two when you spend so much time around them.

Alphiriel delicately spears a perfectly roasted miniature squash off of a platter and transfers it to their plate. No need for their family to know they will be utterly unable to taste it. “They have the aptitude. With a bit of direction, I imagine we could, in short order, construct ourselves quite the serviceable force of foot soldiers.”

“To what end? To fight the Order?” Elerith laughs, an objectively beautiful sound, which Alphiriel finds nearly more irritating than being laughed at. “They fight each other already. Why expend the effort? Why insert ourselves -”

“They will tire of battering away at each other sooner or later, and that is, apparently, the absolute soonest we will think to be sorry for not cultivating allies among them,” says Alphiriel sourly, never mind that they held the same opinion as recently as a few days ago.Their younger mother, at one end of the long table, gives them a stern look, which Alphiriel ignores. Aethyr, who dislikes these sorts of dinner table disagreements, has ducked their head and engaged themself with their vegetables behind an intentionally-placed curtain of hair. Alphiriel is prepared to ignore them also, as they often do. When Aethyr has anything to say about anything, it tends to be the recycled rhetoric of their older brother, and as far as Alphiriel is concerned, one of Elerith is quite enough.

Elerith, lowering his chair back onto all four legs, leans forward over the table and rests his chin on a fist, looking Alphiriel cooly in the eye. “Don’t think I haven’t seen you with that witch. The one wearing the shoddy illusion at the ball last week? This wouldn’t be the first time a dalliance swayed you away from the well-lit path, sibling.”

“As if you’ve never dallied with a human,” Alphiriel snorts.

At that, their older mother finally interjects, “Children. Enough.”

“I saw them in the labyrinth,” pipes up Aethyr from behind their hair, the little traitor. “With a human. From the Order.” 

Elerith’s eyes take on a hunter’s single-minded intent. “Aethyr. Do tell.”

Aethyr already looks as if they regret speaking, which they should, thinks Alphiriel, glowering in their direction. “She was in attendance at the ball as well. You danced with her, brother.”

Alphiriel sees the exact moment when Elerith remembers the Lieutenant’s face. A grin, subtle, just a hint of canines. “Ah. Whose bed have you not stumbled into, dear Alphiriel?”

Alphiriel does not deign to answer the question, though the desperate battle between the witch and the alchemist is quite fresh in their mind. A true pleasure to observe. The witch who called themself Winters, holding the clear upper hand, wild with fire and lightning and triumph. The bitterly stubborn alchemist, taking her beating with her teeth gritted and blood in her hair. An encounter of the most mundane sort, despite the charged blasts of magic crackling through the air. Just fury, raw, unforged. No elegance to it at all.

That was what gave them the idea. That microcosm of the whole thing. The witches and the Order, flinging themselves impotently against each other, the Lords and Ladies looking on in mild to moderate amusement, confident in their security at society’s zenith. Now, for once, there is something to fight over. The new ley line. Untapped. Unclaimed. 

Alphiriel sets down their fork, watching Elerith across the table. “If the Order were to lay claim to the ley line, the worst they could do would be to put it off limits to the rest of us. If the witches prevailed, however - that sort of rampant use of unshaped magic could quite easily level the city. Imagine, in contrast, a ready force of well-trained -”

“Pets? They would hardly be good for much else,” says Elerith. “Trained birds with clipped pinions, unable to hunt.” 

“Falcons,” counters Alphiriel, “obedient, dependent, natural talents honed to a thorn’s point.”

“Bit of a human impulse, don’t you think? Domesticating that which ought to be wild.”

Aethyr snickers.

“Shut up, Aethyr.” Alphiriel pushes their plate away, fed up with the pretense of eating. “This dismissal of human ways and habits serves us poorly in the long term, you know. One day we will turn round and discover that the humans have evolved behind our disinterested backs and now find themselves capable enough to roust us from our roosts. I know how you despise looking stupid, dear brother, and I cannot tell you how stupid you shall look the day a human gets the better of you.”

Elerith tilts his head back and laughs, a long bell peal. “Oh, Alphiriel. Imagine genuinely believing that a mortal pus-bag could ever best one of us -” The laughter cuts off so suddenly, Alphiriel can almost still hear it echoing off the high vaulted ceiling of the dining hall. “Ohhhh. It’s that witch, isn’t it. You think they could do it, don’t you. You think, for some unfathomable reason, that if I stood face to face with that stinking rat, they would be capable of doing anything besides choking slowly to death with a thorny bramble about their throat and tendrils crawling into their mouth and ears and eyes -”

It takes Alphiriel a moment to realize that they’ve risen from their chair. “Elerith.”

He rolls his eyes. “Honestly, sibling, it doesn’t even bother me that you’ve decided to consort with the Order, they’re in our pockets as it is, but all this talk of training up witches? Of granting them access to the knowledge and power held sacred by our people for centuries? You’re talking about making them dangerous. Forge weapons of this rabble and we might actually have to expend some measure of effort to turn the blades from our necks. Perhaps I ought to seek out that witch of yours -”

“They’re not mine.”

“Well, isn’t that precisely what you’re proposing? A well-trained witch on a leash for every self-respecting noble in Vandarael?” Elerith stands as well, steps to the side to allow a servant to scuttle forward and push his chair in. “Well, luckily for your little infatuation, I’ve more pressing business to attend to than chasing down your new toy. Do be assured, however, that should they cross my path again…” Here he smiles, and his eyes are full of ice. “I’ll not spare them on your behalf, sibling. Nor the good Lieutenant.”

Alphiriel grips the edge of the heavy oak table, talons gouging the varnished wood. “Then perhaps you ought to be thorough in your extermination, for you shall never discover from me which of them knows your true name.”

Every other member of the Thornwallow bloodline bolts up from their seats. Before Alphiriel can steel themself, Elerith has already vaulted the table and slammed them full-bodied to the floor, crawling black roots bursting from the fine mosaic stonework beneath them to lash them down securely. Elerith’s unglamoured claws are digging into Alphiriel’s throat, pressing into the arteries at each side. “I’ll kill you,” he says, his voice perfectly even, bordering on conversational, but his lips tremble with fury as he speaks. 

“Alphiriel, you didn’t,” says their younger mother, aghast.

Alphiriel can’t taste the blood on their tongue, even as it coats the inside of their mouth, thick and hot. They smile up at their brother, dropping the glamour that hides their pointed teeth. “Go on then. I may not be around to see you fall, brother, but don’t think I shan’t be enjoying it from the other side of the veil.”

***

Alphiriel only staggers a little as they look for a place to sit in the courtyard. A glamor is covering the four ragged wounds in their neck and hiding the iridescent splash of fresh blood on their clothes, still pearly-clear, not yet dried to rust. But hiding is not the same as healing. That will take time, and more magic than they currently have.

This is almost more humiliating than if Elerith had killed them outright. No, not almost. Definitely more.

Dinner arguments in the Thornwallow household usually stopped short of coming to blows, but to be fair to Elerith - distasteful concept - what Alphiriel has done this time is truly unforgivable. 

Alphiriel draws the wide hood of their cloak up over their head and settles cross-legged on the ground in a patch of shadow. No dancing humans here today, but Alphiriel hopes the witch, Winters, might happen along sooner or later. Thanks to the glamour holding their throat closed, Alphiriel can afford to wait, at least for a little while.

They're quite finished with the Thornwallow family. And the Thornwallow family, and the elven nobility by extension, is quite finished with them.