“By Enriah,” Grant breathed as the invisible orb hovering over the demon’s shoulder focused on the red dragon. Larger than a nightmare, it reared its head back, making the audience realize how small they truly were.

“It appears that the demon has chased the Scourge to a city in the middle of being attacked by a dragon,” Grant said.

A hushed murmur travelled through the audience in the arena as they stared at the massive magical projection in the center of the sand circle, set up specially for this live broadcast.

“Are we listening to the same feed?” Theold asked, glancing over at Grant. “He said ‘my demesne’.”

“Implying that he was conquering it.”

“There are fucking flags with his picture on it!”

“Ah, the Scourge seems to have goaded the dragon into attacking, and the demon is making a play for him…. and it seems as though the Scourge has succeeded in getting the two to clash.”

“Let’s see where the Scourge is now,” Grant said, spinning the control of the Watcher so it was looking backward over Kein’Maddal’s shoulder. The clone’s words were indecipherable in the commotion, but the raised middle finger spoke for itself.

A blast of flame filled the vision of the Watcher, targeted at the Scourge.

“Could this be it?” Grant shouted.

The audience waited breathlessly… but when the fire faded away, the Scourge remained, now cowering behind a kneeling woman. The clone scooped her up with super-elven speed and carried her away.

“It seems as though some kind of human spellcaster stepped in to aid the Scourge!” Grant shouted, standing. His commentator’s chair clattered to the ground behind him. “What could this mean!?”

“Means he’s getting help from someone with elf blood, I suppose,” Theold said with a shrug. “A Ranger, probably. The defensive barrier had about the same performance as the one we teach them.”

The clone ran into an alley with the woman over his shoulder and disappeared. Grant, experienced director that he was, zoomed back in on the action--the fight between the demon and the dragon, two beasts they had little hope of capturing for a fight in the arena. In a way, this was its own opportunity.

“Be at ease, folks, the demon cannot die by mortal means. He has the blood scent of the Scourge, so consider this an appetizer to the main event. Although I’m ashamed to admit this may put the Scourge’s execution to shame.” Grant made sure they got an up-close image of flying talons and gnashing teeth.

The Watcher’s screen suddenly emitted a flash of light that seared Grant’s eyes and elicited a cry from the spectators. Then the screen went dark.

Grant placed a hand over his microphone and glanced at the technician standing beside him. “The hell just happened?”

Sam sat by the fire in his underwear, his soaked toga spread out on branches above, catching as much heat as they could. They were a few miles upriver, resting on a bank, and Sam intended to get another few miles of distance as soon as his clothes were dry.

Faera sat removed from the orange flames and smoke, completely dry. She rocked back and forth, chanting and moving her stiff fingers in slow patterns.

“Is that a spell?” Sam asked, watching.

“Special Forces have to master six spells in order to qualify,” she said, nodding. “Right now, I’m doing first aid on my hands.” Sure enough, her movements were smoother and faster than when she had started, albeit not a lot faster.

“What are the six?” he asked.

“A barrier, healing, tracking, navigating, a simple attack spell, and one to allow me to communicate with other Spec-ops silently.”

“That’s not a lot.”

Faera snorted, continuing to chant and move her hands. Now that Sam was paying attention, he could see the swelling of her pink flesh slowly receding.

“Could you teach me?” Sam asked.

Faera stopped in place and gave him a look like he was a stupid, stupid child. “No.”

Sam stood up, then came to sit right in front of her, still in his underwear. “Don’t mind me,” he said, then began mimicking her movements and chanting. He took care to tune his words and actions as close to hers as possible, from the movement of his hands, to the angle of his elbows, the straightness of his back, and the syllables that flowed from her lips.

“That won’t work!” Faera shouted, drawing Sam’s attention to her face. “You’re not--”

“Not what?” Sam asked without stopping. “Not an elf?” He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. At the very least, I can bluff experts if I know the form perfectly.”

Sam used his implant to bring up the memory of Theold waving his hand. It irritated him, watching his eyelids sink shut at the old man’s command ‘sleep’, but he reviewed the scene over and over, trying to figure out exactly what the old man had done. Sam opened up the memory of the sheriff who had also put him to sleep. He was fairly sure it’d been the same spell.

Sam ran the two memories side by side, matching the timing with the command. It wasn’t like watching two screens side by side, but more like superimposing them on top of each other, which gave Sam a slight headache as he meticulously compared the movements of the two elves.

There. There it was. The sheriff had tucked one hand behind his waist while he was helping Sam up, and it was at that exact moment that Sam spotted a bit of movement from inside the sleeve of the old man. Sam isolated the footage and tried to piece together the exact gestures they had made. The skewed angle of the sheriff didn’t make it easy, and it was impossible to tell exactly what Theold’s fingers had been doing, but Sam was confident he was on the right track.

A snap of fingers in front of his face brought him back to the present, and Sam stored the memory snippets he had isolated for later review.

“You can’t because you’re a human, you don’t have the aptitude for it, and you haven’t Molted,” Faera said, gazing into Sam’s eyes.

“What?” Molted? Like a snake?

“Where we come from, there is an energy that accumulates in all living things. Over time, every living thing absorbs tiny amounts of this energy, growing beyond what humans would consider natural. Of course it was always natural to us.”

“What does that have to do with Molting?”

“Don’t interrupt. Anyway, these living things from my plane, when they die, they release that energy back into the environment. But it isn’t like here on earth; it’s not a slow, gradual process. This energy is released all at once in a silent explosion. If a person was standing next to this explosion, they would absorb some of it.”

“Ah,” Sam said.

“If the person were to absorb a large amount, it could be toxic. They come down with a fever as their body struggles to find a way to cope with that energy. If they survive, then when the fever breaks, they find themselves more powerful than they were before. The energy has found an outlet, and is now theirs.”

“Hence, Molting.”

“Exactly.”

“So why not get a bunch of people in a room, and arrange to slaughter a bunch of creatures in their presence, really soak up all that--”

“Stop,” Faera said. Her gaze was unwavering. “That line of thought has already reached its natural conclusion. Our world was broken by a war between an elite class who held all the power in the world--they raised generations of people, for thousands of years, simply to kill them and bathe in their essence--and the pitiful wretches they treated like livestock. The resulting war is what broke our world, and only the Gates allowed us to escape the devastation. For all I know, the war is still going on, but we have no part in it.

“It is now highly illegal to force a Molt. Any profession that experiences its share of death will naturally Molt more often than others, though.”

Sam, considering her words, was chewing on his lip when something dawned on him. His life up until this point seemed to be word-for-word the situation he’d just described. A handful of people locked in a room, slaughtering non-stop, and Tyranus…

“Could Tyranus be doing that?”

“That’s…” Faera spoke, before halting. “A dragon wouldn’t…”

“’Cause it sounds reasonable. I mean, nothing on earth lives as long as elves, so one of them would have to be worth, like, a thousand humans, right?”

“Maybe more,” Faera whispered. “The energy is cumulative.”

“Hmm.” Sam rubbed his chin while he thought. His bristles were beginning to get long now. That was right, this body was only three years old. Three years and two months, if the LED calendar in the testing facility that counted time since the last Generation was to be believed.

While he was supposed to have been around upwards of five hundred years, if his body was only three years old, and if things worked the way Faera said they did, it meant he probably hadn’t Molted. Unless this energy she spoke of followed his mind, and not his body. The energy from her home plane seemed to follow its own laws of physics, so why not?

“Can you teach me anyway?” Sam asked. “I think it’s a long shot, but any little bit could help.”

Faera stared at him for a while. “No.”