The priests remained silent.

The fire began to die down. Elder Kezler stoked it. I got up to feed it more wood, but another elder ran up ahead of me. I sat back down. The other elder dropped the firewood on the fire, and I watched the wood slowly catch the flame. The flame licked the surface of the wood, slowly turning the outer bark dark with flecks of red and orange interspersed along its length.

Priest Oxi opened his mouth, but closed it once again. Unlike the campfire, Noel’s glare was unrelenting. I felt like the priests were too intimidated to speak. Or perhaps they knew they had made Noel angry, and were wondering whether they should go back to groveling and asking for her forgiveness.

I looked at Noel. I knew that she wanted to know where her family had gone. The two graves we had seen by the Roja tribe’s cave, and the elfin skull here at Bek Tepe, had already filled her mind with many questions and worries. Who had died? Who had lived? Was her family still somewhere out there, and if they were, how could she find them?

And of course, why had a tribe of humans taken the name of her own tribe?

See, Noel was smart. Smarter than she might at first appear. She knew that there was something seriously wrong with the stories the human tribes had told us so far. Stories of elves teaching humans, elves ascending into immortality, and a tribe of humans taking the name of their saviors and leading the rest of the humans in the elves’ stead.

“Our ancestors were rescued by the ancient elves,” said priest Oxi at last. “When the elves ascended, our ancestors joined together to form our tribe, and took the name of their saviors to honor them.” He almost teared up as he bowed his head. “To think, that I would live to meet a real elf of the Jora tribe. I am finally fulfilling the dreams of my ancestors.” The other priests were similarly enthused.

“How did they know?” I said, asking the question that I knew Noel was about to ask. Maybe they wouldn’t hesitate as much to answer my questions.

“Know what, great one?” asked priest Oxi.

“The name,” said Noel. “Jora. How did they know what the elves called their tribe?”

The priest blinked. “The same way we know what you call yourselves, great one.”

“No, you can’t understand me right now,” said Noel as she switched off her translation magic. Of course, I could still understand her since I had kept mine activated.

The priest opened his mouth and closed it again. He furrowed his thin, droopy brows. “I am sorry, great one, I cannot understand you.”

“I know,” said Noel. “But your ancestors. It seems they could understand my tribesmen. Why?”

“It must have been your magic, great one,” said the priest. “Although we learned what we could from the ancient elves, our understanding of magic is still quite wanting. I had not even realized that you were using magic to speak to us right now. The ancient elves must have used the same magic.”

“That isn’t possible,” I said. “Only the two of us can use this magic.”

“Only the two of you?” said the priest. His eyes brightened. “You must be the most powerful magicians, even in the elfin tribes. No wonder you can travel freely from the immortal plane!”

“We aren’t immortals!” shouted Noel, forcefully. The priests were taken aback. They began apologizing profusely, and even the elders of the other tribes turned their heads down, for some reason.

I put a hand on Noel’s shoulder. She was breathing heavily. I was pretty annoyed at being compared to the beings who had put us in this situation, but Noel’s frustrations were mounting. We weren’t getting a lot of information from these priests, and they didn’t seem to understand the question we were asking or the accusation we were implicitly making.

“I think they might need an explanation,” I said, slowly. I patted Noel’s shoulder a couple of times, and made her look me in the eye. She calmed down a little. I turned to the priests. “This magic was gifted to us by powerful beings, known as immortals. Only the two of us possess this magic, and it allows us to translate any language to a certain degree of accuracy. That is how we are able to understand you, even though we do not speak your language.”

“I understand, great one,” said priest Oxi.

“No, you don’t,” I said. “You don’t understand and I’ll tell you why. Your people claim to have learned magic from our elfin Jora tribe, yet you do not even know the fundamentals of magic. I know this to be the case, since if you knew the fundamentals, you would not still be living in caves after so many generations.

“Your people claim to have named themselves after our elfin Jora tribe, yet there should have been no way for your tribesmen to have understood our language. We have confirmed, by disabling and re-enabling our translation magic, that the way you say the name of your tribe is the same as the way it is pronounced in the elfin language, even though it should have been awkward to use a word from such a completely different language in your own.

“Those two facts, if considered alone, should suggest that your ancestors learned what they could from our people, but were unable to learn everything. Perhaps they imitated what our tribesmen were doing when they cast magic, understanding what they could from gestures and objects. Perhaps they adopted the name after hearing the elves use it to refer to themselves, which was why it was taken as a whole word instead of being localized or transformed to suit your own tongue.

“But this explanation has one glaring flaw: time. It has been many generations since your people met ours. Over the great expanse of time, many things should erode. Language, customs, histories, and myths. Anything that is transmitted purely through the ages by word of mouth, should be distorted and altered. Most of all, a foreign word that sits awkwardly on your lips, standing out among all the other words that you have been saying to us.

“Your own history, despite the crude carvings on the walls of the passageway to this temple, should not have stood the test of time so well without a more robust method of recording. And yet, you are able to tell us the name of the tribe that rescued your ancestors, as well as the reaction of those ancestors, and how the elves came to ascend to their immortality. I can assume that some parts of this history are incorrect. It is unlikely that any elf ascended to becoming an immortal. Yet, the story remains so compact and believable. Almost as if it was sanitized from the natural morphing of narratives over generations.

“Are you telling me, no parent was tempted to invent a stern, scary elf who would punish their children if they didn’t listen? Are you telling me no great storyteller has invented a trickster; a clever elf that won things like sunlight and stories from a great demon or god, thus making storytelling a great gift? That there is no elf of love, no elf of hate? No elf of storms, no elf of sky? That other deities were not merged into the overarching story, creating a more complicated mythos, as would be natural when several different tribes were brought under the banner of this one cult that meets every year at the summer solstice?

“It doesn’t make sense, priest from the tribe that took our name. Your name, so beautifully preserved, as if to tease us for having been forced into the future alone, does not make sense. Your history, so sanitized from the history of others or the history that should have come after you met our tribe, does not make sense. And your mythology, revolving around the ancient elves who achieved immortality instead of the many natural phenomena, creative archetypes, or other aspects of reality that exist around us, none of it makes any sense.

“You and your tribe, no, the existence of any of the tribes of the double river basin, at least in the form that they are in right now, it does not make sense. And from our experience.” I stood up. Noel stood up too. The elders and priests, still a step behind and making strange expressions after hearing my words, also stood up.

“From our experience,” continued Noel. “Whenever things do not make sense, there can only be one explanation.” Noel pointed to the sky, where at some point in the night, both a full moon and a pulsing red star had suddenly appeared, shining more brightly than they had ever before.

The other humans around the various tents mulled around unperturbed. Nobody pointed to the sky, or commented on how bright it was. Only the elders and priests whose gazes followed the direction of Noel’s finger, had a silver and red glow reflect on the surface of their eyes, transfixing their eyes and mouths wide open.

I chuckled because the scene looked comical.

I could have sworn I heard the echo of a laugh come from somewhere in the distance.