[center][b]The Queen of Souls[/b][/center]

Cabriel walked unevenly down the alley, his slender elf legs still shaking from his trip through the Junkyard and its maze of steel and iron. A flock of faery children, noticing the rapier at his side, scattered from their play. They left behind them chalk scrawlings of flowers, trees and sidewalk games. Oddly innocent doodles for the oppressive despair of the Blight. Along with them was a familiar image, a ring of two dimensional mushrooms, drawn in a circle upon the cracked concrete. Checking all dark corners for unwanted eyes, Cabriel stepped into the center of the chalk fairy ring and pulled a vial from his buttoned coat. One slender drip fell from the tube and struck the ground between the high elf's polished boots. The concrete, previously stable, wavered like the asphalt roads on a hot day and consumed the faery like a bed of quicksand. The moment his blond head vanished beneath the ground, it stabilized leaving no evidence of the doorway but the chalked mushrooms which encircled it.

The high elf shielded his eyes as he walked from the dark passage into the atrium. Under the warm, enchanted light of magical crystals the highest of the highborn lounged. Courtiers and courtesans, some busied themselves with rare delicacies, magical grapes and roasted cockatrice, while others played with their human toys, vapid, beautiful addicts of magic who laid at their feet like dogs and purred like cats as they were stroked. Cabriel walked quickly past the degenerates. He held his Queen in the highest regard for her sole concern was the continuance of their race, but he could not understand why she insisted on keeping those decadent elves around. Two knights in full mithril plate, relics of an age long past, stepped aside for their senior. Cabriel watched them move fluidly in their metal skins, doing justice to his training. Mithril armor was not like the crude, clunky iron or steel suits human soldiers wore. It molded to the body and hindered it less than even simple leather. Sadly these two suits and his own, were among the last in existence.

Beyond the mindless chatter and giggles of the court, Cabriel found Juliana where she spent most of her days. Beneath the glow of the overhanging prisms, bathed in magical radiance, her face buried in the pages of an ancient tome far older than even Granny Oak. While she read, pixie and wisp servants flew about her like a swarm of bees about their nest. While the wisps provided clear light for her reading and whispered their scholarly opinions in her ears, the pixies made over her appearance, twisting red hair into braids and applying pink nail polish to dainty spread toes and slender fingers.

"The meeting went well?" came the Queen's voice, ageless and wise, from behind the scuffed cover of her book.

Cabriel fell to a knee and bowed his head, eye level with his majesty's ongoing pedicure, "yes your highness. The 'boss' of the wyldlings has agreed to your terms and yielded the location of the changeling."

The book fell revealing a face which couldn't be older than twelve but which contained eyes that had seen centuries. "Well done, my brave knight." She placed a soft small hand upon the high elf's head and warm magic flowed into him, driving away the last pangs of the iron sickness like the heat of a hearthfire upon cold bones. When her voice came again it was close, intimate and for his mind only. He met Juliana's all knowing eyes, as her calm, determined voice penetrated his thoughts. 'You are to go with a pair of knights to the Boggart's Hole. Be discreet and if possible convince her to come of her own volition. Use your glamer to touch her with betrayal as you tell her the truth about Adin and how he has turned on her.'

Cabriel wasn't remotely surprised the Queen already knew all he did about the changeling and her location. There were no secrets, neither of heart nor mind, in the light of her legendary glamer. That's how she got her name on the streets after all, the Queen of Souls. 'My lady I still don't understand... this changeling, why not just kill her and be done with it. I know a goblin assassin who could....'

[b]'NO,'[/b] despite being only in his mind, the force of the word hurt his ears, 'the changeling is essential.'

'....But they are just freaks?...'

A clever smile curled across Juliana's youthful cheeks and Cabriel followed his lady's eyes up to the glowing crystals which studded the ceiling. 'Do you know how I created the phoridia, the star stones?'

'Your books....'

A shadow passed Juliana's face and for a moment Cabriel could feel the weight of a horrific memory pressing on the other end of the telepathic bond. 'That's right, my knight,' she placed a hand upon the ancient tomes and gestured to its many brothers and sisters stowed in shelves about the study. 'Records of the ancient time, forgotten alchemy and lost history, saved from the fires of the human rebels at the fall of our people centuries ago, passed to my grandmother from her mother, from my grandmother to my mother and from my mother to me... I have read them all, many times over and others procured by your valiant efforts in the the underworld, Cabriel,' She gave her loyal knight an appreciative smile and he felt a pride enhanced by her glamer burn in his chest. 'Under the life extending light of the phoridite crystals I have learned much. For example.... I now know what the wizards were.'

'Wizards? But they are a human myth, the ugly ones can't bend magic to their will, they can only vomit it from their bowls like those abominations in the junkyard.'

'Changelings have more control, do they not?'

'An anomaly.'

'And so many think, but I've learned differently. Cabriel what I tell you here must not pass from your lips for it will endanger all my plans. I tell you only so that you know what's at stake and why the changeling must be preserved at all costs.'

'My liege you have my oath as always, my true name is yours to call.'

'As you say [b]Kynerell[/b]. But first, let me ask you this: what is a changeling?'

'The spawn of some enchanted reprobate obviously.'

'And how did humans live before the War of Broken Names?'

'In their rightful place as our enchanted servants.'

'Well think, my knight, for centuries we bred enchanted humans as livestock. A changeling like this Claire creature is first generation. Those who lived in our courts and from whom the first wizards arose were tenth or twentieth generation and with each magical birth their control over the arcane became greater. The wizards, Cabriel, were changelings.'

'.... that's impossible.'

Juliana looked once more to her books, 'it's all on those ancient pages written in the elegant hand of our ancestors. Wizards are extinct only because humans chose iron and steel over magic. It vanished from their blood over the generations until they returned to the barren state in which we found their savage ancestors living so many ages ago.'

'But if this is true... why not kill her. She's a danger to us all.'

Juliana smiled a knowing smile. Her almost divine confidence flowed across the bond until Cabriel thought he might float off the floor, 'not if she and her progeny are our allies and I mean to make sure they have no other choice in the times to come.'