Chapter 537 — The Elves

She lifted her head and looked around the brightly lit oval hall—at the arched metal frames that joined roof to floor around the chamber, at the rune-lights flickering bright and dim between those frames, at the elven mages passing to and fro throughout the hall—and asked aloud: "How stands the anti-gravity unit?"

The mage charged with monitoring the anti-gravity unit answered at once: "Output steady, Your Majesty. Unit response rate seventy percent."

Seventy percent…

A thousand years ago it had been eighty percent; five thousand years ago, ninety.

The Sunvault Palace was a precious legacy handed down through the generations of the elven race, yet the art of its making had long since been lost; the silver elves of today did not even dare to be certain whether this floating fortress had been designed by elves at all, or whether they had carried it out of some yet more ancient ruin—the overly long history of the Silver Empire and the chaotic age of the primal elves had destroyed far too much inherited memory. Everyone said the elves were the most advanced civilization on this continent, but Belantia herself knew that the elves were merely lying atop a heap of advanced ancient relics; those relics were slowly dying, and the elves' Silver Empire… was slowly dying too.

When would the Sunvault Palace fall?

It seemed no elf in all the generations had ever considered the question; in their hearts, this ancient and eternal floating fortress seemed never to fall. But sitting upon the Throne of Dominion, listening to those ancient, worn-out machines laboring to run, listening to the machine-spirits groan under their burden within her own nervous system, Belantia felt… that in her lifetime, perhaps, she ought to consider the question.

Seven hundred years ago, the Silver Empire could still raise the Great Wall; yet merely because the last vacuum extraction station had shut down two hundred years ago for reasons unknown, the elves of today found even the repair of a single Sentinel Tower fraught with difficulty.

As ruler of the Silver Empire, Belantia did not wish other nations to know of this dreadful decline; but as a member of the intelligent races of Loren, she must warn the human kingdoms of one fact:

The Great Wall would not hold many more years, and the Silver Empire that had once built it… no longer had the power to mend it.

A personal handmaiden stepped forward and bent low beside Belantia's throne: "Your Majesty, you should rest a while."

"Don't worry. The load is very low at the moment."

Belantia waved a hand, then lightly tapped the armrest on the other side of her seat. A synthetic voice, slightly quavering and distorted, echoed through the control hall: "Command input... switching to automatic homing mode..."

A faint tremor ran through the entire Solar Vault. The vast floating fortress departed from the skies of the Highland Kingdom and began a slow flight toward the sprawling forests of the Silver Empire. Belantia shifted her posture in the seat, leaned back against the rest, and tilted her head slightly toward her maid: "Do you still remember Uncle Gaoyang?"

The personal maid who had grown up at her side since childhood nodded: "Back then, you loved following him around."

Belantia laughed. "Following him around to make trouble—dragging him off to visit taverns and the like in the name of the Queen."

Her contact with Gaoyang Cecil had, in truth, never been extensive. The Northern Frontier Army had founded a new kingdom in the continent's north, and settlers busy grappling with the wasteland could hardly find time to journey south often. As ruler of the southern Silver Empire, Belantia had little occasion to leave her own country either. Their only chances for contact had come during a few joint operations between humans and elves—including the groundbreaking and completion ceremonies of the Great Wall, the signing ceremonies of several major accords, and the like. But in those days Belantia was still just a young girl newly seated on the throne, governing nothing at all, with the Empire's power temporarily held in the hands of several regent dukes. That left her ample time to slip away to the encampments of the human kingdoms on every such occasion of exchange.

Her two favorite destinations in those days had been the residence halls of the Kingdom of Anseth and the Kingdom of Typhon—and Typhon at that time was still merely one of the many kingdoms in the continent's east.

"Do you believe the reports that Duke Gaoyang has been resurrected?" the maid could not resist asking. "Though there does seem to be evidence now proving it true..."

"I believe it is true," Belantia said softly. "How could a man who received the blessing of the four elements die so lightly?"

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