My name is Ephaliat, and I have been dead for twenty thousand years, ever since the light was cleaved from the darkness, the water from the land.

My body, a titanic mass of tendrils and tentacles emanating from my single brilliant eye, was buried beneath the earth by my killers, where it laid forlorn for millennia. One of those killers turned on her kin, and for it was maimed and forced into exile; she scurried beneath the surface alongside her worshipers to find my body, and baptized them in my thick black blood, that they might grow strong.

Thus came to be the civilization of the dark elves. During an annual ceremony, every child of thirteen years was engulfed in my ichor, staining their waxy pale skin an obsidian black, gifting them with some element of my former powers over light and darkness.

Yet, also, they gifted me some tiny fragment of their own power. Their blood flowed into me occasionally, by minor wounds that were ignored, by accidents and deaths that happened in my waters on occasion, and I supped at the chance for life. I drank greedily at every opportunity, leaving them gasping and sick after their submergence, but they never ceased their baptismal rites, even as they gave me the chance for consciousness once more.

Do not be confused. After thousands of years of this, I was still but a fraction of my old self. I could not raise the least part of my wounded, ripped-open body, could not stop a single babe from wandering into the thick molasses of my essence that had spilled throughout the cavern I was buried in.

So I prepared to leave. I waited for my opportunity, seeking a host of the best physique, breeding, and magical potential, and I found him after years of searching. A young boy named Ylantar, of the house Jehalaora. When he drew breath beneath my blood, a gasping surprised jerk, I thrust my consciousness in through his mouth, dug myself deep into the bowels of his being, and waited quietly. I stared out through his eyes as he was drawn from my body, listened through his ears to the words spoken by the people who treated my body as a thing killed in a sacred hunt by their goddess and given as fodder to them.

“Ylantar, why did you breathe?” The voice was stern and female. “You can get sick if you do a thing like that.”

“I’m sorry, mother,” he said, bowing his head almost obsequiously low. “It was colder than I was expecting.”

Of course it’s cold. The whole world was cold when I yet lived.

The boy jerked his head at that, glancing around as he sought out the voice in question. I quieted myself, hid in the recesses of his mind. I might reveal myself to him, but not just yet. He eventually seemed to decide that he’d heard nothing, and quietly walked along with his mother back towards the home.

When they arrived at their home, his mother sending him off to his room, to be minded by one of the servants, I paid quiet attention to his behavior. Each scrape of his chair as he read through one of his family's codices, each hum as he put down the book to simply think over what he had read. Occasionally, he would take notes, making white marks on a black surface that was replaceable, as he sorted through things in his mind.

With each passing day, I insinuated myself ever deeper into his body, that I might not be removed were some magic to be used. I could not simply devour the boy from within - I was too weak even for that. Nor would I have - an animated corpse would have less magical power than a still-thriving Ylantar, less capacity to feign life and humanity.

It also gave me the chance to get an idea of these dark elves' civilization, their culture, their despicable religion about worshiping the woman who had killed me. One thing I couldn't help but notice was the matriarchy. Women made the decisions, men merely executed them. It made the decision to possess the boy… seem a little less wise, but I was unable to reverse course, and had to see it through to the end.

Besides - there were ways to work within this context that only a male host could. In societies dominated by men, women often seduced their way into high positions, did they not?

* * *

I saw and heard the boy's daily routine, and it quickly became clear that I had selected a good host, even if perhaps I should have selected a female one. He was clearly doted on by his mother, Llezina. Not in the sense that she spent much time with him - she surely did not - but in the sense that she clearly saw him as among her most capable children, and cultivated his talents appropriately. He had virtually free access to the family codices, as well as two separate tutors. One was Qilanna, a former military officer who was employed as the head of the family guard, with tightly-braided white hair, and a muscular, tall, yet buxom physique, whose job was to teach him swordplay.

The other, his magic teacher, was as new to him as she was to me. All the dark elves - or at least, the baptized among them - had a native talent for two spells, both of them derived from my essence. On the one hand, light, the luminous nature of my being which allowed me to see in the primordial darkness to which I was born. On the other, darkness, as the inky black of night, something I could spread at my will to hide myself from the sight of others. Neither had sufficed to stop their goddess from slaying me.

As such, while Ylantar had been working on his footwork and martial techniques for years now, he had not been so diligent practicing magic until my presence entered him. And, given that his magic - the magic of all the dark elves - came from me? It should only be self-evident that he proved to be a true prodigy in the control and manifestation of light and darkness.

He was taught the basics of magic by his aunt, Aunrae va Jehalaora. She was a rather curvaceous and tall woman, quite beautiful, with her hair done back in a long, single braid. "You are doing very well," she would say, when he would accomplish what I was quite certain was well beyond the capacity of any normal boy his age. "Now, again, but more targeted this time," she declared, and together our wills drew light into a razor-thin cord that slipped through the air and poked at the wall. There was no mess, no spread of the light: it was an utterly perfect shot. "Hmm." She stepped towards the wall, brushing her finger through the space the light went as if to experiment and ensure he hadn't cheated. "It is decent."

It was absurd, is what it was. Aunrae had been quite taciturn and tight-fisted with her praise for Ylantar for all the time he had been training under her. I had worried and wondered if perhaps our combined efforts did not result in the level of apparent talent that I thought - if, perhaps, this world had moved on without me - but I had rather quickly seen what his sister, two years his elder, managed. He was, within thirty days or so of being immersed with me, doing much better than her after two full years.

Then I worried that perhaps she was suspicious of him, that she had some intuition that there was something unusual in how powerful and controlled his magic was. I tried to withdraw subtly, to lower his talents without making it obvious what I was doing, but that, too, didn't change her treatment of him. If anything, she became nicer, if only in the backhanded way one reserves for one's lessers: "That's perfectly good, don't worry." "It isn't like you've done anything wrong, people are just good at different things."

She was lowering him, intentionally avoiding offering him any praise for his successes. It irritated me, primarily because I'd spent a good deal of time, effort, and mental energy seeing if there had been some flaw of technique on my part, only to discover it was nothing more than some internal family squabble. I hadn't seen any conflict between Llezina and Aunrae, but the mortal beings that had grown up in my wake were inclined towards family rivalries.

She's talking down to you, I told him, when she next offered her vaguely-critical attack, something just mute enough that he could have claimed innocence were it pointed out, yet undeniably meant to suggest he was anything less than the most talented young sorcerer of his generation.

His lips twisted on his face for a moment, but otherwise his expression was subdued. This time, he didn't seem to wonder at where my voice had come from, confusing it with his own. Given his placid response, I concluded that he knew what Aunrae was doing. I should practice on my own, I whispered, hoping that he would confuse that with his own thoughts. A teacher so wildly incompetently smothering as Aunrae was going to be a net negative on both of our ability to improve.

By the way he shifted his body weight, as if steeling himself to receive a blow, it appeared he had indeed resolved to practice on his own.

* * *

The first such practice session took place in his room, at night. He had a codex on the subject of the luminous magics, and a bit of light emanated from his palm. He would consult the codex, quietly change the light in its color, brightness, angle, heat, or other features, and hold it in whatever its new state was for a time, before carrying on to the next one.

The entire situation was quite opaque to me - what possible reason could his mother have to give him to a woman she had some rivalry with? Elves, no matter their breed, deeply loved their children. Even the mild cough and fatigue that had come with my entrance into Ylantar's body got her attention and care. After considering it, my focus half on aiding Ylantar in the development of his magic, I simply gave up. I had no idea.

Ylantar created a flicker like a candle, gently swaying to and fro in the room, and managed to affix it to the air before returning to reading. His focus was half on the text before him, half on the magic maintaining the candle light.

The text itself was focused on how, precisely, to twist and reshape the light my essence produced. Some, I must admit, were novel to me, but most were not, the simple change in hue or brightness born of modulations that I had performed a countless number of times in the past. Each time Ylantar occasioned to try a new variation, my will was with him, making it simpler, easier, a movement smooth and simple. He seemed pleased to manage them, and started to play with raising the brightness higher and higher.

Ylantar's room was on the second floor, a single window with a thick curtain occluding the outside world. The dark elves lived within excavated and preexisting caverns; oftentimes, the walls were themselves mere rock bed earth, cool to the touch most of the time. Ylantar had the privilege of a window, his view being that of a grand garden of fungus that grew on the Jehalaora estates. I say all this to establish the scene, as there was the meaty smack of meat against the rim of the window. What's that? I asked, nudging him as subtly as I could manage to the possible intruder. I should go get my mother. It would be centuries at the least before I could gather the strength to take on a host again; I did not want to risk this one.

Instead of going to his mother, though, Ylantar immediately started to walk towards the window, shifting the curtain aside to reveal a young woman, maybe a few years his senior, with white hair cut short and vivid blue eyes, an easy smile on her lips as she clambered up inside the room with him. She had a fit physique, a modest bust, and an easy, boyish smile. She moved without hesitation, her legs swinging over the edge of the window sill, slipping it shut behind her. "How are things going with you, huh?"

"Don't you have work to be doing?" Ylantar asked, giving her a cold look. He knew her. That explained it.

She just chuckled. "Not really." It sounded almost like a shared joke, from the way she said it. "I'll be joining the army soon, I think. Become an officer."

"Didn't know they were letting lazy commoners become officers," Ylantar replied, absently opening and closing his fingers. "It's been over a month since you came by."

"It's so hard to get in here." She actually whined as she said it, rolling her shoulders. "Sorry I couldn't be there for your baptism, but, y'know."

"I know. It's very hard to do things when you're the biggest flake in the world."

"That's right!" She practically rushed forward to him, squeezing him in a tight hug, pinning his arms to his side. He just let out a long sigh, as if this was the most arduous experience of his life. "But I know you love me anyway, right, Illy?"

"Only in the sense one grows to love a three-legged puppy; out of a mix of pity and exasperation."

"I'll take it," she said, continuing to smush her body into his. I felt as much as he did the way his body naturally responded to her closeness, his erection absently pressing against her thigh. With his youth, she still had a few inches on him, but she held him like he was her baby brother, the same casual boredom that one expects of it. Still, she was provoking a base physical reaction in him, and in turn I felt the warmth of her own body rise, spotted out of the corner of Ylantar's eyes the way her eyebrows raised in surprise. "You're getting so big," she said, as she broke off the hug, smiling brilliantly at him.

"Maybe you're shrinking," he said, in a total deadpan, earning a giggle from her. It was obvious to me that she was attracted to him, and she'd spoken of going into the military. I knew even from my brief time with him that Ylantar would be entering the military in a few years; it was simply expected of young men of his social status, and he would be staying there for a decade before getting married off. It was part of the local custom. If he could make such a connection now... I should make sure she'll help me in the military, I attempted. He just snorted.

That was enough to break off the hug. "Something funny?" She asked, almost pouting at him.

"Yeah. I just had the idea that you could be useful to me at some point, which is ridiculous."

"Yeah, probably," she agreed easily, flopping down onto the bed. "I really am thinking of joining the army, though. What else is there to do?"

"Start a household."

"Yeah, with all my fat stacks of coin," she said, kicking her legs. "Maybe with an officer's pension I could manage that."

"Better aim for a soldier's pension, I doubt you'll ever be seeing an officer's pension except from a distance."

"Probably not," she agreed amicably. I had the impression of their relationship that the girl was unerringly lazy, and the boy wished she wasn't, but cared for her anyway. Not in a romantic sense, though. "What are you doing in here anyway? Reading books?" She glanced at the still-open codex on his desk, and he went over to it, letting her look over her shoulder at the pages as she did so. "Studying magic? Don't you have a tutor  to teach you it?"

"Aunt Aunrae is not a very efficacious teacher," he replied blandly.

"Whaaat? Isn't she like this amazing sorceress or something?"

He shrugged. "She's dragging my progress down. I'll continue attending lessons for Mother's sake, but I'm not wasting my time."

"You're my total opposite," the girl replied, shifting her position so she crossed her arms and rested them atop her head. "Vicolene the Lazy and Ylantar the Hard-Working."

"Diligent," he offered mildly.

"Vicolene the Diligent and Ylantar the Hard-Working."

"No, you-" he let out a sigh as he cut himself off. "Diligent means hard-working."

"But I already called you hard-working."

"Different word choices matter for this sort of thing, Vicolene. Some words sound more erudite than others."

"What's erudite mean?"

"Do you intend to become an officer with the vocabulary of a six year old?" He asked, shifting his head to glance halfway up at her.

"I didn't realize that we were gonna be tested on vocabulary instead of, like, tactics and stuff."

"I'm sure your talent with that is just as miserable," was his succinct reply, turning his attention back to the book in front of him.

"Yep!" She agreed easily.

She hummed pleasantly as she read the book from atop his head - he was quickly so engrossed that he paid no mind to the way she was balancing her weight atop him, until, after over an hour, he yawned and stretched, his fist clipping her chin in the process. She let out a hiss of pain. "Ow!"

"You're still here?" Ylantar asked, bewildered.

"Wow... first you get mad at me for not trying, then you get mad at me for trying too hard? Is that fair, you think?"

"I'll get mad at you for whatever I want. I spoil you anyway."

She flopped down onto his bed then, lying on one side. "You're right. Where are my grapes?" She demanded from where she lay.

"They're right up your ass," he countered. "Grapes are way too expensive to waste even a single one on you. Even I don't get to eat them unless we have guests."

"Aren't I a guest?"

"Guests that anybody cares about impressing," he corrected, a slight smirk appearing on his lips. She let out a feigned noise of pain from the bed.

"I'm being bullied by a boy who's barely a month past his baptism... if my mother were here today, she'd be so ashamed."

"Your mother is a servant in this very home."

"Yes, but she's not here," Vicolene countered with an intense gesture to the room as a whole.

He let out a long sigh. "How am I supposed to work with you here?"

"You were working with me here for a whole hour while I was left to just stare down at the book," she declared, stretching her body and letting out a faint groan. "Just forget my presence."

"How can I forget it when you won't shut up?" He said mildly, but turned his gaze back to his book soon enough, the candle light beginning to shift slowly through each hue, moving at a sedate, regular, carefully formed pace as he made sure to make it every color in the rainbow and then start again from the beginning, keeping his pace steady and consistent all the while. He had some help from me, of course, but if he didn't have a clear and focused mind, I doubt I could have managed to get the magic working as well as it was.

At some point, she came over to rest her forearms atop his head again. He let out only the briskest of sighs before becoming absorbed in his studies again, carefully making little calculations on the small tablet to his side.

She left us alone for the night, at the least.

* * *

Aunrae was inspecting his work again. In this case, it was a light that was meant to blind, providing him with a decent chance of taking advantage of his enemies' sudden weakness. The disabling elements of light and dark were among the first ones that young dark elves were taught, for the obvious reason: more elaborate techniques had the risk of not being grasped quickly enough, or not being efficacious in a fight if they weren't entirely made instinctual. Further, something meant to blind rather than to harm carried less risk of some child inadvertently causing permanent damage.

Naturally, with my assistance, Ylantar had mastered it almost instantly, simply drawing up his hand and releasing the burst of blinding light. Over Aunrae's eyes lay a thin film of darkness, as if she were in shadows but only there; a simple method of ensuring one's eyes were protected from the potential damage that an overly-bright burst might create.

She didn't betray any particular feelings, as the light rapidly faded away. "That was much too bright. You could easily do permanent damage, with that luminosity."

Ridiculous. That was perfectly safe. My host, however, simply gave a mute nod. "Let me try it again, then." Aunrae nodded, and he let out another, significantly lighter burst of luminous energy - one slight enough that I doubted it would produce any blinding at all. Perhaps they wouldn't like to look at it, but I could hardly imagine it would actually blind anyone.

"Better. Keep at that level, perhaps even a bit smaller," she said. "Remember, anyone who hasn't specifically protected their eyes is in danger - not just your target. Be sure to use it in such a way that it only blinds your enemy, whether that be by warning your allies or positioning yourself carefully." Her lessons were an odd mix of useful advice and obvious attempts to get Ylantar to underperform. It was increasingly obvious that she was intentionally sabotaging Ylantar's education; for what specific vagary of dark elf internal politics, I could hardly guess. She didn't seem to have some other student she favored over Ylantar.

When we finished with the day's lessons, Ylantar having been taught to do everything that Aunrae could justify in such a manner by half-measures, he returned to his bedroom to continue his studying in private. She was lying about your magic being too dangerous. He just let out a quiet sigh, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "I know," he mumbled, likely to himself, given that he showed no other sign of realizing my presence as a distinct entity. "She is teaching me the basics of it in a practical manner... Mother wouldn't want me to come complaining to her at the first sign of trouble." He rubbed the side of his head, talking to himself as he ran through the entire situation. Rather helpful for me, since I was still missing much of the context.

"Ideally she would start to teach me properly, but I don't know how I can make her do that. I am a man, after all." Why can't a man do it? Since he was already talking to himself, he didn't even seem concerned. "Men are generally not expected to learn much more than the rudiments of sorcery. Aunt Aunrae was a prodigy when she was younger, and is still well-known today. If my natural talent provoked only a negative response - and my brief failing a positive one - then she has to be doing it on purpose."

I listened to him carefully as he paced in his room, speaking in careful, precise language. "The most likely reason I can think of is simply that she doesn't like the idea of a man performing so well. Particularly if I wind up going on to exceed her. That means I'd have to convince her it wasn't shameful to be beaten by a man in sorcery, which... isn't true."

Isn't true? I had as yet remained ignorant to the particulars of the dark elves' culture.

He paused at that, as if some fresh new thought was occurring to him. "If I can convince her men can be excellent sorcerers, that there's no shame in being outdone by one... if I can convince her. Yet if I could, somebody else could. And they didn't." He sighed at that point, sitting down on the edge of the bed as he massaged his temples. "I don't know what to do. I can't simply complain to Mother, she arranged this."

Can't you?

He paused again, seeming to weigh that thought in his mind carefully. "Hmm... no, no. It wouldn't work. Aunt Aunrae hasn't done anything explicit in her teaching; I would just be considered an ungrateful child. Perhaps I could have another tutor arranged, in a way that saves Aunt Aunrae face?"

There was the sound of flesh against the window sill. Ylantar stiffened, sitting up straight and glancing at the curtains as Vicolene once more dragged herself up and over the edge. "Ah, good, it's just you," she said, smiling as she saw him.

Could she be useful for this somehow? I didn't know the specifics of the situation, but Vicolene seemed quite personally loyal to Ylantar, so...

"Do you still plan on joining the army or have you given it up already?"

"I've said that I'm going to join the army many times," Vicolene replied with faux offense, touching her hand to her chest. "I'm not going to just give it up like that.

"Then I would like to offer you my support in achieving your goals." Ylantar wore a broad, probably fake smile; Vicolene certainly did not seem overly pleased to see it.

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