This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright ©2016 by Wen Spencer
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com
ISBN: 978-1-4767-8180-8
Cover art by Dave Seeley
First Baen printing, September 2016
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Spencer, Wen, author.
Title: Project elfhome / Wen Spencer.
Description: Riverdale, NY : Baen, [2016]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016018030 | ISBN 9781476781808 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Elves—Fiction. | Pittsburgh (Pa.)—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION
/ Science Fiction / Adventure. | FICTION / Science Fiction / General. |
FICTION / Fantasy / General. | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3619.P4665 P76 2016 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016018030
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)
Printed in the United States of America
eISBN: 978-1-62579-521-2
Electronic Version by Baen Books
www.baen.com
Acknowledgments
I’m afraid that I’ve forgotten some of the people who helped greatly with these short stories, as some were written long before the thought of a collection occurred to me.
Here are the ones I remember:
Beth Bowles
Andy Bradford
Ann Cecil
Brian Chee
Russell Davis
Joan Fisher
Bonnie Funk
Kevin Geiselman
Ruth L. Heller, DVM
Nancy Janda
Don Kosak
Laurel Jamieson Lohrey
Nan Nuessle
Ellen McMicking
Sue Petroulas
Hope Erica Ring, M.D.
June Drexler Robertson
David Stein
Traci Scroggins
Larisa Van Winkle
N. A. Young
Foreword for Project Elfhome
Before We Begin, I Would Like to Say a Few Words
I learned how to read before I started kindergarten. I was an avid reader, devouring entire libraries’ worth of books. Unfortunately, since I read quickly, as soon as I found something I loved, I would have read all that was available.
Eventually I realized that if I wanted an unending supply, I was going to have to make it up myself. So I did.
The problem with being a writer is it’s a skill that doesn’t turn off easily once you have it ramped up to novel-a-year speed. It kind of goes into overdrive and every chance it gets, it spits out more ideas than you can possibly use. How did these established characters first meet? How did that person get his name? What was it like building a railroad through virgin forest filled with monsters? What if your brother was half-elf? What would a garden DIY show be like on a world with man-eating plants?
I write down all story ideas because a year goes by faster than I ever thought possible. At the end of the year, the next novel has to be queued up. At some point, I decided to make the ideas that didn’t fit into novels into short stories. Some of the short stories grew into novellas. Some ideas, however, stayed less than short stories.
Meanwhile I started to read fiction online. Okay, to be totally truthful, I started to read fan fiction online. There were a handful of worlds and characters where I once again devoured everything the author wrote. Other fans, however, had stepped forward to explore all the possible angles. I loved the explorations into lives of characters who didn’t have a point of view in the original story. I liked it when the fans took the plot in different directions just to see what it might have been like. And most of all, I was envious of the idea of dribbles and drabbles and such, where a moment is explored and yet not expanded. They were little snapshots of fiction—dependent on the knowledge of the original work—and yet always so vividly drawn.
I wanted to be able to use that freedom to weave something that wasn’t a novel, but something more than just a collection. With drabbles and short stories and novellas, I wanted to make a mosaic of the world of Elfhome. I titled it Project Elfhome and started to collect bits and pieces.
What you hold in your hands is the end result. This is a collection of novellas, short stories, and drabbles that join together to make a cohesive picture of four worlds colliding in one space. The City of Pittsburgh on Elfhome.
Singing Storm of Fire
Before you ask, no, I don’t know how I came to be. I can, however, discount many of the rumors.
My father, Sword Strike—who is the queen’s First and thus the moral compass for the entire holy sekasha caste—did not go mad. He did not rape my mother, Pure Radiance, nor did he mistake her for the queen during a drunken orgy. That anyone would even suggest any of the above proves that living forever does not make you wise.
Sword Strike couldn’t have. Ignoring who my mother is, the Wyverns would have beheaded my father instantly if he had lapsed into random madness or rape. As for drunken orgies—despite what might be believed of the elfin court, such things are just not done—as in the sun just does not go out.
Besides, one must consider too my mother, Pure Radiance. She is the queen’s oracle for a reason. I have seen the female stand blindfolded under oak trees and catch falling acorns. No male could touch her with force—she would foresee the event a week before he thought of it.
I wouldn’t put a lot of weight in those stories that my mother tricked my father somehow. Yes, she can manipulate events with amazing cunning. I’ve seen humans set up ten thousand dominoes to trip and fall in succession, and I thought “my mother does that with people.” But again, one must consider my father—who could and would—behead her the moment he discovered that he had been tricked. Since everyone knows that he’s my father, there could have been no trickery involved. (Okay, one could argue that my father knows that attempting to behead my mother would be impossible since she could stay twenty steps ahead of him at all times. I would think, however, this would infuriate my father, and having dealt with them my whole life, it is safe to say that the only thing my father feels toward my mother is bewilderment.)
My own theory, that has stood the test of time and knowing each of them well, is that my mother saw my existence necessary for some trigger of events. She approached my father to act as her stud, and took away his seed while leaving him clueless as to why. When I was a young child, I naïvely thought I would be the center of her plan, the pivot on which the fate of worlds would hang. For most of my adolescence, and the first years of my triples, I then became convinced that my mother was the one hiding a mental illness and I was just the first sign of her madness.
But I digress.
I’d been drowning myself in elfin novels at the time I met him. An odd and painful way to suicide, to be sure, but it let me escape my existence without doing bodily harm. Even in my deepest pain, I still believed that my mother had some great plan for me that I merely had to wait for. She was the queen’s oracle—the greatest intanyei seyosa ever born—surely she had some great, secret reason for bearing a half-caste child like me.