The teleportation spell soon came to an end, and the four of us found ourselves in a completely different room, seemingly made of stone. Peering outside the window, I saw that we were in the middle of a lush forest.
“This is...”
“We’re in the middle of the forest!” Teto exclaimed.
“I believe we are inside the fortress at the forest’s entrance. I came here with my contractor to fend off the humans during the war,” Fauzard explained.
Shortly after, I noticed the magic circle beneath us blurring and fading.
“Single-use teleportation circles, huh?” I noted.
When you poured mana into a magic circle, the spell carved into it activated automatically. However, you couldn’t just make a magic circle willy-nilly; you’d need to use materials to create it. Of course, the more powerful the spell, the rarer the materials were. And even after all that, you’d still need to pour a boatload of mana into the circle to activate it.
“Elves have a lot of mana, so they could activate the circle with only a few people. In any other nation, they’d most likely need to use a bunch of magic stones,” I mused.
Still, I couldn’t help but feel like a bit of a VIP, considering how much effort making and activating a magic circle was.
“Are there other teleportation circles in the elves’ kingdom?” Teto asked, looking down at the spot where the magic circle used to be.
“Installing magic circles in every settlement—and ones that can be used several times at that—would be difficult, so no. There aren’t any teleportation circles in the kingdom,” Althea replied with an embarrassed smile.
Carefully cradling the spirit lantern in her arms, she led us out of the room. Outside, elven soldiers were waiting for us, holding the reins of a few mythical beasts that looked like eight-legged horses.
“I’ve never seen this type of mythical beast before,” I said. “We don’t have any in the forest.”
“They’re so big! And so cool!” Teto exclaimed.
“They’re sleipnirs,” Althea explained to us.
As soon as they spotted me, the sleipnirs started shoving their snouts towards me, begging for some mana.
“Wh-What are you doing?! Calm down, will you? You’re being rude to Miss Chise!” Althea scolded them, grabbing their reins and trying to pull them back, but they wouldn’t budge.
“They seem to like you quite a lot,” Fauzard commented
Teto quickly put a hand on my back so that I wouldn’t fall. “Uh-oh, are you okay, Lady Witch?”
“I’m fine. I hadn’t expected them to be this friendly.”
But it’s okay, this isn’t my first rodeo, I thought as I stroked the sleipnirs’ snouts. One after the other, they absorbed mana through the palm of my hand. When they had gotten their fill, they let Althea pull them back.
“Sorry for the commotion. We were supposed to ride the sleipnirs to travel through the forest, but...” Althea trailed off.
“They have started fighting to see which one will get to have Lady Witch ride on their back,” Fauzard muttered.
He was right. The sleipnirs were pressing their foreheads together and glaring, stomping their hooves as if to intimidate each other. The elven soldiers were desperately trying to calm them, to no avail; they wouldn’t let up. After all, the one that I ended up riding on would be able to feed on my mana. None of them wanted to pass on such an opportunity. The only one who wasn’t fighting with the others was Althea’s sleipnir, as it’d get to ride with us no matter what.
“Um... Will you be riding on the sleipnirs as well, Miss Chise, Miss Teto?” Althea asked awkwardly.
There were no roads inside the elves’ forest, so riding in carriages was not an option. This must have been why they had brought the sleipnirs for us to ride. But there was one slight issue.
“Teto and I can’t ride horses,” I confessed. “But it’s all right; we’ll just follow you on our flying carpet.”
“We haven’t used it in sooo long!” Teto exclaimed.
I took the magic carpet out of our magic bag and rolled it on the ground. Upon hearing my words, the sleipnirs stopped glaring at each other to face us instead, their eyes wide open in shock and disappointment. An awkward smile curled on my lips when some of them whinnied to try and get my attention, but I did my best to ignore them.
Althea didn’t pay them any mind either. “I’ll be heading into the forest with this one, then. Follow me,” she said, climbing on her sleipnir and heading into the woods, Teto and myself flying after her.
As Teto and I admired the scenery, Althea shot us an apologetic look from her sleipnir.
“I am sure that you must think we’re going awfully slow compared to your flying carpet’s maximum speed, but please bear with me,” she said.
“It’s fine. I wouldn’t want you to push your mount past its limits.”
“Teto likes the flying carpet because she can stick to Lady Witch,” Teto said, wrapping her arms around me from behind and resting her chin on my shoulder.
I let out a surprised cry; I hadn’t been expecting her to start hugging me out of the blue. “Teto! At least warn me before you do that,” I scolded her.
An elegant chuckle escaped Althea as she looked at us.
“You’re much cuter and more down-to-earth than I expected. Please pardon me,” she said in between chuckles.
My face flushed; I lowered the hood of my robes so that it’d hide my eyes and pretended to look at the trees.
“Lady Witch is feeling embarrassed,” Teto—who was more than familiar with my mannerisms by now—muttered to Althea.
“Is it really that funny?” I grumbled.
Althea stopped laughing and looked at us with a serious expression.
“Most people who come to our kingdom—especially the ones hoping for an audience with Her Majesty—harbor some ulterior motive. That’s why I’m pleased to be able to guide someone with such a mild and pleasant demeanor to our forest for once.”
The elves’ queen was not only immortal, rich, and powerful, but she was also a high elf—a supreme rarity even among elves. Most humans who came to see her did so because they wanted something—usually not something good. Some coveted the queen’s magic, some wished to unveil the forest’s secrets, and others wanted to turn all high elves into slaves or learn the secret of their immortality... And there were those who wanted to lay claim to the forest and its resources altogether, including the mythical beasts and the elves themselves. The queen sure didn’t have it easy.
“Our main goal is tourism, so...” I shrugged.
“But, Miss Chise, you might end up in a similar position to Her Majesty in the future,” Althea pointed out.
“I might. I might not.”
In a way, the elves’ forest represented one of the potential futures for our own forest. For now, they were pretty similar: just like the elves, we only exchanged with the outside world through limited points of contact and refused any outside influence. Our current main goal was to protect the forest and the people and creatures living in it. But...
“For now, our main goal in the Witch of Creation’s Forest is to produce mana, but once this world’s mana levels are back to normal, I’m thinking of clearing some land,” I said.
“What for?” Althea asked me, a surprised look on her face.
“I don’t plan on getting rid of all the trees or anything, just some of them. Don’t get me wrong; I believe that we should take good care of nature, but, at the same time, I don’t want to get in the way of the development of humans and their culture.”
“Lady Witch is always reading books!” Teto supplied.
Just as Teto said, I liked books. For a culture to develop and flourish, books were an absolute must. Besides, I believed that nature and culture could coexist. So while I was absolutely against the complete destruction of nature, I would have loved to create a space where both nature and civilization could thrive together in harmony.
“Teto hopes that one day, the mythical beasts will get to live wherever they want.”
I nodded. “Me too. The world is big; it’d be great if they could live outside of our forest. I hope we’ll get to see that day come.”
Mythical beasts could only live in mana-dense places. Most of them had perished during the fall of the precursors, and very few remained. Not only did this mean that mythical beast poaching was rampant—since they were so rare—but also that they could only live in very specific regions. But if the mana levels of the world were to rise again, the mythical beasts could live in their preferred environments without so much external pressure. Moreover, if they were to spread out across different regions and breed, there would be more of them all over the continent. Perhaps one day, we’d get to see a world where humans and mythical beasts coexisted peacefully, just like the dragonkin with the griffins and pegasuses, my disciple Yuicia and her little cat-sith companion, or Althea and her sleipnir. Of course, I was aware that as their populations grew and spread, they were more threatened by illness, accidents, and attacks from humans and monsters alike, but to me, this seemed like a necessary evil if it meant protecting them from species-wide extinction.
“I called you down-to-earth earlier, but you’re actually quite the dreamer, hm? And you seem to really like mythical beasts.” Althea said.
“Wouldn’t it be beautiful, though?”
A small, gentle smile had curled on Althea’s lips, and she looked fondly at Teto and me as if we were children. Which, okay, by elves’ standard we might have been. She had called me a “dreamer,” but as an immortal being, what would be the point of living if I didn’t have an ambition or two?
And so, the three of us (plus Fauzard in his spirit lantern) made our way deeper and deeper into the elves’ forest.