Chapter Text
Starting Life in Another World (No Way Home) - Chapter One - The Witch's Knight
It is sometimes a mistake to climb; it is always a mistake never even to make the attempt. If you do not climb, you will not fall. This is true. But is it that bad to fail, that hard to fall?...Sometimes you wake, and sometimes, yes, you die. But there is a third alternative... ...You learn to fly...
~ Neil Gaiman
The silver haired elf moved like a stone skipping over a still lake, leaping to perch atop each of the steepled rocks in turn until she grasped an outstretched tree branch and used it to swing to a high ledge on the rockface. She glanced back, her pale skin almost glowing against the shadow cast by the gorge, to regard him with a wide smile.
"There, now you try." Her voice prodded, baited him in jest. Even with his abilities and the training and time he had put in, there would be no way he could match her grace and fluidity. On the chance that he managed to stick all the landings, any miscalculation could shatter the rocks beneath his feet.
"Come on now, stop playing." Erik Killmonger threw his hands out to his sides, a crooked smile on his lips despite his best efforts to lock it up.
"Aw, that's all I get? You could have at least given me a laugh," said the elf.
He pointed at her. "A chuckle, maybe, if you're lucky."
"A chortle then? Yeah, let's settle on a chortle." Amy raised a hand and, as if it were nothing at all, brought a walkway of rock up from the ground leading to the ledge where she now stood. "Dona." She uttered the spell incantation under her breath.
"Why didn't you just do that for yourself?" Erik asked as he jogged along the path provided for him.
Amy shrugged. "Didn't need to." She reached out to grasp his hands, helping him onto the ledge. A radiant smile spread across her face as her big blue eyes searched his expression. Her teeth at the front and center were slightly bigger than they should have been in a way that betrayed her true age.
"What's that look for?" Erik struggled to pull his eyes off of her, she'd ensnared him. When he eventually stepped to Amy's side, she lifted a hand and waved it to dismiss the rocks, forcing them into place in the earth.
"Hmm, nothing," she said with a mischievous squint.
"Uh-huh, that wasn't no 'nothing' look." Erik made a small sound, sucking on his teeth.
"I don't know—just thinking about The Great and Powerful Killmonger that I first met. That Killmonger wouldn't have trusted my magic enough to sit on it, let alone walk on it over this gap." Amy tilted her head to the side. "You don't even realize how much you've changed."
Erik sighed, shaking his head. Amy probably had no idea. Of course, he'd tried to explain to her the world where he had come from. The world where people with skin like hers had enacted atrocities on people like him. He remembered his life where her kind of beauty would have been a warning. Maybe it still was.
"Nah, I get it. We came a long way." He glanced off to his side, down at the valley below them and then stared into her eyes.
She ran her slender fingers up through his trimmed beard, over his ear, and brought them to rest on top of his locs before she pushed up onto her toes to plant a kiss on his lips. Her mouth tasted sweet and tangy with the citrus of the fruits she carried slung over her back in a satchel. They parted almost as soon as they had touched, and she gazed up at him with a smirk before sticking her tongue out and giggling.
Erik tutted at her. "You childish," he chided her playfully.
"I'm two hundred and six." She cupped his chin in her hand. "You're practically a baby in elf-time." With that Amy pranced off through the winding slit that cut between the two sides of the gorge.
"Hey, that's gross." Erik shook his head. "Tsk, told her that shit's weird."
The pair of them made their way through the split in the gorge with Erik following close behind Amy, watching her hair swish against her shoulder blades as they walked in the shade cast by the rock. Her hips swayed in a smooth motion with her arms swinging at her sides with this arcane efficiency. By now, the unearthly grace she moved with should have been familiar, but it was like every time that he watched her move he was seeing it for the first time.
Art by wakih (edited)
As a kid Erik had been something of a nerd, he'd buried himself in certain pursuits because they offered an escape to the harsh reality of growing up in Oakland. He never believed that elves were a real thing. When he had read the blurb under their race in the tattered Dungeons and Dragons Player's Handbook his friend Marcus would lend them to make characters, he couldn't imagine what was meant by their beauty or gracefulness.
Seeing it in real time, he still couldn't quite understand. It was like whole the world moved in thirty frames a second, Amy moved in one hundred and twenty.
"Aye, them fruit were for the kids," Erik shouted after her.
Amy stopped and turned to shrug, the white of her clothing seemed to draw in what little light was available in the crevice. "I had to sample them. What if they were poisonous?"
"Right, poisonous. What kind of poison fruit still grows on its tree?"
She pressed a pair of warm, slender fingers to his lips and cocked her head to one side, lifting her ear to better hear. He knew full well how her heightened senses would pick up on the first signs of trouble. Amy listened with her chest still as she held her breath so nothing dampened out the sound she was focused on.
"There's someone else at the camp." Her words were less than a whisper and more like a thought carried on the breeze straight into his ear.
Erik paced forward. "You think we were followed?"
Amy shook her head. "Even then, no one should be near Redonas Plateau, the place is abandoned because of the contamination." Erik had heard her say that before, but something about the simple way she wouldn't elaborate worried him.
What contaminated large areas in a world without the kind of chemicals used in industrialization? His imagination had run far enough that he didn't like any of the available options.
She moved first with Erik being pulled in behind her. No reason to speak nor think. The two of them raced along the winding path for camp. Though Erik's blood pumped with the nectar of the heart-shaped herb even he could hardly keep up with her.
A sliver of light appeared between the rocks and then they pressed on. Amy drew her daggers, a pair of thin, needle-sharp knives that she kept at her belt and continued her charge with her arms thrown back behind her. Before Erik could reach the end of the corridor or readied his spear, she was out in mid-air poised for the attack. Amy landed with her feet braced on the back of a man and the daggers jutting out of either side of his neck.
There were a dozen men scattered about the small campground trying the wrestle the children up and herd them toward the other end of the camp. Erik could see carriages with massive cages where the cabins should have been waiting. The assailants didn't have time to react to Amy's attack before Erik dropped in the midst of a pair of them sweeping across the area with his spear to fell them both.
Told you we needed a look out. Of course, there'd be more of them." A massive man with sun reddened skin and scars etched into his face gestured with an axe, pointing it at Amy as she stepped off the back of his comrade. "She'll fetch a pretty penny."
Another of the men brandishing two curved swords spoke. "Yeah, a real full-grown female elf—definitely don't see those everyday."
Slavers. Judging by the lack of worry about their fallen companions, Erik could also guess that the relationship was strictly one of convenience. With the kind of sum that one elf would bring in, a few of them being dead only meant a larger cut of the reward. It was just business.
"If you've laid one hand on those children I swear—" Amy's words were a growl echoing off the nearby rocks.
One of the men further in through the camps stepped out, yelling over her. "You're going to make us rich. Do you know how much you're worth?"
"I hope those few blessed coins are worth dying over!" Amy shouted.
One of the men further off through the camp who was standing half in one of the tents rose up with a club in his hands. "I hope your human friend there knows what he's getting into. A man could die for messing around with an elf—especially a silver haired one."
"Oh, I think I see a few men who might just lose their lives today for that same thing," Erik tipped the spear back to rest on his shoulder, reaching down at his side to grasp the handle of his gun. It was wasteful to use the ammunition as he only had so much of it at a time and making more proved to be tedious, but the shock effect of firearms on people who had never dreamed of such a weapon held a certain kind of worth.
The gun kicked in his hand and in an instant the bullet tore through the chest of the man standing at the tent door. Blood blossomed out from the wound in his chest as he released his weapon and raked at the new hole. Amy wasted no time from there as she flung one of her daggers into the head of another man and ran to kick and flip off of the man who had asked about her worth.
Contests had played out like this enough times for Erik to predict Amy's path, to track her movements and cover her flank. Though, she didn't need him. Her grace and expertise would see her dance through their ranks, tumbling out of reach and sliding past to cut men down. Amy had been blessed by this world, a blessing that let her move to a rhythm and timing on a beat that only she could hear. It made her mesmerizing to watch, unmistakably gorgeous with how harmonious she was with the world, and devastating in combat.
In truth, the actions of the Witch of Envy nearly four hundred years ago and their fall out had made it so simply bringing an elf that looked like Amy into a town and entire ordeal, but he didn't believe it justified the way that elf kind had been regarded since.
Erik Killmonger also had no fear that these men could have handled even him or Amy had either of them been alone, their odds of even being injured in a fight against the kind of nobodies who took to stealing and trading in children were nearly zero. Of course, Erik approached every fight with Amy by his side like that.
No matter how lucrative it might have been for him to sell out her and the children, money wasn't the thing that drove him. Opportunity, means, a path to toppling the corrupt structures that saw half-breeds, elves, and non-humans as inferior: once he had those things he was going to burn down the whole of Lugunica for her.