I Found a Door to the Elven Realm

Chapter 177: Total Migration

The last thing Eren saw before he opened the portal was the north side of the sky.

It wasn’t a sky anymore. The flames had reached the tops of the tallest trees in the outer forest and the whole northern horizon was just orange and black from end to end. The heat was reaching the village center now and it was bad enough to make his skin feel tight and his eyes sting even though the actual fire was still a few hundred meters out.

He focused his mana and the air in front of the Totem split open.

The portal held steady at about fourteen seconds now. His mana pool had grown enough over the last months that a single opening could hold long enough for what they needed and he’d been drilling this exact scenario with the village for weeks.

Thadric had done his job perfectly. By the time Eren got the portal open the elves were already moving in a line from the village square toward the blue shimmer. Three times in the last month alone Eren had run evacuation drills where everyone grabbed their assigned bags and walked in formation toward wherever the portal would appear. The drills had felt pointless at the time. They didn’t feel pointless now.

The older elves had complained every single time. Galadrim had told him he was "paranoid like a squirrel hoarding acorns for a winter that never comes" and two of the senior craftsmen had flat out refused to participate in the second drill until Selena told them she wouldn’t serve dinner to anyone who didn’t show up.

That threat had worked better than anything Eren could have said.

The line moved fast. Even the oldest elves in the village had base stats around Level 15 which meant their strength and endurance was at least double a normal human’s. Elf women who weighed maybe fifty kilos were carrying leather bundles the size of small suitcases on each shoulder without slowing down. One of the elder craftsmen had an entire stack of leather-bound books strapped to his back with rope and was jogging to keep his place in line.

Nobody was carrying furniture or tools or heavy stone artifacts. Eren had been very clear about that during the drills. Small things only. Books and scrolls that contained elven history and knowledge that couldn’t be replaced. Seeds and plant roots wrapped in moist cloth because some of these species didn’t exist anywhere else in Evon. Pouches of rare magical components that Selena and the healers used for cooking and medicine. Personal items that individual elves refused to leave behind, small carvings and jewelry pieces that had been in families for generations.

The big stuff was already gone. That was the whole point of starting the Earth relocation weeks before any of this happened.

Eren had known since the first dragon attack months ago that this village was on borrowed time. The Totem’s barrier kept shrinking every month and the dragon was nesting permanently on the mountain above them. He’d started moving the most irreplaceable things to the Earth property the same week he signed the papers on the coastal farm. The magical farming equipment that Oldir’s team had spent decades building. The ancient recipe stones from Selena’s restaurant that contained cooking formulas older than most human civilizations. Emily’s mother’s hunting journals written in a mix of Elvish and some older language that nobody could fully read anymore.

All of it was already packed into a storage room on the farm in Turkey. If the village burned tonight those things would survive because Eren had been paranoid enough to move them first.

Thank god for paranoia. First useful thing anxiety ever did for me.

The elves filed through the portal in a tight stream and Eren counted heads while his mana drained second by second. Rosa and Emily were on the other side handling arrivals. They’d done this before during the first dragon attack and the system was the same: pull people away from the portal exit and keep them moving so nobody blocked the path for the ones behind them.

Ninety-three elves went through in one opening. The portal snapped shut and Eren’s mana pool hit zero. His legs buckled for a second from the drain and he braced one hand against the Totem’s trunk to catch his breath.

The tree felt warm under his palm. Not from the fire but from inside, that slow pulse he always felt when he touched it. Weaker than last month though. Weaker than last week even.

I don’t know if you can hear me in there but this might be the last time anyone touches you for a while. Sorry.

He didn’t know why he thought that. The Totem was supposedly just a tree. He pushed off the trunk and turned toward the south side of the square.

..

The village looked wrong with nobody in it.

"Six months.." he muttered while looking at the empty stone paths. "Felt longer than my whole life before this."

He’d walked these paths every day for half a year. Morning coffee at Selena’s restaurant with Yaksha egg toast and Lyra’s bread. Afternoons arguing with Thadric about barricade designs while Toris smoked his stolen leaf cigarettes and offered unhelpful opinions. Evenings where the Koen vines on every wall would glow amber and the whole place reminded him of a painting he’d seen in a museum once as a kid.

His mother had dragged him to that museum. The Pera Museum in Beyoglu. There was a painting of a small European village at dusk with warm lights in every window and his seven-year-old self had stood in front of it for five minutes without saying anything because it looked like a place where nothing bad ever happened.

The elf village at sunset had always reminded him of that painting. Warm lights and stone walls and a quiet that didn’t exist anywhere in Istanbul.

Now the warm lights were from the fire eating the northern horizon and the quiet was because everyone was gone.

Thadric was at the ranch gate with his metal spear in his left hand and two leather bags on the ground next to him. The rancher had spent the last twenty minutes running between the village warehouses and the ranch collecting everything Eren had pointed at while they sprinted through the square.

"Got the rest of the historical texts from the south warehouse." Thadric dumped a third bag at his feet. His face was covered in sweat and soot from the smoke that was starting to drift into the village. "Some of those books are older than me and my grandmother combined. The elders would skin me alive if I left them."

"How many animals are still here?"

Thadric’s eyes went straight to the ranch pens and his grip tightened on the spear. He always got that look when the animals were involved. The man would stand between a troll and a Yaksha calf without thinking twice about it.

"Four Yaksha. Three are milking females and one is a juvenile that’s too young to ride." He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. "Two of the riding mounts are still in the back pen. I couldn’t get the big male to move because he’s being stubborn and the female won’t leave without him."

The riding mounts were the dinosaur-looking things that the elves used for transportation. Not actual dinosaurs but close enough that Eren had done a double take the first time he saw one. They stood about two meters tall at the shoulder with thick scaled legs and flat heads and long muscular tails they used for balance. Faster than anything their size should be and their temperament ranged from "mildly annoyed" to "actively trying to bite your face off" depending on how recently they’d been fed.

Eren had spent weeks rotating animals to the Earth property in small batches because moving large magical creatures through a fourteen-second portal was a nightmare. Getting a two-meter scaled mount through a door-shaped opening required the animal to not panic, not attack whoever was pulling its lead rope and not turn sideways in the frame.

The first time they’d tried it the mount had locked its legs at the portal edge and refused to move for the entire fourteen seconds. Thadric pushed from behind and Eren pulled from the Earth side and the whole thing felt like trying to parallel park a truck in a space meant for a bicycle.

They’d gotten better at it since then. Thadric had figured out that blindfolding the mounts and wrapping their heads in Lyra’s baking cloth calmed them enough to walk through without resisting. The Yaksha were easier because they’d follow whoever was carrying food, anywhere, without asking questions.

"What about Griks’s snake?" Eren asked while stuffing two more pouches of dried herbs into the bags Thadric had collected.

"Beska is in the last pen on the right. Griks wrapped her around the support beam yesterday and she hasn’t moved since."

Griks had found the python about three months ago in the deep forest south of the village. A non-magical constrictor about four meters long with dark green scales and a head the size of Eren’s fist. Kobolds had a natural connection with reptiles and Griks had walked up to the snake and the thing had curled around her arm without any aggression at all. Just accepted her immediately.

She’d named it Beska which apparently meant "quiet one" in the kobold language. The snake spent most of its time coiled around whatever warm surface Griks left it on and ate one of the oversized rats from the forest every few days. Completely harmless to anything bigger than a rabbit but Griks treated it like a firstborn child and had threatened to "bite Eren’s toe off" if anything happened to it during the evacuation.

Kobolds and their animals. Griks had spent more time in the ranch than anywhere else in the village during the last few months. She’d reorganized Thadric’s entire feeding schedule, built two new nesting boxes for the younger Yaksha and somehow taught the juvenile mount to come when she made a specific clicking sound with her tongue. Even Thadric was impressed and that man didn’t get impressed easily.

Eren glanced north through the gaps between the ranch buildings.

The fire had reached the outer edge of the village. Flames were eating through the charred stumps of the already-burned northern houses, finding whatever scraps of wood and dried vegetation had survived the first attack. The smoke was getting thicker and a grey-brown haze was drifting across the village square. The air tasted like ash and that same sharp chemical undertone the wolves had smelled from kilometers away.

Underneath all of it the dragon roared again from somewhere inside the inferno. Closer now, maybe two kilometers out. The vibration shook dust off the ranch roof and one of the Yaksha in the pen bleated so loud and so scared that Thadric flinched and grabbed his spear.

"The barrier.." Eren started to say and then stopped because he could already see it.

The Totem’s protection field was invisible but Eren had learned to feel it over the months. A faint pressure change at the boundary, easy to miss if you weren’t paying attention. The fire was passing through it. No resistance at all.

Thadric had been right. Natural fire with no magical signature meant the Totem’s defense system had nothing to grab onto. The flames were just heat and burning wood and physics and the ancient protection spell that had saved this village for centuries couldn’t tell the difference between a wildfire and a lit candle.

So that’s the trick. Dragon breath would be magical and the barrier would block it. But once the breath lights regular trees on fire the magic part is gone. By the time the flames get here it’s just a normal forest fire and the Totem treats it the same way it would treat a cooking fire.

What the hell does this lizard have against this village? Emily said dragons are territorial but this feels personal. Nobody burns a forest for ten kilometers in every direction just because they don’t like their neighbors.

He pulled the Dungeon Heart Fragment from his pocket. The small crystal marble glowed faintly with stored mana in his palm. A thousand points of reserve energy packed into a rock the size of a shooter marble.

"Alright. Let’s get the hell out of here.." he whispered while looking at the approaching fire one more time.