by Adam Golden
The Light Elf female held the tattered remains of a gossamer nightdress clutched against her chest, desperately trying to both flee and dodge the sharp barbs that her tormentors thrust as they gave chase.
One of the dark elves sprang toward their victim on legs, whose strength was belied by their shriveled appearance, and drove the girl to the ground. Pitch black talons pulled and tore at the filmy protection of the girl’s nightdress, shredding the garment away to nothingness. A howl of victory went up as he waved the last vestiges of the clothing above his head in celebration as his victim writhed beneath him, trying to cover her nakedness while she squirmed away.
A shockwave of cobalt fire struck the Dark Elf attackers, smashing them backward like a hurricane taking hold of the clutch of twigs they resembled. Shocks of skittering blue energy crackled along the surface of Elphame’s skin, her fine silver white hair floated around her caught up in the force of the winds that held her above the ground as she floated down from the temple steps.
“Enough!”
The single world shivered through the broken city both as a shouted command and as a mental assault that slammed into every mind it encountered like a battering ram. Silence boomed through Alfheim as Dokkalfar and Ljosalfar alike cowered back in dread from the force of Elphame’s rage. The elf queen lifted a closed fist above her head and raced upward into the sky until she loomed over all of Alfheim, a figure seemingly carved of crackling blue lightning.
“The doom of all creation is at our gates,” she boomed. “The very doom our peoples were created to forestall has come, and now stands on the very threshold of victory, and why? Because of us.”
Elphame’s words cracked like a whip through the minds of the elves spread throughout the city, most of whom had been so lost to the bloodlust and dread of their conflict that they had no concept of the threat building beyond their walls.
“We were to be stewards,” Elphame raged, “guardians of that which the gods made. That was our charge. Create, mold, teach. Maintain the balance! Look down upon the plains before our mountain. Look at what we’ve wrought together. How long has it been since we even attempted to feel the state of our charge? Reach out. Can you feel the tatters that have been made of the veils between the planes? Does reality scream in your ears as it does mine? That is what we have wrought with our fear and our pride, with our hunger for power and for vengeance.”
Shame and terror ricocheted through the hive of minds connected by Elphame’s power, but suspicion and anger flared as well. Was this some Light Elf trick to drive the Dokkalfar back into subjugation? Or some Dark Elf scheme to weaken the last of the Ljosalfar resistance?
“We stand at the mouth of Ginnungagap,” Elphame said, pleading in the minds of what remained of her race. “The great abyss which our mothers and fathers filled with their creation yawns wide yet again. We have forsaken our purpose, forgotten the balance, and now the seed of chaos has slipped through the wards we maintained for so many long ages. Our charge teeters on the edge of a precipice. It was our fear, our anger, our jealousy, and our resentments that gave the enemy the opportunity it needed to break through our painstakingly constructed defenses.
“Our power was ever in unity. Once we recognized that our differences made us stronger, we sought understanding and consensus. We must do so again or we will surely perish. I ask you again, reach out. Send your senses beyond our little fortress here, feel what has been done. What we allowed to be done. The world heaves its last breaths, it is dying, poisoned by madness. What shall we do?”
Elphame felt the minds of the combined elven nations quest outward. She felt their horror, felt them brush against the pernicious delirium of Maelstrom’s influence and recoil in shock. She felt the first adamantine flecks of resolve start to take hold among them. She let herself gradually sink toward the ground as the static charge bled off her skin. She could do no more among her people. Either they would see the need and come together on their own, or they would all be destroyed together. She thought they might reach past themselves and choose to live, and if they did there was one more thing she had to do.
—
Maelstrom hit the ground with the force of a falling comet and blasted a crater of stillness into the churning melee of fire and frost battling at the foot of the mountain. The avatar of chaos laid in a broken heap. Shards of shattered bone were driven up through scabrous leather-like flesh in dozens of places. Black blood pulsed between a running liquidity and a semi-solid gelatinous sludge as it oozed out of wounds that worked like fleshy toothless mouths, gumming at themselves as they vacillated between mending and gaping ever further. Bones and muscles writhed beneath the skin, welding themselves together in haphazard knots of tissue.
His body worked rapidly to mitigate the damage, but the shadow monsters were on him before the work was complete. Dark as inky midnight and silent as the grave they came on, they fell on him like a pack of rabid animals. They stared eyes of bloody crimson and their narrow lupine snouts creased in vicious hungry grins. Teeth and claws as insubstantial as smoke but as sharp as chipped obsidian ripped through flesh and broke bone. They scored stone, shredded fibrous woods, and pulped ice.
No substance that made up the disparate parts of his ever-changing physique was immune to their wild abandon. Yet, in the midst of their murderous barrage, a blood-chilling giggle burst forth from the ravaged lips of their victim.
Maelstrom’s will lashed out at the human sorcerer’s shadow familiars like a barbed whip and, where it touched, they exploded into nothingness. Their effectiveness had been in ambush, but they could not stand up to his will once he was prepared for them. Maelstrom had been born, in part, of the power of men intimately steeped in the use of shadow magic. It offered him no real threat. No magic he knew of truly did. He could be hurt, but cared nothing for damage, and thrilled at the riotous wildness of pain.
Maelstrom pressed his concentration back toward the repairs to his flesh as he dragged himself, lumbering and ungainly in his damaged bulk, from the crater.
He was just over the lip of the crater when another bombardment of shadow creatures streaked toward him. A pass of a single multi-jointed arm that now protruded from his left hip collapsed the spell with all the difficulty of waving away an unpleasant odor. His legs grew bulky, bulging with grotesque knots of sinew and muscle as he threw himself forward.
Streaking toward the human at a speed many times more than any mortal creature could match, Maelstrom’s form compacted, growing as broad and dense as a boulder. He struck the heavyset but infinitely delicate human form with the force of a landslide. The enemy was driven backward in a violent tumble, and then Maelstrom was on him, around him, he was everywhere. The mad demi-god’s body shifted and grew slack, expanding and stretching to engulf his opposition in a rapidly tightening bubble of thick tar-like flesh and tissue. He had him! He’d won.
—
The wizard, who was both the fearsome Sange Klau and the reasoned scholar Nicholas, writhed, kicked, and struggled like a cat in a sack. A panicked, maddened cat in a quickly contracting sack of living flesh and bone. The black knife, still clutched tightly in Nicholas’ right hand, ripped and gouged at the knotted mass of tissue as it constricted tightly around him. Even the keen edge of the demon blade could do nothing against a hide which grew denser and thicker than the thickest leather, and which closed any gash instantaneously.
Air came in desperate, short gasps. His arms were slowly pinned in against his body, the bones creaking as the pressure grew tighter. His chest contracted, ribs grinding as they pressed inward toward his vital organs. Halos of brilliant color danced before his eyes as his brain was starved for oxygen.
“One day it’s going to get you boy, life is going to get its teeth in and ring you around but good.” Nicholas heaved a sour grunt of bitter laughter as his father’s gruff, boisterous voice rang in his head. You were right, Father, it got me in the end, he thought tiredly. You just remember, daring, his father’s ghost whispered in hi
s ear. You be brave . . . Sometimes, we find ourselves alone and barefoot in Hell . . .
Nicholas smiled to himself as the last gasped breath of oxygen stalled in his lungs.
Just keep walking.
—
The wreckage of seven men lay littered on the immaculate marble floor of the Dawn Temple. Their weapons, their armor, even their mutilated and polluted flesh had been cast off, and with it the weight of their crimes and those committed against them were shed.
The keen edge of Elphame’s power, the razor focus of her will, slid through and severed the stranglehold of the black dagger on all souls of those it had enthralled. Or nearly all. Standing amidst the cast-off remnants of Nicholas’ other revenants was a short, slight-boned figure wrapped in maggot-white flesh and bearing a grizzly red rope mark about his crushed throat.
Even shorn of his trophies and his hideous bone club, the creature whose mind named him Prancer radiated menace, madness, and savagery that the elven queen hadn’t been prepared for. Her magic had failed utterly to release this particular soul. It clung to the dark spell that animated it. This one gloried in what it had become. Still, the elfess struggled with her decision, batting it back and forth within her mind endlessly.
She’d decided she couldn’t do it. Not even to save existence. How could she do such to a living soul? This though? She looked into the core of what this creature was, and knew what must be done. She stepped toward the magic-hobbled monster and lightly touched its forehead.
—
Maelstrom coursed through Nicholas’ flesh, blending, bonding, grasping, and grafting with every cell and fiber of its greatest foe, its most hated enemy, its creator. Bony spines burst upward along Nicholas’ back, bulbous tumors boiled along his arms and legs as Maelstrom remade him to fit itself. So much division, so much doubt, so much . . . chaos roiled inside this human! It was delicious. The avatar fed its latest victim just enough air to keep him alive as it fed, slowly adapting the man into itself.
Maelstrom would complete the conquest of the mountain wearing the face of their last hope for salvation. It would look through Nicholas’ eyes as the last spark of life in existence flickered and grew cold. The thrill of it surged through it like an electric shock.
Be brave.
Maelstrom saw a craggy, bearded face it didn’t recognize flash in its mind’s eye, and then the soft porcelain features of the elf queen took its place. You remembered the power, the control, but you forgot the substance, the elf girl’s crystalline, tinkling voice said sadly. Real magic comes from fostering the good, from feeding the light.
The harbinger of entropy cackled madly in Nicholas’ head. Magic, real or otherwise, would be dead in a moment, as dead as the wizard, as dead as the elves, as dead as the light. Maelstrom wrapped his will around the tattered remains of Nicholas’ power and hurtled it at the mountain. The blazing missile of psychic force struck the filmy, flaming barrier about the elvish homeland and shattered it like spun sugar. The last bastion of solidity and order stood breached. With a wave of the arm that had been Nicholas’, the demon seed of disarray launched his army of monstrosities toward the waiting horst of elves.
—
Nicholas’ body landed in the center of the elven city, shifting and twisting like softened rubber as Maelstrom rooted about inside him. Hordes of the chaos demon’s twisted flesh puzzles boiled through the ruins of Alfheim in a frenzy of destructive glee, but found nothing and no one.
Maelstrom twisted Nicholas’ features into an obscene, snarling sneer.
“You cannot hide from me!” the creature roared through Nicholas’ abused vocal chords. “There is no escape!”
“We seek none,” came a calm imperious voice that Maelstrom knew from the memories of its host.
He turned to find the tall, regal figure of Elphame, Queen of the Ljosalfar, standing before him, alone and brilliant in her shimmering gown of brilliant white gossamer. “We have remembered our purpose,” she told him proudly.
The ceaseless shifting and changing of Maelstrom’s form within Nicholas’ shell ground to a halt as the restored weight and solidity of substance settled around him. The supernatural harbinger groaned under the pressure, and cast about for its source. His will slid through space and wood and stone, questing downward toward a disturbance he couldn’t identify.
In a torch lit chamber deep in the heart of the mountain, he found every living elf of the sacred mountain gathered and chanting. The low bass hum of the incantation made the air quiver like a shimmer of heat. The combined magics and willpower of the elven nations were concentrated on a single point of intention, a single focus. A bubble of pure solidity and undiluted order shimmered into existence around the temple square. The physical laws of creation slammed down around Maelstrom like the blow of a hammer, locking him into a single, heavy, limited form.
“Remember,” the elf queen said as Maelstrom’s attention snapped back to the temple square. “True power comes from community, from trust . . .”
Nicholas finished the sentence, “And from sacrifice.” The words grated out of Nicholas’ lips and Maelstrom felt shocked. Those words had been Nicholas, but how?
—
The creature who now thought of himself as Prancer, he who had been the man Pair Fouettard, saw the moment of rigid shock and sprung. It had always been his special gift, knowing just when prey was at their most vulnerable, just when it was the perfect moment to strike. It was a sense any predator required, and if Fouettard had been anything, he’d been a near perfect predator.
Prancer didn’t know what the witch had done to him, but whatever it was crackled through him, building in force and violence with every second. Pain was just a vague memory buried deep in the back of Prancer’s mind, but he thought it had never been quite so terribly exquisite as the agony blooming inside him now. He closed the distance and wrapped his iron-hard arms tightly around the throat of the man who had been his master, his maker, and his destroyer. The demon-wizard hybrid tried to buck and twist, but he’d made Prancer strong. The elf witch was talking again, but Prancer didn’t hear the words. He heard the rush of power building deep inside him.
—
“A man bound by demons binds a demon with his very flesh,” Elphame intoned as though in prayer. “A victim binds his killer with the strength that killer gave him, and the light of life blooms in a heart of death and darkness. Balance in all things.” The elf queen was somber, even sad, as she spoke.
Prancer opened his mouth to scream as a bolt of pure white light blasted forth. Cracks and fissures of brilliant liquid white light spider-webbed across his features.
Elphame pulled in a deep breath and held it, looking on serenely as the spark she’d given the voiceless killer bloomed into devastating life. She’d said it was a power that couldn’t be used, only released, and so it was. A shockwave of pure possibility blasted outward from the peak of the sacred mountain, throwing tidal waves of chance and intention, of unfettered creative force across the reaches of existence. On every world of every plane what had come before was washed away, reordered, and remade as the wounded corpse of existence scabbed over and began to heal.
Nicholas was scoured clean, he felt Maelstrom ripped from his flesh like a rotten tooth, and the pollution of the Krampus magic burned out of him like the cauterization of a festering wound. A wave of bliss and wonder washed over him. She’d told him . . . true power. He’d really seen it. Tears streamed down the dying wizard’s face. He wished he could do more, wished he could atone. Nicholas, the Wonderworker of Myra, bent his considerable will inward, seeking, questing. He had one last task, one last debt to pay. He pulled in a deep, shuddering breath, and then closed his eyes and gave himself over to the light.
Epilogue
The boy’s heart hammered in his chest as he crouched low, trying not to breathe. They wouldn’t find him if he was careful. He just had to be careful. Somewhere a shrill scree ripped through the silence of the late Solstice night, sounding for all the wor
ld like the squawk of some terrible sort of bird.
Or monster . . .
He shouldn’t have come out here. Mama said bad things happened to boys who didn’t do as they should. A low snarling growl came next, and the boy whirled about looking for its source. He couldn’t see it, but he suddenly felt eyes on his back. Watching, weighing, measuring. A wave of gooseflesh pricked up his back, and the boy broke and ran, bare feet slapping on the hard-packed dirt as he rounded the corner and burst into a square of pale orange illumination.
“Beatus!”
He flinched at his name and turned to find a tall strong body looming over him. The boy dug down deep and turned to face his fate defiantly.
“Foolish boy! I’ve told you to stop crawling through that window,” his father snapped in a gruff voice that was belied by the sparkle of amusement in his eyes. “Went looking for yer present, eh? Got spooked by that mut that’s been prowlin’ about?”
Beatus nodded, smiling tremulously at his pa. “I just had to see if he’d been here yet pa, I just had to . . .” he said.
The older man smiled and waved toward the corner of the stoop.
Beatus raced forward, skidding to his knees as he took in the sight of a perfectly carved wooden soldier standing erect in beautifully carved black and purple armor, just like a real imperial Praetorian. Father and son wore identical smiles, each caught up in a private pleasure, and then the boy turned to share his wonder with his father before racing into the house, waving his newest treasure and chattering excitedly. His father closed the door behind them and barred it against the things his wife insisted walked the solstice dark.
—
Far to the north, in a city most said didn’t really exist, on a mountain even legend had forgotten, an old and tired man draped his brilliant crimson cloak on its stand in the corner and dropped gratefully into his chair after a long night’s travels. He drank deeply from a flagon and sighed contentedly as he looked out over a cityscape of industrious creation. A city at peace. He chuckled to himself as he recalled the faces of the children as they found the presents he’d squirreled away for them. He always stayed to watch that first look.
