Elves: The Book of Daniel
By R. Brent Powell
Acknowledgements
It took a while to get this book going. Many discussions with many friends and fantasy enthusiasts inevitably arrived at two questions: what are elves really like and how does magic work?
Many thanks to so many people who gave insight into music, physics, magic, and of course elves.
Most of all, I wish to thank my wife, whose enthusiasm for wanting to know what happened next kept me moving and to my son and his wife who are by education and demeanor, ruthless editors.
Cover art by Tamara Rymer, a well-known western artist (tamararymer.com, @trymerstudio or just Google.) Her works are seen at galleries in Santa Fe, Austin and homes around the world. While all of her gallery and published work is western, she likes elves.
Finally, to my seventh grade English teacher, whose surprise at my ability to tell a story irritated the hell out of me.
Copyright @ 2016 by R. Brent Powell
All Rights Reserved
All characters and events in this book are fictitious.
All resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.
The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Lease purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
Table of Contents
Elves: The Book of Daniel
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
EPILOGUE
ONE OF THE HISTORIES OF OUR WORLD
To understand where we are it often helps to know from whence we've come, otherwise no movement would be perceived. We believed and now know that our world has many histories all revealing themselves at the same time. Many of these worlds have only subtle differences from our own, others are all but unrecognizable. There is great conjecture on the part of our deepest thinkers when asked whether the spirits and portends we sometimes hear are our own imaginings or communications from one of these parallel worlds. This work concerns the fourth known age of our world and before proceeding I will briefly describe the first three.
The First Age
How the world began is a subject of great argument between theologians and scientists. There is even some dispute when asked whether the argument created the participants or if indeed participants created the argument. For our purposes, it is enough to know that the world began.
The Second Age
Throughout the many ages, many changes have occurred. Those of which we are sure will be repeated here. In the beginning there were many animals, fishes, birds, plants, and other living things beyond number. But the two most important groups to our history are the races of elf and man. In what we call the Second Age the world was much different than now. It was mostly covered with ice and snow and most temperate plains and forests were found around a great sea. The race of elves lived in these temperate climes. As now, they were a people who lived at one with nature, learning to work with nature's power to build their cities and way of life.
The elves of that age were more numerous and more inclined to study the world around them than the elves of today. The significance of this observation will become clearer further along.
But first, we must examine the condition of the other race, man. Mankind, in the second age resembled current humans even less than modern elves resemble their ancestors. Man was a large muscular creature only a few steps above others of nature's creations. They had primitive stone tipped tools, dressed in animal hides, and had no language beyond the words necessary for survival. They hunted and foraged for their food in small family groups and tribes. He was well adapted to the ice and snow and thrived in the colder climates. His survival was day-to-day and often whole tribes would be wiped out by a single avalanche or the failure of one hunter.
Each race knew of the other, and the elves expressed some curiosity in these primitive men. The men, who may at first have considered the elves as food, quickly learned to fear them. In fairness, it was not that the elves bore any ill feeling toward man; it was that man could not seem to understand any other possibilities.
How long the second age lasted is lost but we know that it was many thousands of years. We also know that the second age ended with cataclysm.
The Third Age
The changes came rapidly. The onset of summer was earlier and warmer than usual and the storms more fierce. The water began to rise. While many chose to believe it was simply unusual spring floods, most admitted they were far worse than usual. After several weeks of heavy warming rains, the waters of the oceans and bays began to rise rapidly. Whole cities were submerged in hours. In a matter of days the coastal areas, in some places for many miles, were lost forever.
The elven world was shattered. Thousands upon thousands drowned, while others were carried by the floods and scattered. What records are left say the water rose 30 fathoms or more, and rose so fast that little could be saved. Some groups of the survivors tried to rebuild high in the mountains, but as the warming continued, those high places were abandoned for lack of water. Most of the elves retreated to the forests and took up residence in the trees. The few great elven cities today are still in those ancient trees.
The elves had never been like grains of sand. Even so, rebuilding their population would take many thousands of years. How the crossbreeding with humans began is still conjecture. Their cities gone, their people scattered as they ran from the encroaching waters, many of the elves were separated from their kind. Whether they believed all other elven kind had been lost or they were taken prisoner by the humans makes little difference now.
Those elves with animosity towards the humans claimed elven females were forced to breed like any other female member of the tribes. Others believe the crossbreeding was an experimentation perhaps to improve the fertility of elves. The two explanations do help explain the attitudes toward humans of most elves.
These hybrid offspring had qualities of both parents. About half looked like modern humans today. The humans gained in intellectual capacity, agility, speech, and the ability to build. While they retained some of their aggressiveness, few acquired the gift of magic.
After many generations the hybrids began breeding true. Although in human kind you can still see some of the brutish look and behavior of their ancestors, others could almost pass for elves. In the end the difference between the original races and current men and elves is simple. Men are curious, aggressive, reproduce rapidly, and employ machines. The elves are vastly outnumbered, secluded, and have magic.
The Fourth Age
The fourth age has occurred in my lifetime, and to it, I will speak directly. As is the case with childre
n challenging their parents, man began to test his strength against the elves. Man’s aggressive nature combined with a history he wished to forget, drove him to expand and grow. The confrontation could be seen coming by any who were willing to look. The elves were not willing to fight their cousins and instead withdrew until they could withdraw no longer. Finally, as their last resort, they struck in the only way they could.
The result was a savior, scourge, lunatic, or brother depending on who writes the history. But this is my history, written from what I have seen and what I know. I will show no partiality to either side as they showed none to me.
ONE
Another Thursday night in the lab, he thought. Thursday in the lab paid for Friday and Saturday night if he was careful. He signed into the computer and waited for what seemed an eternity as the booting process took its own sweet time. The first email subject line was Malaysia, and that meant Dad (the professor) had been there just before or just after he had made the recording. As usual it was followed by Malaysia 2, 3, 4, etc. His dad, his adoptive dad more precisely, wasn’t very creative when it came to naming. Adoptive dad isn’t very precise either, Daniel thought, he’s my dad although sometimes I am glad we share no genes. His adoptive parents frequently quipped at how pleased they were that Daniel couldn’t have inherited the other’s traits.
Daniel smiled at the idea and refocused on the newest batch of recordings. He had lost count of the recordings over the last two years. The fun in counting stopped at about a hundred and twenty-three or four. He could go back and count them all but it wasn’t worth the trouble.
The job wasn’t all that bad and he got paid from a grant.
“We can do this with federal grant money because you have true perfect pitch and that is rare,” his dad had told him.
Perfect pitch and a good feel for rhythms and beats, he thought, anybody can run this software to sort out the sounds - anybody under forty, and he smiled at the idea again. His dad apparently had written the grant around Daniel’s natural talents intending to dispel any issues with nepotism. When the subject came up his mom would say, “Sam, you are going to prison alone. Knock yourself out.”
She was a mechanical engineer, Deborah Sanders-Mullins, and the practical one of the two, at least in her mind. The household sniping had always been fun. She would say, ‘if it weren’t for me you would still be living in that van,’ and he would say, ‘Deb, you’re not tall enough to see the big picture.’
After adopting Daniel in their late thirties, they had doted on him. Looking back it was like a competition to see which one he would take after. His mom had said, ‘it’s easier to learn to count if you have something to count.’ Even though he didn’t know exactly what it all meant he could recite one hundred and five elements in the periodic table by age five.
Whenever he learned a new element she would bring him a piece and let him keep it in a special printer’s tray in his room. The tray had some holes where toxic substances would reside when he got older, and he never got anything his mom said ‘would glow’.
His dad had countered by teaching him all the different musical styles from all over the world. By seven he could tell the difference between the songs of northern Brazilian tribes and southern ones. Little kids are funny, he thought, to me it was a game we played for hugs. He had no idea how lame it was till he got to junior high. Of course, he corrected himself, everything is lame in junior high.
The grant was to ‘save the religious practices of indigenous peoples.’ His dad had gotten all into them when he started his master’s in music and then got buried in them for his PhD. Daniel’s father, Dr. Samuel Mullins, who it was hard to believe had once been an Indie rocker, was collecting all these chants and tunes to keep them from being lost.
As far as Daniel was concerned some of them would be better off lost.
He put on his headphones and folded his long lean frame into the old chair in a cross-legged manner. Chairs just never seem to fit his six foot three inch frame. They always made his knees hurt. It had been funny when he got his growth spurt, his dad was a stretching five foot ten inches and his mom was five foot two. They had never made any secret about his adoption and had always said, ‘some people have kids and others have to find theirs.’ When he was little he thought of himself as the prize at an Easter egg hunt.
The padding on the arms of the chair was on its second layer of duct tape and carried the sweet musty smell of years of oil sprayed on all the chair’s hinges to stop the squeaking.
Daniel waited for the first file to download, and tried to guess its size. It was a game he played out of sheer boredom: if he was close, he felt good about his guess, if not, well, it was a game anyway. He got paid by the recording, so he always looked forward to the short ones. The file size told him he was in for about four minutes, his eyes narrowed as he quickly did the calculations, not too bad. If the others were the same size he would be done reasonably early and have money for Saturday night.
The trick with his job was to listen to the recording, the original was always copied to a remote server first and then stored. Then he had to separate out all the background noises, chanting, etc. He would then do a recording of his own voice duplicating the melody and harmonies so the tones and beats could be examined and compared by the computers without all the screeching and shouting that seemed to be part of the magic.
When he asked his dad about that, he said, “It allows everyone in the tribe to participate, giving it more power.” Apparently the real power was the status the local witchdoctor gained by playing on the tribe’s superstitions.
Some of the tunes were actually pleasant and catchy but most were discordant and sinister sounding. In Daniel’s mind they were categorized as white and black magic.
Daniel adjusted his headset and clicked the play button. Good news, not too much screaming and a complex but pleasant melody. He began humming along, learning the complex interwoven notes. His mind drifted to his upcoming date and how the light played off her long dark hair. The tune was hypnotic and it made him think of faraway places and times.
Daniel was on a hill looking at the back of a fairy tale princess as she watched a tournament in the hollow below. The light breeze flowed across her dark hair causing the reflections of sunlight to almost sparkle. His focus changed to his surroundings. The stands lining the hollow were bedecked with colorful pennants and a shout arose from the crowd after each series of clanks and crashes produced by the combatants. To the left and right of the oblong arena, dozens of colorful tents were erected. Above each was a standard floating lightly on the breeze. Since the breeze was blowing from right to left, he assumed the tents on the downwind side were for lesser nobility.
The girl was exceptionally tall, at least by what he thought were medieval standards, maybe five foot nine, but it was tough to guess with the shiny pale green gown flowing to the grass and the pointed hat trailing a darker green veil that seemed to sparkle gold in the sunlight. Her dark brown hair was pleated as a support for the hat and still managed to fall to the middle of her back. He thought her hands were in front of her but couldn’t be sure with the long draping sleeves hanging down. One of these days, he thought, I am going to have to ask someone in fashion design what the point of these ridiculous outfits was.
Daniel was thoroughly enjoying the cool breeze dancing between the veil, trailing off her pointed hat, and her hair when he realized the breeze was cool because he was naked. “Ah, crap,” he said aloud looking down at his torso, “I hate dreams like this.”
He looked up quickly at the gasp he knew was the dream girl. The Murphy’s Law for dreams like this would mandate that she see him as soon as he saw himself.
“A dream you say.” She had gathered her composure quickly and was looking him over. She did not seem afraid or shocked. Why should she, he thought, it’s my bad dream hers.
“I was not aware that ravishers blushed when caught prematurely.” She said all too calmly.
Daniel knew he was red, “I hate these dreams,” he repeated with more frustration. His embarrassment was driving him to search for the kind of clever, witty comeback that only shows up too late or in dreams. “But if I were the ravishing type you would be the one I would pick.”
Her slightly triangular face and high cheek bones showed almost no reaction, disappointing Daniel a little.
“OK, it’s time to wake up, Daniel,” he said more to himself and thought, I never have the nerve to say something like that.
“This is now, officially, the weirdest dream I can remember. Usually people just stare and I run around looking for clothes till I wake up. And I am cold.” The thought struck Daniel as odd but passed quickly the way they do in dreams. He wanted to hide, the girl was starting to laugh, and he wanted to wake up. You aren’t supposed to have to think this much in a dream, he thought, at least the panicky sensation feels familiar.
“Seems as your dream is turning to a nightmare, sir.” As she spoke her eyes moved from him to a point just past his left shoulder. He turned to see what she was looking at but never had a chance to focus before the gauntleted fist landed.
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