Of Dark Elves And Dragons

by Greg Curtis

  “You have my support, my sword and my magic.”

  “I know and I thank you, but it’s your home we want. At least for a while.”

  “Then you shall have it. But you already know that you and your family are welcome to stay with me for as long as you want. Narinne, Esille and Ashiel are all there now, hopefully cooking up a feast for our return, and if they wish to make it their home for a while longer, then they are more than welcome.” He meant it too. In barely a week spent with them in his home he had already come to think of his new guests almost as family, and he would do anything for family.

  “Actually Narinne’s back at the Lagoria where you awakened us, with a dozen of your steel elementals. The girls are alone at your cottage.” That caught Alan off-guard and he was briefly concerned.

  “What? Are they protected there? Without the steel elementals all they have are the fire and air elementals, and as I told you scarcely two weeks ago, I dethroned the king of Calumbria most publicly, before levelling the castle. Despite their fear of the demon spirit of the forest as I am known, the people may retaliate and attack in force. Especially when word reaches them of your shopping trip and my presence with you. It may be enough for someone to put two and two together, and realize that I am the demon spirit, a mortal wizard and not a demigod.” Of course Umber already knew that and Alan could only hope that he was learning to enjoy his time as a peasant fisherman stranded on a rock in the middle of nowhere, with only an assassin on a neighbouring rock for company. He hadn’t checked to see that he was still there, but it seemed unlikely that he would have escaped yet.

  Meantime he had also managed to make another trip into Silver Falls before they’d departed and there the gossip and songs from the bards were all of the demon spirit and the missing king. None of them had spoken of a wizard, and in truth he’d quite enjoyed the tales. He’d quite enjoyed dancing with Rosalie a little more as well, as she had, deliberately he thought, kept him away from the Huron, and one Huron in particular. She and Ashiel had managed to at least keep their differences to themselves for once, but their jealousy simmered on not too far below the surface. Not that either of them would speak of it to him. It wasn’t so much that they wanted him he suspected, it was just that each was determined that the other should not have him.

  “Be at ease. Both girls are well versed in the arts of war and magic, as befits those Huron from our time sadly. It is embarrassing that it is for our skills of destruction that we are remembered, but still it is true and they are capable. Between your remaining elementals and the girls’ own magic they are safe, and soon they will have company.”

  “Not for weeks. It will be at least another full week before we reach the ranges and Ashiel’s family, and then several more before we return.”

  “Many more will arrive before then, and even as we speak the girls are busy spending all their energies preparing materials and magic to build homes for them.” Dava saw the shock and confusion in his eyes and took pity on Alan.

  “When the war was ending and the worst of the fighting passed, our world was in flames and the last of our people took refuge in remote shelters as you already know. But what you don’t realise is that for the most part, we didn’t do it in small family groups as you imagine. Rather we hid ourselves in five main caverns, one each for our five great provinces.”

  “Lagoria was one of them, and many thousands of our people are still sleeping there. Narinne has gone to awaken them, and tonight when the moon is high and we can begin fire talking, I expect to hear that the awakening is well under way. The elementals had all but reached the first chamber last night.”

  “She’s trying to break into another cavern by herself? That’s dangerous! And did you say thousands? And where?” Suddenly the questions were pouring out of Alan's mouth as fast as he could think of them.

  “When you entered the passage ways, you reached a fork, one up and one down. Had you taken the other fork you would have eventually reached the main caverns, deeper in to the heart of the mountain. Our chamber was set aside for us because of Narinne’s and my rank. We are the elders of our community if you like, its leaders and protectors by default, though only because most of the stronger had perished. We were the ones who should have been awoken first. And Narinne is not going to do anything so foolish as to try and enter through the passages. She does not need to thanks to your cleverness.”

  “She has your steel elementals and the knowledge of where the chambers lie. They are tunnelling through the heart of the mountain itself from our sleeping chamber. Hers is a relatively safe path, which is why I agreed to let her travel it alone. Our path is more risky, which is why I asked for your help.” And in doing so he had truly angered the elders as he’d chosen Alan over all of their finest young scouts and journeymen wizards. Another cherished memory for Alan and a slap in the face for the elves.

  “With luck three and a bit thousand of my people will be heading for your forest in the next few days.” Three thousand and more ancients? Alan’s eyes almost popped out of his head as he heard that. In all his life he’d never imagined that there could be so many ancients still alive in the world let alone about to be awoken. He was certain the elders hadn’t guessed it either.

  “We’ve scouted around a lot, and found a clearing by a river which will be perfect for our needs, six leagues away from your home along the north eastern path, and the girls have been busy buying building materials from Gaulda and Silver Falls all week. I hope that that will be far enough away that we don’t intrude on your life but close enough that you can visit whenever you choose. And you may be assured that we will not damage the forest in the least. We will be good neighbours.”

  “In the mountains you call Gorgotha, there were housed the last of Ashiel’s people, the southern tribes, and I hope that two or three thousand more may be found sleeping inside. But it was difficult to communicate between tribes and provinces towards the end. There was so much secrecy and fear, and no way of knowing if her family were among the survivors or even if there were any. But with the blessings of the creator, they too will join us in your forests, and the last village of the Huron will be formed.”

  “I’m not sure if that should be considered a good day or a bad one. A victory over our enemies, or a mark of shame as we measure our losses.” Once more Alan was reminded that while for him these people had been missing for five thousand years, to them, the great battles, the defeats and their retreat had all been only a few weeks and months before. The pain was still fresh in their hearts.

  “Surely it will be a great day. A day to celebrate the survival of your people across five thousand years. Yours is an amazing feat.”

  “Amazing and yet still tragic. We used to number in the millions, a dozen great tribes spread over the five lands, and now all that is left are a few thousand people and one village.”

  “You said there were five such shelters. Surely that leaves three more to find.” Alan was still working on automatic, asking questions without really concentrating on them. He was still trying to get his head around the idea of having neighbours within his own forest, or what he had always thought of as his own forest. Then again, perhaps he was just being selfish, as it wasn’t as though they would be living on his doorstep. Six leagues was a good three hour ride and probably at the edge of his sensing ability’s range.

  “The others have all awoken a long time ago. Probably once the expected fifty years were over. It's just that none among your people realized that. But we have studied intently all that you have shown us, all that the elves have given us, and all else that we could find.” Which was true. His small library of a few hundred important tomes, mostly of magic and history, had more than trebled in size in a week as the elves brought them all the knowledge that they had asked for, and his guests had devoured all the books with gusto. So had he.

  “To the north and west the tribes of what we called the great gardens of the world must have awoken five thousand years ago, only those garden
s have become great forests and plains. Over the years the survivors have become the elves and the dryads, and they have built a dozen great cities and hundreds more small villages and copses.”

  “The northern lands, north of the great mountains where you found us and which were once great open grasslands and sea ports, have been shattered and torn until they became mighty crevices and mountain ranges, with little in the way of grass. But the tribes from those lands have awoken as well, and become the dwarves. I simply can’t wait to meet some of them. I understand they now have hair all over the face and body, are powerful if short in stature, and retain much of the knowledge of mining and mountains. Physically they are the most changed of us and perhaps their knowledge is the most different as well.”

  “The eastern and southern lands were once the largest and most varied of all our lands, starting with the high mountain grazing lands and deserts, down through to the rich pastures and great forests of the central plateau, and then on again and down to the shore and the great cities and ports, and the islands beyond them. Once five tribes lived in harmony there, some of those cities had two and three hundred thousand people. But the survivors of those lands have awoken as well, and for the most part they have become the humans. The great travellers, traders, horsemen and farmers of this world, and then they in turn have gone on to found cities and villages across the entire world.”

  “And where the provinces have met, where the survivors and their descendants have re-joined, whole new races have emerged, halflings and gnomes, pixies, sylph and hillmen. The diversity of the people of your world is staggering, and not just in physical form. Some of you have retained some of our knowledge, the humans especially as they work in steel and farm, fish and forest as we once did. And when you think about it, the very name they term themselves is so close to Huron that it speaks strongly about how much they have kept even if only as legends. Others have kept only other fragments of the whole but developed new knowledge to add to it, most especially the dwarves from what we have learned.”

  “Some such as the elves have our magic, and some such as yourself have taken what we once considered to be the rarest and least useful of our magics, and made them into something unexpected and wondrous. The druidic magic of the dryads and I suspect, the dark elves. Your two peoples may be closer than you know. The same skin shades and the same magic. Perhaps your people are not dark elves as you name yourselves but rather dryads with elven ears. Meanwhile the humans have lost much of their magic until only a few possess it, but replaced it with technology, and dwarven magic and science seems to revolve entirely around stone and strength.”

  Alan listened to his friend’s theories with only half an ear. They sounded reasonable and many believed that they had descended from the ancients, though perhaps not in quite the same way as Dava told it. But in truth he was really only trying to work out how his life would change, and whether that was a good thing or not. He suspected not.

  He had lived alone ever since his parents’ death, and often he’d hated it. Hated the loneliness, the isolation, and the hiding from the elves, the Everliving’s servants and the baron’s evil. But he had also enjoyed aspects of it. The peace, the freedom, and the chance to become all he could be. Few spellcasters ever got the chance to simply study and practice; few soldiers either. They always got called into action one way or another. And with his druidic gifts as Dava called them, he was uniquely sensitive to the presence of people. He could feel them, especially when they had strong emotions at work. By the same empathy he could feel the forest all around him, the animals that wandered through it, even the trees themselves, and in time that peace, that natural order of things had seeped into him, become part of his very blood. It was a precious gift and he didn’t want to lose it.

  No more did he want to stop Dava’s people from finding a new home. It was the right thing to do, and even if he had been able to say no with a clear conscience, he wasn’t at all sure that his new friends would let him. For them, this was personal. More than personal, it was family and life, and he couldn’t imagine them stopping, least of all for him. Nor could he ask them to. It was the right thing to do, it was his duty and his honour to help them. He just didn’t like it.

  In time Dava finished his tale, and Alan didn’t know what to say. He didn’t even know what he wanted to say. The fire crackled away merrily in the small clearing, the stream tinkled away just a few yards away, and the birds sang their evening song, and the silence stretched between them. It was the first that Alan had known during his time with the ancients, and it was uncomfortable as it told him of the gulf that lay between them, a great yawning chasm he hadn’t known until just then.

  Instead of speaking, he busied himself with adding the tea to the boiling water, and preparing the evening meal. They were make work type chores that he could have done in his sleep, but which let him have enough peace to think or simply absorb what he had been told.

  It was the nicker of a horse as it smelled something strange that saved him from the silence. It might also have saved them both from far worse.

  At the sound Alan looked up, felt the horse’s thoughts in his own and then looked with his wizard sight to where the strangeness was. After that all other thoughts went out of his mind as he knew they were in danger. A small force of undead was approaching, able to creep up on even a wizard like him, because being undead they had no emotions and no true life for him to notice.

  Rising like a striking cobra, he drew both swords with practised ease, even as he sent the elementals racing out to meet the approaching enemy. They were strong creatures, not steel or fire elementals unfortunately, but they would hold the undead back for a time. Long enough for him to summon some more.

  “Undead, a small force trying to sneak up on us.” It was all he had time to say as he began concentrating on his summoning, his mind blessedly clear of distractions. Even as the sounds of a battle being joined made themselves known, he sent another half dozen elementals into the fray. All earth elementals, the quickest and easiest he could raise and far from the strongest, but at least it was a barrier of stone between them and the enemy.

  The battle though was far from one sided. The elementals were strong, but few, and the enemy, skeletons and zombies for the most part were many and they quickly began overpowering them. But they paid a cost for that, as the elementals crushed them beyond recognition and removed the threat they posed, one by one.

  “Biyi wha!” Beside him Dava cried out some magic of his own and the result was immediately apparent as some sort of blue shimmer appeared in the air all around them, just at the boundary where the clearing met the trees. He’d raised some sort of barrier thirty yards away from them.

  “Keep raising your army, the barrier will hold them off for some time.” His first three elementals finally destroyed and his next half dozen entering the battle right on time, Alan did exactly as he was told. Their very lives depended on it. He concentrated on more earth elementals and when he had time, a few air ones as well. The air elementals weren’t great fighters, but against skeletons and things that walked when they shouldn’t and somehow held themselves together without working tendons and muscles, they were a powerful threat. The sheer power of the winds they could unleash would tend to scatter the skeletons’ bones far and wide. They were also next to unkillable by the undead, and fast. Even before the third group of earth elementals had made the battle, they were unleashing their winds.

  The result was everything he could have hoped for as through their eyes he could see a dozen skeletons already in pieces from the point at which they had charged into the battle, and more were scattering all the time. It was at that point that Alan began to feel more comfortable. An assault force of fifty undead, and already half of them were returned to their final resting places. That was until he saw the lich coming down from his post where he had been directing the undead army in battle, and cold ran down his back as he knew the danger.

  “Lich!” He called out the war
ning, not even knowing if Dava knew what a lich was, whether they’d had such evil creatures five thousand years before. But he’d have to learn and quickly. An undead sorcerer was a dangerous foe, and something that it was far too early in the cycle of the undead to come across. All but unkillable, not that they were alive, able to confound spells aimed at them, and possessing terrible powers of their own, they were the generals of the undead battlefield, and deadly beyond belief.

  “Chain lightning!” His friend’s response wasn’t quite what Alan had expected, but he didn’t care as half a heartbeat later he saw a blast of lightning arc down out of the darkening sky and hit squarely in the middle of the battlefield. Before his next heartbeat he watched through his air elemental’s eyes as that single blast of whiteness hit its first target, a zombie of some sort, and then split into two and hit two more. Then each of those split two ways, and four more targets were hit and so forth. The impact was everything he could have hoped for as he watched skeletons and zombies explode as though they’d been filled with gunpowder, and once the brightness had died down a little, he knew the lich had been among them. Best of all, not one of his elementals had been touched, and suddenly they outnumbered the undead by a significant margin. He had to learn that spell!