THE ELVEN SEER AMAZAS hurtled out of a dewy bush early the following morning, brandishing a pair of daggers with astonishing vigour for a one hundred and thirty-nine-year-old, allegedly blind Forest Elf. “Avast your advance, filthy scruffulent beggar! Put up your socks!”
Edged weapons did nothing to her sparkles. Phew.
Allory nipped over and tweaked the point of his left ear. “Amazas –”
He howled, “Stinking carnivorous mothmonsters! Back, I say! Back, you savage twinkly … whatever!” The daggers diced up nothingness. “I’ll stuff a crumple down your fizzle! I’ll carve your gizzard into a gazillion gazumps!”
“I’m Allory. You must be – eep!”
His gnarled hands closed over most of her sparkles. “I have you surrounded in all fourteen quarters, o quarrelsome apparition! Castigate my crackling ear cartilage, will you? Go pinch another helpless old Elf, I dare you, ha-ha-huh?” His hand flew to his mouth. “Where’d my toothache go? Now I’ve less than ten thousand reasons to be a grumpy old frumpy. Fiend. Blithering backstabber. Flatulent flungersnitch! Rotten tactics, these are. Totally unacceptable.”
Slipping out between his fingers, she called, “Amazas, I’ve brought Ashueli, your great-granddaughter.”
“Who’s there? Speak up, you gabbling glubber-wretch.”
Suggids! Did this Elf wear war paint all the time? He looked like one of the Chameleons trying to imitate some fierce bird, only his fantastical crimson, yellow and orange getup was all done in some kind of organic paint, with a matching, quite marvellous headpiece of feathers that stood at least three feet tall atop his head.
At top pitch, she yelled, “Ashueli, your great-granddaughter!”
“Who much and how when?” He mined his left ear with a very long fingernail and flicked away what appeared to be a squirming grey grub. “Squeak louder, you mish-mash-sparkleshroom!”
“Ashueli!”
“Eh? Oooooh, the cheeky chit who slip-slop-slapped by the other day? I smackerated that imposter packerating, I did,” he said proudly, hitching up trousers which appeared to have been woven from reeds. “Nobody’s as beautiful as my Smashueli. Gorgeous as Middlesun is long. Hair like a blackberry bush, as I recall when my second sight was bright. Now, what were you saying about Brashueli?”
“She’s here. She’s my friend.”
“Ooh, why didn’t you say so five times be-four three two … one … eh? Who were you again?”
“Allory Fae.”
“Means dilly diddums to me – and I’m not sorry at all, hee hee hee.”
“I’m a Scintillant, if that helps?”
“Swat my scrawny backside with a Thrice-Tufted Viridian Parrot feather, one of the legendary healers? Well, you lot evaporated like a misplaced puddle and lost all of your confuddle sparkle-muddle, as I recall the histories went. So what?” He folded his spindly arms across his chest. “Amaze me, sparklebug, or I’ll conslobberate all of your lurking loony chums to the chim-cham-chunter!”
Eccentric? Aye, and then some.
Allory considered all the things she could possibly say.
“Amazas, I’m the girlfae who, together with all of these creatures you’ve so ably detected, is trying to stop Middlesun from wobbling into the side of Spheris and destroying our world.”
“Ha.” His white-rimed eyes blinked in rather the wrong direction. Then, he whispered conspiratorially to her, “Almost lost that amongst all the other blithering blather-some balderdash swilling about in your miniscule mind – smallest this, tiniest that, worthless, most useless mouth in the cocoon? What a disgusting trough of slop and lies. Took you awhile to swim through to find the truth, didn’t it, Allory Fae?”
She sparkle-blinked.
Not half as loony as people said, was he?
His hand moved in a flash, but only to stroke her sparkles tenderly, as if he held a length of Faesilk rather than an Elemental Faerie creature. “Remember, no matter how talented the Dragon’s whiskers, they are a pretty unreliable indicator of the end of the world. Now, let’s call your fulsome friend-fiends over. Great jumping Forestal Dragons! Is that cowardly cad holding my Ashueli’s hand? I’ll skin him like a jackrabbit and roast his entrails with a perfect blend of sub-subi peppers and barigori spice!”
How did he even know? Blind, right?
“Great-grandfather, stop!” Ash called, just in time.
Better still, he actually listened to her. First time in a while, by all accounts. Although, Allory resolved to call the Elven Princess ‘Smashueli’ at a better time. Better nickname than Sweetblades? Hmm. Everything was fine until Ash blurted out that Barakunal was her newly-discovered father.
Amazas leaped for his throat with a wild roar.
Elemental or none, the Master had to smoke for his life.
An hour or so later, the forest returned somewhat to normal – considerably more agitated than before, but normal. Amazas now knew the whole story – at least, regarding his great-granddaughter’s alleged ‘shenanigans’ with Jhoranyal and the revelation of Barakunal. He had also chased both men around the treetops to his satisfaction and insulted them in every possible way, using the full range of his impressive vocabulary, both esoteric and invented. For an Elf of his venerable years, Amazas knew a trick or three about forests. He had enormous stamina and a rather disturbing facility with blades that translated into violent attempts to gut the Dark Elves like a pair of fish. Clearly, this much had passed down with the family sap. That no-one was hurt had to be a miracle.
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Once he calmed down, the Seer led the large group to his treehouse, whereupon he scratched his head and decided that he could not, after all, have everyone over for afternoon bark tea.
A madman with a spick and span house.
A neat conical woven dwelling, much like a bird’s nest, stood about four hundred feet off the ground in a grove of mighty, long-leafed zathiguri trees almost overrun by at least fourteen different types of flowering creepers and vines that created the enormous towers, bridges and ramparts of a floral castle. Bright black-and-yellow bees, iridescent hummingbirds and vibrantly coloured insects buzzed lazily around the offerings. A heady scent of pollen and nectar hung in the air, thick enough to cut with one’s wings. Creatures who had them. Those who could enjoy the bounty, not that a certain Elemental was at all sore about having to practice abstinence while everyone else gorged themselves upon the bounty hanging above Amazas’ neatly arranged vegetable and flower patches, and his richly stocked orchards to the sun-spinward and sundown sides of his home.
Allory sulked near a waterfall of gorgeous purple trumpet flowers, only to get the fright of her life as Amazas popped out of the middle of it, right next to her.
“Allory! It’s coming, what can we do?”
“What the – it –”
“The thing! The horrific ravelling rumpus! The walloping beast, the smiter of minds – help me!”
His scream paralysed her. Front and centre in her mind flared the awareness of an intolerable build-up of pressure. Pain like before but ramped up a hundredfold. Did she hear countless souls screaming somewhere in a distance beyond eternity?
The attack escalated so suddenly, Allory could do nothing to stop it.
From nowhere, a hammer greater than anything in legend smote the world. The air vibrated like a gong. The shadows around her elongated and warped as never before. Every bough shook at the basal vibration, a sound deeper than any ear could hear – perhaps the agonised groaning of Spheris itself. The reverberations of that strike cascaded over her body, again and again, with a storm’s roaring and the dominance of gravity itself – indeed, gravity run amok. Her companions dropped like flies, every last one; most were struck unconscious, but a few like Jhoranyal, Ashueli and Yaarah remained partly conscious, stirring slowly where they had fallen.
Although she hurt in ways that defied physical description, Allory knew she must rush to their aid.
Like a glutinous blob of nectar, she stirred. Suggids, this is … bad …
A paean of pain contracted her mind to a pinpoint of consciousness. Was it – was this attack aimed at her, too?
Yet, even in this space of abominable hurting, Allory’s awareness sharpened upon an odd atmospheric effect, like a grey veil drifted over Middlesun. Her sparkles twizzled automatically to gaze up through a gap in the foliage into a Centresky dimmed not by twilight, but by a different shadow, a gloom more sinister by far. Pure terror eclipsed her being. Middlesun had turned dark. The usually brilliant sphere emerged so dulled that she realised the smoke trails of burned, vaporised Shyraiama Dragons drifted across its strangely enlarged face. Tendrils of smoke writhed away from the outer corona where sometimes brilliant white-blue flares were visible at sunrise or sunset. That huge gleaming orb swayed like nectar jelly in a bowl. From azure, the colour had dipped into the deep, ugly reddish-purple of a bruise upon Elven skin.
No, oh no! Please …
How could this attack be orders of magnitude greater than before? How could she have survived, if not courtesy of her new existence in this Elemental form? Providence or coincidence? She really needed to pull Yaarah’s tail about the implications of – suggids! If millions upon millions of Dragons had just perished …
WHOMP!
Allory swayed and screamed as a familiar psychic punch knocked her silly.
Ten times bigger. A migraine fit to fell any Dragon crammed into her tiny mind. Strange colours haloed before her perception.
WHADDA-WHOMP!
Middlesun trembled, flaring as if panicked by the devastating scale of the attack launched against her. Spinning, flailing, falling, Allory wondered if she imagined or observed real, wave-like ripples of power spearing upward into the sky from a site not very many leagues away, perhaps near the middle of Marakusia. Elemental perception? Could magic travel through the atmosphere so discernibly? How could any sound possibly be so colossal, she felt it in her soul?
What did she know about that place?
WHOMP!
She hit the ground and stayed prone. Unmoving and immovable.
WHOMP! WHOMP! WHOMP!
Colossal backlash, wave upon unbearable wave. A frustrated flurry of attacks!
Slowly, the world she knew receded. Allory realised that she was being crushed once more, crushed to nothingness. Elemental or none, she rose and fell with each inconceivable application of weight, as if the Wraith breathed deep of the power, lightening her load, before reaching out to pound Middlesun with world-staggering blows.
How could any entity possibly be so powerful?
WHOMP!
How many aeons had it being preparing for this moment?
WHOMP!
Her vision narrowed to a long tunnel … diminished further … she must not lose consciousness! Not now!
WHOMP!
The true nature of the attack struck her in a burst of prismatic colours. Separation! The Wraith entity meant to sunder the link between them. In terms of her backward, little-me logic, the revelation staggered her. There was a causal link. This meant that something she was doing kept Middlesun alive, functioning, resisting, healing. She could bring it back from the brink by returning a glimmer of healing to the entity up there. Being somehow … present. By changing something.
For once in her life, matter.
As this attack proceeded, did she sense ever so dimly that the great pounding punches became more desperate, less focussed and more flailing, as if the Wraith knew it lacked the capacity to execute that final, killing blow?
Now was the moment she must neither faint nor fail.
She must dance, as bidden.
Fight-dance!
Allory knew she must do battle for the souls in her keeping before the Wraith stole them all.
She speared her search inward. Not a second to waste.
* * * *
Satiated, fattened beyond belief, the seven shadows slopped over the mountain of bones that overspilled the boneyard’s shattered stone crown. Obsidian skeletons lay heaped upon obsidian stone, yet the blackness was of two different types. Allory had never seen bones as big as these. Their smallest ribcages had to be bigger than Henzaroseflash in her entirety. The smouldering, smoking heaps of superheated black bones entirely obscured the thick, widespread layer of older bones from before.
So huge had the shadows become, they lay atop one another, overlapping, sluggishly dragging themselves across the feast. Bloated. Loathsome. Never pausing in their gluttony.
They writhed as an unseen blow shook the boneyard. Skeletons scattered. An eerie keening vibrated against her senses, as if these creatures suffered pain of a kind hitherto unknown to her. Where the wind moaned and guttered, was there a draw of magic similar to the life-force of ariavanae?
Does the Wraith feed upon the feeders, the parasites?
As if sparked by this insight, an idea coalesced in her mind. One chance, one action, one simple hope.
