By: Brianna Lee Hubler
Copyright © 2022 Brianna Lee Hubler. All rights reserved.
The Flame Elf and the Pyromancer
__________Fruyr descended through the dense, eerie mist that flooded the field beneath the old cabin and the ethereal door. The lake of mist destabilized and displaced the solid earth, which moments ago supported Fruyr’s weight, as he dashed to Kimio’s rescue. Tiny water droplets bespeckled Fruyr’s tan skin, his bright, red-orange hair, and his soiled village clothes. The leathery, gnarled hands that dragged him under, dragged him deeper and deeper into a biting, otherworldly cold, until the droplets crystalized, and the chill crept into Fruyr’s bones.
__________Even the warm blood seething from the wound stripe on Fruyr’s back froze, as the half-formed fiend, who stole him from the world above, tilted Fruyr’s head towards a pit of cascading, ringed, canine teeth, which formed its open mouth. Fruyr’s internal flame, a gift bestowed to the Faomekatheermor by the Eternal Flame—sheltered within the heart, spreading through the veins, and pooling in the irises—ducked and dimmed against the overwhelming chill in the air. Fruyr’s body stiffened, as the first row of the phantom’s menacing teeth latched onto his skull. With its claws embedded in his ankles, the phantom trapped Fruyr against its unfinished body. Then it shook Fruyr by the contact points of its teeth, like a proud, hungry terrier. Fruyr snapped in and out of consciousness, until another phantom body slammed the first, knocked the claws and teeth from Fruyr’s flesh, and Fruyr spiraled through an unlit nightscape, towards a mound of flesh, bone, blood, and wailing, piled atop a lifeless, alien ground.
__________Smack! Disembodied organs smashed under Fruyr’s weight, splattered cold, stale blood across pale bones. Severed appendages writhed with the last spurt of energy the brains that once controlled them left behind when detached. Then suddenly, the severed appendages stilled and greyed. A jeweled crown frisbeed past the mound of flesh, and a red-haired boy, who appeared a few years Fruyr’s junior, cartwheeled across the barren stretch between himself and the crown.
__________He completed the cartwheel and caught the crown in his upturned hands. He dropped the crown atop his head and dramatically bowed, as though he stood atop a stage, but as the boy lowered his head, the crown slipped and fell again into his hands. The boy sneered, raised the crown, and dropped it back down onto his head. The circumference of the crown was a few inches too wide for the boy’s head; the crown slunk to one side, crossed over a red eyebrow, and covered half an ear. Despite this, the boy did his best to appear dignified. He dusted off his lavish, orange robes, straightened his back, raised his chin, and marched to the foot of the mountain of corpses, for atop this mountain an outsider lay.
__________The boy’s eyes were as dark and deathly as the dowsed coal of a cold forge. They scaled the mountain in an upward glance and rested at the sight of Fruyr’s frozen feet. “You can’t move, can you?” the boy assessed.
__________Unable to speak, Fruyr whimpered softly and mournfully. The persistent cold of the nightmarish realm sealed his eyelids and his lips shut. His internal flame sputtered desperately and deliberately, like a ship’s beacon, or a survivor’s flare, searched for kinship among the damned, or perhaps with their keeper, the Lord of the Undead. Could that be the title of the silly, dark-eyed, red-haired boy who assessed him, though he looked no more mature than Fruyr himself? What kinship could a spark birthed from the Eternal Flame, and ignited in Fruyr’s heart, have with the lord of this gruesome, frostbitten realm? It was sickly unnatural for such starkly different elements to share such a closeknit bond, but was that not the same slur the Zalirkatheer woman spoke when she witnessed Fruyr’s sacrifice for his beloved brother, whose elemental bond was opposite of his own? After all, Fruyr’s parents formed what many of their kind labeled an unnatural union, and both Fruyr and Kimio owed their conception to what others might call their parents’ shame.
__________“A definite shame,” the red-haired boy began.
__________Unable to detest in words or indignantly scrunch his frozen face in annoyance, Fruyr shuddered internally. Is this kid reading my thoughts? he wondered. I didn’t feel him enter.
__________“To waste so many useful parts,” the boy finished.
__________Fruyr relaxed internally, though he could not slack his muscles or otherwise reposition his body. Irony, not invasion or scorn, Fruyr decided. I’d laugh if I wasn’t three-quarters dead and almost as stiff as an ice cube.
__________The boy cupped his hands and raised his arms. Then he spun his wrists and flattened out his palms towards the sky. A fire ignited beneath the corpse mound, gathered in a stream of flame, and snaked up the mound. The wailing of the dismembered undead, who were hidden among the dismembered dead, rose in pitch and despair. Even after the flames devoured the tongues of the screaming, the screams of the undead hung in the air for a time, like the reverberating, monotonous ring of stilled bells. When the spiraling stream of flame reached the peak of the corpse mound, the mound erupted, formed a foul-smelling, pungent bonfire, which scorched the desolate ground below it and ravened the moisture from the air above it. As soon as the flames met Fruyr’s flesh, Fruyr’s flesh absorbed them. His internal flame welcomed the quickening, which defrosted and revitalized Fruyr. Fruyr slid down the charred, sunken corpse mound. His descent displaced some of the ashes left behind by the red-haired boy’s bonfire. Ashes were all that remained of his outfit and several of the corpses.
__________These ashes tumbled down the mound with Fruyr. Some of these ashes clung to his skin and burrowed into his wounds. Contaminated, his wounds stung, as though they burned. This was the only burning sensation Fruyr had ever known. It reminded him of sliding on carpet and scraping the skin off his knees, though this version of that pain was more intense. Fruyr ignored the pain, as he would a playground injury, since now his feet met the ground, and his eyes met the distinguished, unfamiliar boy, whose control of Fierey—the Element of Fire—rivalled his own. Fruyr missed the warning the pain forwarded to his thoughts, as he eagerly greeted the ominous, dark-eyed stranger, whose spell rekindled his internal flame.
__________Warm blood gushed from Fruyr’s previously frozen injuries. Two tall, fanged men hissed and leapt from the shadows. They grasped Fruyr’s arms, dug their nails into his skin, and salivated at the sight of Fruyr’s blood oozing from the wound stripe on his back. They wiped their mouths on the shoulders of their sleeves and offered Fruyr’s rescuer pitiful stares, like dogs begging to be treated from their master’s plate.
__________“No, you good-for-nothing leeches!” the red-haired boy reprimanded. “This is not the night to eat our guest. Escort him to my sewing shed.”
__________The fanged men hung their heads, but they glared at their feet. “So be it, Lord Draiden,” they resigned.
__________Fruyr did not resist the trip to the small, metal building Draiden called his sewing shed. His energy drained, as he bled from his back, his forehead, and his ankles. The sight and smell of his bleeding wounds tested the mettle of his vampire escorts, who stayed their fangs only by Draiden’s order. Much to Fruyr’s liking, they departed shortly after tossing Fruyr inside the shed. Draiden followed in after Fruyr, shut, and locked the door behind them.
__________Fruyr’s eyes scanned the shed’s interior. The metal panels that formed the ceiling and the walls had been pounded flat by a blacksmith’s hammer and crudely welded together by hand. The floor was clean, polished marble. In a corner of the small room rested a mop and bucket. The formerly cream-colored hair of the mop head was stained pink. In front of Fruyr was a stool, and to his right was a metal desk with labeled cabinets. Across from spotless, metal cabinets labelled for types of thread and needles, there were rusting cabinets labelled for appendages and animal parts. Both rested under a clean but cluttered desk top. The room reeked of decay and of burning kerosene. Two kerosene lamps hung from hooks. The hooks were welded into the ceiling as messily as the walls. The lamps sputtered ominously overhead and attracted a mob of flies and moths.
__________“Ever at war with maggots,” Fruyr muttered offhandedly.
__________Draiden smirked menacingly. “So was your mother’s kitchen before you lit it aflame,” he taunted.
__________Fruyr glared. “How would you know?”
__________Draiden shrugged. “Maybe somebody died up there. People die every day, and some of them, end up here.”
__________Fruyr crossed his arms. “I’m not dead.”
__________“I know. Odd, isn’t it?” Draiden remarked.
__________Fruyr dizzied and stumbled from blood loss. He grabbed a corner of the desk and lowered himself onto the stool. Then he released the desk, grasped the edge of the stool with one hand, and pressed the other hand to his forehead. His elbow jabbed his thigh, as he hung his head, closed his eyes, and with the palm of his hand, dulled a throbbing headache.
__________“Good, stay just like that,” Draiden said. He opened a few of his cabinets, threaded a needle, and raised the threaded needle to the lamplight. The needle was sharp and sturdy enough to push through, and pull together, flabs of tender, Elvish skin. The color of the thread matched closely to Fruyr’s complexion. Draiden chuckled, “For once, I get to sew a warm body.”
__________Fruyr groaned. And brutalize me worse than that piglet I branded, no doubt.
__________Draiden moved behind Fruyr, aligned the flabs of Fruyr’s skin torn asunder, and stabbed his threaded needle into Fruyr’s flesh. He brought the needle through and out the opposite flab and pulled the stitch until it tightened. He continued, pulled the thread from one direction and then the other, as if he laced a shoe. He stitched the flabs of Fruyr’s skin together with precise, deliberate motions, like an expert tailor neatly joining two sheets of fabric. Fruyr wailed through the first few stitches and sobbed through the rest.
__________Draiden tied off his last stitch, snipped off the slack thread, and dropped the needle into a bowl of water. He pressed a palm to the side of the metal bowl and heated it with a contact spell. As the water boiled and marginally sanitized the needle, Draiden examined his needlework. The flabs of Fruyr’s skin were inflamed where the needle pierced them, but the stitches were secure. Dried blood crusted the stripe where the flabs of skin met and plugged the holes the needle left behind.
__________Draiden placed his hands on his hips and smirked. “You’re patched as well as any recently spayed mongrel,” Draiden announced.
__________Fruyr sighed. “I’m not female, I’m not a dog, and last I checked, everything from the waist down is still intact,” he argued.
__________“But you are a mongrel,” Draiden replied, “who strayed too far from home, tumbled into my corpse landfill, and forced me to murder some of my subjects.”
__________“You mean that screaming pile of rotting appendages?” Fruyr asked. “It’s not my fault you burned it.”
__________“Burned them,” Draiden corrected. “All they needed was a little sewing, but no, I had to incinerate them to save you, because you survived the phantoms and living people aren’t under my jurisdiction.”
__________Fruyr crossed his arms and rocked back and forth atop the stool; he rebelled against the frigid atmosphere that chilled him and the stitches that stung him. “I’m sorry. Okay?” he said. “Just toss me a robe and show me the way out.”
__________Draiden opened another cabinet, retrieved a hospital robe, and tossed it to Fruyr. Fruyr shakily unfolded the robe, pushed his arms through its short sleeves, and fumbled with the ties behind his back. Draiden closed the cabinet, and then placed his hands atop his desk. He stared at the wall, almost through it, as if it were empty sky. When Fruyr stood, Draiden stretched out an arm, blocked him from exiting, without turning to face him.
__________“If only it were that simple,” Draiden said, “but lives were lost, you live, and the treaty between the Twin Terror Realms stands.”
__________Draiden slowly turned his head, until his deathly eyes met Fruyr’s gaze. “You are a problem for me, living or dead,” he declared.
__________Fruyr backed up a few steps, his ankles bumped into the stool, and knocked it over. His heartbeat quickened. Flames rose in his honey-yellow irises. His fingers bent into a casting position.
__________Draiden’s smaller hands grasped both of Fruyr’s, folded Fruyr’s hands into fists. “Don’t bother,” Draiden said. “I’m a pyromancer. Your fire cannot hurt me. Mine cannot hurt you.”
__________Fruyr nodded, his eyes aglint with comprehension. “Kalinvaud,” he acknowledged.
__________Draiden’s ever-dark eyes shimmered. “To determine how you will serve me, until she comes to collect you,” Draiden explained.
__________Fruyr raised an eyebrow. “She who?”
__________“Your life belongs to the Zalirkatheer woman, who believes you traded it for your twin,” Draiden continued, “but you’re alive, so I can’t kill you to avenge my incinerated subjects, and I can’t send you home either.”
__________Again, Fruyr steadied himself against a corner of the desk and caught his forehead in his palm. His thoughts stammered, Kimio’s alive… He needs to know I’m okay. I can’t stay here!
__________Draiden patted Fruyr on the back. Fruyr winced.
__________“Cheer up,” Draiden consoled. “We’ll have lots of time to play together.”
Endlesslore 