By: Brianna Lee Hubler
Copyright © 2024 Brianna Lee Hubler. All rights reserved.
The Remnants that Torment
__________The sun ducked behind the ridge and tossed a wave of shadow over Talsis’s stranded horse. The horse twitched its ears and flicked its tail, as the evening chill bit into its fur and lapped the warmth of daylight from its skin. The horse grunted, craned its neck, and sniffed the groundcover. Its snout rifled through spikey, almond-shaped leaves and lean, bristly stalks for sweet, coastal strawberries, but the bushes were bare. The horse impatiently scraped the soil with its steel-shoed hooves and nervously ground the bit wedged between its flat teeth. Finally, it lifted its head and peered out to sea. Somewhere, either floating atop or sinking beneath billowing rolls of sea foam, its rider tarried.
__________Meanwhile, a pair of bluish, agile feet leapt from the branch of one perch to the branch of another, as gracefully and cunningly as the ebony paws of a dark-coated jaguar. Pine needles shook, the affected branches creaked, and only a few, insignificant twigs snapped, because Uuinora’s feet always landed precisely where she intended.
__________Camouflaged from the rising moonlight, the she-elf crouched in the shady, L-shaped nook between the limb that supported her and the tree trunk that stabled Talsis’s stranded horse. The horse swung its long neck over its shoulders, as its large, brown eyes darted towards the commotion but detected none. Attuned to daylight and open plains, those vigilant, equine eyes fared poorly in the shallow moonlight, which concealed Uuinora’s espionage and stretched the shimmering pupils of nocturnal beasts.
__________Uuinora pressed a palm to the tree trunk beside her, cautiously reached over her shoulder with her unoccupied hand, and quietly retrieved a simple trap from her knapsack. It was a coil of Elvish rope, with a ripe, juicy, red apple fastened to one end. Uuinora cradled the apple, while she unfurled the coil. She tied the spare end of the rope to her perch.
__________Plop! She dropped the apple.
__________Zwoop! The rope straightened.
__________The apple bounced before the horse’s nose. The horse chomped the air, sought to snatch the tasty morsel that teased it, but with each misplaced bite, the apple swung a fraction-of-an-inch out of reach. The horse snorted and whinnied. It charged forward, straining its leather reins and tightening the knot that bound them to the tree.
__________Uuinora dropped down from her perch. She twirled the rope in her fingers, winding the apple into her hand. Finally, she clutched the apple, turned over her palm, and handfed the horse. The horse munched the apple, rope harness and all.
__________“Poor Melihrene,” Uuinora cooed. “Cold, alone, and hungry.”
__________The horse licked and nuzzled her hand.
__________Uuinora stroked the horse along the snout and down the mane, until her fingers touched the strained leather reins that bound Melihrene to the tree. She glided her fingertips along the reins and located the knot.
__________“Here you stand by loyally, dangled before the dripping maws of hungry wolves,” she persuaded. “They drool for the meat on your sturdy bones, as you drooled for the succulent fruit of that sweet apple.”
__________Melihrene ignored most of Uuinora’s speech. It listened only to her last two words and craned its neck around her waist. The horse sniffed and bounced her knapsack with its snout but vainly mistook the rattling of Uuinora’s tools for the jostling of more apples.
__________While Uuinora unknotted and unwrapped Melihrene’s reins from around the tree, the horse latched onto her knapsack and pulled. Its nip tore a hole in her knapsack, and her tools poured out, like water down an unstopped drain. Her lockpicks and tinderbox disappeared under the leaves of the barren strawberry bushes.
__________When the weight of her knapsack plummeted with her tools, Uuinora cursed under her breath: “By the Eternal Dark…”
__________With a skyward flick of her chin, she tossed back her hair and scrunched her shoulders. She passed Melihrene’s reins from one hand to the other, and then back again, as she weaseled her arms out of the straps of her torn knapsack. Silently, she recited a self-taught lesson from her tumultuous childhood: If you don’t need it, leave it.
__________Back then, the wolves chased her. To throw them off her scent, she crawled through a flowering blackberry bramble. Bees buzzed about her ears. Their stingers, and the bramble’s thorns, pricked her tender flesh. With tear-stained cheeks, puffy pinpricks, and bloody scrapes, she tunneled through the bramble and tumbled out the other side. But when she climbed to her feet, the thorns caught in her hair.
__________The young girl squirmed against the nature-made trap, for she heard the wolves snarling, panting, and pacing nearby. Desperately, the amateur scavenger pulled an obsidian arrowhead from a small pouch, where she stashed her scarce boons. She grabbed a fistful of her beautiful, long, dark hair and cleanly sliced it off. She left those detached locks hanging from the trapping thorns, to misdirect the rapacious wolves, as she fled the scene.
__________The grown woman blinked, dismissed the memory, and refocused on the task at hand. She wound Melihrene’s reins around her wrist and hoisted herself onto the horse’s saddle.
__________She patted the horse’s neck with her free hand. “We are alike,” she whispered in its ear, “since those we trusted, threw us to the wolves.”
__________Melihrene snorted, whipped its neck, and bucked.
__________Uuinora wrapped her arms around the horse’s neck, squeezed, and held on. “Your master has forsaken you,” she coerced in Elvish, “but your mare awaits you. Bear me out of these woods and gallop to her.”
__________A puff of purple smoke escaped Uuinora’s lips and wormed into Melihrene’s ear. A matching light flashed inside the horse’s skull and seeped out through its eyes’ sockets. Senselessly, Melihrene turned its rear seaward and charged up the trail.
* * *
__________Since they were as dingy and motionless as uprooted vegetables, Glaiven piled his fainted recruits into his carriage like sacks of potatoes. He tossed Kimio in last, atop the others and near the door. Kimio’s left arm flopped aside his chest and hung in the way of the door. When Glaiven gruffly lifted the boy’s hand to reposition it, a static jolt, as short and as sharp as the slap of an eel’s tail, stung Glaiven’s hand. The jolt spiked through his arm, passed through his internal reservoir of magic, and livened his thoughts. He recalled a memory that he had killed to bury.
__________The humans on Vesperus nicknamed it: Odin’s Spear, but the elves knew better. The heavenly strike came not from the hands of a judgmental god but from the concentrated rage of Simrah eirst zelth Histovia Lastrucus. The spear-shaped, liquid lightning bolt that struck center and scorched that final patch of green between the Crystal Wake and the Spirit Crawl—the last trade route between those sacred lands of the Ecliyar—was discharged with the agonized scream of a tormented elf-child. Simrah’s scream initiated a ground-level thunderstorm of electrical charges. The boy’s despair echoed in the terrorized screams of the men, women, and children vaporized by his spellscript. Glaiven’s adopted daughter, Siir, was caught in the blast.
__________Siir fared better than those nearer the epicenter, but when the dust settled, it poisoned her lungs. Her lycanthropy activated instinctively when the spear touched down, but the thunderstorm reached her, before the wolf within strengthened her. The lightning struck her as she swapped skins, mutilated, and deformed her.
__________When Glaiven reached her, she vomited blood. Her skin was mottled with blisters and burns, yet she died smiling. With her last, belabored breath, she passed the eight-inch, crystal stalactite, which she plucked from a wing of the Crystal Wake’s crystal arc, into the caring hand of the only person ever to treat her kindly. Finally, she passed onward to the Spirit Crawl ahead of her father. For a haunting hour, Glaiven chased the tail-end of the spirit that left his daughter’s mangled body and flew across the scorched field, but he was unable to catch it. Thus, Glaiven the Enchanter died with his daughter, and Glaiven the Warmonger arose to avenge her.
__________Glaiven clutched his forehead and shielded his eyes with his palm, as he moved Kimio’s arm and closed the carriage door. “Their sunshine-yellow manes, sky-blue eyes, and graceful smiles are an oxymoron,” he whispered contemptibly, “for demons of desolation reside within. Let not another elf-child of zelth Histovia Lastrucus be bred to range and ravish the realms.”
__________Glaiven released his forehead, scowled, and marched to the nearest garden trench. He reached down, picked a sprig of a medicinal herb growing therein, and bit down on its stalk. With the sprig sticking out from his bluish lips like a farmer’s wheat tassel, he settled into the driver’s seat of his carriage and gathered his horses’ reins.
__________“Let’s get these boys back to the barracks, shall we?” he urged the horses.
__________The horses slowly trotted forward, complaining in their language of snorts, grunts, and whinnies, for the added weight of Glaiven’s unconscious cohort-in-training.
__________“The crystal haul was heavier,” he teased the horses, “and I won’t have your muscles flabby from disuse.”
__________Somehow, Glaiven heard Siir’s girlish laughter in reply.
* * *
__________Kimio clutched his chest, because his heart raced. There was a knot somewhere within the wellspring of his magic. A living sinew must have twined together to form that knot, because it wriggled its frayed ends like the fluttering fins of a fantailed goldfish.
__________He struggled to decipher: Is it essence or blood?
__________Kimio’s head throbbed, and his skin sweated. The squalor, barracks mattress underneath him was so dampened by his perspiration, and so dirty for lack of scrubbing, that he mistook it for the moistened soil of the pitted field. He mistrusted Glaiven left him there to rot. Kimio was unable to open his eyes. Internally, he burned, as if someone spitted his heart over their cookfire and tossed salt into his blood to quicken a rolling boil.
__________“It’s poisoned blood,” he whispered rhetorically.
__________At Kimio’s bedside, Zayven slammed a dusty tome shut. He touted, “Elemental cross contamination!”
__________Kimio sneezed. The painful lurch dizzied him and wrenched his torso. It felt as though someone played his ribs for a xylophone. He wanted to clapback against what his ears interpreted as another slur for his mixed parentage, but he mustered only the strength of tone for a single word. He growled, “What?”
__________“What scorches the womb of a treacherous, Ecliyar she-elf,” Glaiven interjected. “Sterilizes her as she labors, if she survives it, especially if she births twins or more.”
__________“That probably feels a lot like this,” Loistrus remarked. He sat across from Kimio, on another squalor, barracks mattress, while he heated the needlepoint of a threaded needle over a candleflame. He brought the heated needlepoint to the spade wound across his belly and winced, for the piercing, tugging, and burning of sewing the wound closed.
__________Zayven rolled his eyes and retorted, “Quit bellyaching over a bellyache.”
__________Loistrus scowled, which dried his tears. He gripped the dingy fabric of his mattress and looped another stitch through his flesh. He gasped, pulled the needle through, and then snarled, “Easy for you to hang tough while I hold out.”
__________“An outer burn is paltry to an inner blaze,” Glaiven confirmed, as he placed his hand on Kimio’s forehead to gage the ferocity of his fever. “Isn’t it, Little Selkie?”
__________Kimio rolled over and buried his face in the sack of straw that served as his pillow.
__________Fruyr, what’s wrong? he sniffled. This hurts, like hellfire.
__________Glaiven clapped his hands, and his able-bodied recruits scrambled to their feet. They gathered in the narrow aisle that led to the door, bowed their heads, and waited for orders.
__________“Dolts,” Loistrus scoffed from where he sat and sewed. “That isn’t what he wanted.”
__________Glaiven combed his hair with his fingers and whistled an inimical dirge.
__________The boys in line swallowed and folded their hands behind their backs.
__________Glaiven maneuvered to the front of the line and punched Zayven in the gut. Zayven crumpled, stumbled, and fell backward. He crashed into the boy behind him, and the line toppled over, like dominos.
__________“Are you learning your tactics from mortals?” Glaiven criticized. “War is gritty! Show your own.”
__________Although he endured the greatest brunt of the blow, Zayven rose first. With one hand, he gripped the eggplant-purple gemstone of his climactic amulet. A violet light pulsed outward from within the stone, shining through the gaps between his fingers.
__________Zayven’s other hand cut the air above his comrades. His outstretched hand vacuumed tufts of shadow from their hearts, as if these were dust bunnies off the filthy floor. The tufts gathered as an orb and clung to the palm of Zayven’s hand. When Zayven tossed the orb at Glaiven, it separated into a horde of shadow-borne wasps. Those wasps swarmed Glaiven and stung him in circles.
__________“Run,” Zayven hissed through clenched teeth, “while my pets play.”
__________“Pests, you mean,” Glaiven corrected, as he batted at the wasps, even though they could not be squashed. For, whenever Glaiven smacked a wasp or two, the bodies of the ghostly horde separated into slippery strips of shadow, which phased through his fingers. Shortly after separating, the wasps’ ghostly bodies reformed, and the horde stung Glaiven for another round.
__________Zayven’s dominoed comrades scrambled to their feet and fled the room.
__________Kimio covered his ears to mute the violent buzzing, swearing, and thrashing.
__________Zayven must be keen to perish for his friends, he decided, because no one can win a game of mercy against an opponent who has none.
__________Loistrus growled, “Glory hog.”
__________Zayven smirked. “Grossly standoffish,” he countered, “for a whelp who can’t stand.”
__________“You’re as bold as you’re boring,” Loistrus yawned. “Half those words mean something other than what you meant.”
__________The injured boy tied off his stitches and snipped off the slack thread with his teeth. Splash! Clunk! He dropped his bloody needle into a wooden cup, half-filled with spring water. He jostled his hand to slosh and stir the water. He watched the needle spin in the center of his makeshift eddy, until its bloody needlepoint dyed the clear water a translucent pink.
__________“You rendered Shadow’s Bend impotent,” he criticized, “because you cheapen spells as sloppily as you cheapen puns.”
__________“Send wolves, not wasps, huh?” Zayven laughed.
__________“Peddling insults panders wrath,” Kimio grumbled.
__________Since cupping his hands over his ears was scarcely effective against the Zalirkatheer boys’ prattling, Kimio quoted his father. Talsis’s words were renown for quelling loudmouths, and Kimio was an inborn copycat. He was a few minutes younger and a few notches shyer than Fruyr. He was a follower and a mimic, who bolstered his bravery with the boldness of others. Although the spirit of a fighter hid within him, as fierce as the war heroine who birthed both twins, coaxing him out was easier when Fruyr—or anyone else—stepped first.
__________With his blood tunneling through his swollen veins, like magma in the lava tubes of a restless volcano, he craved silence. He was determined to quiet the room for contemplation. He needed to think clearly, so he could act quickly. A mysterious contagion tainted the blood he shared with his twin. If Fruyr survived Uuinora’s axing, his life now dangled over the chopping block once again. It was as if they were back behind Uuinora’s cabin, but their roles were reversed. Fruyr was in over his head, and he needed Kimio to dive in after him. If elemental cross contamination plagued Kimio, then elemental overflow threatened Fruyr.
__________Kimio rolled to one side, bent an elbow, and straightened his back, until he halfway sat up in bed. Although he could not open his eyes, he would not need to. He had heard Loistrus’s spinning eddy and Zayven’s swarming wasps, all too clearly. Kimio twisted his fingers and turned his wrist towards Loistrus’s cup of water.
__________Whoosh! The water leapt out of the cup, dropped the needle, and formed icicles that hovered above the rim.
__________Loistrus squinted and poked an icicle. It rocked back and forth, as if it swung by a string. When its tip fell back against Loistrus’s finger, it stung him with a sharp, chilling jolt. Loistrus recoiled his finger, and the icicle stilled.
__________Zayven laughed.
__________Kimio grimaced. He flicked his spell hand towards Glaiven, and the icicles bombarded the buzzing wasps, like a volley of tiny javelins. Each icy tip speared its mark and stretched to cocoon it. The frozen wasps plummeted, like a shower of hail spit from a purple cloud.
__________Freed of the swarm, Glaiven crossed his arms and smiled menacingly.
__________Zayven’s eyes widened, and he bolted.
__________Loistrus set down his cup, pressed his hands to his stitched wound, and hobbled after Zayven.
__________Glaiven watched the stragglers exit, but he did not pursue them. Instead, he laughed hysterically. When he sobered, he collected a salve from Loistrus’s medical kit, dampened it with the contents of his canteen, and slung it over Kimio’s eyes and forehead.
__________“You spared me the scalding of casting radiant beams to dispel the swarm,” Glaiven acknowledged, “but not for kindness or caring. What were you bargaining for?”
__________Kimio clapped a palm over the salve, held it in place, and sighed.
__________“The quiet,” he pilfered, “and a vat of shaved ice.”
__________Glaiven raised his eyebrows and nodded. “Well played.”
__________Be safe, Fruyr, Kimio cautioned, because he gambled with their shared blood.
__________Glaiven left the barracks. He gathered a couple of his lackies on his way out, and then returned with supplies. The Dark-elf trainees, who pulled their knives on Kimio during his initiation, carried an oxen trough to Kimio’s bedside. Meanwhile, Glaiven maneuvered two large sacks of ice chips, so they slid off his shoulders into his arms. His trainees retrieved one sack and dumped it into the trough.
__________When Kimio heard the chips pour into the trough, he tossed the salve aside and rolled off the bed into the ice. As Glaiven’s trainees dumped the second sack atop him, he shielded his face with his arms. The ice chips pelted him and cooled him. As they slowly melted, their chill soaked Kimio’s uniform and seeped through his skin into the marrow of his bones. From the marrow, the chill entered his bloodstream. The ice bath soothed and tired Kimio, as it broke his fever. Since his gills would open instinctively, should he plunge beneath the melting ice, Kimio slept, and his racing pulse slowed to a steady beat.
Endlesslore 