“Such a… nouveau presentiment!” Ave’s praise for what towers over her is another concerning addition to their trek. This returning elf, who just boasted of grandiose intentions, seems frozen in place at the next duty to meet with “the oldest elf” of the shadowed village.
“Never, even in stories, has such a… style been shared. It’s… I’ve, never heard of an elf using windows before? To… hide from the breeze, is this…?”
“It—” Mython’s reply chokes to a stop on a single syllable. Rubbing her cheek to get the sweat off of it, she starts again.
“The oldest one’s soul is very…” Only she dares speak within vicinity of the destination, with her compatriots creeping away behind her back the moment Ave openly spoke of this one.
After gulping hard, she finds the word. “… uniquely unique.” The sweating Mython relaxes with that explaining everything.
(No one will say the obvious? That this “old one” is bizarre among the strange?)
Adris and Still privately compare thoughts by touches, taking the opportunity of hesitation at the edifice before them.
{The flow is absent. There are no pools of shadow.} Still’s new use for Adris as a personal raiment, her arm around him ever since entry, is also unique.
Were it any other time, he’d endlessly tease her.
{It’s wrong, this sharp fortress. It’s… denying us. Even water.}
(Denying you, a being close to the shadows. Me, though?)
Jutting out do the edges of this despot’s fortress, one that is an oval shape filling an entire side of the elvish grove. It fills more space than a tree’s roots, but shapes upward with narrowing blades of itself like a thinner tree would.
No forest symbiosis is overgrown here, only dead plants clinging on the exterior. The fortress is built asymmetrically in similarity to the organic growths of a sea shell, but then denies these by the spartan exterior swooping off into clean, intentionally artificial directions like cardinal points.
Adris recalls ventifacted sculptures within the wastes of Xin, where the storm winds had eroded the lands into alien shapes. Looming as tall as any elvish living tree, there’s no ornamentation save for windows of thick glass to allow the light from outside into the cold enclosure.
(The glass is too thick to let much through, though.)
The shells of packed grains and fragments that the exterior is built up from resemble spiky stag beetles in their outward protections. What must be entered might be a reversal of the process of creating by erosion, instead capturing what flows toward it if the dead branches and leaves caught by the exterior surface attest to this. Its building pieces place one-upon-another like haphazardly stacked sticks with an intentional disdain for seamless beauty. These long, curving layers and protrusions are sleek as bone where the grains making them up are most compacted.
Only a thick turret that rises up on the back side of the oval structure seems a separate display than the rest, as it is curiously conspicuous by how its red, tight-fitting brickwork clashes with the aesthetic. How it clashes makes the alien design more garish.
(A house made by what process? Of what?)
In the side of the oval end facing them, three great triangles are seated at ground level amongst the curving, hollowed spikes.
(There’s long holes in the structure pieces everywhere?)
Raised art lacking elsewhere surrounding the circular portal closed by them announces that [it gathers for its own passions], without saying what “it” is.
For a moment when taking it all in, Adris must open his mouth to try and breathe, for he feels choked by the memory of a fire pit where the gathered sticks have been charred and fill the surroundings with smoke…
(“It’s obviously made by someone competent, and elves won’t hurt us if Ave doesn’t want that to happen. I want to meet who made it.” Come on, Still, it can’t be—Ugh!?)
Still’s immediate response to his dismissal is to grab his pinky and twist!
Such a rarity it is, that the overconfident witch should behave more like Ave than herself. Adris smiles at the witch instead of headbutting her.
(So cute, when you’re dependent on me!)
“Elves are unique? This is hardly shocking information, Mython. Am I to be impressed by one oddity amongst other odd designs?”
“Shocking…?” The guardian studies Adris with a confused expression, then bows toward him. “No, not shocking, as an idea, would anything thus far be for outsiders? Apologies, for standing between you and your own forthcoming experiences.” After bowing, Mython drops their carried possessions. “Enjoy the… your meeting with the elder.”
(Now, this guy is so scary you won’t even go in? Stop trying to scare me. I’m not impressed.)
No matter how strong they are, nothing Adris has experienced so far is unexplainable.
Illusions are as weak or as strong as the resiliency of the victim.
He grinds his back teeth on the idea that they’re all so intentionally vague as this Mython for the purpose of emulating Adris’ own technique of ambiguosity against the girls. Just like with the false dragon that was simply the forest and some pseudo-aura circulating, it will be his fault if he succumbs to that panic again.
(It’s an act to con me into believing that they’re far more than they appear. If they want to prove that, they’ll need to use real dangers.)
A defense against illusions begins with refusing to believe in them.
“Stranger though, I’d expected ‘liveliness’ from elves. Every moment with Avenalliah is bright.” An attempt at insult by comparison, where Adris gives a dismissive grin and turns away, should now earn first blood. “All our discussions, even the smallest moments… pleasant. What greets me within paradise is thus far…?”
“… lacking.”
Adris’ mouth snaps shut when it’s Mython that finishes his own complaint. Ave twists in place to also stare back with surprise.
The elf guardian’s visage is a drooping show of tiredness. She pulls her cloak of leaves before her when caught, as if using it to fight back a chill when in view of the fortress.
“…
… Then…” As Mython is alone now, for the two flanking her have long since crept away, she seems rather even smaller than her childlike stature grants. “Happiness… I hope will be your suitor, Priestess.”
A curiousness of these elves is how they can turn and move off with such ease of motion, where Mython’s grace has a sprightly balance that any woodsman would be jealous of with the lack of a foot trail left on the fresh, springy moss.
That moss which doesn’t encroach on the fortress is what she dared not leave.
(… Right… how did I not notice that already?)
The bare ground itself is an off-white like bone under the fortress, but has the consistency of packed gravel.
“Why avoid a Sylvan Caller? ‘The Caller remembers, and when speaking, the wind recalls…?’” Ave whispers to herself again, an incomplete thought full of hesitation when taking in her next duty.
“Appropriate answers, coming do these only from confrontation of the pertinent questions.”
“Right, Neesiette. ‘Without anything but curiosity’, always forward!”
Then, refusing to rely on Mython for more information, Ave is already to the three-paneled door and waving a hand over one of the elvish runes bordering it.
“[My passion is my own, for I too am the wind].”
That named force whistles when the lines of the door crack open and pull inward, as if a great need for it was contained in the darkness that opens up!
“There’s no safer place than where the wind is heard.” Ave is barely heard over this sudden drawing in.
Adris struggles not to fall backward when Still keeps yanking. A just-recognized “lack” of something about the fortress and surroundings has become apparent to his aura senses after experiencing this consuming hunger.
(It feels like a land which has been claimed by some Xinian monstrosity or powerful Technique user.)
“Boss, ahead is a very bad feeling. Kol has become ‘prickly’, never had that on skin before.”
“A jackpot” is what those places are called.
And so Adris grins at that, trudging forward against his yanking blue cloak to lean down and whisper to Kol when the kobold seems hesitant to cross into the fortress’ territory.
“Do you know where your master claimed his strongest abilities, disciple?”
“Nnn!? No, Kol, was never told.”
Adris pats her helmet once, then moves off with a chuckle.
“Boss, STILL didn’t tell!”
“Remember your rules, Kol.”
“Which one!? Where to find, Kol should figure out?”
When Adris picks up the pace to enter the dark interior, the kobold grunts while looking between him and the building, then to Still and…
“Dangerous places before, Kol found…? Oh!” Kol swishes her tail once, then merrily lopes after him. “Kakaka!”
“Under the laurel tree, the bench
of greenish stone is damp;”
A darkness which allows no depth to shadows is so vaulting within that the joyous singing seems to come from all directions at once. What they sing has rhyme not matching the words. Adris can feel a twang within at the disconnect between language and intent.
“the rain has washed the dusty leaves
of ivy on the white stone wall~!”
The first singer is joined by the multitude of short others crowding him, stopping in their pattering of feet to shout.
“The warm breath of the autumn wind
undulates the grass, and the poplar grove”
From cubicles of shaped wood they spring down too to add to the party. They drop off fresh buckets of water before turning to climb back up.
“converses with the wind…
the afternoon wind in the grove of trees!”
Slender, foot-tall midgets wearing floppy, tapered hats and over-sized, festively-colored cleaning smocks scuffle about wielding brooms, mops, and other cleaning tools. Across the dirty floor they wander in these parties. Endlessly cleaning, but not forgetting to thrust their branchlike, earth-colored arms toward the hidden sky when they get to a good part.
“While the light from the sunset glows
on the clusters that hang on the grape vine,”
Merrily singing altogether in unison do many dozens of voices. Coal mote eyes recessed into their faces shine dimly. The song comes from a slash beneath them without nasally additions, because they have no noses.
The work parties at the front scoop up so that the aft members may toss the gathered detritus of seed husks and dust and straw behind them as new refuse. Winding through the darkness so vast, where only their tiny homes full of tiny furniture and possessions can be found, little people thrive where no cheer should be found while doing meaningless things.
Ave’s thrust into their domain is no bother to them, for when reaching her long tail in their work path they simply line up so the leader at the front can help toss the others over it before leaping himself.
“Kol finds hard to breathe.” A squire rasps this while scratching over her tabard.
(It’s because the air is so… dead.)
Unmoving and heavy, more alike the crypt of the Emperor that had never felt the air for however many hundred years. It stifles the rhyming song shared by all, and even Adris’ voice when he whispers to Still.
“What causes darkness to deny you?”
{…!?}
Still’s hand is a frenzy when trying to answer, but an unknown fear grips that denies open signs. She instead traces the darkness with a finger until it is pointed at what’s ahead in the distance while her other hand thumps against him.
{These yapping, rhyming forest devils called ELVES only go silent when stalking you with your doom, boy!}
“and the good citizen on his balcony lights
his stoic pipe in which the tobacco smokes~!”
When the little people finish their part, they also turn as one to clap at what Still points to.
Many feet off the floor rise thick stalks of an orange, scaled plant that are Adris’ waist size wide. With no other structure in sight, it is between two of the larger craning specimens that a woolly hammock is hung.
Rusty hair of immense length fills so much of the hammock that it spills over the side from where the occupant lays sideways in it angled toward the floor. These locks alone shimmer in the darkness, lit by the soft glow from an elf’s bare body where their own hair doesn’t cover.
“I am thinking of my childhood poems…
Whatever happened to my melodious heart?”
Another elvish being that has no presence to Adris doesn’t lift from where it’s cocooned in comfort when Ave slithers closer. They only sing with a sonorous, deep voice the ending to the small peoples’ song.
“Can it be true, beautiful shadows, that you
are fleeing through the trees of gold?”
A cheerless conclusion represses Adris’ own growing interest with its sorrow. The elf’s deplorable mood cracks along with his tired voice, for only a male voice could be this deep as Adris knows from traveling groups of minstrels.
When this abiding depression spills over the little people, they shrug once… then jump back into their useless tasks with nary a concern on their smiling faces.
“One!”
“Two!”
“What poem…?”
“… next for you!?”
The lounging elf doesn’t respond to them. A minimum of movements lifts his head.
Instead of calling out the new poem, this near-sleeping, or perhaps near-dead, lump stares at Avenalliah with purple irises glinting.
“From… very far, I’ve come for aid. To… give aid, Oh Caller!?” Ave’s whisper of greeting then cracks when the little people rush over to prod her forward with their broomsticks.
Adris almost jumps into this attack, but Still as a clinging anchor and his own feverish brain recall his position.
Decorum makes elves responsible for their own introductions. Even though Adris wants to shout many things after the greetings outside in the grove.
(We’re not being taken seriously. And stop hitting her!)
Ave forgets her greater introduction when prodded so close to the lounging, red-haired elf whose near nudity makes him seem like a nature spirit. The shifty workers circle Ave, tilting their heads at her.
“…
… The wind calls me Avenalliah Aurmaris.”
Purple eyes, almost completely shut with listless abandonment, ever-so-slightly creak open.
“Aurvarel (TWO TREES), not Aurmaris (THREE TREES).”
“… Eh?”
Ave’s surprise at the distinction results in Adris finally hearing the meaning of her surname.
“Old as the tongue used is, most incompetent, the jest as used in. Even one’s self be misbegotten, for never shall there be an Avenalliah (WIND SUNG FROM DEEP BELOW).” The elf says this, then closes his eyes again. Drifting off as he sighs, he sinks into moving no longer with obvious disdain.
“Jest…? It’s… what the wind calls me… what it always has…?
… Avenalliah Aurmaris.” Ave whispers this again.
“There were — two — trees.”
An emotion rouses along with a spark on Adris’ bare skin.
Sweat is what he has coating his back and armpits, though it feels very cold within the darkness of this fortress so vast.
“The wind that called you that was a mistake called ‘a lie’.” One dead eye burns. Staring Avenalliah Aurmaris down, daring her to ever again speak her own name, the elf finishes his declaration.
“Lies have no place within, nor without.”
Adris’ cross pulls free when someone speaks ill of lies, joining Kol extending her poleaxe with a hideous screeching clank.
It’s not really the insult that has Adris’ adrenaline pumping, nor Ave’s pale-skinned distress.
It’s a feeling like… the emptiness around them might soon fill with something.
“Assert what be true to oneself, never again having the opportunity if passing up now!” Neesiette’s piercing order spins Ave around.
Adris’ first elf has so many emotions flitting across her face, tightening her features in confusion and anguish.
But then Neesiette slaps at her dress where on Ave would be a trapeze bag held.
“… Three trees. There were… three trees.”
Before the elf in the hammock can grow more angry, Avenalliah bursts open her carried bag, a treasure stolen from the Alchemaster’s Castillo, and which is a memory of an ancient elvish city. From within she pulls free a big leaf bound in golden chains.
“It will tell you! Here, the story within! Rouvenor’s tale has the complete truth!” Ave holds up the folded leaf to show it off. “It’s… closed right now, but it certainly tells the stor—YYYY!?”
The golden chains sunk into the leaf’s skin lift from being embossed to shake violently, and then yank the living tale from Ave’s grasp.
A priceless possession floats toward the rust-haired elf’s curling finger.
“My book!?”
“An invention of those doomed to die that degrades meaning so terribly… such books are.”
When within reach, the chains that are still shaking burst one by one.
Adris’ arms jerk with each snap. He fights to keep himself from grinning like a madman when the freed leaf opens, golden chains still attached to it but also uselessly hanging loose.
(THIS ELF CAN BEAT AURUMIA’S BONDAGE!?
Mine…! I FOUND THE BIGGEST SCORE!)
“[Show me a fun scene, oh wondrous tale].” The command phrase that Ave used is repeated, though this sleeper could’ve never heard it before.
It’s the very first page that folds out of the leaf, popping up into spiraling helix trees alike the icon Ave saved at the entrance to the world tree.
So dryly that he might evaporate an ocean, the lazy elf reads aloud with a voice that oppresses everyone.
“‘The endless tale I would carry out began…
In the First Age of three, when no doomed being tread upon sacred root or grass, nor tainted beloved breath with sorrow traveling widely…’”
The different colored trees are more than one kind, though.
A sandy variety whose color and bark seems all-too-familiar stands out, with a cold sternness alike Neesiette’s; a loam variety with thin, sheathed bark that is thinner allows the second to easily sway with the wind; and a third’s…
“Seeds fell then from across the divide of all things, three of them which made three trees;
And from those three trees were made three forests, and then three kinds of kin to fill them.”
Both the elf and Ave are reciting the lines now, merging the dreamy, yet hurt, honey voice of a longing girl with the deep, yet now minutely enlivening, tone of a tired man.
“Chastened by moon and stars, Ysanne in fall did rule.
Maddened by song and fae, Gilad in spring did dance.
Yet… emboldened by… sun and endless sky…”
As this third tree, broad-leafed, deep emerald, and mighty rising up from the parchment uproots, and floats off the leaf book.
“… ‘in… summer’, the claim.”
“You skipped the tree’s name? But, if you read it with the rest, it makes the threeeee treeees!?” Ave then shrieks when her leaf book’s contents spill out! “Why is my childhood deconstructing!?”
Every page is its own leaf in a sudden gale, to spin and fold out into a scene around the old elf that whispers commands to them in a tongue Adris cannot hear.
No longer stretched out without care, he instead takes in so many pop-up memories playing out.
“You… no, my Rouvenor’s tale can do that!?” Ave slithers closer to watch in amazement at a new effect. With the many scenes playing out, and to match the magic shown in the Castillo, the infinite darkness of this fortress home fills with scents foreign to it.
Of many different lands, all assailing at once, there are colors rough and raw that spill in to swoosh around the many little people gathered around Ave.
They stand stock still, staring in wonder at the displays of fairy colors denying the once reigning dark.
(Be impressed with her… and then help me with…!)
Adris again fights the urge to speak, wanting to learn the words that he couldn’t hear which Ave’s insane book obeyed.
Tiredness leaves this elder elf with the vivid, painted colors bathing his skin.
His long hair glitters dangerously to match his narrowed eyes. Suspiciously awake now that he’s lifting enough from the hammock to showcase his proud chin.
“Novel, this memory which might be a fool’s…”
“Memory? Of whose? Rouvenor’s!?”
Ave grasps her hands reverently, almost like she’ll swoon, but there are no more chances for questions when the elder elf holds a palm up toward her and the party.
“Rouvenor is real, another kin knows…!”
Having lifted up his head, the disheveled host that has never named himself looks mildly alive again.
“… Interesting.”
And before Adris can boast of how interesting it will become,
“Go play for a bit.”
The elf vanishes into a moving, rigid wall of rapid darkness that roars like a sandstorm out from behind him!
(Why are Zennians always so sudd—!?)
First Ave vanishes into its black grains, then it strikes Adris!
From the ground they rise, one at a time to lament that there’s no wind to clean them.
Adris finishes coughing up what of the wall hit him and stuck around, smudging the black of it onto the back of his hand to inspect it.
“Ash?” Adris allows Still to see the smudge from where she lays face-up on the hard-bark ground.
Expecting some comment, Adris is annoyed when the witch doesn’t bother to even uncross her arms. She just lays like an unburied corpse quivering beside him.
“My book…” Ave stares at the fortress whose entrance is shut once more, left deposited on her side before it.
“This lady’s near-Art… shared.” Neesiette climbs up using Ave’s many hanging sashes. “Together, recovering cherished possessions shall be foremost the goal.” Making assurances when patting Ave’s shoulder, Neesiette earns a difficult smile for that offer.
“No… maybe… it’s fine to share a… very good story, Neesiette. It’s better to be apart for now.” Said for her own benefit as if to ignore the issue entirely, Ave picks herself up and glances around. “My kin are…?”
(Gone!? Even our bags are, too!?)
Adris flips up onto his feet when the voyeur elves are no longer visible through the omnipresent haze surrounding the party. Only Neesiette’s tome is left with them out of their luggage.
A rainbow of dull colors envelops, obscuring the once visible grove. At Adris’ feet the terrain is still as it was before entering. They’re right outside of the crazy elder’s fortress, but there are no reference points anywhere else.
Only an endless expanse of shifting colors in the distance presents, with the white brightness shooting up from between the cap of roots leading down into the grove’s chasm feeding into this haze’s shifting state.
(Even fairies avoid here. How will we get around!? I feel nothing beyond the haze, only what obstructs.)
A feeling of chaotic intentions when touching his aura senses upon it. Staying just out of reach, but also cloyingly close.
“Ave, where were we sent?”
“Sent?” Ave glances around again, then smiles lightly at Adris. “We’re back outside? The grove is a bit unwelcoming, isn’t it…? But, our possessions were stored, so that means we’re accepted…”
Kol stands finally, clanking over the huge breaths she takes in.
“… Nnn… that elf, pretty dangerous, Boss.”
“Danger is found when there’s no alternatives to safe welcomes.” Whatever the chaotic situation, Adris has to maintain his control of it.
“No, Kol agrees… just… can’t explain, but need to…?
Ah?” Kol’s rambling stops when Adris flashes a signal at her.
Now that he’s proved to himself it was indeed worth coming to the world tree if only to meet this “elder elf”, Adris has much to wrangle within his thoughts and emotions into a semblance of a plan. That Kol has more to say will have to wait when nobody is capable of hearing what’s she’s figured out except for himself.
(Where could we find such a private, defensible location in a forest of freaks that can hear better than wolves can? Maybe, Still’s charms…?
Nope.)
The witch still hasn’t done more than quiver, suggesting that she’s not the source of his solution presently.
Starting with sussing out Avenalliah’s equally insane particulars, he does want to find out one trait of hers now.
“Ave, how do the elves around us seem disposed toward us?” Adris’ concentration is on Neesiette when asking this instead of their pet elf.
(Can you see through this illusion they’ve thrown up?)
The moon mystic’s focus upon Adris flashes sternly when she becomes aware of the true intent of the query, then Neesiette turns and lifts up both hands to beautify her amber hair beneath her crown once more so that her expression cannot be seen.
(Because Neesiette will likely say “I see overwhelming pseudo-Art”.)
“They? The elder has accepted us. The others? Their interest is very strong. Every moment alive is a time to be enjoying it! Some of them are… like that closest one there, she is …?”
Ave scans fixed directions, as if meeting eyes with each unseen elf that she’s reporting on. Everyone is quiet while listening to Ave’s calm, uplifting voice.
(Any of the times we’ve been turned aside or warded off, it was as if she couldn’t see what sought to press upon us.)
“… I’m… not sure what she’s painting so aggressively? But, it’s proof she’s inspired!” After a short monologue of each elf’s individual fixations, Ave claps her hands to interrupt Adris’ ongoing thoughts. “To them, let’s leave their pursuits! It doesn’t do to be idle, so let’s have our own. Kol, you’ve always tried to get me to play new sports?”
“… Kol recalls. To very different results with each try, Elf should not forget making Kol lose.”
“They’re all quite a lot more violent than I like, plus you put me against…!” Ave’s many troubles are shed after briefly frowning, and then she pulls hard on Kol’s arm. “Wouldn’t you enjoy a sport which kin love that I can introduce you to, dear friend?”
“Oh? OH!? New way to challenge!?” Kol drops her poleaxe onto Still, who freaks out like a scared cat when it slams onto her. “First time, Elf has ever offered her own challenge time!”
“Why is every ‘game’ a ‘challenge’? Does Kol not know the real word for a game? … Well, come! The communal grounds have a center, and that center is empty, just like the game! I hope you all can enjoy it.”
“Enjoy what game, Ave?”
Adris’ arm is stolen too when asking, for Ave seems to favor a kobold and a boy as her prospective playmates when slithering out into the devouring haze.
It is no obstruction to wherever she intends to go, trailed quickly by both Neesiette and a witch, who is unwillingly dragging a poleaxe up the roots they climb.
“Let’s play ‘Iâ’ (NO-NOTHING)!”