“The Great Tree loves you all. She said as much to me. Surely you read that in the waters.”
“I do not know love.” Deh Leccend answered indifferently. “She may say it, but I am unable to feel it. As such, it is of little consequence.”
“Oh...” Shannon said sweetly, as if dealing with an adorable kitten. Her heart went out to the poor elf-creatures called Black Leaves, but more directly for Deh Leccend. He was the only one she associated with and identified with despite his lack of persona. She didn’t care what it meant to be a Black Leaf. Shannon felt him to have a heart and a personality. It was just a matter of discerning his particular idiosyncrasies. Though, she had to admit, they were buried deep beneath the machine-like behavior and monotonous tongue.
They were there though, she could feel them.
“I love you.” She said matter-of-factly, moving to make him see her and hear her voice. She felt badly that he should lead such a life. She felt even worse when he just stopped walking and stared down upon her evenly, trying to decipher the meaning behind her actions. His fine albeit masculine brow furrowed ever-so-slightly, but he had no way to respond to such a statement. She may as well have said something that didn’t make any sense whatsoever.
“Do you hear me?” She barred his progress, clutching his arm, desperate and sad.
“Yes.” That was a question he could answer easily. It was simple fact that he could hear her voice.
“I love you.” She said before giving up, knowing she couldn’t make him understand or feel anything. Not ever. Of course she was speaking less of real love between a man and a woman, so much as she was speaking platonically. But still, it was the attempt that mattered and the failure hurt in return for her efforts. Shannon was saddened for him, but this time it hurt. It hurt in ways she couldn’t even begin to decipher.
“Okay.” He finally found an answer that worked to respond to one of the most purely emotionally wrought statements in the entirety of human forms of expression.
“If you would come along please, milady Firea’csweise. We have a fair way to go yet, and much must be witnessed. We cannot be late.” He said, gesturing ahead. Flustered, Shannon didn’t know what else to do.
“You’re hopeless, Deh!” She blurted in his face.
“You’re hopeless!”
Frustrated without reason, she wheeled away from him, striding free of his touch with storming steps. With a huff, she came to a halt and crossed her arms, hugging herself. What was she thinking? What was wrong with her? He couldn’t know any better what was disturbing her than she. It wasn’t his fault he couldn’t feel, but for some reason she was discontented to remain apart from him for a time. It hurt more to stand and silently fume and beseeched the trees by eye, alone.
Deh only sulked and stared at the earth at his feet like a robot on standby. The Black Leaf wasn’t capable of truly feeling sorry for himself, but he did know when he was being scolded. The tone of her voice made him shrink. He lowered his head like a reprimanded puppy and his long ears drooped lowly. He looked in a sorry state when Shannon finally felt awkward in the silence they shared and cast a glance over her shoulder.
She felt sorry for him, sulking like that. She didn’t pity him, so much as she felt bad about what she’d said, how she’d said it, and how she’d treated him for something he obviously couldn’t help. Guilty, she came back to him, needing to say something. She didn’t know what, but she just had to. He just looked so forlorn, so childlike despite his immense age and obvious strengths and skills.
She lay her hands on him again, taking his arm and his chest. He didn’t even feel to be breathing beneath her touch, but sure enough, it brought his dark eyes up.
“I’m sorry, Deh.” She admitted her fault. “I shouldn’t have said that. It was wrong of me to say that.”
“Okay.” He responded, the same response he’d learned once already that was capable of answering emotional talk aimed in his direction. There was nothing else he could say, and Shannon understood that now. She accepted it, though it hurt to have to do so. She still didn’t know all of why, but it hurt.
Human beings really were among the most emotional of creatures. They needed emotional contact to survive. Deh Leccend knew this. Even if he had been able to begrudge her for harsh treatment, he wouldn’t have under that light. He knew that human infants couldn’t survive without human contact and emotional cares, and he knew that the adults were no less dependant upon their feelings in interactions with other emotional minds. Those who try to exist outside such a staple of their human condition become abberant -twisted about in their own psyche. Some of those even killed their own kind. For that reason, Firea’csweise was already predisposed to suffer if her kind ends up eliminated.
“We must be going.” She said, setting him back on his usual arrow-straight tracks.
“Yes.” He agreed. How Deh Leccend knew where he was headed without the human landmarks to guide him through the everlasting twilight of the unending forest within the Veil was beyond Shannon, but she resolved to follow as dutifully as she could in their passage east.
Chapter 15
In wake of what many were already coining, the Dunesil Message, the many governments of Men were scrambling through protocols, activating their highest terror warnings, mobilizing their many military forces, and desperately struggling to communicate with their allies and the rest of the world. However, without satellite connections, they were reduced to radio transmissions and the traditional telephone lines that had succumbed to steadily being phased out by the majority of the civilians with the advent of the cellular generation.
Not long after they began to communicate with one another, further power stations were annihilated. Blackouts swept through cities with a rapidity that was swiftly growing alarming. Nuclear Power plants were torn down, and the peoples were plunged into fear as radio transmission only became possible by alternate power sources, namely huge fuel-run generators in the largest of stations. These held out for a while. However, private homes would soon be unable to receive such radio messages without batteries of their own.
Stores were flooded and shelves were emptied of more than just power sources, but anything and everything and whatever else they could get their hands on. Humanity panicked. Stockpiles of food and water were forged and the civilians locked themselves away or fled the cities in record numbers. Chaos was sweeping through the nations.
Most feared the very end of the world. Fools claimed the Dunesil Message was sent from an alien master-race bent on enslaving Mankind. Environmentally aware groups began rioting, playing along with the message, deciding to finally take the plunge into agreement with the little known E.L.F.’s standpoint on the defilement of nature. Though, these cases were isolated and few, and only enacted in desperate hopes to ensure their own survival by proving themselves worthy to the eyes of the watchers -these soldiers of Dunesil who the people wrongly perceived to be judges of their behavior.
No amount of anarchist behavior was going to save them.
And only very few actually did as Dunesil decreed must be done by all to ensure the survival of the human race, and a few simply wasn’t enough.
For the most part, families hunkered in their homes, preparing for the worst and keeping in touch with their loved ones by frequent phone calls while every nation waited for the return of power. It would take some three days for the blackout of all electric plants to shut down in every major city, and two more for every minor suburban area on all of the continents.
The Black Leaves were very efficient. The world dropped into a chasm of hushed anticipation. They waited and waited for the seventh day in growing voiceless fear.
Soon, the major radio stations were out of power, or their antennae were torn down. In either case, their broadcasts ceased to come, leaving the peoples in the dark and the airways clean of the perpetual buzz of human interconnection for the first time since the inception of such modes of communication. Quiet voices were left to traditional phon
e lines, expressing prayers for loved ones, and fears of what were yet to come.
At the end of the fifth day, the major phone companies and all of the interconnected systems went down and telephones around the globe ceased to speak of the poor people’s terror. There was nothing anyone could do, and no higher-governmental powers could keep up with the rapidity and universal scope of this attack. They perpetually arrived too late at every scene of destruction they were notified about, which proved to be too few and far between to begin with.
It seemed, as if the Dunesil Message had been no lie, for it appeared his so-called soldiers were everywhere at once...and nowhere.
On the sixth day there would be utter silence but for select military connections, and the many roads in the many cities fell silent as well. Without electric pumps, all that was available for fuel was what people already possessed, and it ran dry quickly enough. The world was a ghost town so swiftly people feared to so much as go outside, and it would only grow worse as time wore on, breeding paranoia, nightmares and silent pandemonium.
No one could have expected civilization to come to this, a silent expectation, unable to do anything but wait. Not for all the movies and stories involving the end of the world could they have guessed it would be such a quiet end. It seemed as though the annihilation of mankind was already complete, without ever having begun.
But this was only just the warning’s passing.
No matter what they expected to come, nor how much they feared -none of the world’s creatures could even begin to anticipate what would come in wake of the seventh day.
There were some across the face of the great mother, however, who would try to both predict and prevent the inevitable.
In Washington D.C., a briefcase was in route to the oval office, clutched almost casually in the hands of an agent who was not CIA, NSA, nor FBI, though some had been in contact with him already.
Through the halls he was escorted by a trio of secret service. The entire place was a continual hubbub, much as the offices of the various agencies of America were cast into a race against time to decipher all that was occurring.
There were special operations task force soldiers everywhere beneath high ranking commanders dressed to the nines for combat. No one went in or out of any room, let alone on or off the premises of the Presidential Grounds without clearance. It was on lock down, and preparations were already made to evac the President, Mr. Thurston Manning, at the slightest sign of the dangers forewarned within the Dunesil Message.
He should have been evacuated days ago to ensure his total safety according to protocol, but he’d refused. He would not run from terrorists of any sort, unless he absolutely had to. His chopper was waiting on permanent standby on the grounds, along with two black-hawks which served the special forces brought in to ensure his total protection. They came complete with all manner of sensitive instruments to find out the most elusive of spies and assassins, complete with fully automatic tactical rifles, mounted with laser-sights and muffled muzzles, infrared goggles, night vision and heat sensitive seeing implements, and a host of the highest-trained snipers, who occupied the roof as a full twenty-four hour guard with shift cycling.
It was presumed thereafter -no one undesired could come or go without being seen, let alone taken out. But they were all fooled by their own human blood. They could not penetrate the Veil with their eyes alone, and neither could their special goggles. They were simply ill-equipped to deal with the assassins who were said in the Dunesil Message, to already exist within the presidential grounds.
Federal Deputy Director, Michael Farsing had already requested council with the Secretary of Defense, John Hargrove, and he’d gotten it of course. Under scrutinizing secret service eyes, the two sat together to discuss what Farsing would share before Hargrove decided whether it would be worth bringing Farsing to President Manning.
“What have you got for us, Michael?” Hargrove queried. He was a heavyset man, and he rested even heavier across from the agent director.
“We’re not entirely sure yet, Mr. Secretary, about the certainty of the Dunesil Message being entirely without truth. The country is quiet. The airwaves have gone dead, phone lines are down, and the majority of the people are without power all across the board.” He admitted.
“So, you’ve got nothing for us then?” Hargrove sighed, disappointment thick on his fattening features.
“Well, not exactly.” Farsing answered. “There was an agent, Ben Connelly, working a specific case just before this all began, which I have reason to believe might be related to this Dunesil figure’s message.” He informed, drawing a questioning look on old John Hargrove.
“Really? Well, that’s better than nothing. Lay it on me.” He said.
“Agent Connelly was in partnership with Agent Fastez, who recently lost his life in Washington State during his eleventh year heading up an Eco-terrorist investigational department, focusing primarily on a group that calls itself E.L.F.” He paused.
“I’m sure you’ve heard of the incident.”
“I have. He was the first agent we’ve lost in a long time on American soil?” Hargrove sounded questioning.
“Yes.” Farsing answered. “He was shot and killed by a sniper, but it was not a gunman. Autopsy reported he was killed by an arrow, and ballistics analysis confirmed that whoever was responsible had to be a very good shot.” He sighed.
“In exchange for Agent Fastez’ life, Connelly captured one of the terrorists, a young lady named Shannon Hunter, though he had to shoot her to do so. Several days later, she escaped custody while under lock and key and Seattle P.D. supervision in the hospital. Agent Connelly in correlation with Special Agent Arthur Black had already questioned her once, but she denied, demanding a lawyer.” He paused, preparing to wind up into the real matters at hand.
“You think her escape has something to do with all of this?” Hargrove made a presumption, reading it on Farsing’s face.
“Agent Connelly certainly did.” Farsing answered seriously. “He called me within moments of the beginning of the Dunesil Message, and that’s how I’d come to see it.”
“How does it connect?” Hargrove demanded to know, but his tones were still low.
“Agent Connelly reported having seen a black-cloaked figure. He described it like the image in the Dunesil Message, having seen a glimpse of it through the window in Shannon Hunter’s hospital door not moments before her escape.” He paused briefly, but hung a heavy look on Hargrove’s old face.
“She disappeared without a trace, John.” And the Secretary of Defense matched his look with an arched brow.
“There were no footprints in the debris of an explosion that ripped the wall of her room apart and allowed her escape. It was mostly sheetrock dust, and she was barefoot and recovering from a near fatal gunshot. And yet, there was not a trace. No one saw a black-robed figure in the entirety of the hospital’s staff. No one reported seeing anything out of the ordinary. Not even the security cameras saw a thing like Connelly had described.”
“So, what do you think is happening now? Do you think she’s involved with this Dunesil Messenger?” Hargrove asked skeptically.
“I’m not sure, but I’m willing to bet that her involvement with the E.L.F. has something to do with her disappearance. Think about it, John.
The black cloaked figure in the message.
One in her hospital room in Seattle?
The Dunesil Message itself was eco-terrorist in nature.
Shannon Hunter being a member of the E.L.F.?
Something big is obviously happening, and we’re sitting here, completely in the dark.” He sighed. “There has to be a link.”
“I agree.” Secretary Hargrove responded after a long moment of thoughtful contemplation.
“But unless we have that link, we’re going to continue sitting here in the dark like the rest of the world, Michael.” He noted the obvious.
“Before we lost international radio transmission and telephone comm
unications, we’d been receiving reports from all around the globe. Everyone is experiencing the blackout and communications block. Whoever is responsible, Michael, is very serious and extremely capable. I’m half tempted to admit the Dunesil Message was entirely truthful.”
“I know.” Farsing responded. “We’d been monitoring everything before the systems went down.” He sighed once more, exhausted with more than a lack of sleep through the majority of the past week.
“Alright, let’s take this to Manning and let him know we at least now have a hint of a connection.” Hargrove grunted, rising on his aging bones, drawing Farsing to his feet as well.
The two proceeded towards the oval office, under secret service escort. They passed the special forces soldiers with clearance enough quite easily to find President Thurston Manning standing near a window, looking out wistfully over the lawn and the quiet of the land and city beyond. He too could feel it. The world was empty of sound and motion.
E.L.F. - White Leaves Page 20