E.L.F. - White Leaves

by Ness, Michael

  “We are here,” The Black Leaf went on to clarify what he’d already expressed. “and he will not expect us to be what we are when he comes. He will think his coming will obliterate this peak, and all those surrounding, instantly.

  He is right, milady White Leaves.

  His coming will turn this entire region into a gaping hole. He will open the door to free Enfeari, the fire wolf, and his presence will melt the polar ice caps. The world will flood and the two of the waters will wake. This will come to pass, I fear, but in his alighting he will find you, milady. If his blade touches you, his charm will defend you, and he will be sent back.” He sighed, hesitating, feeling her tense in fear of being cut by the starfire sword.

  “It is going to be by a slim margin, but Micqael will fail to withstand his own insatiable hunger to slay anything in his path. You will withstand him. However, in his wake, the fire wolf will be freed. With the old White Leaves fallen, under your rebirth, it is already bound to happen. I will do my best to keep you safe, but when Enfaeri rises, I will have to bring him to you. For he is wild, and will seek only to escape you.” The Black Leaf was certain of these things, but Shannon cut him short, no longer needing to hear such frightening things at a time like this.

  “Why will he come here rather than somewhere else?” Shannon asked curiously. “Why Everest?”

  “Why do you think this mountain is called Everest?” Deh Leccend asked in return, brow arching.

  “He will come here, milady, because this is The Ever-rest. This is the burial mount of Enfaeri.” He spoke with alarming clarity.

  “It is for no light reason nor coincidence then, you see, that this peak’s name returned by chance, and lives on even in your kind’s time. It is the Everest of Enfaeri. He comes here to free the hound who does his bidding most willingly over all the other Powers, for Enfaeri is his brother and his dog.” Shannon was surprised, but not enough to draw silent entirely.

  “What does Enfaeri look like?” She asked instead, curiousity winning out despite her sense of time. Deh Leccend looked back to her from the sun once more.

  “He is great in size and even stronger than he looks, milady White Leaves.” He answered, sounding grim and looking it, but Shannon smiled in his face, trying to be brave in the face of all that promised to destroy their happiness.

  “Please, Deh, my name is Shannon. I wish just once before we die here you would call me such.” She chided him gently, and he smiled lightly. He’d heard that plea several times before by now, and she smiled in light of his grin.

  “Very well.” He answered, but silence ensued once more between them for a time as the sun climbed ever-steadily towards the lengthening of the day.

  “What else can you tell me about the wolf, Enfaeri?” She asked eventually, softly, forcing him to sigh.

  “He is not a real wolf, but rather, like a man. And he is tremendous. He wears a great crown of spikes, and bears two twisted horns from the back of his dome. He has six tails and great claws. His eyes are those of the earth’s core and he is hideous to survey, for he has three jaws within his one maw.” Shannon stiffened up as she clung to his slim frame anew beneath the imagery he provided so nonchalantly, prompting him to loop his arm about her raised knees, pulling them closer to let her feel safer once again.

  “And what of the others?” She eventually asked, deciding she needed to know, in order to prepare herself for their comings.

  “The one which legends of your kin call, Quetzalcoatl, is actually forged of Lleviathaln and Kraqen, as I’ve told. Comprising many legendary monstrosities as actually two entities bound together as one great body. He is the largest of the Powers, and yet, has the greatest weakness. I do not fear them so much as the others, milady.” He hesitated.

  “Lleviathaln, is the legendary serpent he’s forever been told to be, but he has no tail. His maw is vast, with jaws so lengthy as to consume the greatest of the world’s many creatures, counted by the hundreds. His tail is bound to the body of Kraqen of the seven tongues, who also has no tail. They are longer together in countable feet than I am in countable centuries of age.” He paused to let the implication of sheer physical size set in.

  “Their heads were locked in combat since their birth, and were frozen by the charm of their White Leaf within the mass of the northern pole. They were put to sleep, and over ages buried beneath the many seas. They are in all waters, all at once, for their length is that great. When they wake, the seas will consume all things beneath their battle, for it will renew upon their first moments of being freed from the dreams they’ve suffered for so long.” He sighed heavily.

  “The others though, are more fearful. Of them, Onix and Fafnir, the Bahthalamuts, are more easily consumed than the last to wake, the Reclaimers, Traemin and Gane.”

  “Why are they easier to overcome?” Shannon cut.

  “Because they are enemies of one another, like Lleviathaln and Kraqen, milady. Their battling will never cease between them, and it makes them easier to find. It is hard to miss two great reptilian eagles, two great Rocs tearing each other to shreds, whose plumage when it falls is like brimstone set aflame by the fires of Enfaeri, which will consume the skies.

  It is especially more difficult to miss them when they are not just eagles, but like the wyrm kin, with many long tails and serpent necks. And triply more difficult to lose sight of them when wreathed in countless cyclones of terrible size which rip the land to shreds beneath flaming hail and undying lightning.”

  He smiled stressfully in a pause, trying not to be weighed down by the prospects of it all.

  Shannon had to gulp. She’d never seen a tornado in person, aside from movies and video footage, but what she knew of one powerful one was enough to scare her when she thought of hurricanes and hail and lightning, fire and brimstone featherfalls, and countless other tornado-children. She swallowed her fears.

  “And what of the last to come? These reclaimers?” She asked.

  “Traemin and Gane are indescribable monsters, milady. They are giants, only human in general figure, but the likeness ends there. They are wrought of stone and earth in Traemin, and wood and life within Gane. There is not much more to tell of them and their looks, for they can change their figures as easily as a hillside becomes a mudslide.

  They are ever-constantly shifting and reforming as best would suit their reclamation of the lands.

  Amorphous, they reshape the land and cover it with faux forestry as they pass, only to re-make their own work if they come back to it again.” Deh Leccend’s description of Traemin and Gane was indeed more frightful for Shannon than any of the others. That was the vague amoeba-like non-descript concept of a real nightmare he'd just described.

  Even though it seemed that their ultimate product was actually a good thing, it chilled her spine. They reforged the earth and gave life. That certainly sounded like a good thing in some respects. However, there had to be a bad side, and she already knew what it was. In reclamation, they had to take life to give it back again in wild, indiscriminate growth. Thus, it was likely they would consume anything and everything in their paths to remake the world.

  Shannon shivered. She didn’t like what she heard within the final comers, but it would not be helped. The best she could do was focus on what was coming most immediately.

  Micqael, the starfire sword.

  She looked up.

  The sun was high.

  Chapter 23

  High at noon both the sun and the moment reached their inevitable peak.

  The glaciers had been melting rapidly. Trickles of ice and snow became streams, and then rivers that ran tumbling down the mountainsides all around in countless falls. The air had grown warm despite the elevation, and swiftly became oppressive, finally warranting the casting aside of Deh Leccend’s warming cloak, but Shannon had not yet released his frame’s reassuring touch.

  She needed it just to hold onto her slender shred of resolve, but she almost abandoned all hope of seeing her duty through to the en
d as the glaciers and aged ice and snow beneath them began to give way more rapidly.

  She wanted to bolt and run, but to where, she wouldn’t have the slightest clue. She couldn’t have so much as hoped for a direction to go, even if she was to begin fleeing. And even if she could have brought herself to pick a direction, she knew, she would never make it clear of the Everest’s immensity in a matter of mere hours. Even if she could manage that, she knew, she would never escape the Powers, for Deh had assured her several times. The Powers would consume the whole of the earth’s face and more. Not even the Veil of the Leaf’s Edge could save her. Not even if she could manage to flee into it under her own power.

  The coming of Micqael was then abrupt. It brought these fears into the real, stacking them all upon her so quickly Shannon staggered to prepare herself.

  It began with the Black Leaf. He bolted to his feet, extricating himself from her tangled touch like oil and smoke, impossible to hold onto, but its touch impossible to forget. His abandonment left her jarred, but she scrambled to catch up as he offered his hand to help her rise.

  “He is coming!” Deh shouted, dragging her to her toes, but suddenly she was beyond her own two feet.

  Deh gaped at her weightlessness. His voice was lost to her ears, feeble before a series of violent tremors within the mountain. But it only grew more difficult to make out the Black Leaf’s thoughts as an utterly shrill, high-pitched whine called out over the world. Like an air-raid siren it rose up, indeed the clear ringing easily confused with the blowing of an angel’s horn at the dumping out of God’s wrathful bowls. Golden light descended upon them, enveloping the entire peak of the Everest.

  “Deh!?” Shannon cried to him, buoyed from her feet and drifting into the air, as he remained firmly planted upon the suddenly vaporizing snows. Left behind to gape in awe, Deh couldn’t answer her, and without his protection, she panicked. Helpless and out of her human element, Shannon flailed.

  “Deh!” She screamed again, as the light intensified around them, like a lingering beam from some science-fiction satellite-borne laser cannon. She struggled to right herself, but doing so only caused her to windmill out of control, permitting her to gaze out across the land –a scrolling panorama filled with rising snow and rock.

  Seemingly isolated to the Everest, Miqael’s coming wrought a massive cylinder of anti-gravitational upheaval. Everything drifted into the air just as helplessly as she did. The remaining masses of glaciers shattered and snapped upon the many peaks within the girth of the light, falling away even as they rose up and melted away.

  Then there was a new light.

  Dim by comparison to the initial beam, this new concentric cylinder of illumination seemed to be bouncing back, miles and miles in diameter. Was that what was bearing the earth’s ruin aloft? Shannon had no way to know, but it certainly looked it.

  Shannon was helpless to watch this all come to fruition like a doom upon her. She was powerless, and so too appeared to be Deh Leccend for he gaped up at her, waiting. She could see him over her shoulder. He was shouting something, but she couldn’t make it out, just as he likely couldn’t hear her pleas over the horn that blared over the world. She struggled to watch his lips move, trying to make out what he was shouting.

  “Hold on, milady!” He appeared to be crying, but even if he was screaming it until his voice went raw, she would never hear it over the starfire sword’s coming, nor over the rumble of the peaks being torn to shreds.

  Suddenly, she felt Him. She could sense his coming. His presence was strong. Terrible power reached down and choked away her fear, clutching her heart in a constrictive vice. Her voice failed, and Shannon gaped into the sun, blinding herself with its brilliance to await her end.

  It was over, she knew. She was dead. There was no overcoming a god from else-realms. All that she’d discovered, and all that she’d been through faded from thought –an anti-climactic moment hung upon the clock. Nothing of her life was sorrowfully recalled, and nothing flashed before her eyes but a blackness.

  It ripped past her, streaking into the sky.

  Deh had crouched below, gathering himself for a tremendous lunge. Shannon didn’t even realize it was the Black Leaf, gone to meet the star-fire. She caught only a glimpse of him trailing his sword, which had grown once more to ridiculous proportions. He brought it to bear like a lance against their foe, but vanished in the blinding glare, gifting Shannon nothing more than the sound of swords meeting in a deafening ring, like mammoth shears snipping together in a lethal drawl.

  A report, sharply pinging, then rang out over the land, capping the collision she could not see, and the black streak sailed out and away, drawing her gaze off to the west like a rocket.

  It was the Black Leaf, she realized, too late. He powered through rocks and ice and clouds of steam, unhindered in the least, and he disappeared altogether beneath her cry.

  “Deh!!” She wailed for his life. Despite his strengths being more than twenty times a single Black Leaf, Deh was gone.

  Shannon couldn’t even hear her own voice echoing away amidst the undeniable thunder of the mountains and the resonance of the collision of swords which lingered on like a crystalline glass wind-chime beneath the shrieking whine of Miqael’s descending.

  At miles from her presence, Deh Leccend vanished, but she could not stare after him, for she could then hear the starfire sword’s voice. A gleeful howl, it enveloped all other sounds, as he found her in his lightning swift plummet. Her gaze found the light once more in a flicker, but she was far too slow. Something heavy struck her breast with a crunch, and she caught sight of his otherworldly countenance –an inhuman mask of wild hunger, intense and insane.

  At that instant, a new light erupted, splaying out from her bosom in cool whiteness that sucked all the sensation and strength right out of her. The piercing of his blade was gone. Sounds faded from thought, and the light of his descending was no longer so bright -gone suddenly dim as she felt the Everest rock bite into the back of her body and head.

  For a moment, it was just a dream, an image emblazoned on her mind and recalled flawlessly upon waking. Stretching back to what seemed to be forever beyond him, the Power trailed a river of white hair, streaking out into the sky and stretching away in every direction, like ribbons of mammoth cloud-cover. His wings were all furled back in his plummet, as flame and glaring feather and cords of light that reached back to the very sun itself like the strings of a marionette.

  But, on impact, everything went black and stayed that way.

  ***

  Deh Leccend was flung away at the meeting of Miqael’s sword, borne like the terrible lance of power that it was. Through mountainous shards of airborne rock and ice, the Black Leaf was cast down violently. He flew so swiftly it was as if he’d become a dark star-fire shard himself, and so wounded, there was nothing he could do to prevent it.

  He plummeted aside so swiftly, it was a mere second before he struck a resistant peak beyond the sundering ring of the Power’s coming, some miles beyond the rising cylinder of light. He struck down with enough force to let it cave, and his impact cast down a great landslide. An avalanche of sheer rock rumbled its way to a new resting place at the far base of the mountain as he too was cast into darkness. Buried in the mountainside, Deh was spared as the land within the chamber of Miqael’s coming was utterly obliterated.

  It simply blasted away from his alighting. Entire mountains disintegrated, hammered into no more than sand and clouds, as if numerous huts made of straw before a many kiloton nuclear detonation. There would be nothing left of them when the dust settled, but Deh would not bear witness.

  Before he would ever know it, the entire region was simply gone in the blink of an eye. The single greatest catastrophic event mankind would ever witness within their minute recollection of time had come to pass in one fantastic burst. The Everest of Enfaeri and everything within miles of his bed became a flaming, gaping hole in the earth. However, the monstrously monumental occasion passed withou
t many witnesses beyond the unconscious duo.

  Out so far in the middle of nowhere, there were perhaps only distant settlements in Tibet or India that might have witnessed. If they did, however, it would matter little. They would be as awestruck, silent, hopeless and inactive as anyone might be who witnessed such mysterious, blinding devastation.

  It would be long moments of eerie silence and echoing rushes of vacuumed air returning from the expulsion, before Deh Leccend came back to himself. He rose under his own power within the dark of his tomb, but he was a broken figure from the ruin of his fall.

  When he crawled free of his tomb and lay his gaze upon the sea of molten earth that spanned out and away below him, Deh gaped in awe. Not even having witnessed such a lake of fire once before would exempt him from that sort of amazement. It swept through him with a shuddering gasp of failure and terror.

  But, the world was silent in the wake of Miqael’s coming. There was nothing but the product to be seen of the fire-fall coming of the star-fire sword. He couldn’t believe it, even though he’d predicted it.