“It is you who is the fool, Dunesil!” Deh shot back. “What has come to pass is all that we could do nothing to stop! You must see that fate decrees over even we in all of our time in life!”
“Never! Choice is the master over destiny! You know as well as I the truth in this, Black Leaf demon!” Dunesil shot back, and it became clear that he was not going to be swayed in his mindset. Shannon should have guessed it would be as such, for she’d made him, and all of his kin into this after speaking with the great tree. In effect, she could assume this was Addl’laen’s doing.
“Please, listen to me!” Shannon cut in quickly before things escalated to an unavoidable brawl.
“Get your filth out of my house!” Dunesil shot back at her, not giving her the time of day as he deteriorated the situation further.
“Dunesil! You must listen to me!” Shannon cried once more. “The Reclaimers are coming! They will tear down the Veil!” Her voice had gone desperate to be heard, but the Elvine Lord already knew this.
“Do you think I don’t know that?!” He snapped.
“They will come and tear down my walls! I will die defending the great tree, and then they will take her as well! And it’s all your fault!” He hissed, throwing a fist at her violently. Shannon couldn’t have predicted the Elvine Lord would lash out against her in an effort to harm her, but she was spared a tremendous blow of unseen power by the outstretched hand of Deh Leccend, whose level brow was already set and waiting. He bore down against the Elvine magic unleashed against her, and the land all about them shattered beneath the blow, blasted and torn apart. Sent ripping away, great chunks of earth filled the air, but Shannon stood unfettered.
“Dunesil!!” Deh Leccend howled back a dreadful warning, letting the debris fall to rest as his gaze weighed heavy upon the Elvine Lord. “You must relinquish the Veil! The Reclaimers will tear it down if you do not! You will be killed, as you know, and they will reclaim the Addl’laen regardless! But you can spare yourself, and all of your kin, if you just relinquish the barrier!”
“No!!” The Elvine Lord defied him. “I’ll do no such thing, Black devil! Take your White curse, and leave me!”
“Dunesil!! Relinquish! You must! I implore you! I beg of you. I order you, release the Veil!” The Black Leaf tried one last time, but his refusal to do as the Elvine Lord wished, only prompted further spite.
“I said, get Out… of My… House!” Dunesil shouted haltingly as he wound back with his powerful fist and threw a mighty punch down upon the Leaves. Shannon cringed, having seen what had happened the first time he’d done similarly. Deh Leccend didn’t even try to withstand the power of Dunesil Llaerth, the oldest and highest of the branch of the Elvine.
He instead wheeled on Shannon and wrapped her up, shielding her with his backside to the blow as it powered into them. She felt it suck all the air out of her lungs, and the next thing she knew, she was tumbling backwards in a tangle with the Black Leaf...
* * *
Next Week: The Final Two Chapters of White Leaves!
Chapter 28
Twilight was replaced by daylight. A high and swiftly rising sun vaulted into sight, and then she struck the earth alongside Deh Leccend. They landed hard on unforgiving concrete, and rolled to a dazed halt.
Shannon coughed and wheezed, struggling to rise against the jarring pain in her figure, but Deh Leccend was forever faster.
He was on his feet immediately, all liquid movement. At once he was pulling her up, plucking her from the earth in a delicate cradle. Shannon could only whimper. It seemed at every turn she was taking devastating falls, and it was really starting to hurt. She didn’t know how much more she could take of that sort of rough treatment, and she clung to Deh Leccend, letting him hold her close as she winced and gasped for her breath and tried to overcome the harsh bites of her tumble.
Slowly, she came to grips with the pain as it dulled to a series of sharp stings and numbing throbs. Her endorphins kicked in to help her deal with it quickly. Her breath returned and slowed, and she realized Deh Leccend wasn’t moving. He wasn’t going anywhere. He wasn't carrying her to a safe resting place.
He was just…holding her.
For some reason she didn’t get the impression he was paying her any attention whatsoever.
A sound graced her ears then that she somehow recognized. There was a soft rustling like wind through the countless leaves of a forest canopy, yet the air was calm. Then, she heard the cries of birds. Seagulls prattled their awful squealing as they flew overhead, streaming across the sky in droves. And lastly, a shuddering soft boom rolled through the earth, and up through the Black Leaf’s body.
She scrambled to extricate her face from where she'd buried in his shoulder and cloak.
His neck was craned up and turned aside, face alighted by the rising of the sun with eyes cast upon something that dragged his stately ears down like a heavy sorrow. She quickly followed his gaze, twisting about within his grasp.
Shannon suddenly recognized where she was. She saw a familiar building, and then others, and soon she was looking upon the heart of Belltown -skyscrapers rising up high beyond the nearer buildings. She was in Seattle again, at the union of Pike and 3rd!? She couldn’t believe it.
Addl’laen rested where the Emerald city stood, and that meant the great tree was here, dominating the northern bulk of Belltown, the Seattle Center, and overlooking Lake Union! It was here the whole time! At long last things had come full circle, but it wasn’t Seattle that struck her in sudden silent awe.
Rather, it was the destruction she saw here. Somehow, she’d not heard a single cry in her recovering from the Veil-fall, but there were people everywhere. Men, women, and children. Everyone was running and screaming, crying for their lives. She heard them now.
But Shannon couldn’t acknowledge them.
She stared instead upon the unfathomable aberration, the monstrosity, the last of the else-dimensional Powers... the much feared, Reclaimers.
It was Traemin and Gane.
Inbound from the south, the amorphous unraveling juggernaut took a mighty step forward, and Seattle trembled wholly beneath their bulk. Her mouth hung agape and she simply hung there in Deh Leccend’s grasp as people completely ignored everything in their need to flee the terror of make-believe come true.
“Deh!” Shannon finally found her voice, and for once, in face of the Powers, she could actually be heard. The coming of Traemin and Gane was almost utterly silent, aside from the sound of wind in the leaves of a non-existent canopy and the occasional thunderous step forward. How odd that it should be so quiet, Shannon could have thought, if not for the abhorrent fears that had come to grip her like everyone else.
“It is the Reclaimers!” Deh Leccend snapped back a quaking peal to her, revealing the obvious.
“I know who it is!” She shouted back. “We have to get out of here!”
She couldn’t pry her eyes off of the monstrosity. It rivaled the skyscrapers -a massive humanoid figure, whose left half was wrought entirely of stone and earth. The right half was an insidious, greatly misshapen figure construed of wood and leaves, bearing a long, drooping, dragon-like set of bizarre, ineffectually root-bound jaws. Its entire muzzle grew like roots towards the earth as they progressed -its whole figure reshaping as if to make a leg for its next step out of its very head. As its last leg lifted and its weight shifted forward, that’s exactly what was beginning to happen, and its head stayed put, replenished by the hind limb’s rejoining of its mass.
Deh Leccend didn’t heed her words, left staring just like she was.
The woody half, Gane, had a number of glaring iridescent green eyes, each swiveling every which way like google-eyed comedic glasses, but they moved with an unholy, revolting keenness of sense that stole all possibility of humor out of the air.
Thoughts and fears alike were inconsequential as the towering juggernaut reared back with its stony half.
At last, the Reclaimers had reached the Heart of the Veil
.
Earthen Traemin reared up, winding back with a mockery of a mighty humanoid fist as its stony, almost featureless face fixed upon the nearest skyscraper. Shannon saw what was coming, yet she did nothing for a full second, staggered by the implications of preempting Traemin’s movement. Then it was clear he meant to assault the skyscrapers.
If the thing was capable of or requiring breaths like any other mortal creature, Shannon could not be certain, but it surely could draw wind. Its massive shovel of a maw yawned open, and a tremendous vaccum occured. The sound of it was disorienting, but unmistakable for anything else. And in moments, Traemin's inhalation began tearing the skyscraper apart as easily as a shop-vac tending a pile of dust.
“Deh!” She shouted, kicking against being held.
“Deh! We have to go!” She finally dragged her eyes away from the horror, and jerked on his cloak at the breast, but the Black Leaf just continued to stare. She could only wonder what horror he could see with those black eyes that she could not, but it obviously held him under its spell.
“Deh!!!” She shouted in his ear, fists full of his garments. Her jerking finally broke his seeming trance. He blinked coolly, narrowing his gaze, shriveling his brow and lowering his wing-like ears even lower, as an angry cornered cat might do.
Then, Boom! The earth shook. Seattle reeled like a living thing underfoot, and Shannon's gaze flashed back to the skyscrapers.
The impact of Traemin’s fist struck the first of the many towers. In a tremendous shuddering, the monster punched clean through, and the skyscraper began to topple away as a rain of glass and debris. It fell to the city streets in huge sheets, furthering the chaos to no end, but what smaller clouds of matter were made of its sinister touch were instantly sucked up by its gaping jaws.
Shannon’s eyes flashed over the obscenity of it all as the building crumbled in a thunder. However, even as it fell it was disintegrating, melting away as if no more than a mountain of dust -held together only temporarily by mankind's ingenuity. Traemin’s blocky mouth yawned, unfathomably hungry, inhaling all that gravity didn't claim first.
The other half of the juggernaut had outstretched its indescribable new hand, which became a forward stepping foot, and it latched onto the gargantuan, black, Columbia Tower which Shannon most familiarized herself with upon coming into Seattle from northbound I-5.
Like a great tree, possessing wild, frightfully swift-growing roots, Gane rolled over and through the skyscraper, and went surging both up and down its sides. Its growth rushed throughout the massive building and down into and through the streets with a stunningly voracious, insatiable hunger of its own. It ravenously consumed neighboring towers with the same great ease, tearing them down and disintegrating them to dust only to proceed onward as the Powers’ whole figure advanced behind, moving unhindered through the heart of Seattle’s great structures.
Anything it touched with any part of itself simply evaporated like sand castles before bullies on a beach. It simply pressed into them with its breast, and the buildings in its path laid down in a matter of seconds.
Suddenly, the roots appeared on 3rd avenue, far too close for any comfort, and they went rushing aimlessly through the streets like a flood. It was all fluid in movement, and all consuming, growing so rapidly as to overtake anyone trying to escape. The people wailed as they died, and though their disintegration was instantaneous, Shannon could see the agony etched in their faces. She could almost feel it herself.
“Deh!” Shannon started screaming again, frantically clawing at him.
“We go, now!” She ordered, and finally the Black Leaf obeyed.
“Right.” He answered grimly, turning about and bounding away. In a single leap, he overtook the nearest building. And in a rush he raced away, gliding and bouncing through the space, but neither of them could know where they should go. There was nowhere to go but away. Behind, the oddly quiet coming of the final Powers, the reputedly unstoppable Reclaimers, continued unchecked.
However, these Powers were faster than they looked. They rushed through the buildings at a seeming leisurely pace, but this did not prevent them from tearing it all down in a matter of moments. The whole world seemed to be crumbling behind the race Deh Leccend tried to undertake with Shannon in his clutches, but in a matter of moments, it seemed the world before them was also crashing down. The roots of Gane were everywhere, and trees were springing up to the tune of the constant rustling of the Powers’ presence.
Shannon couldn’t believe it. By now she should believe everything she saw and experienced, but this happened far too swiftly, and now she knew how it was that the Reclaimers covered hundreds of square miles with every stride. The length of a step was greater than it seemed.
They were the land, as the Black Leaf had said, and they rose up before her even as they came from behind.
Deh Leccend suddenly skidded to a halt on the top of an apartment building near Denny Way just blocks away from Seattle’s famed Space Needle. There would be no going forward. The growth there was already overtaking everything, and just one touch would be the end of them -a dilemma to be certain, for Shannon's very duty was to do just that. The White Leaves could do nothing to these giants. Not if she wanted...to live.
Shannon could see the Needle and the grounds of the Seattle Science Center, whose ornamental white towers mimicked the knot-worked structures of the Elvine bath houses in the Palace of Llaerth. They were already being overtaken as well, and the Space Needle was sprouting trees from its lofty peak, even as it began to crumble to dust. The whole of downtown was already fully being consumed, Belltown was on the verge of extinction, and without a glance she knew Capitol Hill would be the same. The breadth and scope of it was unfathomable, even after all that she’d seen.
They were cornered, hemmed in like everyone else. There was simply nowhere to run to. Shannon looked high to the sky, praying for the Black Leaf to make his mighty jump and carry her away, but even the sun was over-run, crisscrossed in a myriad of aberrant wild growths. Its net overhead looked more dreadful than that cast by the Rocs and the serpents of the sea in their effort to lay trap to her.
Loose, free flying leaves were filling the sky beneath the wind produced from the utter collapse of so much physical matter when Deh Leccend set Shannon to her own two feet and drew his little knife. He ripped it free with a shrill ringing, letting it fling wide once more to ridiculous lengths as he threw back his tattered cloak and stood ready to defend her to the death with his little figure.
Shannon couldn’t grasp why he’d chosen to do as thus. She merely looked on, astonished at this newest pair of Powers. She wanted to flee the ferocity with which the growth grew wild all about her, but she couldn’t do anything more than stare up at the incoming amoebic juggernaut who only feigned at anthropomorphizing itself.
It’s mighty heads then loomed and screened away the sun.
A single step would bring Gane’s new right hand right down atop them, and half the Belltown neighborhood. Its mighty roots ran over everything, preceding his coming like a hungry tentacle rain.
For once, Shannon would not cringe. She stood there hopeless, eyes drooping but cast aloft, lips pouting but agape. There was no denying the Reclaimers, and she now fully realized the truth of that as the sky was all but blotted out by growth and gale-blown leaves and their hideous figureheads.
Nevertheless, Deh Leccend was fast at work, hacking away in devastating swipes of his great sword, keeping anything and everything far at bay by his own great power. He was doing well at defending her, but Shannon knew his efforts as useless. There would be no stopping them. In fact, his severing of the countless limbs of Gane only drew the creature’s many illuminant green eyes down upon them, and then everything disappeared in the darkness the monster cast.
The last thing Shannon was allowed to see was the sun, glaring through the break between the juggernaut’s two mighty heads. But then, there was nothing. Only the cold embrace of death did she witness as Deh Leccend the Blac
k Leaf abandoned the futility of his struggle against the volatile growth.
“Deh.” Shannon submitted to the end, drawing him close as she quickly beckoned him nigh. There was nothing left for him to do if not cling to and shield his charge, his White Leaves, with all that he was. He unleashed his Black Leaf birthright, and defended her for as long as he could with sheer magical forces she couldn’t even begin to identify even if she was aware of them.
But in the end, all seemed for naught -a valiant but wasted effort- as they descended to that dark chasm of the lost.
***
E.L.F. - White Leaves Page 38