by Ember Lane
“Where?” Lincoln asked.
“Where what?”
“Where is it written?”
Glenwyth laughed. “You should control your clever tongue, else those luck points you so cherish will run out.”
Arriving at the gloomy riverbank, Lincoln was surprised to see a small rowboat now moored there where another elf sat with oars primed. “This is Elleren, and she will take us home.”
Lincoln reluctantly got into the boat, sitting in the bow end. Elleren turned and welcomed him.
“My friends?” he asked again, but neither elf replied.
Elleren pushed the boat off the bank with one oar, and began rowing. Lincoln had fully expected to be taken south and deeper into the forest, but Elleren took them upstream, toward the mountain and waterfall.
“Rhangnarg,” Glenwyth told him, lighting a lantern hanging from the boat’s stern. “You were wondering what the structure over the valley was. It is the ruin of Rhangnarg, and no one has entered its halls for an age. Even the deep-down dwarves steer clear of its tainted stone. It is said that the very rock bleeds tears for its past, that its bowels are fire and its rooms are as cold as ice. Do not awaken Rhangnarg, even if your blood runs Mandrake.”
Lincoln grunted. He looked at Glenwyth, she appeared to be trying to be mystical, to be mysterious, but though her movements were fluid, they were those of a warrior, and not the peaceful type of elf that usually inhabited these types of fantastical lands. She was also looking at him strangely.
“So, you have taken an elf as a lover? Was she half-elf?”
“My business,” Lincoln muttered, but Glenwyth laughed in response.
“Bashful, Lincoln the Builder, very bashful. Tell me why? This land is bountiful. Why be ashamed because you supped from it?”
Shifting uneasily on his seat, Lincoln tried to contain the guilt that was rising in his gut. “I betrayed my true love,” he said, his teeth gritted.
“Is she here, in this land?”
Lincoln fixed Glenwyth a steely stare. “No, she’s dead.”
He noticed Elleren missed her oar stroke, and Glenwyth stared out over the shade-filled river. “I’m sorry,” she finally said. “We would celebrate that. Find joy in a life shared. The land wouldn’t expect you to mourn forever.”
“So the land respects that things change,” Lincoln said.
“All things change.”
“Then how do you know that Crags is bad, that all gnomes are bad?”
Her laughter tinkled around, then abruptly stopped. “Digberts,” she snapped.
It was Lincoln’s turn to laugh. “Now he can be quite the character.”
This time, Elleren stopped rowing, and Glenwyth sat bolt upright. The boat started drifting back with the current, but neither elf seemed to care.
“You’ve met the demon king?”
“Digberts, yes, he was okay. A bit…chaotic, but just a little playful.”
“No,” Elleren said. “What Glenwyth meant was, ‘You’ve met the demon king and survived.’” She grabbed the oars and started rowing again, her strokes more urgent now.
Confusion filled Lincoln’s mind. He couldn’t work out the elves at all. They just didn’t seem right. Glenwyth appeared genuinely confused by the simple fact that he had met Digberts. He tracked back over everything Digberts had done, but nothing was that odd. Lincoln was sticking with his original thoughts that Diberts, Marngs, and all of them were no more than hooligans.
“Why did he let you live?” Glenwyth asked again.
“Probably because I’d done what he asked. I killed the troll, Esmeralda. He searched her cave for loot and moved on.”
“What did he find?”
“Nothing. It was too well hidden. Once he’d gone, we found the way.”
“And where did it lead?”
Lincoln smiled. “That is for me to know. Maybe once my friends are freed, maybe then I’ll tell you, but for now, no.”
Glenwyth glared at him, but said nothing in reply. Lincoln sat and stewed, worried for Aezal and Crags, especially Crags. Eventually, the way became lighter, and Lincoln heard the constant rumble of what he assumed was the waterfall he’d seen earlier. He craned around to see it, but they burst out of the forest and were soon rowing toward it.
Soon at its base, Lincoln looked up at the cascading fall, his eyes drawn to its power. Spray bloomed all around it, the water fighting, jostling as it fell, losing the surrounding gray mountain in roiling silver mists. It fell to the semi-circular lake now around them, pinned against the craggy mountain by the thick of the forest.
Elleren turned the boat toward the distant red cliffs, and Lincoln saw that a sizeable chunk of land had been hidden from him by the curve of their ridge. A rough wood jetty welcomed them once they’d traversed the lake, and Elleren skipped from the boat when they drew alongside it, offering Lincoln a helping hand.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“You have your secrets, we have ours,” Glenwyth said curtly, as Elleren spun him around and tied his hands behind his back before he’d even gained a good foothold on the jetty.
Glenwyth walked up to him, and face-to-face, smiled at him, though not in pleasure, and pulled a hood over his head, dousing his day to night. She pushed him around, shoved him in the back, and he stumbled forward. Lincoln felt a rope fall around his neck, and a noose drew shut, tightened by a tug. “This way,” he heard Elleren order him.
Branches whipped his face as he entered the forest; nettles swiped at his feet as Lincoln was dragged along like a captured fugitive. Neither Glenwyth nor Elleren said a word. Elleren pulling him forward with sharp tugs, Glenwyth prodding him on, the tip of a stick or shaft digging into his back every dozen or so paces.
Sweat poured from his forehead, streamed down his back. The air was muggy with the waterfall’s spray. He felt exposed, vulnerable, and wondered how he had been tricked so easily by these elves. As for Aezal and Crags, he doubted they lived now, everything clearly a trap. That the elves and gnomes were enemies was plain to see, but elves and humans? And if Digberts was the gnome king, then he’d certainly treated Lincoln better than the elves. What had happened that Elleren and Glenwyth had turned so? Could it really be because he refused to tell them anything? He was beginning to wonder whether elves were, in fact, evil in this land. He saw his energy falling, thirst raking through his body.
“I need water,” he shouted.
“You’ve still got fifty points left,” Glenwyth shouted back and gave him another sharp prod for his troubles.
Lincoln’s consciousness became blurred. He staggered forward with every tug, feeling his neck welt with burns from the noose. His health wasn’t tumbling, but was bouncing up and down as the odd point was stripped, only to be replenished by his regen.
“Why?” he shouted.
“Why?” Elleren growled. “You expect some measure of respect when you come to ravage our forest? You expect to ally when you bring our mortal enemies to our home?”
Lincoln felt a kick in his back, and he went tumbling forward, falling, rolling down a slope and coming to a crunching halt against cold, hard rock. The hood was ripped from his head, and he saw Glenwyth’s booted feet standing over him. “You sure you don’t want to tell us?”
“Tell you what?”
“What you found in that tomb.”
Lincoln tried to get up, but his tied hands gave him no leverage. “What does it matter? What I found, I left, and then I sealed the place and hid it.”
“You hid it?”
“Yeah. It wasn’t a thing that needed looting. It was…sacred…”
Glenwyth spat on the floor right by his head. “Liar. You took something. You took her mark!”
“The Mandrake thing?” Lincoln cried. “I didn’t loot that! It just appeared.”
“Mandrake scorched the world.”
“And yet the world recovered,” Lincoln told her.
Glenwyth scoffed. “Come, he will decide.”
Elleren yanked the rope and dragged Lincoln to his feet. Lincoln now saw that the forest had thinned, the trees no longer a lush green, more a blighted yellow, and the red rock of the ridge now loomed high above them. He saw a long, wooden stockade that led away in both directions, and he saw a small gate to which they headed. Looking up at the top of the stockade, he saw elves patrolling up and down along some concealed walkway. Tiny caltrops littered the ground in front of the wooden palisade, a ditch running its length for good measure. They crossed through, and Lincoln entered the elven village.
It was a jumble of wooden huts, of vine walkways, stacked timber, and elves crisscrossing each other, barging, bumping as they went about their business, and they all looked so…so angry. Lincoln could only liken it to a city back on earth, where everyone seemed unbearably sad at life.
Though he too was angry, he had to know why. “What is up with all these folks?”
“We are forced to live here, forced to live like this, because of the gnomes,” Glenwyth growled.
“Why?”
“We have to protect her. If Digberts comes back, we will fight to the last,” she said.
Lincoln heard a great roar, and looked to try and see where it came from. As they rounded a small line of ramshackle huts, Lincoln saw the source of the commotion. In the midst of a square of dirt, a cage sat on top of a ten-foot-high wooden pole. Crags was looking out through its wooden bars, ducking as a mob below threw rotten fruit at him, jeering with every hit, booing with every miss.
Bursting forward, Lincoln forgot about the noose around his neck. It snagged tight, tearing at his neck, pulling from his feet and nearly snapping his neck.
Damage! You have received 20 damage points. Your health is reduced to 58/80.
Lincoln stayed on the ground, gasping for air.
Caution! Your energy is 40/100 and falling.
“Why?” he asked, but was just dragged to his feet.
“I’ll show you,” Glenwyth said, taking hold of the rope and pulling him past the pole, past Crags. Lincoln scrambled up. He thought he heard Crags cry out, but his brain was muzzy, his vision coming in waves. He staggered through the elven village, ever closer to the red cliff face, and there he was forced to his knees in front of a skeletal tree, all trunk and withered branches, not a leaf adorning its angry boughs. Sadness tinged Lincoln’s angry heart, for the tree looked as though it had once been mighty. Its trunk must have been ten feet in diameter, but from it, only ghosts of what must have once been grand branches limped out.
“This is what the gnomes did to her, to the One Tree.”
“How did they do this?” Lincoln asked.
“Digberts opened a chaos portal right by it. His poison blighted the land.”
“When the ridge rose up from the land?”
“After. It was Digberts, no one else. The tree powers the essence of the land. The mighty jaspur, as it fades, so Barakdor falls into chaos. Now we live here to protect it. It is our toil that keeps it alive. The ground dried up, we water it every day, thousands of buckets from the lake, but to no avail. Digberts placed a curse on it.”
Her words fell to the ground like droplets of despair. Her eyes were downcast, her manner defeated. Glancing back at the tree, he felt its sadness too, if that was truly possible. Lincoln let his mind drift down into the soil. He saw the dry mud, despite the rain, despite the efforts of the elves, and he saw the trees withered roots. Farther down, the packed earth became looser, and then his mind broke through and he was under the tree, under the soil and then plunging through a skin of clay. Once past it, he plunged into a vat of water, an aquifer, but Lincoln sensed the water was tainted with iron leached from the red cliffs, unable to drain away, plugged by the clay.
“It wasn’t Digberts,” Lincoln muttered. “When the land changed it released, it trapped…” he looked up. “It let loose some poisons and started drowning the roots.”
“Lies!” Glenwyth shouted.
“It will die unless you move it,” Lincoln said, simply. “I can help you do it, for the gnome. My price is the gnome.” And then he blacked out, his energy finally drained by the divination, and he tipped, face first into the ground before him.
Lincoln woke and screamed. Crags looking straight down at him, still covered in smears of rotten fruit.
“I don’t know what you said in there, but I sure am grateful,” he said. “You?”
“Nope, me neither,” Aezal’s voice boomed out. “One minute I was in here on my own, the next, you two were thrown in. Now, well, at least we’ve got food.”
“Yeah, and they’re not throwing it at us,” Crags added.
“What did you promise them?” Aezal asked, but before Lincoln could answer, the door to their room burst open and a dozen or more elves crashed in, picking up Lincoln and dragging him out, then Aezal, and then Crags. Soon outside, they were carried through the village and toward a large house nestled in the corner of the valley where the ridge and mountain met. Lincoln was deposited by the dwelling’s front door. Before he’d even gotten a good look at the place, the door opened, and he was pulled through.
Torches lit a large, round room. A set of spiral steps led up to an upper level, and a small ember fire glowed in its middle. A sole elf sat the other side of it. He had long, gray hair, a wispy, straggling beard, and a frame that resembled a skeleton. Sagging, tired eyes looked up at Lincoln. He appeared to have the troubles of the world on his shoulders, and looked defeated, bereft of any hope.
“Lincoln the Builder, you promise much. Please sit.”
The old elf patted the ground beside him. Lincoln rounded the fire and sat.
“I’m Forgarth, supposed leader of this tribe of wood elves—the tribe of the land. We are tasked with protecting the tree, though the tree fades, and I with it, as the tree fades, so do my children. Its blight affects everything we are, everything we do. Glenwyth tells me that you think you can save the tree, restore it, but alas, I think we only have one option left to us. That option is contrary to everything I believe, but the gnome was brought to us for a reason, so it must be his blood and guts the tree hankers for.” Forgarth looked up at him. “The tree is thirsty for a final sacrifice, before we all join Lamerell.
“His blood will not cure the tree,” Lincoln said. “His death will not save your souls.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I have seen what is wrong.”
“Are you a farseer?”
“No, a builder, I build things, make them grow, and the only thing that will grow if you sacrifice Crags is your war with the gnomes.”
Forgarth scoffed. “Those vagabonds.” He turned to Lincoln. “And you think you know the answer?”
“I do,” Lincoln said. “I would move the tree to a clearing I found, it will thrive there.”
Forgarth rasped a laugh. “You can’t just move a tree.”
Now it was Lincoln’s turn to laugh. “You can, it just needs planning. I will save your tree if your tribe of elves will live in harmony with my new settlement. That is my promise to you.”
Fogarth took a long breath. If possible, he seemed to wilt farther toward the embers, as if a breath of cold would freeze his bones. Then one eye perked up, and he regarded Lincoln with the glow of a spark.
“Will you do this?”
Forgarth has offered you a quest. Save their One Tree. Reward unknown. Do you accept the quest? Y/N
“Save the tree, and we will talk again,” Forgarth added.
“I cannot save the tree without founding the settlement. You’ll just have to trust my intentions.”
Forgarth nodded slowly. “Do you accept the quest?”
“Yes.”
You have accepted the quest, save the One Tree. Reward yet to be revealed.
“Then found your village.”
“I will have to destroy much of yours to complete the quest.”
Forgarth looked at him. “My tribe has fallen the way of the tree; poison runs through their veins. I thought it
the poison of the gnome, but if you’re right, then laughter may once more vanquish sorrow in this valley, and we will be forever in your debt.” Then the spark of life left his eyes, and a cold returned. “The gnome stays here; you may have the warrior’s aid. If you fail, we try my way.”
“If I fail, it is because the tree is already dead. If I succeed, I will build you a village around the tree, so that you may tend for it and live in harmony with us. In return for two things…”
“And they are?” Forgarth furrowed his ranging eyebrows.
“Firstly, you make sure the forest and the mills are in perfect harmony.”
“Agreed.”
“Secondly, the tree houses… For my own sanity, I’ll have to change them,” said Lincoln. “I couldn’t help but notice some design flaws. It’d drive me nuts to know I had such badly built huts in my settlement.”
15
Echoes
So let me get this straight,” Ozmic said, as they sat around their new fire pit—the dwarves hadn’t been idle while Lincoln, Aezal and Crags had been with the elves. “You’ve agreed to move a tree in return for getting the gnome back. A gnome—if you don’t mind me saying, that we didn’t want in the first place and is potentially spying on us.”
“But is quite fun,” Grimble added, shifting on their new bench.
Lincoln had been pleasantly surprised when he’d gotten back, and even though it was way past dusk and headed toward the middle of the night, the dwarves were still up and tinkering with their new creation. They’d set the fire pit halfway between the bridge and the first huts they’d built. Made of a drystone, hexagonal wall about a foot high, they’d also made six simple benches and placed them around it. Lincoln sat on one, Aezal next to him, with the two dwarves opposite.
“I still shouldn’t have left him. I should have bargained harder,” Lincoln said, angry with himself, visions of Crags stranded up that pole in that cage, haunting him.