CHAPTER 84: Dark Elves

We were led to one of the larger treehouses that boasted three rooms a kitchen and a comfortable living area. Via Elle, Floréal instructed us to rest there for a short while our hosts called a meeting of the village.

It gave us a moment to have a look at the interior of the house we stayed in. The interior walls of the house had a polished wood finish with matching cupboards and all the rooms and the kitchen. Although the kitchen had a sink and a small table where one could sit, nowhere could I see any method to heat food. However, there did seem to be a stone fireplace in the living room. We each picked a bedroom and left our backpacks there. I forgot to mention we discovered a bathroom facility attached to the house accessible on the ground floor at the base of the tree.. If you’re wondering why the elves didn’t place the WC inside then ask yourself how many times you noticed plumbing pipes in all those fantasy tree houses you’ve seen over the years. I’ll leave the details of that to your imagination lest I destroy the fantasy sitting. A few hours later a couple of elves escorted us to the village meeting place.

We arrived at a small circular arena. Its stepped sides dropped towards a platform in the centre. Elves sat on one side of the arena, part way up the steps and on the centre platform sat Floréal on a stone throne. There couldn’t have been more than a hundred elves sitting there. I thought we were attending a village meeting, surely there were more people than that? At the time I wondered if some of the villagers were perhaps occupied with other things and couldn’t make it. The lack of children made me wonder if children weren’t permitted, that was until I noticed one sitting in the crowd. The only one. I was quickly getting a bad vibe about the situation when we were accompanied by a few elves to the platform.

“I’m not getting a good feeling about this Shane.”

Said Hana anxiously.

“Yeah, me too. Just go with the flow for the moment.”

Floréal addressed me directly.

“Present the dathrod.”

I presumed she wanted the cage released onto the platform, so I dropped it onto the stage as she requested. With the release of the cage, a gasp rang out from the elves. I simply assumed the elves were surprised by the dathrod’s deadly physique. Since I understand elvish, I realised what actually surprised the elves.

“He used packing skill.”

“Can you believe that? I never thought I would see packing skill in my life.”

“What that skill could do for us.”

That worried me. Wouldn’t the dathrod be something more of concern. At that moment I understood how Alice felt when she arrived in Wonderland. Elle looked particularly shocked as her eyes snapped onto mine I suddenly felt the concern behind them. Before I could react I felt strong, thin hands suddenly pin my arms behind me, pushing me into the ground. I couldn’t move. Judging from the noises from Hana and Elle, the same happened with them. I didn’t utter a sound until I heard Floréal say.

“Release the dathrod.”

“What? Don’t do that, you don’t know what you’re doing!”

I shouted with my face plastered to the ground, but I didn’t know if they understood what I was saying but the message was clear.

“Dathrod, come here.”

Out the corner of my eye I watched in morbid fascination as the huge dathrod calmly walked out of the cage over to Floréal and laying down at her feet as if it were always her pet. Suddenly everything fell into place. All the unanswered questions that bothered me before became crystal clear. Ara confirmed my thoughts. Come to think of it, Floreal never said the dathrod killed elves, she only said it killed people.

“You humans will no longer enslave us. We will not continue bowing to your merciless actions. See the power of our wrath!”

At that last statement Floréal’s voice suddenly rose an octave, highly unusual for her since I never heard her raise her voice anytime I could remember. What was that story about enslavement, I never enslaved any elves and if any humans did, what did it have to do with us? All that time they pretended to cooperate with me those blasted dark elves played me like a musical instrument. I felt like a total idiot.

Although I fumed, my mind worked methodically at the problem. At that stage the elves hadn’t removed my utility belt, a major mistake on their part, but I still couldn’t get to the items I needed while I was being held down.

I need to pause the story at this point to explain something to you about my skills. Anything that I personally possessed as a skill I could activate. I held one transfer storage, attached to me as a skill, which used my own ethereal energy as its power source. All the other transfer storages I used were attached to mustite bars on my utility belt, and I needed to physically touch those to be able to activate the transfer storage skills and if necessary use the ethereal energy stored in them.

But I digress, back to the actions I needed to take. Step one; I activated my air sense to quickly select my priority targets which turned out to be the six dark elves holding Elle, Hana, and me down on the ground. With my air skill I released the two metal spheres in my pocket like angry bees from a hive. The spheres whipped around a hundred and eighty degrees like homing missiles and banged the two dark elves holding me down squarely on their noggins before they could react. As their two unconscious bodies fell and collapsed beside me I remained perfectly still, adding to the remaining elves’ confusion as to the source of the attack. With my eyes firmly on Hana’s captors next to me, I converted another two proselytes who were temporarily released from their worldly concerns. By that time, the two remaining dark elves holding Elle knew those flying spheres heading for them would hit them on their foreheads and both reflexively put up their arms to block their heads. Unfortunately for them, just before impact, my spheres dropped down a head’s length hitting them squarely in the chest, knocking them off their knees and the breath out of them. With their hands now on their chests, my spheres lifted vertically into the air and came crashing down on their exposed heads, knocking them out. I heard the stone-cold voice of Floréal.

“Dathrod, attack him.”

Rolling over I activated a transfer storage on my belt to stop the huge dathrod hurtling in the air towards me, it opened its huge maw filled with teeth and extended its claws to maul me. It still had a grudge against me, launching its lighting fast attack on me. Unfortunately for the dathrod, as powerful as it was and while in the air, it couldn’t perform U-turns. Once it jumped, it committed itself to the leap. I merely opened a transfer storage in front of it and emotionlessly watched it disappear into the hole before closing the storage. Having learned from my previous encounter with the dathrod made fighting it so easy once I understood its weaknesses.

“Elle, Hana, stay here for the moment.”

Standing up, I walked with determined purpose towards Floréal, who by then was flanked by a few of her best armed elves. Before they could even take a step towards me, Floréal disappeared into my storage along with her elves and in a matter of seconds they were gone. The elvish spectators watched in horror as their plans descended into chaos. Suddenly, as if suddenly grasping the gravity of their situation, they started screaming and scattering like dried leaves in a gale.

I retrieved my creation core and placed it on the platform with a firm thud. Time for step-two arrived; the mop-up. Out of the core came a large mustite bar from which I released hundreds upon hundreds of modified high-speed scolems from storage, all of them designed for one purpose, to capture elves. Each scolem could easily outrun an escaping elf. Every scolem could capture elves using a transfer storage attribute attached to their front legs. As soon as they touched an elf, a large hole in the ground would swallow them up. Soon there were no elves in the vicinity as I continued to send out more scolems to scour the area. It seemed all the elves were originally in the arena, making it easy to capture them. Soon, all the captured elves were placed in the creation core.

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For two hours we stayed at the arena while the scolems scouted the area. I mentioned my theory about the dark elves motives and that they were behind the dathrod attacks on the human villagers.

“I’m sorry Shane, I never realised they were dark elves.”

Elle apologised to me.

“No Elle. There’s no need to confess. You did a good job and if you had known they were dark elves, you would have warned me. I always thought dark elves were darker skinned though?”

It was the anime influence I confessed to myself.

“Huh? That’s not why they’re called dark elves though. They tend to be a bunch of mean-spirited elves. It’s their stinking attitude that’s dark.”

Oh well, lesson learned. Note to self; not all elves were nice forest dwelling folk.

“What’s your plan now?”

Asked Hana.

“We need to do this step by step. There’s no way I’m going to release a bunch of soured dark elves to brood about what ugly thing they can do to us next. But there’s also no point rushing out of here until we are more certain about our plans. As it stands I’m not even sure how to get home, you got any ideas?”

They both shook their heads.

“Well, it should be safe to stay here for the moment. Let’s find that house we stayed in and camp out there for the night. I’d like to spend the rest of today just clearing out whatever we can find.”

“I can’t believe they used the dathrod to kill people.”

Commented Elle.

“It makes sense to me now. They must have been in the area, controlling the dathrod’s activities which also explains why they arrived so quickly once they realised I captured it. No one would ever have suspected they were the masterminds behind the attacks. Something Floréal said about enslavement seems to be their motivation. We had nothing to do with that and as far as I’m concerned, everything we can find here is compensation for what they did to the villagers and to us.”

“What are you planning to do with the dark elves you captured?”

Asked Hana.

“I’m not sure yet. But they can stay where they are until I figure something out. I’d like to take anything we can find. But whatever you do, don’t destroy anything, and try not to leave tracks. We don’t know if there are any surrounding dark-elf-villages that might want to investigate the disappearances later. I’d like to leave as few clues as possible to our involvement here.”

I was right. A few moon cycles later, long after we left, three dark elves arrived to investigate Floréal’s village following their scout’s reports that no dark elf villagers had been seen for a while. Dark elves were fiercely territorial and only foolish elves with a death wish would transgress over another’s territory. They knew Floréal used a dathrod for her pet, so the elves were overly cautious, but they soon discovered the abandoned village. They found only empty houses. No furniture, clothing, or food remained as if the elves that once lived there, hastily packed up and migrated somewhere else. There were no signs of struggles or battle, all simply vanished. From that time on, no one ever visited that village again, too afraid to also experience whatever happened to those villagers. Some dark elves even speculated the dathrod went rogue and ate them all up.

We, on the other hand, sat with a dilemma. Every time we tried to leave the dark elf village, we ended up walking in circles. Twice we set out north, only to turn up at the village again. It became abundantly clear as to why so few adventurers ever delved into the Ironwood forest. It was almost as if the forest turned itself into a giant maze, guiding us back to where we started.

“I can’t believe we’re back here again.”

Hana complained. We were back in the comfortable house we used as a temporary base. After five days of pointless wandering since our incident with the elves, I became exasperated. I wanted to avoid taking dark elves out for questioning because they were a bunch of sneaky snake-eyed toads, but it was looking more and more likely we would have to, and soon. We had enough food for a while still, including what we found in the elf village, but that wouldn’t hold us out forever and we needed to get back to camp before they tried launching pointless rescues to find us. Since no one even knew where to start looking, it would be a fool’s errand, and everyone knew that.

“They must have a way of getting through the forest without travelling in circles.”

I mused out loud.

“Perhaps they understand nature in some way that we can’t.”

Offered Hana.

“Perhaps. Elves are good at understanding nature, but I don’t think they’re that good. Don’t you think it’s strange they wanted us blindfolded whenever we travelled? To be frank, no one in our team would have the slightest clue where we were even if we could see.”

I didn’t add Ara into my equation.

“Yet we travelled blindfolded as if we were walking on a smooth road. Our latest experiences were nothing of a sort.”

Elle said. She had a point because our experience trying to leave the last few days was nothing like our arrival. We traversed gnarly roots and trudged through swampy terrain, all while being unable to see more than twenty meters through the murky wood. We were constantly attacked by voracious insects and strange Ironwood creatures, testing our sanity to the limit. The odd places where we could walk freely we gladly accepted. I suspected those innocuous looking paths were misleading us.

“Could it be that blindfolding us had more to do with their concern of us learning what they used to help them through the forest?”

I smelled the first sign of a lead.

I recalled the thin silver necklaces both the men and women all wore.

That piqued my interest.

Since everything we retrieved was placed into the core, Ara could easily analyse or retrieve smaller items of interest for us using the core.

“Look here.”

“On the core lay a small ruby-like gem attached to a silver chain.”

“All the elves we travelled with wore these under their garments. What do you say we give these a try tomorrow morning?”

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