First the elf came behind him. The light off of her face warmed the back of his neck as if it was sunlight shafting through the thick canopy. To turn would be to show fear. He didn't turn.
Then she came above him. Fog whispering from bough to bough obscured her movement but he felt her as he walked beneath. He knew she was testing him. To draw [Booky's blade] would be to die. He didn't draw.
Finally she came before him. Profiled against the black trunk of a great tree. One amber eye and the slope of her nose and her untroubled mouth. The color and form of her slender curves and too long limbs like one of the [brigadier]'s inks spilled into starlit water suddenly expanding in cobweb strands then slowly distilling into the medium, perfectly invisible within it, just an odor and a tint, then nothing.
He said in human talk, "You honor me."
"Thus spake fire to tinder." She turned her back to him and he saw her shock of silver hair dropping between her shoulder blades to drag the ground. She glided through the darkening wood and it beckoned him like a wisp. For hours he followed it until in the world beyond the forest night fell like a blade across the sky and he saw her no more, yet every needle of every twig of every tree echoed her voice.
"Why have you come?" she said.
"To learn how you've grown this wood."
"Why?"
"My home's dead and dying."
"Your voice speaks of many homes."
"The one bordering your forest."
"You are orc. Things to you are slayed and to be slayed, and from your manner and speech raised by men who see things as owned and to be owned, and bearing across your back a tool of dwarves who see things as shaped and to be shaped."
"I'm not here for those things."
"Then I say again: why have you come?"
"To learn healing."
"Strange thing for a slayer to want. Already the wastes are not as they were when you last trod them. Does that gratify you?"
"If they were getting better maybe, but they're only getting worse."
"Who can say what is worse or unworse without standing at the end of time and space with an unobstructed view of all causes and their effects?"
"Me."
He heard her laugh and he felt her trees pressing in but he could not see them. Nor her.
"Turn a cheek and he speaks again as an orc. All is becoming, cub. You woke at your folk's dusk but it is the world's dawn. You think yourself and your places frozen like fish in a winter pond, yet fog boils off this dewy wood and by night the wood will be ash and its smoke will have gathered around tall mountains in swells to clog and choke and destroy, and by evening new mountains will stand where valleys once sank and all creatures that were will be other than they are yet no less magnificent. What makes you smile so?"
"You remind me of someone."
"You have met other elves?"
"A shorthorn friend."
"I know of this otaur. She hears my wood's expulsions. This surprises you? Such listening is not forbidden. If more orcs had thought as you and she perhaps we would not have sided with the child king against your forebears."
"You can side with us now."
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
"We cannot climb the waterfall any more than we can stop its coursing. Even you become now, right now, in this very instant you differ from the orc who stands here now and now and now. You farmed once. Your nose close against the pregnant soils, breathing their dusts deep into your lungs."
"You know more than I’ve told.”
"I do. Your places walk with thee now. Unwitting and unwilling you became them, and now you have brought them here amid mine. Did you drink from the milk of the cow? Thus you became part cow and she is here also."
"They never let me near her."
"Of course they didn't. Yet you bathed in the otaur's river. The one she calls Mad."
"What of it?"
"Thus did you become it, and the river thee. Thence to the ocean who is also now thee. Even now your exhalations are transformed by those gathered here. And when your blood dries in my wood the water it carried will help the wood take up its iron."
"I'll not bleed here."
"There's the orc again. The moment you crossed my border your time of orc as orc ended. Soon all orcs are ended. Too soon some say, yet I shall not judge thee for it. You like we are only bridges to be crossed, not ends to be celebrated and worshiped until the celestial expansion ceases and motion ceases and thus time ceases also, until there are no more nows to be had in this universe for it rests at the end of all things and thus the end of itself. Only change justifies our existence, for change is the sole source of justice."
"Show yourself and I'll show you another."
"Stay your hand. You have naught to strike. Do you doubt my words? Look upon your back, you carry there a piece of the end of all things. There it is, the end of change, the end of becoming, perfectly just."
He touched the spike of the [Skyshard] where it hung near his hip. "Your becoming sounds no different than the slaying you say defines my kind. Perhaps we're more alike than you think."
She laughed again but this time at him. "That's the old woman talking. You and she aren't the first to say so. As for elves, others may now be otherwise. I have not seen them in many of your generations. Recall that all is always becoming."
"If you won't help me perhaps they will."
"They cannot. The power of this wood is here, not there, and it cannot be removed without removing the wood itself."
"I don't understand."
"He who carries the black end of everything knows so little. Lo the arrogance of men who remade your kind in their image. Our very existence is bounded by an endless curve, yet their idiotic pride extends beyond it into all places and all times, into your folk's home a century ago and into your ignorance now and tomorrow into this very wood."
"I'm no man."
"Yet they raised your former self and displaced your kind to their lands and now their foolishness directs your thinking and limits your perception."
He examined what little of her he could see. "You won't tell me what I wish to know, but I've already figured it. You keep the elfstone."
She did not answer.
"Hewn from the stone of the earth."
Still she said nothing.
"I met a dwarf who once possessed it."
"Truly? But no. The progenitor of our world's awakening is long lost, and such words from an orc are profanity. It was lost before orcs woke. Before humans. Before this wood and the otaur's river. That which you called the elfstone rests with our mother, but it is a mere echo of the stone of the earth. A gift from the first dwarves who saw it as their natural kin, none of whom now persist as animate flesh."
He looked at the black bark of the nearest trunk. He reached for it and it seemed the bark reached back for him. "The elfstone powers such growth," he said.
"One thing of many."
"Lend it to me."
"What? Lend?"
"I will return it."
"Such gall. Truly you are the strangest orc I have ever known, and I know many. But no. I shall not lend anything to thee because I have nothing to lend. Mother keeps the stone."
The [brigadier] came unbidden to mind. "What mother?"
"This world's oldest living creature. In her presence you shall be closer to the first morning than anyone but the eldest of dwarves. If Mother wishes thee to have the stone then thee shall."
Finally the elf appeared before him at arm's length. Her silver hair rested on her shoulder and plunged down her chest and coiled between her bare feet as if poured from the [brigadier]'s crystal carafe. It lit the tree's gnarl on which his hand rested and he saw that the gnarl itself was twisted around and folded into an orc's face, finally he saw her fine chin and her upturned nose and her brow and above all a [dagger] overhead clasped in both hands.
"Approach me," she said.
He didn't move. "I bring no quarrel."
She stepped forward. The [dagger] descended and its point touched his breast. "Thus you are unique among orcs, and have earned this highest honor."
He said, "I'm no different from any other," as he felt the [dagger] prick his breastbone. The venom shocked his blood and his arms and legs and neck and hands and feet and his eyes blew outward in opposing directions all at once as if a bolt of lightning arced through every vein and vessel. He collapsed onto the duff and all the breath went out of him in a wail and his teeth snapped shut on his tongue and split it in two and his heart stopped.
Before he died he heard her say, "I do not judge thee."
----------------------------------------
> +1 [Awareness]: ...which means if you cut away enough then you've got an altogether different person on your hands with a different way of thinking and knowin and bein, and that's who I found up in them woods... (5/10)