It was a dreary day when I came to the great Brine Flats, when I stood atop the great limestone cliffs and stared down upon miles and miles of stinking beachland. Nothing grew there, nothing lived there, for nothing could. Anything left there for even a moment would dissolve in the acidic wasteland that was the home of Phandraleon, the Brine Elemental.

My father had lured him here after my grandfather had flooded his old home. Now it was my turn to destroy him for good. I set down my pack and I began chipping away at the limestone.

“I’m sorry,” the rude pirate interrupted. “What is an elemental?”

Argive of the Cliffs stuttered to a stop in his story. He’d never considered that someone wouldn’t know what an elemental was. He’d spent his life fighting one. “Well it’s... well... Imagine all the rocks in the world. Every pebble and stone and boulder all the way up to the largest mountains. A huge number of rocks, an incomprehensible number of rocks. Now, imagine all of those rocks are the home of a living thing. Not something you can see, but something that’s there all the same. Every time you step on some pebbles it knows. Every time a rock falls from a mountain it is there. Every time the earth is split apart by an earthquake or an eruption it grows angry. That is the rock elemental.”

“I’m pretty sure rocks don’t get angry.”

“Not like we do no, elementals don’t think like us, they are far too big in scale for that. But they get angry all the same. And when you battle one in its home it gets very angry indeed. Now, I have a story to tell.”

“Yes yes, sorry sorry.”

“Right, so I was chipping into the limestone.

You see my father had spent his entire life filling this dreary edge of the world with acid and brine, far from any civilisations. So when Phandraleon moved and looked for a place to rest he came here. Right into our trap. For surrounding this beachland were huge cliffs, great pillars of limestone. Miles and miles of the stuff, expanding in all directions, pillars and piles as far as the eye could see. You may have noticed that there is none there now.

That is because I chipped away at it and I built my little hut out on the Brine Flat out of limestone. I built great tall shoes to go back and forth across the Flat out of limestone. I took more and more limestone from those great cliffs and built with it down here, for limestone does not dissolve in acid like everything else. No limestone destroys acid just as acid destroys limestone. Everywhere I walked I left tracks that burned at Phandraleon. Everything I built burned him even as he did his best to burn it right back. For ten years I did this, building and burning, scraping away at the cliffs. But then he began to grow truly angry.

Every night a huge wave of acid and brine would slowly rise up from the Flats and chase me into the cliffs and through them. I would run on my dissolving shoes and all around me the cliffs would break and shatter and crumble, falling into the acid. Every night I climbed out of that hissing tide of acid and avalanches. Cutting myself on the rocks in the dark and then getting acid in the wounds. But every night I would survive, I would stitch myself back up with herbs and medicines and then every morning I would go back and add more and more limestone to the Flats.

Each time he chased me into the cliffs he would burn himself up further as he dissolved the pieces of the cliff that fell into him. So each time I ran this gauntlet I was making more and more progress toward my goal. The goal of being the first person to kill an elemental. This continued for another ten years. Some days I would not return and gather my strength elsewhere to avoid the chase but most nights I was here, digging by day and running by night. But it seems ten years is the time it takes for Phandraleon’s ancient brain to tick over, because after another ten years his strategy changed. After another ten years came the pillars of acid.

At first it seemed that I had a moment of relief for a few months passed with the waves of acid decreasing in strength and then stopping entirely. I was beginning to consider that maybe for a moment I might have faced the worse of what Phandraleon had to offer but he was only just beginning. One day when I was returning to my hut, walking across the acid on my stone shoes the Flat started to rumble and shake. I ran back to the safety of the cliffs but it was not me he hunted. No, instead the earth beneath my hut erupted in the wet brine and sludge of the Flats. A great pillar of acid and foulness consumed it and towered high into the air. For a moment I thought I might have avoided the blast entirely but then it stopped rising and then it began to fall.

The acid rain fell down all across the Brine Flat and the limestone cliffs. With my hut destroyed I had nowhere to hide but in those cliffs and they burned and sizzled away before the rain. It rained all night and all throughout the night the cliffs crumbled and fell, my various caves of safety threatening to crush me but I managed to dodge through them and live out the night for I was young then you see. In the morning great piles of limestone had fallen into the brine flats and were slowly dissolving there, burning away into Phandraleon. Meanwhile my entire hut had been destroyed and many of my possessions lost to the Flats. However, knowing how dangerous the Flats were I kept another store of things far from them and I went there now, gathering all I would need. For my work was not done yet.

Now each night the Brine Flats would erupt and rain down upon the world, often multiple times each night. Searing away the cliffs and searing away my various hiding places. I burrowed deep down into the limestone, worming my way into a deep cave and then digging it out further. Each night I would return there and then each morning I would dig myself out, praying my cave did not collapse in the night.

I no longer built a hut on the Brine Flats, they were far too volatile for that. Instead I simply tossed as much limestone as I could into them each day. There was a great deal of it lying around as each night more would break off. However, as it happened I needn’t have bothered. For there was something else at work now. Something I would discover very soon.

One night in my cave I awoke to a horrible stench and I flailed about in the darkness before managing to light a flickering lamp. It was difficult to see anything in the cave but soon I noticed a shining reflection of my lamp. Looking closer I saw a black reflective shape had spread out in one corner of the cave. A shape that was the foulest of brine. For while I had long treated the limestone cliffs as a safe haven, vulnerable only to attacks from above, I had not realised the extent of my foe’s power. While he had been spitting pillars of acid at me he had also been spreading out beneath the limestone cliffs. Melting them away from below to get to me. That night he had finally penetrated into my cave and worse still, he had done so from the twisted pile of rubble that I used as an entrance. I could not flee that way, rife as it was with acid, so I instead had to take up my pickaxe and dig blindly into the limestone, trying to tunnel my way out, the acid closing in behind me.

But it was still night on the surface and the acid rains had not ceased so even as I tunneled and undermined the limestone it melted away above me. Combined the great cliff I had made my home in stood no chance and it cracked, giving me a brief sight of freedom as well as a sky drenched in acid rain. But then it crumbled. My tunnel, my cliff, my home all fell in around me. Crushing me, trapping me beneath piles of limestone while below the brine worked its way up and above the rain worked its way down.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

I soon discovered I could move most of my body save for my arm which was trapped beneath a large portion of the cliff. I struggled to free it to no avail and so I simply waited in the cliffs to die. But I did not go to my death in misery. For I knew that in working his way under the entirety of the limestone cliffs Phandraleon had doomed himself. It would not be long before they all dissolved into him and took away all that gave him substance. He could rage and roil with his waves and his pillars all he liked. But even in death I would have won. So I faced my doom in peace.

But I was not doomed. Some days I wish I had died there for what came next was absolute misery but I still had the knowledge in my heart that I had won, that I had succeeded. So I faced what came next and I lived to fight another day. So let me tell you the rest of what happened that hellish night.

I don’t know whether it was the brine rising from below or the rains trickling in from above but something started to fill the cavity within which my arm was trapped. First my hands and fingers began to burn, then the whole of my arm. Soon the pain was so great I could barely remember what was burning or where I was. I rent and tore at my prison, desperate to escape from the searing pain and I fortunately did not have to endure for very long as the acids of Phandraleon work quickly. So while it seemed an eternity to me at the time I deduced later that it could not have been more than a few minutes. My arm, melted and ruined by the acids that were now filling up the cavity the rest of my body was in, came away in my flailings, and leaving it there I fled, bleeding and burning, out into the world above.

Tossing away the rocks and rubble that imprisoned me with my remaining arm I burst out into the searing acid rain. This rain was far worse than what I had seen before. Phandraleon had been ramping up his attacks and now each drop left huge searing holes in the limestone it splashed onto. Several of these drops and their splashes hit me as I ran through the pockmarked wasteland and melted away much of my clothes and skin as well as what remained of my arm. But I soon reached shelter and then I began the long and difficult task of moving from shelter to shelter, cover to cover, taking things one crumbling outcrop at a time. I slowly moved further and further from the Brine Flats, from the source of the rain while all around me the limestone crumbled and fell into the acid beneath it.

In the morning the rains did not stop and nor did I. Moving further and further away. The worst was behind me though as elementals do not move fast, especially when they are being burned away by limestone. So I trekked and traveled, scrambling and sliding. My body cut to shreds my limestone and melted away by acid. For seven days I fled, leaving the limestone cliffs on the second day and entering a forest, still pursued by the acid rain. Eventually I rested by a lake as the last drops of the rain faded away. I tended to my wounds for three months. Using what I could find in the forest to keep myself alive. My arm was gone and I had to learn to function without it making the recovery process even more difficult. Then, on the fourth month, I returned to what had become my home.

The limestone was mostly gone, only a few of the largest pieces still remained and they had been worn down to almost nothing, just small lumps sticking out of the Brine Flats. The Flats themselves had expanded, covering where the cliffs had been and more. But they were no longer as acidic as they once had been. I built new shoes, dredger shoes, designed to walk on this new, weaker acid. Then I began to explore. My foe was not yet dead though he was dying. It would take many years for him to fully burn away to all the limestone he had just consumed. But he was far too weak to challenge me. At last I was free to make the Brine Flats my home proper.

I built a hut, a wooden one this time, although I set it atop great stilts that slowly burned away from below as I replaced them from above. I began walking out to the beach and dragging food and wood and cargo from what the sea washed up there. Each time I would go I’d find that the acid worked its way into the ships and wood slower than the time before. For Phandraleon was dying, I had won.

But there is one more part to this story. One final scene if you will, something I’m still not sure was real. Perhaps this last part was just a dream but demons are known to speak in dreams, why not elementals. So perhaps it was a dream but still real all the same. Regardless, the story goes like this.

One night I was sitting on my porch, looking out across the Brine Flats and the sea beyond, lit up by the bright shining stars and moon. I was enjoying a fine brandy I’d found in some shipwreck and content with my success, my triumph over Phandraleon.

Then the brine flats began to stir. It wasn’t a rumble, not this time, but it stirred nonetheless. I considered fleeing but I was old at this point and my days of mad scrambles through the cliffs were behind me. So I simply sat there and waited to see what Phandraleon had as a last ditch effort against me.

Before me a shape rose out of the brine, a slimy pile of acid and disgust that reeked far stronger than the rest of the Flats smelt in those days. It rose up until it was about my height and then sat there for a minute. I took another sip of my brandy and watched it, helpless to do anything meaningful before a shape that was likely most of what remained of Phandraleon himself. The shape looked at me in what way a pile of acid and brine can, and then it bowed. It bent over itself, the top end extending out toward me. It stayed there for a few seconds while I looked on in absolute wonder. Then it collapsed and faded away back into the Brine Flats.

The rest of that night I sat on my porch and watched the Brine Flats, astonished by what I’d just seen. I had studied elementals my entire life and my family had been researching them for generations. Nowhere was there any record of something like that taking place. Was I the first person in history to ever witness the true form of an elemental? And had that elemental showed respect? Admitting his defeat and acknowledging my success? I suppose I shall never know the truth but that matters little for I know what I saw and I would be surprised if any other humans ever see something similar. An elemental, in a form not as a force of nature, but as a living creature, much like a human or demon, yet far more powerful.

In the years that followed I never saw that shape again and the acid of the Brine Flats grew weaker and weaker. Nowadays I have walked across it with no shoes at all for short periods and soon I imagine it will be nothing but harmless mud, safe for children. I suppose it is inevitable that people come here, as you have done, washed up in boats or simply exploring the far edges of the map. So far no one else has survived the journey here and the Brine Flats themselves but as they grow less dangerous surely more and more of you will arrive.

“Yes... yes I’m sure that’s a possibility,” the rude pirate, Mangon Tull replied. Thinking back to how he’d gotten here as the old man rambled on about elementals. Getting here wasn’t easy. There were great rocky cliffs and reefs and regular raging storms. He didn’t know how he knew this, he hadn’t actually come that way. He’d come a different way. He’d come through fire.

Deep below the world Phandraleon lay dying. He had been beaten by a human. Tricked into consuming enormous mountains of limestone and now he was being crushed by it. He had accepted it though. Elementals are in some ways victims of their own inevitability and after that fateful night his own weakness was dragging him down to die as more and more of him dissolved his powers grew weaker and weaker, unable to slow the process until eventually it would consume him. As an elemental Phandraleon didn’t see but he was aware all the same and as he died he became aware of a monolith. The monolith didn’t speak but neither did Phandraleon. They understood one another. An agreement was made and as the limestone fell further and further into the earth, crushing all before it, Phandraleon faded away. He disappeared, into darkness.

The Prophecy of Hahkenata - Transcribed by Gushkabel

Night:

Two will be Demons, reclaiming what they Gave

Six will be Monsters of Woods and Caves

Four will be Sorcerers, Immortal and Heartless

One an Elemental, Fallen into Darkness