The City of Tombstones was not, of course, called the City of Tombstones by the humans who lived there. They knew it by a different name, one considerably more irrelevant to our story and thus of no particular interest to anyone. ‘The City of Tombstones’ was an elfin title, given it half a century ago by a wandering pooka, and as it was apt it stuck. For the City of Tombstones was a city of tombstones… it was an endless expanse of grey, drab concrete, blocks of the stuff put into rows and left to rot. The buildings were old and worn, and slowly breaking down, but as they looked decidedly better than their surroundings no one really minded.

Said surroundings were cracked and pitted streets, with only the occasional expanse of grass to break up the view. The grass was dead, but strangely sticky, and the people who lived there stuck to the concrete whenever possible. They were a sorry lot, rushing back and forth with their heads down, focused only on getting where they needed to go and ignoring anything or anyone in their way.

The City of Tombstones was a sad place, a lonely place, but it was also an easy place for an elf to blend in. Yaaroghkh gave his hat a three quarters turn, snapped his fingers, and murmured the magic word ekplettontai, and he was no more than a smear in the lamplight. This would not have worked in more attentive cities - where people might have wondered about a shadowy smear moving doggedly across the sidewalk - but in the City of Tombstones people did not look up when they bumped into you, often barely muttering a “sorry,” and so no one knew if they had walked into a normal human or a shadowy smear in the first place.

And so it was that the elf shambled horribly through the city unmolested, sipping at his hot chocolate and thinking. And oh, the thinks you can think! You can think up a yopp, you can think up a mop. You can think up a mop with a yopp up on top. You can think up three sperds, and those aren’t even words! You can think up three sperds, feasting on small little birds. You know, if you think all aglow, alit with the Fire of Razzmallado, you might even think up your foe.

Yaaroghkh repeated the cogitation technique taught to him by Mrs. Claus, when he was a wee elf in Wee Elf School all those years ago, and pondered. The site manager had certainly been a vicious fellow, but only of a middling sort, and the evil he committed of a different kind to that committed by the defiler of cookies.

Clearly, then, what was needed was to track down, not just an evil, but an evil on par with doing injury to the Spirit of Christmas. It was a hard task, for what among the ills of man could compare to reviling Innocence itself?

Having run out of thinks he could think, our intrepid and adorable (in a tenebrific, antiamphibolous sort of way) protagonist decided to do what all people do when they hit a problem with their Thinker-Upper: find an expert.

But an expert in scum, villainy, and the despoliation of Innocence is no easy figure to find. Not that there weren’t masses and masses of people who did all these things, but as any martial artist can tell you, it’s not a knowledge of forms but skill that makes a martial artist. And true skill in the art of evil had been rare even in the preceding aeons. Yaaroghkh hunted down a number of individuals - whose activities were unutterably revolting, and which we need not describe in any detail (I would rather not trouble your sleep) - but though he heard much amid their shrieks and babbles the majority was of more mundane forms of wickedness, entirely unsuited for the object of his search. At the end of five days he was no closer than he’d been on the first.

Fortune favours the dedicated, however, and at lunch on the sixth day - a week from the day of the poorly conceived assault on Santa’s workshop - he caught his fateful encounter. It was an unexpected discovery. He’d been tracking down a rumour of a ring of criminals, who kidnapped and experimented upon children, and had gotten his address mixed up. He was supposed to have gone to forty-two forty-first street; but he got his street signs confused, and went to forty-one forty-second street. (To be fair, they looked completely identical: dim, dirty, and full of grime and misery.)

Now though the warehouse on forty-two forty-first street was full of evil, child torturing demons, whose depiction would necessitate a Content Warning on this chapter, the warehouse on forty-one forty-second street was only full of fences. A fence, for those who don’t know, is a type of criminal who specialises in the trade of stolen goods. Posts, pickets, rails, cap boards - you need ‘em, they got ‘em. The White Picket Gang - the group occupying the warehouse on forty-one forty-second street - even had iron railings.

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Yaaroghkh had nothing against such people. Sure, it was technically a crime, but he’d been to the post office and knew that they were being derelict in their duty to officiate over posts, so it’s not like he could blame people for taking advantage. And anyways, the illegal fence trade was hardly on the far end of wickedness; it didn’t even earn you a place on the naughty list. (Yaaroghkh even had solid evidence that Comet sold bedknobs and broomsticks on the side.)

So no sooner had he realised his mistake then he turned around to leave, secure in the knowledge that, thanks to his hidden movement technique, he was no more than a mysterious, unnoticeable stain upon the wall. And then a voice stopped him.

“Oy,” it said, “what’s that there mysterious yet noticeable stain upon the wall? Looks like some sort of hidden movement technique. You there, freeze!”

Yaaroghkh muttered an oath in the old tongue of long lost Xylankazath, and then froze. The men swore as an ice sheet bloomed under their feet, frozen snowflakes of colossal size blossoming across the room. At the centre of the blizzard the elf flickered back toward the door, a swarm of limbs manipulating the fury around him to conceal him from the humans.

Santa did not live in the frozen north purely as a matter of comfort; he had made of the storm a Dao, immensurable aeons ago, when during a snowstorm he had chanced to see how the light reflected off the snowflakes and realised his purpose to unveil the Light in the midst of the tempest. His elves, who viewed him as their father, practised the same art as he. Techniques channelling shadows were all well and good when one wanted to move in the shadows, but when in public…

***

Tommothy was panicking. The day had started off normal enough - they’d received a shipment of kickboards from their blackmarket contacts, and were preparing them for sale - when suddenly he’d been unlucky enough to notice a suspicious stain moving along the wall. So he’d called out - a simple warning, that was all - and then the room had exploded. The temperature had dropped over two dozen degrees, and ice crystals sprung forth from every surface, growing in strange and blasphemous patterns along the walls.

Half of the gang was down before they even had a chance to react, whimpering in pain on the floor. A couple of the guys drew their guns, firing at the… the… thing which pulped, loathsomely, near the back of the warehouse. It flickered, dancing between the bullets, and extended one pure white wing, whose "feathers" fractured and refracted through the air until they slammed into the offending gunmen, sending them flying.

Tommothy pulled out his club, getting between the creature and the door. His lips were dry and his heart was rattling, but he held steady, remembering the instructions of the Doc. The thing shifted, in the heart of the blizzard, shuffling on ungainly and disjointed pseudopods towards him, and moving far faster than a thing of its bulk should. Tommothy gulped, uttered a cry of challenge, and charged.

Up close the ice was no longer cold; it burned, a frigid and invisible fire pulsing and tearing at his flesh as claws reached from the dark towards him. Tommothy kept his form - as the Doc said, "he who bullies the weak yet flees from the strong is a coward, and will falter when it comes time to confront Death" - and swung his weapon with all the strength he had.

It smashed through the approaching arms, pulping the flesh and snapping bones like twigs. Bits of its body spattered him, burning holes through his clothes and into his skin. The viscous fluid within oozed over the club… and then, before the man's horrified eyes, reformed, many jointed fingers wrapping themselves around his club. Slowly, the creature dragged him towards its loathsome visage, until he could see a sea of lidless eyes gazing out at him from under the eye of the storm.

***

Jingle Bells! Yarroghkh felt like he was fighting children. Children with an unusual amount of pluck and verve, but children nonetheless, even if they did know a little about cultivation. The one who'd just poked him looked like it was taking all he could to avoid pissing himself. Clearly, somebody needed to use their words here, and if the humans wouldn't then he would.

***

The eyes unfolded and dissolved, a hideous maw emerging jaggedly from their remains. And then it began to speak. Tommothy screamed as the shrieks and gibbers of a thousand abominations howled and cackled with a furious, pulsating energy, hellish vistas of fractured sound opening up before his eyes. (Curiously, it also smelt of hot chocolate - incomprehensible hot chocolate from beyond the back of the darkest stars.) He wheeled back, blood streaming from his ears, and ran. This was far beyond him…he had to get away…he had to find the Doc.