Santa’s choice was not arbitrary, nor was it simply because the wicked, like garbage, are a stain upon this good earth. Yaaroghkh Yeserakir - janitor of Santa’s workshop - had one trait the other elves did not. All the elves were lovable, and mischievous, and occupied infinitesimal immensitudes of subjunctive mathematics, but none had the sheer deliberacy of Yaary, as his friends called him. When once set upon the task, he would pursue it to its conclusion with every tool and thought in his power, chasing his target like the Hounds of Tindalos across many-angled skies. This, more than anything else, was why Santa valued him as a fixer, and why he was next in line to the Claus family in the task delegation chart.
Yaaroghkh recorded, with meticulous detail, what was known of the assault and its origins; and after giving Arius the respect due his employer’s son he retired to his private apartments, and prepared his bags for the journey. He made sure his elf cap was suitably pointy, took a lint remover to his favourite elf sweater (handknitted by Mary as a gift last Christmas), and buffed his wee elf booties to make sure their curled toes were nice and shiny. Then he donned his overcoat, tucked his toothbrush into his pocket, and set off for adventure. “Now hold on just a minute here,” he said, freezing in time, “I nearly forgot something.”
And, returning to his desk, he rooted through some papers before triumphantly lifting a spatial ring up into the foetid air. “Nearly forgot to bring this: it’s full of useful, unspecified macguffins in case the Author writes himself into a hole later.”
And with that he departed, stopping only to beg some fresh cookies off a congenial Mrs. Claus. Those of my readers who have themselves travelled to Santa’s workshop are doubtless excited about what comes next, for the journey north of the north pole is fraught with danger - dragons, pirates, dragon pirates, itchy underwear - and is impossible to complete without some deeds of derring-do. And after all, Tiana’s crew may have been a gang of regular Neoptolemi (Neoptolemuses?) but surely Yaaroghkh is more like Euthymus, and therefore we might reasonably anticipate a stunning fight between the Elf and the dread Ugoth, daimon of Interior Decorating. Nor need you fear, for I share your anticipation and will not let you down.
Yaaroghkh shambled horrifyingly to the edge of the world, where the air was thin and the boundaries between worlds thinner, and then… sat down. He assumed what might charitably be described as a pretzel position (or, more honestly, as a demonstration of certain forms of thus far purely hypothetical fifth-dimensional geometry) and calmed his breath, gazing with tranquillity at the night sky.
For a moment there was nothing, the elf in a state of pure quiescence as his inner eyes abandoned the fields we know, flying amid blazing glories only he could see. Then his fingers began to whirl, weaving a dance in a sphere before his midriff, a loom upon which his qi could spread with a soft glow.
His voice rasped out, a handful of syllables dropping into the quiet:
“How many miles to Babylon?
Three score miles and ten.
Can I get there by candlelight?
Yes, and back again.
If your heels are nimble and your toes are light,
You may get there by candlelight.
And then he was no longer among the pines and candy canes of Santa’s workshop, and the scent of hot chocolate no longer floated subtly in the air.
It was dark, stormy, tortuous - the pitch of midnight spilt like so much paint over a landscape torn and ravaged by the creeping fingers of giants. It was a night to chill the blood and freeze bones. It was, in short, precisely the perfect night to kill Santa Claus.
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“...Why is there the ghost of a female cultivator shaking her fist at me?” Yaaroghkh asked aloud, but he knew that some things are better left mysteries and, with a shrug, stepped off the north pole (it was bendy, striped fuschia, and labelled “North Pole Here”) and took his first step south.
“Thank Santa I know the Otherworld Journeying technique. That Ugoth guy has no sense of subtlety. He’s never figured out that what makes something beautiful is not the object but its arrangement, its incidental features - not the leaves, but how the light reflects off the leaves. Meeting him would have put me off my turkey stuffing.”
And having delivered this inscrutable remark on aesthetics (and broken our expectant hearts), he continued on his merry way.
Ignoring the bad weather Yaaroghkh slowly strode into the sky, and moved as if skiing through the storm. The wind chilled him not, for it passed through his diaphanous body with nary a breath, and no cold could affect alien organs tempered by millennia of cultivation in the chasms of Santa’s workshop.
A greater threat was direction. Yaaroghkh was not one of those we call ‘directionally challenged,’ but it had been nearly three centuries since he last trod on mortal soil and things had changed somewhat. As he moved south and west he found himself obliged to fly lower and lower, until he could feel the spray from the storm-tossed sea on (what I will politely call) his cheek. He took his time, enjoying the breeze and the blue of the waves, until he saw his first sight of land. The rocky islands, stretching out desolately ahead, posed him no problems, for long had they been there and long would they hopefully remain, but as he passed over them and into more civilised lands he found the clouds thicker and fouler, and they left a taste of acid and metal upon his lips.
He licked his lips with forked tongues. He knew this taste, and he knew what it meant. With a twitch he shifted direction, turning two degrees farther south. And sure enough the great big sea began to narrow, until the land rose up to either side and it had become a river. The land here was still green, with forests sloping gently over tall hills, and the towns scattered among the trees were small. As the river narrowed further this began to change, until the first grey blocks of that land long known as 'the City of Tombstones' came into view.
Yaaroghkh walked back to the earth before he reached the city, settling on the edge of a lake filled with all manner of delightful crud. It burned and hissed, the water burbling incessantly, and smelt of battery acid and sludge. Nor was the source all that hard to find, for not fifty feet away the maw of a pipe gaped wide, and it was from thence that the toxic waste came forth.
Yaaroghkh’s fingers flew through the air, and his eyes glowed blue as he traced the path of the pipe with his inner sight, muttering a curse (“oh golly”) under his breath as he saw that it was improperly sealed. Whistling an ancient religious hymn (Skip to My Lou) under his breath, Yaaroghkh followed its path, walking over a miserable hill, across three grey and dying fields, and through an abandoned school until he reached a dump.
From there it was not hard to find the source of the problem. Yaaroghkh had not, of course, made this journey for the end of stopping pollution, but he figured that birds of a feather flock together and thus that whomever was responsible for polluting the lake might know about who had desecrated Santa's workshop.
A shot in the dark, but he had but one clue - the name of the city from whence his foes came - and he had to start somewhere. And this dump seemed as good a place to start as any, for even had he not seen the pipe leading out the rest of the dump was hardly better. Nothing was sorted correctly; no one had been given proper safety gear; and he could see more health and safety violations than at an illegal moose fighting contest. If anyone at the outskirts of the city might be able to direct him to the despoiler of Santa, it was the site manager.
He ignored the workers (an easy feat, when one exists in nine dimensions simultaneously) and made his way to the main office, where the site manager was going over some documents alone. He was a gaunt man, with a half-starved look and a combover, and was so intent on his paperwork that he failed to notice Yaaroghkh until the latter tapped him on the shoulder, and asked to speak to him.
And here something happened which our readers may have expected. You see, Tiana was a cultivator. Even if she spent most of her time sitting and circulating her qi and tragically neglected the cultivation of her spirit or her endurance, she was yet hardier and of a stronger will than the average mortal. Hence the sight of the elves, though greatly distressing, left her fundamentally untouched.
The site manager had no such advantages. He was a thoroughgoing materialist, a subscriber to all the leading financial journals, and the most supernatural thing he'd ever read was an article on the benefits of mindfulness in the workplace. Consequently it should not surprise us unduly when, upon turning around and coming face to face with an incomprehensible noumenon from beyond the bounds of language and thought, something within him snapped and he started frothing at the mouth.
"Aaaagghh wab wub dub dub, it's so hideous and vile," he said, and died.
Yaaroghkh stared in shock at his rapidly cooling corpse. "...Well that's rather hurtful."