Our tale resumes the next morning. Our intrepid protagonists had awakened, refreshed, and parted ways shortly after dawn. Yaaroghkh had a miniature version of his map open, and was following its traces with his footsteps; Caedes was going to a payphone, to call his girlfriend.

The streets of the City of Tombstones were a labyrinthine mess. The city had been designed on a grid, but like all such mathematical projects decay had eviscerated whatever efficiency its design once possessed, and now it was worse than if it had never been planned at all. The overshadowing nature of its antique infrastructure did not help matters, and Yaaroghkh felt the buildings watching him like hungry beasts as he passed slowly through the crowds.

He had walked four blocks, sliding lithely through the masses, when he saw a familiar face near a bridge overlooking the great river, buying chocolate from a street side vendor. He waved one clawed hand as he neared the man.

“Fancy seeing you here. What brings you this way?”

Caedes looked up in surprise, and acknowledged the greeting, thanking the shopkeep for her time before rejoining the companion he’d separated from not even an hour prior.

“I made plans to meet my dearest for lunch at La Nourriture, so I’m just buying her a little gift first: it’s been a couple days since we met, after all. And you?”

Yaaroghkh growled in frustration. “I was following my target well enough, when suddenly they swerved direction, and began going to a totally different location. So now I’m going down this path, same as you.”

Caedes chuckled. “It’s not a bad path. The trees over the riverbank are lovely, even in winter: the way the frost forms on them has its charm. And there’s a good beavertail joint a few blocks down. If we’re still together by then I’ll introduce it to you.” (Ah, the joys of cultivation, like eating truly inhuman amounts of tasty snacks.)

The two began walking down the riverbank. The weather was cool and crisp, and though it was cloudy there was no snow. It was far enough into November that the last of the leaves had died off the trees, and they did indeed have a truly skeletal beauty as the pair walked companionably under the sleeping boughs.

“You know,” Caedes said after the silence had been allowed to reign for a while, “you know why I became a cultivator, but it occurs to me that I’ve never heard why you became one. Did you even have a choice? Is it something all elves do, or just Santa’s, or was it something you yourself came to choose?”

The elf considered this. “I suppose every elf I’ve ever met has been a cultivator, although some haven’t been very good at it. It’s hard to be an elf and not cultivate; it’s interwoven into the very fabric of elf culture, from our arts and crafts to our music to our secret, arcane cookie recipes. I wasn’t always an elf, though.”

He thought about this astonishing statement, then added, “at least, not knowingly.”

“Really,” Caedes said with some surprise, “I thought you were either born an elf or not.”

“Oh, no,” Yaaroghkh replied vaguely. “It’s more a way of being than it is a type of being. Some are born to it; others come to it. I was the latter, possibly.”

“…Possibly?”

“It’s a long story,” the elf said as the two bought beavertails (they were, strange to say, still on the same path).

“You see, much like you, I was raised in an orphanage. Unlike you, I’m not an orphan - my parents lost me in the mail-”

“They what now?”

“Oh, it’s a common enough occurrence. Happens all the time. So as I was saying, my parents had lost me in the mail, and I was being raised in an orphanage. It was a hard childhood. From the earliest that I can remember I was not only unloved, but feared, with both the orphanage owners and the other children keeping their distance from me.”

“Because you were an elf?”

Yaaroghkh looked at him in confusion, as he licked cinnamon off his fingers. “No? Because I was ugly.”

Caedes was about to make a remark, when it occurred to him that he’d never met any elf other than Yaaroghkh and for all he knew the others were stunningly gorgeous, fabulous beauties. (2 ~ see below)

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“Yes, I was an ugly child, but more than that, I was cursed.”

“Cursed?” Caedes asked involuntarily as they ambled down cobblestone paths, finishing off their tasty treats.

“Yes. Some demon, or monster, or other sort of foul, vile thing had fastened its invisible claws into me from birth, and at the sight of me people shivered. Their breath ran out, their throat dried, and they'd start to heave. But of course I was a wee tiny child at the time, and took it personally until I started to notice some thing tracking me in the shadows. I could see it from the tip of my eyes, watching me out of the window, and it stared me in the face when I dressed in the mirror.

"At that point it was not only the other members of the orphanage who were scared; I was haunted, day and night, and tortured by that fungous thing which wore my face as it fluttered about me, mockingly. My feeble, childish attempts to escape its grasp proved futile, and I could see the growl in its mouth every time I tried to defy it. At last, the terror proved too much, and at the age of five I struck out on my own, determined to save my poor compatriots from whatever was tormenting me, and to seek whatever knowledge I could to solve the problem on my own.”

“You left at the age of five?” Caedes asked, incredulously. Yaaroghkh gave him a strange look, then his eyes widened.

“Ah yes, most people grow slower than that. I was a fast growing child - by that time, I was already three yards tall, and nearly that broad. Of course size isn’t all there is to maturity, but as I could speak four languages and was already familiar with the basics of chemistry, carpentry, and architecture, I figured it was safe to leave. The orphanage owners must have agreed, too, since they practically pushed me out the door.”

“…Uh huh.”

“But I continue the story. And so I became an occult investigator, tracking down the horrors that terrorised my dreams. Full victory eluded me, for never did I encounter the monster that I sought, but I know I stuck to the trail of clues successfully because everyone I met had a terrified look on their face, as if they had encountered some revolting, disgusting beast.”

Caedes stayed silent.

“For seven years I hunted the monster down. I met all those who claimed knowledge of arcane lore, and visited also those repositories of the esoteric where such lore was compiled. I found the former prone to nervous breakdowns - more than one started to cry when I asked what he knew about that which stalked in the dark - and though the owners of the great libraries were troubled if helpful, their lore was less so. I learnt much from Iamblichus and Ji Yun, and from the recondite prophecies of Plato the Archangel, but definitive answers to my own problem were ever out of my grasp.”

Caedes stayed silent even harder, idly wondering why the two of them were still together, for they had long left the more popular thoroughfares and were now in those only attended by the wealthy.

“That all changed one blustery winter’s day. This was not a winter like what you get here, in the City of Tombstones; this was a deep cold, one which went down to the bones, for I was in the northern wastes. I had heard rumours of a hermit who dwelled in a crevice, located in a chasm far in the mountains, and had wearily gone to seek him out and see if he could tell me anything I hadn’t heard before.

“The journey was long and difficult and, mere twelve year old that I was, I was not up to the task. As I was climbing over a crevasse high in the mountains my feet slipped on the traces of the path, and I ended up hanging from a stalactite by just one hand. It was then that I saw him - the hermit of the mountains.

“He was no normal man. He was a leshy - the jolly bearded giant of the Eastern European woods, coming back to his cave with a fresh crate of vodka. Well he stared at me, and asked me what I was doing there. So of course I told him the whole story, from my troubles at the orphanage to how I had come to be hanging on a stalactite outside of his cave. At the end of it all he looked at me, stroked his magnificent bushy black beard, and delivered the tragic hammer blow: ‘yer an elf, Yaary.’

“I confess I took the news rather poorly. ‘Nooooo,’ I cried, as I hung on that stalactite there in the clouds, and it was just at that moment that my hand broke off and I fell into the chasm.”

“Your…hand broke off?”

“Oh, it happens all the time.” Yaaroghkh said cheerily. “That, I suppose, is the end of the story - at least, as an adventure. The leshy and I later spoke at length (when I had climbed out of the chasm), and the end of our discussion was that he was able to get me in touch with Arius - ah, that’s Santa’s eldest son. Arius had taken it upon himself to find and create a sort of yellow pages for all the wondrous creatures that yet dwell upon the surface of this good earth, and he was able to reconnect me with my parents.”

“Huh. Truth be told, I thought you were about to say that he took you in, and that’s why you work for Santa.”

“No. I mean, gratitude is part of it - my parents are wonderful people, who I love very much (even if they have trouble with the postage on occasion), and had it not been for Arius I would never have met them - but the main reason I work for Santa vocationally, and not just with my soul or on a volunteer basis, is the excellent workplace conditions and benefits.”

And they would doubtless have said more, but at that time they across the one they’d been looking for, and two voices cried as one:

“Ah, there she is!”

(2) They were not: the architecture of elf bodies was, and still is, non-commutative, and therefore while symmetrical is not the symmetry needed for conventional beauty. Inasmuch as the elves’ ugliness reached truly transcendental proportions, however, they occupied a negative potency of beauty, a sort of horror whose beauty lies, paradoxically, in its capacity to evoke awe. The interested reader is commended to Byung-Troll Han’s Sylphin Beauty, wherein it is precisely this property of brokenness, or Gebrochenheit, that entails a truly wondrous beauty (thaumaston kalon), in the full sense of that term. ~ Editor