I won’t bore you with all the details of how I found out we had a language in common. Actually two languages. Korean and hochdeutsche. High German. There was some trial and error—and listening first to another unknown language she spoke before I got a trail on something vaguely familiar—that finally registered a hit for me. I sighed when she spoke that first language and cursed myself for not learning the made-up Tolkien language the nerdiest among my scholarly peers loved to make fun of others for not speaking, because she sounded a lot like that. But other than a few words and phrases I couldn’t seem to remember at the time, I didn’t speak Tolkien, or whatever they’d called it.
And listen, I was tired.
I’d barely caught any sleep during the last three days of trying not to get killed by an orc horde, doing the command sergeant major’s dark bidding, well, thinking about doing it, and moving behind enemy lines, digging trenches, and generally running for my life. Plus there was Kurtz, and that dude wore you down just being in his presence. Not by anything he said, because he didn’t say much, or anything he did, though he was always doing something. Very Ranger-Rangering NCO. He wore you down because he was Kurtz and he hated the world and you by extension because you were in it. The weight of his hatred was like an extra sixty pounds in your ruck. You could handle it… but over time it wore you out. And you began to question why it was even in there. And you hated it.
Very tiring. Very tired. I was very tired.
My mind was working at half capacity, at best, and I still hadn’t eaten my morning’s cruddy MRE when the call to get moving down the hill came. Not that I was hungry then. You had to be pretty stone cold to eat anything on the island of diarrhea meets bag of death this place had become. There were Rangers doing just that right now. But I suspected it was all just another unofficial Ranger pissing contest to see who could be more gruesomely hardcore than anyone else. They got some secret thrill out of that. Right now, I’d snort a line of instant coffee if I could. But that was as hardcore as I was willing to go.
The point I’m laboring to make here, is that I wasn’t exactly at my best.
After passing all that carnage on the way down the hill, the shattered and torn-apart orcs and the gutted troll oozing pustulant boils, I felt exactly the same way I’d once felt after a night in Vegas in which a friend said we wouldn’t need a hotel room. We’d just “pick up chicks” who had one.
We didn’t.
And I slept in a booth at an all-you-can-eat buffet until they kicked me out at eight a.m. when they set up the make-your-own-waffle station. Tossed me outside and blinking into the harsh Vegas daylight feeling like I was nothing more than a walking husk that city and every horrible person in it had sucked the life from. That was exactly how I felt walking toward the meeting with the elf girl in armor who’d come inside our metaphorical wire on a dappled gray horse.
I wasn’t in top form. To say the least.
But the moment she lowered the hood of her forest-green cloak, I had a new problem I needed to deal with.
She was flat-out gorgeous.
For an elf. Then again, she was the only elf I’d ever met, and so maybe all of them were like this. If so… the fantastical future wasn’t looking all bad. Nail down that coffee hookup and I might get by.
Perfect heart-shaped face. Stunning silver eyes. Yup. Silver, translucent eyes. Otherworldly. Pale, flawless skin. And yeah, long pointy ears that twitched at sounds in the forest—and even that was kind of cute and s*xy. It appealed to a freaky side of me that I didn’t even know existed until now. She had straight black hair, so black it was almost blue. Full lips.
Female. Me like.
Now I was hungry, undercaffeinated, tired, scared to death, having the time of my life, and… probably in some form of love. Plus lust, obviously. I was probably as close to feeling Ranger now as I ever would be.
And it was time to work at talking.
Listen. Speaking languages can be pretty hectic. Not working a two- forty to the level of load, fire, engage, reduce malfunction, reload, literally see the remaining moments of your life manifested in the length of the ammunition belt left on a machine gun in the face of an overwhelming enemy attack on the score of something last seen during the Korean War and its special form of hell, the human wave attack hectic, but tough all the same in its own way. You gotta play heads-up ball. Otherwise
miscommunications lead to misunderstandings which usually lead to death. For someone.
Still, no environment I’d ever done translation in had these particular parameters. Tired, cranky, in lust, and… need. As in need coffee. Badly.
Plus, ten thousand years in the future.
Okay. So cut me a break. I couldn’t speak instantaneous Tolkien on demand. Plus, nothing I’d ever learned in all those ivy-covered institutions ever indicated I’d actually need to. If you’d have forced me to bet on what fictional language might serve me best in the future, I’d have said Klingon. And I’ve have been wrong.
So as I babbled through some languages I knew, trying out common phrases, it was Anyong haseyo she responded to first. Reacted to, in other words. Not Do you speak Korean, which I’d already tried. She responded to the formal greeting non-Korean speakers would use with Korean speakers.
And when I asked her if she spoke Korean, she had no idea what “Korean” was. That didn’t register for her.
But starting from there we got some basic communication going, and that’s when the German started to appear in her speech patterns. She referred to it as Grau Sprache. Gloomy or Gray Speech.
But it was when we flipped back to the Korean that she didn’t even call Korean that she stopped the whole conversation dead, throwing up her hands in clear confusion. And frustration. I’ll admit that was kinda earnestly s*xy. Again, even on dead body island, I was deeply in love with her already.
I’ll just interject this here now that I have time to think about it as I write it all down. Think about why I fell so instantly for her. Because right there, at that moment speaking next to a fetid-corpse-swollen river and after three days of otherworldly monsters trying to kill all of us, she was the opposite of everything around us.
I could tell that from the start.
She was kind. Innocent. Pure, even. There was something untouched by all this evil lying dead all about her that made her stand out in stark contrast. She was good. It… radiated out from her and filled the air all around. Like some new-age hippie-dippy vibe. And maybe, beyond that self-serving coffee addiction I was nursing, maybe I was afraid, had been afraid all along, that along with all the other things missing ten thousand
years in the future, that missing right along with everything else was that there was no good left in the world anymore.
So it makes sense, as I think about it now, that amid all that future shock and fear that I was going to live the rest of my life in a coffee-less, good-less hell, and those are not the same -lesses, despite their substantial overlap, that I would respond as I did when I found standing in front of me a real live… hot maiden fantasy chick. Like one from an epic about knights and unicorns and maidens who are pure and strong and good of heart. Arthurian long-form epic poem stuff. With eye candy to boot. That didn’t hurt.
And the fantasy chick was real. And hot. Real hot. And I was being useful! I was speaking languages! Victory me.
As if to say, Look everyone… I’m officially not useless. I’m talking to the hot babe.
I looked back up at the suckers on the hill pointing their rifles down at me and watching through their optics. Then I smiled so they knew that I knew they knew. That she was hot, and I was talking to her first.
I turned back to her and stared at her earnest, heart-shaped face. And somehow that made me want to cry a little. Because it meant that good wasn’t dead just yet. It was still alive even if she was the last flame carrying it around here in this crazy messed-up future.
I felt it best not to weep in front of her, as we had just met. And also Captain Knife Hand, who was following the whole conversation like a man waiting for two DMV workers to greenlight his paperwork so he could get on with his day, even though he didn’t understand a word of it, probably would’ve karate-chopped my carotid artery if he saw me start to cry. If just out of general embarrassment for the entire unit.
So I didn’t.
Later, the captain told me he’d picked up a little Korean when he was an infantry platoon leader on the DMZ. But he assured me what he knew was completely inappropriate for first-contact situations.
There she was, in her forest-green cloak that did little to hide her shapely though well-armored charms. Her earnest and cutely confused face. She even stamped one boot in frustration, bringing the whole conversation to a halt.
“How,” she began haltingly. Our versions of Korean were little more
than distant cousins of one another, but they were still more closely related than our versions of German. So I muddled through. I’m pro like that. “How…” she continued, “is… you speak… Shadow Cant?”
I clarified that I didn’t understand what was meant by Shadow Cant. She ran through a few of the phrases we had just spoken in Korean, though again the word for the Korean language meant nothing to her. Hanguk-eo.
“Do you mean Hanguk-eo is… Shadow Cant?”
She thought about this for a moment, biting her lip and raising one alabaster hand to her forehead to brush away a bothersome fly. Hey, another neat thing I noticed about her. Around her, the smell was gone. It was like it refused to come near her. Or rather, her presence drove it away. Only that one fly managed a kamikaze run to make it next to her. It got sluggish and slow and barely missed getting hit by her hand as she brushed it away. I suspect it was glad to get away from her and fly off toward all the ruined juicy bodies bloating in the river.
Back near the others, the sergeant major and the perimeter security fire team, the flies were swarming, and the Rangers were in constant motion batting them away.
Then she nodded, and I’m translating here. “Yes. Most sacred language of… Shadow Elves. Never… ever… spoken outside the… most sacred gatherings… and hunts.”
She stared at me hard, like she was willing me to be just a myth of morning mist and vapor rising off the nearby river. Like I was not to be believed if her world-view were to continue as it had.
“How… do you… know this… Shadow Cant?” she asked in frustration.
