We found ourselves inside an alcove. Something the size of an office storage room. But a secret storage room behind the real live actual secret door we’d just gone through. Something straight out of a murder mystery set in a haunted house, or a fantasy story about lost and hidden kingdoms long forgotten beneath the earth. Or a pirate novel, for there were pirate treasure chests inside the room, along with a wide wooden plank of a table piled with strange vials and bottles of colored liquids all of which glowed iridescently.
A sudden, peculiar thought popped into my mind. Perhaps one of these contained coffee. I hoped, really. I joked and said so in that way where you’re really not joking.
She had no idea what I was talking about and I had to fight off a brief bout of ennui when I realized there might perhaps be no more coffee left in the world. I resolved right then and there to find some, grow it, harvest it, and brew it myself.
I had no idea how to do that. But… I could learn.
The secret door, when I turned around to look back at it, looked like a door from this side. A silver door. Whereas on the other side it had looked like part of the rock wall we’d been crawling along. It was crossed with a silvery tracing of lines that shimmered magically in the darkness, showing runes I didn’t understand and the image of a crescent moon beneath a snow- capped mountain.
“What is this place?” I whispered in the closeness of the room.
She sat on a stool and stared up at the ceiling as she fumbled in her cloak and brought out something wrapped in fragrant-smelling leaves. Cakes. She handed me one and then began to eat her own almost ravenously. She must have had a high metabolism—that would explain her speed and her apparent need for calories. She ate, chewing fast, still staring upward as though she could see the centaurs and gotaurs coming down the ledge above. Her long ears twitched delicately once or twice at some noise I could not detect, and I realized she was using her ears, and their most likely fantastic ability to hear, to triangulate the current position of our enemies.
It was pretty clear to me what she’d done. She’d led them along right down to the fissure that was much more than a mere crack in the cave wall. It felt like something far worse. Like a doorway you didn’t want to go behind, and might not be able to leave once you did.
And then she’d ducked us into a secret room right outside her trap. That was clever. Ranger clever.
Outside and above I heard the muffled clop clop clop of centaur hooves. The hissing giggles of the hunting goat men. The gotaurs, she’d called them. They were close to the door, but the silence between us and them was like an invisible thing that could be felt and not seen. Like stuffy white noise inside a pair of headphones. I had to assume it was magic of some sort. Some feature in the door. But I was more amazed they, the centaurs especially, but the gotaurs too, were coming down, hooves and all, along that narrow ledge. And then, as if an answer must be provided for my disbelief that they would attempt such a thing… one of them fell off the ledge out there. A centaur. It went neighing off, whinnying in terror as it fell for what seemed forever into the deep dark depths below.
She seemed to read my mind.
“No,” she said softly as the centaurs and gotaur began to cry to one another. Some no doubt advocating that they turn back now. Others enraged and braying in their unknown language. “They cannot hear us in here.”
And after a few moments they started down again out there along the sides of the well. They were resolute in their intent to do evil. They would have what they’d come for, no matter the cost.
The first centaur passed just outside the well-hidden secret door and continued on along the cavern ledge toward the crack in the wall.
“This place was the… a holy place…” she said. “To the Dragon Elves that were first… after the Great Ruin. They built the temple above and… delved the sanctums and catacombs below. Vast and extensive. They did things… things… that should not be done. Not… known.”
Something rattled out there in the main shaft. Rattled like a diamondback out in the lonely desert scrub when you’re walking all alone and suddenly realize you’re in someone else’s home. Time to be careful. Warning. Danger. Warning you to get away from it or face the consequences of bite and poison as you lie there dying. I knew that sound. I’d hiked and camped a lot in the Southwest with my dad when I was
young. This sound sounded a lot like that rattlesnake warning inside my head. But also… not. Somehow different. Somehow wrong. The rattle started off almost slow, and seductive. Like a Middle Eastern musical prelude to a keening desert dirge. Only for a few seconds. And then it was loose and wild like sudden electricity live in the air all around us. And the sound of the rattling was lost in an otherworldly hiss and moan that sounded wrong on every level you can imagine. Cold water splashed across my spine as invisible long-legged spiders ran up into my brain. That’s how I heard it. But I also knew… and this is where it gets weird… I knew where the seams in the universe began to show. I could hear what it sounded like to the centaurs and the goat men.
Suddenly I had the worst, or weirdest, headache I’d ever had. Just for an instant. Only a flash. Then it was gone. It was like my mind, and my brain, were on fire for just that second. That wasn’t the worst part. The sudden fever… that was normal, or what I realized was now normal. My mind always burning with thoughts and ideas and dreams just like every human mind out there. Fever was normal human thought. And then suddenly when that moan and rattle came from the dark fissure… I knew for a fact it was from the dark fissure… when it moaned, when it wailed… it wailed for the longing of a void it called the Outer Dark. Oblivion. Destruction. Home.
Out there now, as the fever of normal thought returned and the call of oblivion faded from my mind, I could hear the sounds of tentacles and the neighing screams of the centaurs as they were snared, entangled, and then strangled… and finally dragged toward the hungry thing inside the fissure. The ancient oblivion thing. The thing of evil. The demon.
The thing that had nothing to do with any of this.
The gotaurs tried to flee, but the whipping tentacles came for them too, erupting from the fissure and snaking out into the void of the cavern, questing for souls, anything, to consume to abate the pain that was the thing in the crack’s nostalgia for oblivion. The Outer Dark.
My sudden worst-ever weird headache was gone and all I had left was a memory of losing my place in the universe at the height of it. I was sure in that horrible half moment between existences that the thing in the fissure had a thousand lidless eyes. And each and every one had looked straight at me in the brief moment before the slaughter. The feeding. The frenzy. The
memories of beautiful nothingness. Its eyes, every last one of them, were so very ancient and so very old. They had seen other horrors beyond the imaginings of sane and rational minds. Other worlds ruined. Other endless voids known.
“Are you okay?” she asked as I came back to myself in a cold sweat.
Yeah. Now I was back in the small secret room alongside the ledge in the well and the sounds of the rattles and whips were fading from the universe. As if withdrawing from reality. The centaurs and the gotaurs made no sounds. And I knew they never would again.
Autumn seemed worried as I sat there bathed in my own streaming cold sweat. All I knew was I was pretty sure I never wanted to have that kind of headache again. Or hear… hear the rattles and the… the sound of endless nothingness.
No. Not me. Never again. No thanks.
“T-tell me.” I was stuttering when I tried to speak. I just wanted her to talk now. Like I knew her voice was an anchor in a universe I’d suddenly realized wasn’t as empty as I might have imagined it to be in times previous. And right now, I needed her voice, that comforting anchor, in order not to slip off into some void between the cracks where real monsters like the thing in the fissure lie in dark and unfound places, dreaming dreams of endless destructions.
“Tell me what was that w-w-word…”
She looked at me and I could feel myself sliding toward a ledge with nothing beyond. A vast nothingness you could never get yourself out of. And no place to grab on to.
“Th-th-the one w-with… door!” I spat out finally. And then she began to talk, and the more she did so in her soft voice with all its depths and comforts, the more it brought me back from that edge at forever. And slowly, I began to feel better. “Oh-oh-open.”
A brief look of confusion crossed her beautiful features for a moment. And then she understood what I’d asked. The meaning of a word I’d heard. My own kind of anchor. The game of languages.
“Málo,” she said. “It is… High Speech… for friend.”
“I-i-s that the l-l-language… of the Dragon El-el-elves?” She nodded.
I nodded back, forcing myself into the very act of communication like
it was a handhold I might grab to arrest my slide off the universe along that Forever Edge where the thing in the fissure lay waiting.
High Speech, I thought, and felt my mind find where it was supposed to be, and not where it had wanted to go. Toward that edge, and all the oblivions beyond. The edge along the well of the universe.
The point of no return.
The Tolkien language from our past. That game of linguistics scholars. Here, it was called High Speech. Okay. Good. I could work with that, I told my chattering, shaking self.
“G-g-g-good.”
“When we reach my people…” she began, and she uncorked one of the small vials that had been on the wide table in the room. It was filled with a vibrant emerald liquid. Small wisps of fragrant rosemary came from its unsealed top. Glowing green in the soft and silent darkness between us. Only the silver tracery of magic in the door provided any kind of light by which to see. I sensed that the thing in the crack stifled the effects of Moon Vision. Like its darkness was a drowning thing that smothered everything that got near it. “You must only speak in Grau Sprache or High Speech. Never Shadow Cant. Never… with… my… people.”
I asked her why.
“No. It is… never done. Not… outside must know of… it. Otherwise there will be… much death.”
I told her I understood. And that she would need to start teaching me phrases I could use in High Speech. She looked unsure for a moment, but, like the realist I would find her to be, some kind of irony in a world that seemed so fantastic, she taught me my first words of High Speech. Elven. Yes and no.
Yes: lá. No: alá.
Easy. We were off and learning and my fear-struck mind, which had felt like it was coming unraveled in ways I’d never even imagined, was coming back to where it needed to be. Playing the games and puzzle-riddles of languages. To me, worlds had fallen apart before. And language, languages, the study of them, had always been my safe harbor for as long as I could remember. A shelter against uncertainty and chaos.
I took a deep breath and whispered, “Málo.”
She nodded at me. Friend. Her beautiful silver eyes shining brightly. Brighter than I’d ever noticed. She blinked once… and it was like I knew her even more now. Friend. Málo. It was a powerful word here. To her… it meant something more. Like a drink of water to a dying person crossing a desert all alone for a very long time. Seeking an oasis by rumors alone.
Friend.
A drink of water from that real oasis. Yes.
Lá.
Like a gamble that had somehow paid off despite the odds. That was the look in her eyes too.
“What happened to the Dragon Elves?” I asked in the silence. She shook her head sadly and offered me the vial of iridescent emerald liquid. It smelled good. Like rosemary and mint.
“Drink.” She said it first in Shadow Cant Korean, then in High Speech Tolkien.
I did. Instantly I felt warm, and good. Refreshed and not tired. Yeah, it wasn’t coffee. But it was good. And where I had felt tired and ragged and cold from the endless events of recent days, now I felt empty of all the garbage of those same days and nights. In fact, I felt like I’d just gotten a great night’s rest and a solid workout the morning after.
I felt calm and relaxed, and my coffee addict’s mind wanted to always feel this way. Always.
She watched me as my mind processed the wave of good vibes. “Dragon Elves are…” I looked up toward the ruin above this secret
room. The fallen temple and the rotten cavern beneath it. The ruins hinting at former glories long-ago passed. “They are gone now?”
She nodded again. Sadly. “Was this their home?”
She smiled wanly and looked around, taking in a deep breath that seemed to indicate either peace or the acceptance of some burden she had carried for all her days. I couldn’t tell which.
“No,” she said, and she began to open the ancient brass-bound pirate chests on the floor, removing small and curious items, including more potions. She called the emerald vial a potion. What an amazing thing. Like I said, it wasn’t coffee, but it would do until I started my own farm.
“Fallen… Tarragon… was their home. But… not… no… anymore.”
I stood and realized my MK18 was still ready to engage. I switched it back to safe. Checked it once over. Checked my gear. It was clear we’d be leaving soon.
“No,” she continued as she worked. “The dragon… S’sruth the Cruel… destroyed all Dragon Elves. Drove them out. Hunted them. Piled their… hoard and now… now he sleeps beneath the ruins… the Eternal Palace… of the First of Elves… guarding his ill-gotten… take.”
She hissed these words out. The story of them was a complete change in personality for her. She seemed so angry and cold as she finished her business with the pirate chests.
“Were the Shadow Elves…” I didn’t know what to say. Friends to the Dragon Elves? Happy that another tribe had died by dragon?
I didn’t know.
Oh, and believe me, the fact that there were dragons in this world was not lost on me. I’m still thinking about it as of this writing. But it’s almost too much to consider right now what with everything about to happen as I put all this down. Does she mean a dragon like what people used to call large lizards like the Komodo a dragon? Or does she mean a real-life Arthurian slay the dragon dragon? I forget which knight had that bit of particular business. But it wasn’t just Arthurian tales. Dragons abounded in the mythology of many ancient cultures. I’d noticed them when studying languages and root origins. They appeared so many times it passed mere coincidence, and on long late-night walks home from the library in the dark between the streetlights it made one wonder what the repeated occurrence of them was all about.
At least as far as languages were concerned. The game of puzzles.
Had there really been dragons from before the modern age we’d come forward from? And in the wake of the collapse after the pandemic we’d fled, had they returned once again to rule and torment the world? To take, as Autumn had said. Using Korean, the forbidden language of the Shadow Cant. Gajda. Take. That was pretty mind-blowing. The dragon had taken what was theirs. The Dragon Elves. And what was that bit she’d mentioned about the Dragon Elves being the first after ’the Ruin’? And knowing things they weren’t supposed to know.
As a scholar I found it all pretty fascinating. Endless questions were
already appearing in my hard drive.
As a soldier carrying an MK18 with less than a basic combat load… it was also a little scary.
She turned toward me, satisfied she had gathered everything she needed from the two bound chests in the hidden little secret room next to…
…forget that part. It hurt my mind to think about it even then. Even now.
“Shadow Elves are wanderers,” she said after a moment. “Wandering.” Not halting as she found the right words. Like she’d been thinking about them and how to explain what was needed to answer my questions as she’d worked at the chests. Or even whether to tell me. “Cast out long ago. We have journeyed here, to reclaim from the dragon what is rightfully ours.”
And then, with a cold look in her eyes, she turned to face me in the bare silver light thrown from the magic secret door in the wall.
“And we will.”
