Elfborn

Being Followed

Almost immediately a strange dread filled him. Maker, he had just seen someone die! Unlike his brothers, who had served with his father as retainers to the king, participating in skirmishes with his neighbors, Lash had never tasted battle. Had never seen another die. Until now.

Hand tightly gripped around the sigil stone passed to him by this now very dead elf, Lash leaned against the stable wall as he fought to keep his stomach. Eyes watering, he groaned heartfelt as the fairies darted over the elf's still body. How long would it take to stiffen? To start to stink?

These and other questions battered at Lash's mind as the fairies flew close. And then his attention was captured as a strange dusting fell from the fairies to lay heavily upon the elf's unmoving body. Some kind of magic? An attempt to raise the elf from the dead?

But, instead of breathing life into the elf's broken body, the dust instead began to change it. With each additional layer the fairies heaped onto it, the body seemed to grow less substantial somehow, like it was turning into a mist. Lash had to rub his eyes to assure himself that they were actually seeing what they were seeing.

The elf's body was disappearing! Eyes widening at the realization of what the dust was doing, Lash took a hasty step back. He didn't want any of that stuff on him!

With a final pass, the dust settled. And kept on going until it hit the hay that the elf had been lying on. In the blink of an eye the body was finally gone, as if it had never existed. All Lash had to remind him that this whole thing had actually happened, besides the fairies was the sigil stone, still warm in his hand.

"Maker burn me," he whispered as the fairies abruptly darted out of sight, vanishing as surely as the elf's body had. "Nobody is going to believe this!"

As it turned out, that was mild compared to what Lash actually began to experience as he stumbled into the house the next morning with tales of glowing eyes, dancing fairies and disappearing elves.

Lash quickly discovered that Rip, as well as the rest of Master de Whittier's family had been unharmed by the creatures with the red eyes. So the worst of his fears had been unrealized. But when he tried to tell them of what he had seen the night before, the master quickly dismissed it as a walking nightmare.

"Best be careful, young Lash," De Whittier, a bluff, squarish man dressed in home spun cloth, warned from across the table as he finished ladling hot porridge out of a large pot that sat on a stone and wood hot plate in the center, into a wooden bowl he held. His other two hired hands, Kev de Vanier and Dan nar Tethon, both lean, powerful men from the village, already were spooning the hot stuff into their mouths, pieces of bread clutched in their free hands. They were all in the farmhouse's large kitchen, backing out onto the main yard.

"One of these days those nightmares of yours will see you falling out of the loft. You'll break your neck or worse!"

"Not hard, considering it's such a skinny thing," Kev said around a mouthful of porridge and Dan snorted in agreement. Both men, in their late teens, were well over twice the size of the slender Lash. It didn't matter to either that the slim young man easily kept up to them during their work together.

"I'm telling you, it was no nightmare!" Lash insisted, accepting a wooden bowl from de Whittier's wife, an equally squarish farmer's wife dressed plainly, a white apron around her ample middle. With a glance at Kev and Dan, he sat down to ladle some of the porridge into his bowl. As soon as his bowl was full, Mistress de Whittier took the pot by its metal handle, her hands protected by thick clothes, and returned it to the big hearth which sat against the kitchen's back wall. There its small fire would keep the pot warm for the farmer's children, who would be waking soon.