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ELKA

By Alexander Brittan

Prologue

 

The night has just begun. The stars are beads of silver on the great tapestry of the sky. The air is still, and a slight chill floats about. All the people are in their makeshift beds, under handmade tents, sleeping. We are the Shadhy, a tribe of elves. We are known for our skills in carpentry and needlework. We speak the ancient language, Undiel, and our nights are always spent this way, under the glorious moonlight.

        Our tribe moves around a lot. We are always packing up our tents and belongings and moving away. My mother says its because we need to breathe the different airs and see all there is around us to see. She has travelled all over this world.

        I was born under a moonless sky, as my mother’s sapphire dropped from around her neck and she joined with my father in embrace the night of their marriage. But my father, Zaldien, is not around any more. He went away, and he took mother’s sapphire too.

        My mother’s name is Aliel, and she has a golden waterfall of hair, petal lips and a face of smooth paper. She holds my hand when our tribe moves. I like to hold her hand. It’s like holding a feather, a trustworthy feather that will not let you down when you need to fly.

        I love her.

        I miss father though. I don’t remember him, but he left me a present when he left mother. It is a vial; the glass is bright and cool. When I don’t have mother, I like to hold the vial. The liquid inside is smooth, and father told me to drink it when I need to escape.

        I don’t really understand, and mother told me I must not drink it.

        The tents are made of a beautiful material called Eulé. It is soft and smells like the night, to soothe us as we rest. Some of the people in our tribe have trouble sleeping. I hear them toss and turn, muttering unfathomable words and phrases. Once my mother left her tent, let her hand leave mine. Her eyes were glowing a strange blue and her silken gown blazed behind her. She made her way to the Elka River, and she slept there, with one foot dipped in the water.

        When she returned, her toenails were a bluey-white. She was colourless, and remembered nothing of the previous night’s excursion. That was the last time she held my hand.

        She doesn’t do that anymore.

        Her hands are always cold and pale. She sits in the tent all day, and she doesn’t sleep. She has never closed her eyes – they are always a transparent blue that glows in the night. There are rumours that she has become a Niranda-kuul, a moon-child. The Niranda-kuul roam the forests at night, and the worship the moon, their God, whom they call Anul.

        She has a weird voice that sounds like the river she slept next to. It’s almost like the spirit of the river came into her body that night, and changed her from my mother to a stranger.

        As I sit here, I have the vial in my pocket, and I am holding it. But it’s not warm like my mother’s hand. I brush away a tear that blurs my vision and I see far away a flame light up the sky like a beacon. Then I hear familiar drums, and chanting. They are saying, “Niranda-kuul, enda u Anul.”

        It means, “Moon-child, worship Anul.”

        My mother said, before she went weird, that if I ever heard that chanting, I should run and warn someone. So I left the stump of which I’d sat upon, and whipped through the night to my mother’s tent.

        “Mother! They are coming!”

        She lay there, motionless, eyes still open. Tears formed in her eyes and she screamed. Her scream ended with a gurgle; as if she were drowning and then she screeched and hissed like a cat. I jumped back, startled. She rose from her bed with a glinting knife and lunged at me. I leapt out of the tent entrance, and she glided straight past me with her knife.

        I watched as her gown danced through the air behind her. She ran in the direction of the chanting, and I lay in surprise on the dark, lush grass. Soon enough, I found my wits and warned my aunty, Bellaid, and she warned the rest of the tribe. I told her about my mother, and she told me we would have to leave without her.

        I said, “Why? She is my mother!”

        Aunty Bellaid looked at me with downcast eyes and said, “There is nothing we can do for her now. She is one of them.”

        As I stared at her in wide-eyed confusion, she folded our tent and packed our belongings.

        “What do you mean?” I yelled.

        “She’s not coming back.”

        And that’s how my story began.

 

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My name is Elka, named after the river that changed my mother. I am her daughter. My parents both left me, first my father, then my mother, six years ago. I only have fleeting memories from that night, but I remember the look in her eyes and that knife, surer than my hand ever was in hers.

        I remember the arrows that flew past as we ran, me with two heavy tents I struggled with. One of the arrows pierced a tent and I screamed so loud it echoed all around me.

        I remember the grass gradually changing from lush to spiky and painful as we ran across the Dule Plains. I felt so vulnerable out in the open. I realised why my mother had told me to run when we heard the chanting – we were being hunted.

        I remember watching Aunty Bellaid, who ran before me, as she was struck down by an arrow. I remember watching her body drop and roll, and I heard a few cracks as her neck snapped when she rolled.

        I remember nearly tripping over in fright and horror. I cried so many tears and ran so awkwardly and slowly I expected to be struck down any moment. But I made it.

        I remember watching the Niranda-kuul come with torches and light the Dule Plains. My chest heaved with the knowledge that Aunty Bellaid’s corpse would blacken and shrivel under that ocean of flame.

        Little did Aunty Bellaid know that she would also never come back.

        After that night, the next six years seem a little blurred. I completed my basic education, and then went on to receive training in using weaponry. I grew into an older, wiser elf-girl, and I left my fellow Shadhians to venture out into the world…

        …with a vow to find my mother.