01.025 Merry Christmas

Friday, December 24, 2021

The Hidden Kingdom of the Huldufólk

“So anyway. Are you liking it here? Aren’t elves the coolest? You know I was an orphan right? My parents died when I was tiny, fell right down a glacier crevice and were never seen again! And the elves found me wandering near the camp and took me in. And look at me now, it is like a huge family of immortal fairy creatures! And they have so few children they just have no idea what to do with me. So I was pretty spoiled for a while but then they decided that it wasn’t going well. Did you know elves often won’t talk very much? Like go silent for a year because they don’t have much to say?” Álfheiður must breathe through other means as her continuous chatter never paused, Ella mused, she could say the most appalling things in that same cheery voice although the last part might explain the constant chatter.

“So Kertasníkir came here pretty recently. He is a guest I suppose although you would think two hundred years was enough to be considered permanent. I guess it is just like the hospitality in Hávamál¹ though.”

They continued down the corridor, Álfheiður’s endless stream of words dropping just enough info to not have Ella tune out. Jae-Young was meeting with another elf about the same age as he was who had also spent some time among humans.

They came to the end of the corridor and Álfheiður stopped talking abruptly, almost mid-sentence. She held her finger to her lips and gestured to the door, but then stopped to grab Ella’s hand, pressing something into it. Ella looked down to see a candle.

Ella stepped up to the door and gently knocked. The door wasn’t closed and moved open on her knock. Inside the room flickered and as it opened she could see the light flicker from the candles, hundreds of them. The faint smell of beef and something bitter and unpleasant filled the air.

“Come in, come in.” A trembling voice came from the room. She walked in to see an elf — and why were they all so damn tall? — with a long flowing white beard and red cap.

“Well, let’s see what we got here.” The elf looked up at her and squinted at her. He paled and tore off the apparently fake beard before dropping to the floor, head pressed to the ground. “Your Highness.”

Ella reached to her head but she knew her crown wasn’t showing. “Get up and cut it out!” she whispered frantically looking back but Álfheiður had left already.

The elf, much younger appearing without the beard, stood up but looked at her quizzically.

“Nobody knows who I am here. So no bowing and no ‘Your Highness’ stuff.” Ella felt ridiculous.

The elf slowly rose to his feet, nodding sagely, “You must be in hiding. The Thousand Kingdoms would not welcome the return to empire.”

“The Thousand Kingdoms?”

“Sorry, the Emperor Ekerri conquered lands beyond counting and was known as the Emperor of the Thousand Kingdoms. Now the kingdoms are broken apart into small little worlds of the People.”

“It is as good a name as any. Yes. There are those who have attacked me and I have no idea who they are.”

“I am at your service in all things. I should tell you, Your Highness, that I am not actually Kertasníkir”

“So who are you? And who is Kertasníkir anyway?”

“Kertasníkir is a trickster Santa-like figure here. I met him, and he thought it would be funny if I pretended to be him. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Something tickled Ella’s mind a bit, “For 200 years?”

“Well, to be fair we were quite drunk.” Ella wasn’t sure how the elf could keep a straight face saying something like that. “Have you tried Brennivín? It can be lethal.”

“So who are you?”

“I am Reynard. I am a traveling mage, and elf obviously.” He said the name with a heavy French accent.

They sat down and traded pleasantries. Much like the elves of this kingdom, Reynard was young when the Empire fell and didn’t have much knowledge of what had happened or how. But Ella still had questions.

“How did you know who I was? None of the others here can tell.”

“I was a scholar-initiate at the Ekerri’s arcane academies. I am… for lack of a better word, what passes for a mage in these non-magical times.”

“Then what can you tell me about this?” Ella pulled out the tooth pendant.

Reynard’s eyes widened. He did not gasp or fall to the ground or any of the other things that had happened before.

He reached out to touch it and when he did, there was smoke and sizzling sound from his finger. He kept staring as the sizzling continued and Ella watched in paralyzed surprise for a moment before she pulled away. “Stop!”

Reynard came out of the trance and winced, his finger had burned off almost an entire joint, charred and raw, and he hissed in pain. He quickly made some motions with his other hand and then relaxed.

Ella looked around for bandages and was about to tear a scrap of cloth when he pulled a handkerchief and wrapped it. He cast another spell and took the cloth away: The burnt joint was now smooth with skin over it.

“Well I think I almost lost the hand. And I should know better, the masters would have expelled me for such foolishness.” He regarded the shortened finger almost distantly.

Ella found her voice, “Are you alright? What happened?” She stated in horror at the tooth sitting quietly in her hand before dropping it.

“I was a fool. I don’t know what that is, but it is solid magic. And I never knew such a thing was possible,” Reynard said in a voice of wonder.

“But what can I do with it? And your finger! What does it mean? I have this crown, this tooth, and I have no idea what I am supposed to be doing with it. I think I met Ekerri when i got this. He stabbed me in the chest with his scepter and suddenly my eyes are different and I am in a cave talking to an elf which I didn’t even believe in six months ago.” Ella could feel the suppressed panic being let loose. All the planning, working out, combat training, and her other methods to feel like the problem was manageable, it was about to unravel.

“Your Highness, please calm yourself. I don’t have all the answers for you. But what I do know can help.”

Some tears had escaped from Ella, but she looked up and whispered in anguish, “How?”

“I can teach you some magic. What little I know. I can tell you something about the Emperor and the last days of the empire. I can help you because I was loyal and if the emperor has woken and chosen you as his successor, then I will be loyal again.”

“So let’s talk magic…”

A few hours later and Ella sat back in the chair. Her head was pounding from trying to understand what Reynard was telling her. She could make the slightest bit of light glow from her finger, an amount that would be unnoticed if they hadn’t been sitting in a pitch dark room.

“Why do I move my hands like this?” Ella made a series of finger gestures.

“No idea.”

“Okay but what is special about doing it with my left hand?”

“Not a clue.”

“Ok. So how do I get it to be bright like you?”

“Umm… practice.” Reynard shrugged his shoulders and then continued, “Did I mention that I was just a scholar-initiate? To put that in perspective, take someone who just took high school physics and try and have them explain whatever it is you study.”

“I lived on the outside with humans for millennia. I attended at the Athenian Platonic Academy until Sulla burned it down. I studied at the Imperial Academy and served under the Qing Emperor Yongzheng. I also attended the Sorbonne and most recently Stanford. All trying to make sense of what little I had learned at my peoples centers of learning so long ago.”

“And I couldn’t make it work. I met many of your great thinkers. I even told some of them the truth and then showed it to them. But you are the first human who was able to even manage a finger glowing.”

“And, if I am being honest, it took me three months to do what you did in three hours. You will be formidable one day.”

“So how was your day?” Jae-Young asked while changing for bed. He looked happy. His ring sat in a small tray by the bed unworn.

Ella was in bed already, tired but pleased toying with the pendant. “Look at what I can do!” She raised her right hand and moved her fingers through the movements she had been practicing assiduously all day. Her hand started glowing. More than it had before. It got brighter and brighter flashing between colors as if cycling through a rainbow. The light became more intense until it hurt to look on. Ella quickly stopped and the room plunged into near darkness.

“Sorry, that was a bit more than I had expected.” The afterimages of the light left everything even harder to see and Jae-Young was blinking and had stopped getting undressed to let his eyes recover.

His features were all more angular without the ring, his face more triangular and his limbs somewhat bony. Ella had thought he looked awkward and self-conscious before when he hadn’t worn the ring, but now he looked relaxed and graceful. He slid into the bed beside her and she quickly moved over to say “Merry Christmas” and then gave him a deep kiss.

Afterwards, she got up and went to the washroom to clean up. He called out to her, “Tomorrow they asked me to do some sort of private coming of age ceremony that we do. Something I missed out on. So I’ll be gone for tomorrow as well.”

Ella smiled a bit to see him happy even though he couldn’t see her, “Sure. I am going to try and learn more magic.”