01.028 Rainment

Thursday, December 30, 2021

The Hidden Kingdom of the Huldufólk

The vanilla custard and almond filling had made her fingers sticky and she looked around the room before just getting up and going to the bathroom sink to wash them off.

She came back and looked disconsolately at the remains of the pastry she had eaten. The pastry Jae-Young had brought back from town. Damn him for breaking up with her so nicely. And then feeding her? What was with that?

His stuff had been moved to another room while she had been out. The room felt empty even though it had amounted to one hiking pack stuffed to the top.

She began tracing random shapes in the air, leaving traces in light behind. This magic was getting easier even if her drawing skills were terrible. She looked at the picture of two people holding hands hanging in the air and then wiped them away with a wave.

“I should stick to stick figures.”

And then she added, “Great. Now I am talking to myself. Awesome Ella.”

She picked up her phone and stared at it. No signal like usual here. She could go to the Great Hall which was in her world. There she could get a weak signal and occasionally call friends or home or text. But it wasn’t what she wanted to do.

She had done more exercising for a while this morning trying to stop her ruminations until she had exhausted herself. She had tried to work on her research, but her simulation code kept messing up, and she wasn’t patient enough to fix it.

Her hair was tangled from her shower and not brushing it so she began the work of working out the knots. The repeated motion of brushing her hair was soothing and she found herself counting the strokes and thinking about her mother, who used to brush her hair every night.

Eventually she stood up and regarded herself in the floor length mirror. Her hazel colored eyes stared back at her and she reached up and took the contacts out. She sat down and stripped off the small amount of nail polish that was left and the bit of foundation she had started on earlier but abandoned part way through.

She stood up again and stared at herself in the mirror again. Now truly naked. Her musculature was a bit more prominent from all the exercise but she remained long-limbed. That small bit of softness to her stomach that she had always had was gone, and she could trace the indentations of her muscles in her stomach. The pendant dangled between her breasts, the only thing she was wearing. Her skin tone was a bit sallow, but it was winter, and she had been indoors for so much of it.

She looked at her face. This is me, she thought. She thought for a brief moment and her eyes glowed and a crown settled on her forehead, with more weight than it had ever had before. In the mirror it coalesced from the air and instead of looking misty and insubstantial, it looked solid and almost metallic or pearlescent. A lot more like the crown the Emperor had worn.

“No, this is me.” she whispered to herself.

An errant thought took her right out of her mood, Shit, my unibrow is coming back. Need my tweezers. and that thought, being so at odds with her state, was much more funny than it should have been that she laughed aloud.

She sat down and started getting ready properly. She took her time and redid her nail polish and carefully tweezed her eyebrows back into shape while they dried and got dressed in the very fancy, white and purple kyrtill she had been leant.

“This is also me.” She said firmly. And applied some mascara and eyeliner, darker than she had done before to contrast against her eyes. She left her crown on. A little blush, some natural toned lipstick. Oops bad color, take that off and go back to the older one.

Her mother would have been proud.

One last look in the mirror and she exited the room.

But what she hadn’t expected was the reaction she got. Elves who saw her dropped to their knees without knowing why. She made her way to the central chamber, the Great Hall, and saw many elves eating or sitting and meditating.

Jae-Young was there and he, alone, remained upright when she walked in the room.

Álfheiður, Jóhanna, and other elves ran into the room, and the elves also fell to the ground in supplication. Álfheiður looked back and forth between the elves around her kneeling and Ella, her eyes wide and frightened.

“Please rise.” And her voice carried a deeper authority than it had before. The elves stood up, some of them getting their first look at her and the crown on their head. A susurration crossed the room, a whispering of fear of this unknown compulsion.

“I have not told you all of the truth. And you have all been so very kind so I felt it was time.”

“I was crowned by the Emperor Ekerri as his heir. This happened not so long ago. And I do not know what it means. But this is why we came here. This is why I wanted to find you, Jóhanna. To see what you knew about all of this.”

Jóhanna, her eyes filled with awe and terror, looked at Ella and whispered, her voice carrying over what sounded like some of the younger elves sobbing in fear, “I am sorry, I did not know… I do not know more. I searched for the People after the shattering of our world, I wanted to know what happened. I went out many times. But those few I found knew so little. You knew more than I found in so much searching.”

The room was quiet and the elves all stood there. Many did not know enough history to know much. But this human commanded their attention and they could not help themselves.

“There is one more thing you know. Once, you were with your son in Hong Kong, in Kowloon. And you came across a man, a banker. who frightened you terribly. Enough so that you convinced your husband to leave the deal and his potential future gains. Who was he?”

The room was silent. Some of the elves looked at Jóhanna who trembled. Her answer was a whisper, but it carried, “He was a dragon. I could see it even in his human form.”

Everyone’s eyes were on Jóhanna now. Ella had never noticed that elves didn’t blink very much.

Later, they sat down. Jóhanna, Reynard, two other elven elders, and Jae-Young.

Jóhanna began, “It was about one hundred years ago. I had gone on another search for others like us. Then the Great War. I fled Europe with huge trains of people.” And she shuddered as her memories came alive. “I ended up in a town called Irkutsk and was a guest of a minor cousin of the Romanovs. I think he was quite taken with me. He was always referring to me as krasivaja, meaning beautiful, and other ridiculous descriptions of my looks. I had been starving and living off of bark and insects.” She laughed self-deprecatingly.

“And then Lenin and his Bolsheviks came and I fled again . Apparently being a guest of no background means you might as well be a noble. I ended up in Hong Kong where I met Do-Yun. He had fled Korea at the same time as I and we lived next to one another in the same terrible little hovel. He was there trying to get financing for an effort to push the Japanese out of Korea.”

She sighed, “I remember he had the most lovely suits and would always walk out of that terrible flat as if it was an inconvenience he shed the moment he hit the street.”

“We married eventually, and I continued my search. I was shocked when I became pregnant since we rarely became so.”

“And then little Haneul was born. He wasn’t an elf like me, but I knew it could breed true later. And I loved him so much.” She was crying a bit, lost in her reminiscence. Jae-Young stared at her listening to ancient family history from someone who was inextricably tied to it.

“Then Do-Yun came home so excited. He had a deal to develop a shipping area which would generate wild returns on it. The main backer had spread some bets too wide and so was looking for co-investors and Do-Yun had gotten the nod.”

“We dressed in our best for a social gathering before the deal was to be signed. And I remember Haneul being excited to go to his first adult event.”

“Then we got there, and it was terrifying. That man, his aura was that of scales and fire. I knew what he was. And in my head, he spoke to me, with such contempt, saying ‘Little creature, say nothing and leave with your husband. Run and never be seen by me again.’ I could see his true form and it was… it was too much.”

“I had to argue with Do-Yun and eventually he agreed to leave although it was breaking every aspiration he had in coming to Hong Kong. We fled back to Korea, and eventually he passed and I left poor Haneul to grow up without me.”

“Why did you leave grandfather?” Jae-Young whispered.

“For the same reason you are staying,” she said, “our people needed me and I could not stay forever. I stayed longer than I should have and I could see that he was too dependent on me. Our way is the same, parents will leave after some time to allow their children to grow.”

Jóhanna added, “I was going to ask him to join me here in his last days. I miss him and outliving mortal children is unfortunately our fate.” Jae-Young nodded.

Ella interrupted the moment to bring them back on track, “So do you know more about this… person?” Even though she was surrounded with elves, saying dragon out loud felt ridiculous.

“Wu Shen was his name. And then Wu Longwei when he came to America. I followed him from afar, you see, in the news. He was always a banker. A financier. Always disguised as a man of means, the kind of wealth that commanded power behind hidden doors. So he would be in the business papers here and there but never the main news.”

“Wait one moment.”

She left and walked away. Ella and Jae-Young regarded one another, but where before they might have spent the time dissecting the story together, now they suppressed that practice.

Jóhanna came back with a notebook.

“He was so frightening, but he was also the only one I knew from our world outside of here. And so I stalked him in newspapers and then online.”

She paged through clippings and printouts, some from a long time ago with drawings and pictures of Wu Shen with his elegant mustache and goatee and tinted spectacles, and then Wu Longwei, clean-shaven and handsome.

“And then he took the name Li Feng in the 60s here.” More news clippings about the handover of a storied Hong Kong finance house to a rarely-seen vice president from the Hong Kong office.

Ella looked through a set of clippings from the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal, and read slowly aloud, “Enfant terrible and >wunderkind Tommy Xu to take the helm at Ixus Capital” and the stories went on to outline the outrageous behavior of the young Tommy at private clubs across New York, his successful deals in exotic financial instruments, and numerous statements by Li Feng admonishing Tommy Xu.

Tommy Xu had permanent stubble and a modern pompadour haircut and dress. He habitually wore pink-tinted gold rimmed sunglasses and had a smirk. And he looked the exact same as Wu Longwei.

“Why so few pictures of Li Feng?”

Jóhanna combed through the clippings and found the one she was looking for, “He was apparently a recluse per the articles of the day.” And she handed Ella an article that said as much.

Ella pulled out her phone and looked up Ixus Capital and Tommy Xu on the slow internet that she could manage in the Great Hall. She looked up at Reynard who was paging through the papers, her eyes glowing with intensity, “You are going to have to tell me how you knew about this,” pointing to the crown, “and help me practice hiding it.”

“Why?”

“Looks like I might be applying for a job at Ixus Capital.”