Trapped

“We will accept your hospitality for a couple of hours,” I said, “and then we must leave to begin binding Granuaile to the earth.”

Manannan grinned from behind his mustache. “Excellent. Please follow.”

Carrying Fragarach in his left hand, he walked hand in hand with Fand to a tree on the border of the court and shifted somewhere. Flidais followed, then we found the binding marker he left behind and shifted to a tree outside a large castle set on a cliff overlooking the sea. In the “real” world, this castle was a poor stone hut, seemingly abandoned. Here in Tír na nÓg, it was an architectural wonder set on breathtakingly beautiful grounds. The famous hogs of Manannan Mac Lir—the ones that re-spawned after slaughter, providing him with eternal luscious bacon—snorted fatly in their pen and radiated decadence. Kine lowed in the distance, black-and-white Rorschach blots on a green field. Wolfhounds trotted around creamy pincushions of sheep. The scene was edged with golden highlights, a pastoral the likes of which Thomas Cole would have dreamed. Some faeries were visible here and there—the airborne and the grounded—and while they looked at us curiously, none approached. The three members of the Tuatha Dé Danann were waiting for us and smiled a welcome, beckoning us inside. Manannan delivered Fragarach into the hands of a sleek servant who was no doubt the human form of a selkie. She bowed to him and bore it into the castle ahead of us.

Fand dismissed most of the faeries in the castle immediately, “for their comfort and yours,” she said to me. When I had last been a guest at Manannan’s estate, I wasn’t known as the Iron Druid, and the Fae rather liked me. Circumstances were much different now, and, as such, we were treated to the singular privilege of being served by Manannan and Fand in the kitchen. It smelled of apples, and when I remarked upon this they mentioned a cider press through a door in the rear. They set out a platter of fruit, cheese, and bread, then poured us each a flagon of ale and toasted our health. They gave Oberon a ham bone with plenty of meat left on it.

<Please tell me it’s okay to eat this. It smells so good,> Oberon said.

Yes, it’s okay.

Oberon set his ears back and reared up on his hind legs playfully. <Have at thee, Hamlet!> he said, and pawed at it a couple of times before chomping down and trotting off to enjoy it elsewhere.

Manannan and Fand wanted to learn more about Granuaile since she was shortly to be a full Druid, so they encouraged her to talk about herself. Flidais and Perun quickly lost interest, however, and began conducting a hushed conversation of their own, every murmur vibrating with the frisson of sexual tension.

Before long, Granuaile was talking directly to Fand. The god of the sea had apparently been waiting for this development, because Manannan jerked his head at me to repair to another room, where there was an open window looking out on his sheep pasture.

“Fly with me down there for a moment?” he asked, pointing.

It was unusual, but it seemed a harmless request, so I shrugged. “Sure.” We stripped and shifted to our bird forms; he was a great shearwater and I a great horned owl. Manannan took his cloak of mists with him in his talons. We leapt from the window and coasted down to the sheep, where we shifted back to human. Manannan quickly shook out his cloak and used it, enveloping us entirely in mist. Then he bound the air around us so that no sound could travel out of a bubble around our heads.

“Faeries and enchantments everywhere up there,” he explained with a jerk of his head toward the castle, “and some o’ them are quite talented at remaining inconspicuous while they eavesdrop. I just wanted to have a word with ye that wouldn’t be overheard, and I didn’t want our lips read either.”

“Okay,” I said, though his preamble made me curious and more than a little nervous.

“It’s not only Bacchus who wants to see ye dead,” he explained, “or who might suspect you’re still alive. There was an envoy from the Svartálfar a couple o’ years back, asking if ye might be alive after all.”

“Well, I suppose it had to happen someday,” I said, and sighed. “I actually have cause to blame the dark elves.”

“Blame them for what?”

I shrugged. “Whatever vexes me at any given moment. They have been my universal scapegoat for ages. The truth of the matter is I don’t know much about them.”

One of the stranger developments of modern times is that more people have heard of dark elves today than at any other time in human history. This is almost entirely due to the twin influences of role-playing and fantasy- based video games. Or perhaps more credit is due to the artists who depicted them visually with dark skin and fantastic white hair; they had impossibly magical manes, as if they’d found some eldritch concoction in the deeps that gave them +5 flowing locks.

Even literature got it wrong. There are only a couple of passing references to dark elves in Sturluson’s Prose Edda, but they’re a bit confusing since they seem to conflate the dark elves with dwarfs. I have often wondered how much of that was intentional; in my mind it’s impossible to make such a mistake. They didn’t look a damn bit alike, if my sources were correct.

To be fair, Snorri Sturluson had priorities other than filling in the history of the dark elves. He wanted to preserve his country’s myths and culture without upsetting the Christian authorities of the time. He had to stretch like Mr. Fantastic to make the Norse gods descendants of the Trojans—and thus, to the Christians, not really gods at all, merely heroes—and he probably couldn’t figure out a way to explain the dark elves satisfactorily. Then again, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Svartálfar had paid him a visit while he was writing the Edda and encouraged him to elide their existence all he wanted—perhaps more than he wanted.

The reason that there is so little information about dark elves is that they tend to keep to themselves, and, in truth, from what little I have heard, this is rather kind of them. Any interaction they have with humans tends to ruin the humans’ day.

“I know a bit about them,” Manannan said. “I got the short version o’ their history from one o’ the Álfar.”

“The Álfar spoke to you? Why?”

“This was some time ago. I had the story from a treasure hunter who wanted my help in locating wrecks at the bottom o’ the Irish Sea. Since he wanted a map, I asked him for a map in kind. I never could figure out where the nine realms were located on the World Tree, so he gave me a map that he swore was truth and told me a story about how the Svartálfar were born. Would ye like to hear it?”

“Yes, I would—and I’d love to see the map as well. If the dark elves are actively searching for me, I’d prefer to be armed with as much knowledge as possible.”

“That is wise, especially where fighting them is concerned.”

“Why so?”

“Patience, Siodhachan. I’ll tell all, even as he told it to me.”

* * *

Ages ago, even before the Tuatha Dé Danann had come to Ireland, the king of the Álfar—for there was only one kind of elf back then—commissioned a map of the Nine Realms of Yggdrasil. Asgard, Álfheim, and Vanaheim at the top were well known, but less was known of the six lower realms. The lowest three, in particular, were almost complete mysteries. Niflheim was a land of ice, and it was within that realm that Hel reigned over the moaning, inglorious dead; Muspellheim was a land of flames, where Surtr and the fire jötnar lived, awaiting the day of Ragnarok, when they could burn the whole of creation; but there was another land, both between and underneath them, subterranean and dark, beyond the jaws of the great wyrm Nidhogg, that did not even have a name, and no one knew what waited there in the black silence.

The largest party of Álfar was sent to explore this land, and none returned. All other parties returned and the map grew into an atlas, yet the king was displeased by the loss of the last crew. Another party, half again as large, was sent to seek them after forty years, but they did not return either. Ailing and old, this king—whose name has been purposefully forgotten by the Álfar—sent out a series of single adventurers. They were told not to explore but rather to discover the fates of their forebears and report back.

The answer to the mystery came three years later. Five strange beings appeared at the court of the Álfar king. Dressed in robes of a white material that looked like silk yet shimmered so that other colors reflected from its surface, they very nearly sparkled when they moved.

The beings appeared to be elves, except that instead of the light flesh and light-blond hair of the Álfar, this company had skin of obsidian. Each had a single queue of jet-black hair growing from the very top of his head, bunched together in places with silver circlets and falling down to the waist. Their eyes were green and abnormally