To Light A Candle

And that should not be—not if what lived here was Dark-tainted enough for Vestakia to be able to track it.

By now she had penetrated quite far into the cave system, and though she was on the trail of whatever lived here, she wasn’t sure she was any closer to finding the children.

Suddenly she became aware that there were faint sounds, coming from somewhere ahead—though the direction of sounds could be misleading underground. They were barely louder than her own breathing, but she wasn’t making them.

Idalia moved faster.

The path led to the edge of a cliff. Here the cave opened out into the largest space Idalia had yet encountered. Crude stairs were cut into the cliff face, leading down to the space below.

Below lay a sort of village, and Idalia got her first good look at what must be the mysterious hooded figures that Kellen had described.

From where she stood, she counted about twenty of them. They were gathered around a central cooking fire, where some indeterminate carcass smoked and sizzled over a bed of coals. When Idalia risked another peek without the tarnkappa, she could see it was a bed of carefully banked charcoal, giving as little light as possible, and none of them looked at it directly. She pulled her hood back down and continued watching.

Their garments were primitive, consisting of little more than a crude loin-wrap for males and females both. The half-dozen children that she could see wore no clothing at all.

They were no race that Idalia knew, or had ever heard described. Their skin was a dull fish-belly white, save for a long dark stripe down their spines, and a matching one that covered their lower face and extended down their stomachs. Their hands and feet seemed to be a darker color as well, though whether that was natural pigmentation, or just dirt and callus, Idalia wasn’t sure. Their bodies were entirely hairless, but shaggy dark hair, left long and untended, grew from their scalps. From everything she could see, they existed at the most primitive tribal level.

Their faces were the most unsettling, as if someone had taken something familiar and cruelly distorted it. Their eyes were large, round, and bulging. They were practically chinless, upper and lower jaws pushed forward in a muzzlelike fashion, and when one of them opened his mouth to speak a few words in a curious low barking language, Idalia could see that the mouth was filled with long discolored fangs.

And their ears were pointed.

When she saw that, the nagging sense of almost-familiarity Idalia had felt when she’d seen the creatures settled into place with a sense of almost physical force. It was as if… it was as if someone, somehow, had managed to breed Elves and Goblins together, and this was the result.

Oh, that isn’t possible, Idalia thought with a wave of nauseated faintness. But she knew it was. The Endarkened delighted in perverting any of the creatures of the Light that fell into their hands, and they were masters of Dark Magic. The creatures they had created to fight their battles in the Great War still plagued the world today—the coldwarg were just one sample. Why not these… Shadowed Elves?

And it would explain how they could be here undetected, she told herself with brutal pragmatism. If these debased creatures possessed Elven blood, it was more than likely they could circumvent the ancient wards against intruders placed upon the Elven lands. They would, after all, be Elves, in a sense, able to come and go within Andoreniel’s domain as they wished. The could have brought the ice- trolls and the frost-giants over the border through their own caves. No wonder no one had seen them until it was too late!

Idalia stared down into the Shadowed Elf village with cold horror. How many of them were there? It had been centuries since the Endarkened had possessed Elven captives to experiment upon. And more important— where were they? This couldn’t be the only encampment of them.

She hesitated, on the verge of turning back right now to warn the others. This was a greater threat than the missing children—a Dark-Shadowed race living undetected within the borders of the Elven realm itself.

Suddenly a chorus of furious barking down below drew her attention back to the village. An argument had broken out at the central firepit.

Several of the Shadowed Elves were standing in front of it. One had a large basket at his feet, filled with what looked, from this distance, like large mushroom caps or flat loaves of bread. He was gesturing at the roasting carcass, and speaking urgently.

The other, facing him—the chief?—was speaking equally imperatively, underscoring his words with gestures that Idalia had no trouble in interpreting as a refusal. No meat, then. But for who?

The argument concluded, and the first Shadowed Elf picked up the basket and walked away. His companion —a female—followed.