Challenge #01741-D280: When Next You Stop

High Magics: Fuck you and fuck the piece of reality you were standing on -- RecklessPrudence

Ever after, even in the depths of his self-exile, he would remember the first time that the elf used his name. He'd been travelling with the show for months, and knew everyone. And everyone knew him. Except the elf. It was difficult to tell whether they were male or female and they deliberately exploited that to unnerve people.

They were between towns, camping temporarily along the side of the road, and he was passing along meals for anyone who cared to have them. Beans and cabbage. Food that lasted, true, but food that also had unfortunate gassy side-effects. Tirellari, the elf, recommended eating charcoal to remove said effects. They were the only one who did it. Because it was unseemly for an elf to fart.

Kreg approached the dancer's caravan, intending on nothing more than a little chitchat and hearing the usual stream of casual endearments and no mention of his name. He had decided to get his revenge, that night, by referring to Tirellari as 'elf' and 'dancer' until they relented and used his name. He remembered reaching up to knock, and the next thing he knew, he was staring at the cabbage and bean stew spilling out onto the dirt and people were hitting him and asking where the money was.

He must have been making noise, because lanterns were coming alight all over the camp. But the thing he remembered most was how Tirellari said a foreign word and the thin grass all around him fountained up in ugly, bloody tentacles and the ground turned into a quicksand of ichor and bile and brains and skittering bugs. In a way, Kreg was lucky, because the tentacles were doing far worse to the bandits.

And then a perfect alabaster hand seized his flailing wrist and dragged him out, and then all that was on his clothing was spilled stew and more than a little pee.

"Kreg! Kreg, it's okay. Are you all right?" Tirellari's other hand was holding a wand, which was pointed at... an illusion. From the elfin dancer's side, it looked like laundry and tent canvas was torturing the bandits. Who had also soiled themselves in terror.

He realised that he'd been crying. "That looked so real on the inside," he blurted. And then, "You said my name."

"Elves live for hundreds of years, Kreg," they said. "It's heartbreaking to get close to the mortals. And now I've gone and saved you. You're one of mine, now. And that's going to suck when you leave. Asshole!"

Tirellari was crying, now. Not because they cared. They had always cared. But because they had to admit they cared. Which could only mean heartbreak down the road. Sooner or later, an elf outlived everyone they knew.

All the casual endearments and the dark-but-harmless pranks and the barbed mockery was a wall Tirellari had built to keep people... to keep mortals from getting in. And somehow, Kreg had slipped in anyway. Maybe they all had. Tirellari was prickly to everyone, after that night. And for a few months afterwards. But once she said Kreg's name, she never went back to the casual endearments or the brusque insults.

But some of their usual laissez-faire attitude permanently slipped in favour of melancholy. And in their own, weird way, they were kinder to Kreg thereafter. Their spell didn't kill him. It didn't even hurt the bandits. And the night before he left, he asked Tirellari why she was so strange about 'the mortals'.

"Sooner or later, I will find your grave," they said. "And I will tell your spirit everything you missed. And I will be alone, and not much older. It takes a little bit of my soul, every time. Because part of me goes with you. Always."

Tirellari had always struck Kreg as big-hearted, and he'd never known why until that day. It was because the elf gave pieces of their heart out like grains of sand to everyone they met. Though it shattered into dust, Tirellari had more than their fair measure of grains.

This was how immortals died. They withered away from the love they gave away.

So Kreg learned his letters, and travelled far and wide, and chronicled everything he could in book after massive book. So that he could, in a way, give some of his heart to the elf who saved his life in spite of themself. And when they found his grave, they would not have so much to say.

He was pretty certain Tirellari's first words to that earth would be something along the lines of, "You asshole."

[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / Maximkostenko]

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