Tales from the Low Road: How the Elves Came to Be

By Nikole King

"Mama, tell me the story again." Little Issu said from her pillows, looking up at her mobile. In the center of the slowly rotating bead-images and colored threads was Batu, the Horned God, his antlers reaching up to heaven, his cloak made of stars.

Her mother sat on her bed and leaned down, her round, freckled face and emerald eyes beaming upon the little elf. She reached down and stroked little Issi's ears, almost perfectly rounded like her own, but for a small point at its tip, the delicate structures of her face only giving a hint of her ancestry.

Satori gave the mobile a little spin. "Which story, my dear?"

"The one about the People and how we were made," she said pulling up her quilted blankets to her chin, covered in the animal images of their faith.

"Well, the story of how the People were made starts with the making of the world."

Little Issu snuggled into her covers as moonlight drifted in through the window, sparkling gently off of Batu's astral garb.

"In the beginning was Batu, a young god, bounding from the fold of the All-Womb, to play among the stars and twirl his fingers in the galaxies. He traveled paths laid out in the rays of dying suns, shining like a spider's web in the dark corners of heaven.

And when he had danced and created for himself his cloak of many shining stars, he came then upon the Earth, and what he found shocked him for he had seen naught in the perfect splendor of heaven like it. In those days the Earth was a great roiling ball of corruption, for though the world was dead, yet still, it rotted and warped in its lurching dance through the sky.

Batu looked on it and said "My heart is full of sorrow. The world is full of darkness and corruption though surely life has never been there. There is chaos and disease but no light and no warmth." And so Batu gave this thing a name, and he called it "Tragedy."

So Batu sat among the clouds which roam the sky and contemplated long. So long did he contemplate and so far did his searching thoughts reach that they grew from his head like branches from a tree. Thus did Batu get his horns.

After he had thought long and considered all that he had seen, he declared, "Tragedy will not hold sway here forever. I will walk upon the Earth and make there life from sorrow."

So Batu stepped upon the world and began to order it, shaping it with his hands like a sculptor shapes clay. Everywhere he found corruption and disorder, he made life and harmony. In this way, he made each beast and tree, each blade of grass and each towering mountain. Once he had completed his great work, he delighted for many years amongst the beasts which he had made and danced atop the mountain that he had formed, such that they still bear the marks of his feet in their folds and crinkles."

Issu giggled. She liked the word"crinkles."

Satori smiled and then took on a look of gravity. "On one of those many days, Batu was walking through the forests he had made and when he came to our forest, the first of the places he had laid his hands upon, he looked and saw a stag, its blood pooling about it. Batu rushed to its side but it was already dead, having stumbled down the hill and being struck through with a branch. Then Batu cried great tears which nearly filled up the whole world, covering much of it still in vast salty waters, but he stopped his mourning when he saw the stag once more. He looked and saw what all his time of contemplation in the heavens could not have shown him: the stag was beautiful even in death.

So Batu rose and sang, "Look you, Tragedy! Look you, corruption and death! Though you remain in this world and your chaos yet fills it, look! For my creation is noble even in sorrow! The work of my hands is beautiful even in death!"

He exalted in the moment and cast about the stag's blood all throughout the forest, our forest! He bade the stag stand and it lived! He took branches from the trees and fashioned them like his own crown and placed them on the stag's head.

"Evermore shall you be greatest of beasts and desired above all other creatures of the wood!"

What Batu did not realize as he crowned the stag was that where the stag's blood landed, on tree and rock, and soil, and river from there we rose up, blinking at the sun. From tragedy we came, the People."

Issu raised pulled on her mama's sleeve. "If we were called people first why do the humans call themselves people and call us elves?"

Satori chuckled. "When the human first met us, they called us the Elder People for we were here before them. Through time and their laziness, their tounges faltered. They began to call us the Eldest, then the Eld, then by some strange movement of their minds, they began to call us the Elves. It is best not to consider how they arrived at this name too much. Their minds are not like ours but foolish and concerned with senseless matters. In our hearts, we are the People and they are the Upstarts."

Issu giggled again, mouthing the word to herself.

"When Batu discovered us, we were weak and helpless, living for but a moment and dying the next, but he remembered how he cast the stag's blood about and realized what he had done. He came to them and said 'Children, you who are born of tragedy and beauty shall be eternal even as the heavens are eternal in their beauty, and you shall be the ultimate symbols of my triumph, of the victory of beauty over corruption!' So he raised us up so that we walked on two legs, and he showered us in his own heavenly splendor and taught us the paths that only he once walked before, secrets he laid low in the world.

Furthermore, Batu gave us a few commandments and warnings: "Since the stag is your older brother, you must not hunt him nor any that have antlers like him for they are sacred, but if you find one suffering in the forest, give it mercy and take its horns, that you may exalt in its beauty even once its body rots away. From now on, the deer will shed his horns with the changing seasons and these you will gather and cherish, for they are a sign of your origins.

Since from this ground you came, from these trees and these rivers, this shall evermore be your place and none others shall take it from you, but neither shall you stray far from it for it is of your very being and your beauty shall decay apart from it. Here there shall always be a hiding place for you, always shall the shadow of my cloak shelter you.

Since you are of the tragedy and of my handiwork, you must fear the corrupt and the impure for it desires above all else to take you from me, and you above all else are most vulnerable to it. Keep to the roads I have shown you and beware the places where the corruption spreads.

You must not spill the blood of each other nor make war against each other for this is tragedy. You must not be cruel to any living thing for this is tragedy. You must never tame and cage but only hunt and grow for all else is tragedy."

Speaking to them thus, he declared a great festival and danced among the People for many years. Then came a call from deep heaven and Batu knew he must go.

'I will return one day, my children,' he said before he lifted his feet to the low roads and climbed to roads we still may not travel and was gone. But we, the People, believe him and know he will return to us and set right all that has been touched by tragedy."

"When is he coming, mama?" Issu looked at her mother with those great jade eyes.

Satori kissed her cheek. "Soon, little one, we know not for sure but soon. Goodnight, little dewdrop."

"Goodnight, mama." Issu laid her head against her pillows as Satori picked up her candle. Beyond the open window, lights began to go out in the houses of Four Kings, as humans began to snuff out their own candles and lanterns. The wind whispered through the trees in the forest beyond, moonlight dappling the ground beneath the leaves, its bluish glow casting strange shadows over the rocks and hills.

Then, Satori saw it, just at the edge of the forest: eyes a glittering blue like the moon itself. Eyes questing out in the night just like hers. The moon-shadow was tall and slender, almost passing for another of the trees.

In an instant, their eyes met: a moment of mirrored curiosity of mirrored longing. Satori didn't blink, did not bother to snuff out the candle burning low in her hand. She simply looked into the stranger's eyes, the stranger that felt so much like a friend.

A hand emerged from the shadow, a brilliantly pure white and it gestured to her, and she thought she could almost hear words on the wind as if the trees were mouthing "Come."

Satori walked out her door, leaving it flapping in the night air, letting the candle slip from her hand and extinguish itself in the dirt. She walked, her blood screaming at her. She ran, her eyes streaming with longing tears, burning tears.

She fought with every step to keep her eyes open, to keep looking, to keep this moon-shadow trapped, anchored to her sight. As she reached the edge fo the forest, a shadow hid the moon, and she reached out to a hand that was no longer there.

The yawning mouth of the wood, opened wide and she could see the paths, the paths her people had walked in days of old, laid out in starlight and shadow before her. She knew if she only followed, only walked that road she might be free and never turn back.

Clack, clack, clack. The wind had picked up, slamming the open door against the side of her house where her darling daughter slept, expecting her mother to be there when she opened her eyes.

In an instant of hesitation, Satori looked back to the old oak door, swinging in the night breeze, to the house her father had built. Behind her, the whispering stopped. Spinning around, the great voice that had seemed to fill everything had gone silent and the wood was dark, old, and alien once more.

Satori fell to her knees, tears streaming with renewed vigor at the foot of the impenetrable darkness as the door behind her went clack, clack, clack.