A Failure of a High Elf (Book One)

3.1

Written: 8/3/23
Word Count: 1,076

Runy was a coppery, feathery horse who doubled as the Great Goddess's messenger of the dead.

"Slow—slow down!" I gripped the reins with locked fingers, each joint stiff to the extreme. My knees dug into Runy's sides, mere pressure points away from choking the air out of the poor beast's lungs.

Below us, a giant canyon glittered under the sun, the sparkling water at least a peaceful promise for instant death. We trotted—trotted—along the edge of the valley, the grass sparse but still lime-green. These were the mountains the Hesperides lived, the only other creatures on the Goddess's Femur who dared look like the Royal Family.

And they were mere sun nymphs.

The peaks here were treacherously jagged, like earthen fingers vying into the sky and begging the Goddess for mercy.

After four days on this detrimental excursion, my back had been through it. Even the time when I was younger and got knocked into by a runaway barrel filled to the brim with purplish, sloshing mead and flattened out on the cobblestone streets of Daisy Village, had felt better than this. Plus, the people from that cozy peasant's town feared retribution if they laughed at me.

The peasants outside of the Capital and all its surrounding villages, towns, and cities...didn't bother.

More than once now, I'd stopped to ask for better directions than a straight line running through the most inappropriate map of the Femur I'd ever seen, and been met with scoffs and titters. Really, the map hadn't even wrinkled in age or wind abuse. That should have been a major clue not to touch it, for it was also the only brand sitting on the shelves in abundance.

"Are you sure about...this one?" The clerk had asked me at the little visitors' welcome hut on the very edge of Grand Willows, another quaint village near my family's home. This one was further south and my best guess on how to get to the Western Sector without falling into Disastraveritous.

"Yes, please," I'd replied, my ignorance downright criminal.

I'd never seen a map of the Goddess's Femur that only included the portal transport locations, the volcano as a hatch-marked oval, and the only towns labeled on the map were "Capital" and "Tree." "Tree," of course, meant the Ancient Redwood far in the West on the edge of the dragon wilds, where all of Elven history was recorded.

But to dismiss it under the label of "Tree..."

Aunt Rosetta's village wasn't even a lazy dot. I didn't think anyone had ever used or returned these maps when they didn't need them anymore. Its pristine white edges curled only faintly from being unrolled for the first time, the wax paper edges shining brilliantly under the sun's rays.

The map was now bent all over the place, wedged half under my seat in Runy's saddle. It had new ink marks from my observations, lines where the ink had slid away on its shiny surface, mingling with other marks I'd made some days before. Each village I spotted, and each traveler, and each farmer out on their pastures, I stopped and asked if they knew where the Dark Elf Miners lived.

Without Cauline's snacks, I would have died in a ravine by now. Sure, all the fluffy grass and willowy trees of Pixie Territory looked beautiful and bountiful, filled with any number of snacks to graze on.

"My one chance to become one with the nature around me and my one chance to possibly get my instincts under control by communing with the source of my powers, yet I can't get off this damn horse." I kicked my legs in the stirrups a little. Runy tilted her neck, sliding her white mane around in a clear order to cease all unnecessary movements.

"Agh, even my horse hates me?" I cried, enjoying listening to the echo of my voice as we continued along the edge of the ravine. "We're going to die out here, Runy. We're really going to die."

I'd made up my mind to hand the horse off to the next welcome center hut to be returned to my family, if there were any left in the Middle Sector that mingled with Pixie Territory.

No sense in us both dying, for I was surely going to die out there.

The ravine trailed as far ahead as I could see. On my inked-up map, I squinted against the dying light to make sense of the three jagged lines I'd made after learning from a sheep herder that there were only narrow swathes of land between three ravines—claws, he'd called them—that arrayed out from the Hesperides like stands in an open-air auditorium.

Runy and I traveled along the one closest to the fingers jutting into the sky in the hopes of more easily navigating the downward slope to lower, marshy land. The herder had warned me the other two prongs didn't slope at all. They just ended as cliffs overlooking a low, marshy area with limited visibility. The herder didn't know how long the marsh would continue, nor if I would pop out the other end dangling above a volcano...but, surely, someone must still live along the ravines to ask before I could get to that point.

"The two are blocked off at the end," the herder had told me. "Too many lost sheep, all to the damn cliffs. The pastures' borders keep going, you see. Ain't nothing to worry about owning rights this far out in the Mids."

So we traveled, right along the ravine closest to the Hesperides and their dangerous points, the water of the stream below glittering like an inviting bed made of rocks, cold, and death.

We were surely going to die.

"How is my dorm luggage getting there?" I lamented where no one could see me. "Why couldn't I trail behind it? Why be so obvious you're trying to kill me, Father?"

"Hey!" The sound of a child's piercing shriek zinged straight up my spine. In a moment of utter synchronization, Runy bucked high into the sky while I clung on for dear life.

I wasn't sure if I was screaming, or the horse was screaming.

"Hey! Elf lady!"

The voice echoed, that bothersome, high-pitched tone appearing all around me. It only took a few desperate, wide-reaching glances to notice the Hesperide child standing on one of the smaller, more jagged fingers. Only the ravine with its glittering blue stream stood between us.