The Chronicles Of The Council #1: The Sun's Tears

Chapter 28: Laelia - Departure

Aedan had already dismounted by the time I arrived and awaits me at the base of the trees. He offers me his cupped hands. I gently step on them as I push myself up on his shoulder and then reach for the familiar groove. The first time Aedan and I ascended the tree it took forever, and both of us nearly fell quite a few times. With decades of practice it now only takes us a few minutes to reach the canopy.

The rustle of leaves behind me reassures me that Aedan is following on my heels.

"Why can't she just live on the ground, in a normal home, like a normal elf?" Aedan huffs as we approached the wooden platform that is now covered with moss and lichen.

"Because Aedan-child, the ground isn't safe. It has never been safe, but I am safe in my little tree," my aunt's sepulchral voice echoes over the forest roof. Her voice is like hollow caves with glowing embers creating shadow lives on the abandoned walls. 

"And you cannot use a normal rope ladder and throw it down when we come to visit you?" I ask in my brother's defence.

"Child of Darkness, I do not insult you and your ways when I come to visit you, so you will not insult my home," she sissed.

Darkness, in this case, is most definitely my mother. However, I cannot be sure. Idunn rarely makes sense. When has she ever come to visit us? She has been banned from entering any elfish city.

I pull myself through the hatch. Before I can help Aedan up, Idunn throws me against the floor and holds a dagger to my throat. Her eyes are wild, and for the first time in my life, I see my aunt's menacing madness. She has never threatened my life before now, but the dark look on her face tells me that that one wrong word would end in my death.

I stare at her demented pale eyes. Her skeleton hand stretches out to my hair lazily. Her skin is so thin that I can see the underground table of veins beneath it. Thin crooked claws of a raven weave through my hair until she yanks on one of my curls.

"Little Laelia, I just need a lock of your hair," she says as she slowly removes the cold dagger from my throat and cuts a piece off.

Aedan, aghast at the shocking event, offers me his paled hand and pulls me up.

"I am glad you came, Aedan Moonshine."

"I needed to talk to Laelia in private, and I need your advice, Wise Eyes."

"My house is the safest place in all of ArBrae," she shouts over the mountain tops with outstretched arms.

"Something happened last night."

She looks at him blankly.

"It was our Millennium."

She looks even more befuddled then she grabs my palm and slices across it with her dagger. She pushes Aedan back when he lunges forward to help me. He falls into a pile of netting and clothes.

"I need Laelia's hair and her blood because even if she has changed, she remains the same," she says as she hands me a piece of cloth from the pile Aedan fell into. 

"Wrap it around your hand, or have you forgotten to care?"

I have no idea what the second part of her sentence means, but I obey her command.

"You are concerned because Laelia did not change," she says nodding her head vigorously. The birds' nests in her hair bob with as her head moves.

Aedan and I once counted three nests, but we might have been mistaken, because the rest of the tangle of junk in her hair misled us, and we might have thought that some of the nests in her hair were only twigs. She also has forty-seven broken shells woven into her hair, but again, we might have counted wrong. We've seen ten different golden trinkets in the mesh. One is of a small lion, roaring on its hind legs. There is also a bear with ruby eyes and a fish spewing a blue sapphire fountain. I once thought that I saw a small bone, like the finger bone of a newborn, hidden among her ghastly decorations.

"Yes."

"Yet her ears are not as it was."

"It is only my ears that have changed."

"I am not stupid. Mad, yes, most definitely! But I have forgotten what you yet need to know!"

She turns away and takes a few things from her cupboard.

"Laelia changed. It just took longer."

"And my loss of memory? And the path Aedan sent me on? And his loss of memory?"

"Aedan does what he thinks is best."

It does not shed any light on the matter.

"Moonchild and Lover of the Sun, I would not worry about this anymore. You should go where you are going. You cannot leave the path of fate."

"Thank you, Idunn," Aedan affirms.

"Do not thank me, for I have not done anything. It is all I could have done."

We each give her a quick hug and descend.

Aedan and I gallop forwards. We catch up to the company about two hours later. Nobody spares us a glance, except, of course, Elorhim who glares at us in distaste.