‘Then it was all for nothing,’ I blurted out. ‘Ashgaroth failed you.’
Nab looked down at the ground and was silent for a long time. When he spoke again there was sadness in his voice but there was also hope.
‘The Urkku,’ he said, ‘were created out of hatred, for revenge. They had no choice in the way they acted. But they are no more and because of what we did there is now a world peopled only by the Eldron. They have a choice; that is what separated them from the Urkku. The story then is not yet ended, for whether or not we have failed is for you and yours to decide. You are all the children of the Eldron.’
‘What of Beth and Brock, Warrigal, Perryfoot and Sam?’ I asked him. ‘And what of the elves; did they perish with the old world?’
‘When the old world destroyed itself, ’ he said, ‘the elves remained. They cured the wounds and healed the scars left by the Urkku and gradually they, with the help of Ashgaroth, brought the world back to its natural state. All this time we slept and it was only when the task had been completed that Ashgaroth released us from sleep. The elves are always here. As for the rest of us, Ashgaroth granted us the immortality of the elves. We live together still in the forests and the hills. They have seen you and sometimes you may have seen them though they, like all the other animals, have become wary now even of the Eldron for many of them have denied their true nature and grown similar in their ways to the old Urkku. ’ He paused and then as the sun began to sink in the evening sky he got up. ‘I must go now,’ he said. ‘Beth will be waiting for me,’ and he walked off over the snow towards the edge of the trees. I sat, still shaken by all that he had told me, and watched him go. He was about to enter the darkness of the forest when I thought I saw, coming out to meet him, a little group of animals. With my heart thumping wildly in my chest I stared hard through the gloom of the evening and was almost certain that I could make out the shapes of a badger, a dog, a hare and, flying low over their heads, a large brown owl. Then just behind them another figure; the figure of an old lady with her arms outstretched to greet him. I watched them for a second or two and they seemed in turn to be looking at me. Then suddenly they were gone, swallowed up by the forest.