“Well then, shall we head back?”
“Yep!”
People now called this city “Torch Port.”
Chapter 2
That night, after I fell asleep in my home in Torch Port, I had a dream.
It was a dream of that city of the dead, of which I had such fond memories.
“Listen closely, Will. What, in fact, are the fae?” Gus, with his pale blue body, spoke slowly while stroking his chin. “In a time beyond time, the God of Creation spoke the Words, engraved the Signs, made the sun and the moon, split day from night, and gathered water to separate the oceans and the earth. Fire was born, wind was born, trees were born. It was before gods, and before people.”
Blood was there too, leaning his skeletal body against the wall, hearing Gus’s lesson but not listening to it. It was a peaceful moment in the afternoon.
“Within the water, earth, fire, air, and trees dwell the great Words of the First God. They were more than natural phenomena; they possessed clear individual will.”
“Phenomena with minds of their own?”
“It may be hard for you to imagine… Hmm, especially since there are no elementalists here. If there had been, I could have had them make the sylphs dance or something; that would have made the explanation simple. Well, no matter.” Gus shook his head.
That “no matter” didn’t mean “it doesn’t matter anyway”—rather, it meant
“you will meet one before long, so you simply need to keep this in the back of your mind.” And in actual fact, I did meet Menel shortly after, and could now understand what Gus meant by “phenomena with individual will.”
“Owing to the fact that they had wills of their own, these fae split into two types after their creation. The first was a long-lived way of existence spent clinging to unstable phenomena along with the lesser minions, that is, the fairies and elementals. If an elementalist were to go to a mountain of fire, even today he should be able to see a great fae known as a Lord of Fire there, with elementals of fire obeying its will. In the depths of the vast oceans there would drift a Lord of the Sea, and deep in an ocean of trees a Lord of the Woods would stand silent.”
Gus paused. “Elementalists, incidentally, are those who can perceive and communicate with the fae and fairies who exist in the invisible world overlapping our transient one. Shamans, in other words.”
As I listened to Gus, I nodded and took notes. There was no better way of remembering things than listening, thinking, and writing.
“The other group, however, chose a different path.”
“A different path?”
“Not the nebulous existence of the fae, omnipresent within phenomena, sometimes existing, sometimes not, perhaps dead, perhaps alive, and at some point becoming too indistinct to perceive. Instead, they chose to live a crystal-clear existence, and die a crystal-clear death. In other words, the human way of life.”
I found it slightly amusing that Gus the ghost was the one saying this to me.
He seemed to be aware of this and shrugged his shoulders. “They fell in love with humanity.”
His uncharacteristically romantic phrasing caused Blood to make a sound like he was spitting out a drink. Gus instantly willed a small pebble to fly in his direction.
“Ow! What was that for, old man?!”
“You know what! Now pipe down!”
After muttering irritably under his breath for a moment, Gus continued. “Of the elementals who longed for life with a body of flesh, those who belonged to the air, water, and trees brought the matter up with the goddess of the forest, Rhea Silvia. She was a pleasure-seeker, impulsive and fickle, but that was why she was able to see eye to eye with the ever-changing phenomena that the fae were.”
And the goddess saw fit to grant the fae what they desired.
“Thus the elves were born as the minions of the goddess Rhea Silvia. They were a race with lives as long as the trees, as swift as a gale, and as graceful as a flowing spring. That goddess who lived for love took the fae’s admiration for humans into account, and made it so that the two races would be compatible. It is said that this is the reason that humans and elves can produce mixed-blood children.”
Gus shrugged his shoulders. “But there is an old saying: ‘The neighbor’s wheat looks riper.’ It is sometimes the case that a thing can only be admired from a distance. Although some elves actively mingled with humans, there were also those who yearned for the time they were fae.”
He went on. “Those elves of ancient times, who lived with passion and mixed with people, disappeared naturally with time due to their mixed blood and natural lifespans. Even now, every once in a while, a half-elf will be born from two human parents — a remnant of those elder elves. Meanwhile, the elves who yearned for the days of the fae, and chose to live deep in the forest and insularly among their own kind, preserved their purity.”
“Uhh, I don’t—”
“I’m not trying to say one’s better than the other or make some kind of point here. I am simply telling you that there were two groups who each made different choices. Nothing more.”
It felt like a topic I could see myself sinking into thought over, but Gus seemed relatively content to brush it aside.
“Yeah, so, ’cause of all that, the elves who exist now are pretty unsocial.
They’re good guys if you get to know ’em, but that can take a while.” Blood added to Gus’s explanation. “They’re a skinny bunch, but quick on their feet, and they make good hunters and fighters. Many of ’em have what it takes to be elementalists, too. They go back to the fae, after all. Uh, the takeaway here is, don’t get in a fight with an elf in a forest. ’Cause that’s some scary shit.”
Blood then told me that there were apparently even some he had no idea what to make of, who had mastered elementalism to its utmost limits and could discard their body of flesh and turn back into a fae.
“Those stories are somewhat unreliable…” Gus said. “Though, if there were to be a being capable of such a thing, I doubt it would be anything other than an elf. They are the minions of the god of the forest, and the closest things there are to fae. They are close to human, and far from it, too. A great race.”
With that, Gus brought his talk about the elves to a close.
“But there were also some who obtained flesh-and-blood bodies in a different way: the fae of earth, rock, and fire. Earth and rock command the attribute of immutability, while fire controls destruction and creation. None of them were very close to the goddess Rhea Silvia, and neither did they long for the human way of life.”
“Really? Then why did they get physical bodies?”
“The object of their admiration was human technology. They found it incredibly fascinating, the way we extracted ore from the earth, heated it with fire, refined it, and made it into metal. It is said that fae and fairies are not generally too fond of metals and money, so these were certainly an odd group.”
He shrugged. “They made their way to see Blaze, god of fire and craft. Blaze was stubborn and spoke little, preferring to create and tinker, but he was also a god of battle and anger who, once enraged, would bring about terrible destruction. He exchanged brief words with the fae who had shown an interest in the industrial arts, and once he was sure of the strength of their determination, he nodded wordlessly, and granted them physical bodies as his own minions.”
Gus commented that so far this was the same as the elves.
“And so the race of dwarves was born as the minions of the fire god Blaze.
The dwarves were as unyielding as earth and stone. They lived long lives, could see through darkness like their way was lit by fire, and were skilled in the use of the furnace. But they were destined to deal in the metals the fae disliked, and so their nature started to diverge from the purity of the fae, and the fairies kept their distance. Due to this, there are no elementalists among them comparable to the elves.”