She knew that she wasn't supposed to be out this far and she giggled a bit to herself as she ducked under and through branches, knowing full well that there wasn't really anyone in the town she had come from that could chase her through the woods. Not even her best friend whom she had shown the way to many times could keep up with her. She ducked under the same low hanging branch, and skipped lightly over the exposed tree roots, letting her momentum carry her down and over the next hill. Reaching her hand out, she pushed the next branch aside, and with the next one she would latch onto it with her hand, allowing it to suddenly shift her direction. Today she would go left.
"Here's the tricky part!!" she called back to the few who would give chase to her. In that glimpse she realized that there was only one person still even attempting to catch up and of course it was Emily. Unfortunately for her, Emily was never able to keep up with the chase either and after only a bit farther into the woods even she was gone from sight. Gwendolynn loved the woods; especially during the summer months when everything was so colorful and full of life. She laughed out loud to herself before plopping down onto the ground, staring up into the trees above, their branches and leaves all but blocking the sun from view. It had been a while since this fun chase of hers actually made her sweat, and she only realized that much when a gentle breeze blew past her, carrying the faint scent of honeysuckle on it. She inhaled it deep through her nose, and the smells that the forest carried were one of the many reasons she always loved it. This was her home, and it always had been; Familiar, yet magical.
A small animal caught her eye, and she snapped her head in its direction. "Was that a squirrel?" she asked herself, but she knew it was too big to be one of those. "Or a cat?" she asked in response to her own thoughts. Soon the small black furry creature appeared on the opposite side of a tree she just watched it vanish behind.
….It was indeed a cat, and she felt like petting this cat. She slowly rose to a standing position again, and started making meowing noises toward the creature, who didn't turn to face her before it raised its tail and took off into the woods. Gwendolynn, feeling playful, decided to give chase to the small mammal.
Normally she would be on the other end of these chases, and being the one behind and not as agile as her quarry was almost infuriating for a couple of seconds. The creature climbed up a tree, and started jumping from branch to branch. Of course this didn't stop Gwendolynn who was probably almost as agile as the cat was; instead of climbing branches after it, she simply ran underneath of it as it continued to dart higher and higher. She figured that eventually it would run out of trees to jump to, and then it would run out of height to climb upward. She formulated this strategy before resolving to climb the next tree in her head. If it jumped down while it was not directly above her, then that would make its get-away that much easier. If she ha-
THWAP!!!
She was pretty sure that she wasn't going to catch this cat anymore, and staggering back after running full speed into a stone wall was certainly not an ideal way to pursue anything. She held the sides of her head through her thick red hair, closing her eyes and shaking her head a couple of times. "Damned cat…." she muttered, letting her eyes open slowly against the newly formed headache she had. "More importantly, what is a random stone wall doing out this way?" she asked, and pressed her hand against it. The rock was cold, and uneven, and formed a rather tall wall wrapped around….this tree?
As she examined it, the wall was built almost completely around this tree, with patches of green moss and vines entangled within the separations between the stones. She rubbed the stones with her hand again, almost as if to make sure that they were in fact stones. This tree was certainly not a very narrow tree, easily being over 3 or 4 times her own arm span around. She took a couple of steps back, and realized that the vines that crept up the tree formed a barrier of shrubbery between this tree and any other large trees around it. Was this some kind of…..wall? If it was, she had to find a way around it, as she always did.
Clawing her way up a wall wasn't difficult. Clawing her way up a wall made of shrubbery and vines that would give a bit with each time she had tried to plant her hands or feet anywhere to make any form of progress, however, was trying. Eventually she was able to latch her hand onto the top of this seemingly naturally formed wall, and she hoisted herself upon it.
Looking over the landscape, she saw more than just trees wrapped in stone, although those were there too. There were cobblestone roads, and the houses weren't made of timber or stone as most of the houses she had known were. These houses were made of trees shaped and formed to create arched houses, with more vines and plants she had never seen before lining what she imagined were the walls of the house. Being someone who was already quite a big fan of nature, this was WAY too cool for her to contain her excitement, and she all but jumped down from the wall wanting to explore more. She just HAD to tell Emily about this place, and show her.
"CRAP!!' She said, catching herself as she almost fell into this city, clamoring back onto the crest of the wall. "I really should have Emily with me….she wouldn't believe me if I came back only talking about all of this." After that resolution, she climbed back down the wall, and made her way back to their hometown.
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It didn't take long to show Emily the way, and just as she had guessed, Emily was cynical as she always was. Once they reached the wall of vines, however….
"Holy shit…." Emily said, her jaw dropping at the sight of what looked like a naturally grown city wall. She took much more time to observe her surroundings than Gwendolynn did, and she even started to study the plants that made up the wall, going so far as to count the number of points on the leaves.
"What're you doing?!" Gwendolynn joked to her friend, pushing her playfully. "Ready to climb?" she continued, and began clawing at the wall. This time, she would hold the same places that she knew were stable from the last climb.
"Would it change anything if I said no?" Emily retorted apathetically, rolling her eyes. "You think we're going to climb this ten foot bramblebush?" she continued, but before she could even return to eye contact with Gwendolynn, she was already a good bit of the way up the wall. Emily shook her head, not wanting to roll her eyes so far that she'd see her own brain, and started following in the notches and footholds that Gwendolynn had made.
"Which one do you think is your favorite?" Gwendolynn asked Emily as they crested the wall, Emily much more winded than Gwendolynn.
"Favorite wh--" she started, "Oh my Goddess…." Emily said, almost gasping at the sight of these structures. Each one was unique, some were triangular prisms, others were pyramids, others almost perfect spheres, but all of them were twisted vines and plants entirely, with a couple of rocks bordering holes in the walls if they had windows. Upon closer inspection, Emily started to notice something even stranger. Not only was this town not on any map, but why wasn't anyone here? A lot of the buildings, while made of plants, had marks of destruction nonetheless. There was a battle here, and it couldn't have been that long ago. "I think…" she scanned what was becoming more of an ancient battlefield to her, "That one, that has a really cool black flame design going up the side of it." she pointed to the spherical house that was in what was probably the middle of this town.
"I figured you would like that one!!" Gwendolynn said, playfully shoving Emily again. Emily latched onto her arms in a deathgrip out of sheer instinct, yelping as she lunged to her friend.
"YOU KNOW I'M AFRAID OF HEIGHTS, YOU ASSHOLE!!" Emily yelled, trying to regain her balance by tightening her grip on Gwendolynn's shoulder. Gwendolynn simply laughed, holding her friend in the best hug she could manage.
"Come on, we have to get down sooner or later," Gwendolynn replied, before she leaned to start down the other side, "We have to explore this!!" she continued.
"Oh…..fine." Emily huffed, before moving her grip to the wall of vines beneath her. Gwendolynn started down the side of the wall, easily dropping from branch to branch. Emily on the other hand, would take a bit more time to get down.
Gwendolynn made it down first, and observed this area with more awe than even before. A thud behind her let her know that her friend had just landed behind her safely as well.
"I've never seen anything like this…." Gwendolynn stated, before starting to wander into the streets.
"Wait." Emily said, grabbing her shoulder, "I don't really like the look of this place. I mean, yeah, it's cool and all, but…..why do some of the buildings look burnt? And why is this town not on any of our maps of the area? And why isn't anyone here?!" Emily barraged her with questions. Gwendolynn, of course, wasn't really listening to the severity in Emily's voice, and soon a silence fell between them.
"But what if," Gwendolynn started, "We find something AWESOME?!?!" she said excitedly, before walking quickly down the road ahead of her.
"We already did!" Emily yelled just before stomping after her as Gwendolynn made her way through the town.
Gwendolynn could not get enough of the beauty of this place. She loved every piece of it….even the broken doorways and blown out windows….and slowly it dawned on her that this place was in fact abandoned. She stopped at what looked like a fountain no longer functioning in the middle of the town, and looked into the murky green pool of water that remained at the bottom. She started to trace the engraving on the lip of the fountain with her fingertips as she walked around to one side of it. She couldn't explain it, but she somehow knew what these sigils were. They meant something to her, and she didn't know what.
"Do you have to poke at everything you come across?" Emily said, finally catching back up to her friend who was encircling this fountain much slower than she had moved across the roadways.
"Boop." Gwendolynn said, before poking Emily on the nose, who swatted her friend's hand away far too late, and Gwendolynn laughed again. "This place is really cool." Gwendolynn continued her excitement.
"If you really think so, why do you sound, like, four percent less enthusiastic than you were when we first got here?" Emily countered, and she was right. Something was off about this place.
"I'm sure the more I explore the more I'll learn. We should try to find out who lived here, and how long ago they had lived here!" Gwendolynn stated before lunging toward an open door on a building nearby, slowing her pace as she entered. Emily followed her inside, and Gwendolynn''s attitude quickly went from chipper to somber, as she saw the carnage inside. There was dried blood and partially decayed organs splayed across the entirety of what would have otherwise surely been a beautiful house. The table and chairs that lie next to the entrance were cast aside and charred to match the dreadful thoughts that flashed through Gwendolynn's mind as she tried to understand what had turned this heaven into a hellscape. Everything in what she assumed was the living room was battered, destroyed, and burned, from the pictures that sat on the chimney sill, to the small toys that were still on the ground. The entire house had looked like some vicious creature made of fire and hatred had come damned close to razing the structure. Tufts of hair, bits of flesh and gore decorated every corner of this room, and whatever happened in here could only be described as horror. Gwendolynn went to take a step back, only to feel a sickeningly soft object under her foot, which she immediately recoiled her foot away from in shock.
"Now this is cool," Emily stated in a way that almost seemed psychotic. "I can't even imagine what went down here…." she said and her eyes widened as if to take in more of the carnage that was this first room of the house. Gwendolynn looked down at what she had stepped on, and it was a dismembered pointed ear, with bits of flesh and hair still clinging to what looked like it was either very poorly cut or simply ripped from whoever it originally belonged to. Gwendolynn could feel her pulse slowing in response, and while she had hunted and seen her fair share of blood before, this was something different entirely. "Did you step on that?!" Emily excitedly said turning to face her friend, only to see Gwendolynn pale and on the brink of tears.
"An ear…" was all that Gwendolynn could say before the wave of tears that she was holding back came flooding forward, and that coupled with how despicable the scene here was made her stomach wretch, and she quickly stumbled out of the house back toward the fountain.
Emily caught up to her mere seconds later before Gwendolynn collapsed in a seated position on the fountain outside. Emily was barely able to catch her before she collapsed face first toward the stone and she cradled her friend in her arms while holding Gwendolynn's head in her lap, instinctively pushing the hair back away from her face.
"Hey, hey, take it easy…." Emily tried to console her friend, "What was in there has to have been many, many years old." She reasoned, "There's no point in getting all blubbery about it now. Whatever happened there is in the past, okay?" she continued stroking her distressed friend's temple, and it seemed to be working.
"Elves….." Gwendolynn said, between sobs.
"Elves?" Emily asked.
"Mythical creatures?!" Gwendolynn's resolve was returning as she lifted her head to face Emily, her face still damp with tears, and her eyes still red and puffy. "They were real, and we…."
"We didn't do anything," Emily said, with her sorrow breaking through at the realization as well. These creatures weren't extinct for hundreds of years as they had been led to believe. This was recent. This would still be fresh, and both of them were lied to. "Someone else did this. I don't know who, but I know that I could never do anything like this to anything else." Gwendolynn's gaze grew cynical in nature, as she raised an eyebrow in doubt. "Look," Emily continued, "I know that I say things like 'cool' or 'awesome' when I see blood, but I'm not a maniac. Anyone who could ever have a heart would absolutely NOT be okay with letting anything that happened in there happen. I'm just a lot more used to seeing life's end…...I guess." Emily concluded, with sorrow cracking through her voice again.
Gwendolynn immediately felt remorse, "I'm sorry….I forgot that your brother…." she started to apologize.
"Forget it," Emily said back, and now it was the opposite of a few moments ago. Emily wiped one of her own tears away, "The past is the past, okay? There's no use in crying over the dead." Emily tried to use the same cold logic she had used on herself over and over again on Gwendolynn….
"But it sure feels nice, doesn't it?" Gwendolynn countered, trying desperately to smile through her own tears. The two laughed sincerely at this age-old joke that they had shared, and soon they both calmed back down to sniffles and light sobs. "It….just hit me really hard, ya know…." Gwendolynn started.
"Doesn't everything?" Emily wanted to roll her eyes again.
"Yeah!!" Gwendolynn objected, "BUT! ….To think that….they lived here….so close to us…." she mused to herself. "It's like seeing priceless art destroyed."
"Only you would be sad about a painting getting broken." Emily laughed, and Gwendolynn was finally able to laugh for a moment too. Another moment of silent solace came between the two. After a few moments Gwendolynn looked back to Emily.
"I'm going to explore one last thing….." Gwendolynn announced to Emily.
"Why?" Emily started, and Gwendolynn almost recoiled at the level of rudeness. "And what?" she almost redeemed herself.
"The building shaped like a ball…." Gwendolynn mused, pointing at the building a couple streets down, "I….I can't explain it, but I just need to see what's inside."
"Here you go again, just like you 'needed' to see what was in this abandoned city, right?" Emily quipped.
"Ouch," Gwendolynn responded, rubbing her shoulder as if she had been struck, "Do you have to be so rough?" she teased, pushing her shoulder into Emily as she stood and walked past her.
"I'll be here waiting!!" Emily shouted after her, sitting at the fountain, "And if you don't come back in 5 minutes, I'll come after you!!" Emily then laid on her back, gazing up at the sky that had now become a deep orange tint that let her know that dusk was upon them. "What if she really has been an elf all of this time?" Emily whispered to herself, once she was sure that Gwendolynn was out of ear shot.
_______________________
She would only look inside, that was it…..That was what she had told herself, at least. There was always tomorrow to come back here, right? Gwendolynn almost questioned her own coming into this place, but something in her seemed to call her inside. This wasn't the rampant gore that was in the last building, nor did it even seem particularly like living quarters. This was a building of faith. There were only 4 pews on each side, and Gwendolynn was almost a bit shocked that the inside of this building wasn't nearly as tattered as the rest of the town had appeared to be. She walked down the path in the middle, approaching the busted bronze statue of an elf that existed in the center of the table, the broken idol flanked by 2 unlit candles presumably used for some kind of religious ceremony. Without knowing or thinking why, Gwendolynn picked up the broken statue of the elf to realize that it looked uncannily like her. It had the same incredibly thick hair that she had that seemed to be frazzled out in all directions. It had the same slightly slanted eyes she remembered from her reflection, and those damned pointed ears she'd even been made of fun of for on a few occasions. Of course, all of this had to be just a coincidence…..right?
She placed the broken upper half of the statue above the bottom half, and grabbed a third chunk that made up what she imagined was the torso. Upon handling the bronze statue, she could see that it merely had a bronze coating, and the inside of it was a strange black metal that she had never seen before. Instinctively, like a child with a puzzle, she reassembled the statue, and set it back on the altar where it had come from. Instantly, it fell to pieces again, and she laughed.
"Why am I even doing this?" she asked herself, shaking her head when she realized she didn't have an answer. She moved to repair the statue again, and this time she tried to hold her hands in a way that would reveal as much of the completed relic as possible to her line of sight. Her thumb fumbled slightly, and she was sure that the one center part would fall once again…..but it didn't. She tilted her head in confusion, and slowly backed her hands off of the statue that somehow almost miraculously seemed to stand whole again, save for the cracks in the bronze surface.
"Welcome child," she heard a voice whisper to her, from somewhere she couldn't tell. Her eyes scanned the area as quickly as she could, but still she couldn't see anything.
"He-" she choked out. "Hello?" she asked…..well, who ever that could be.
"You are not alone," the whispers again came from within her mind it seemed, and as she exhaled, her breath cooled her lips slightly.
"Where are you?!" she called out, a bit more confidence in her words this time.
"I told you," Emily said as she pushed past the curtains that were the entrance to the temple, "I was sitting next to the fountain."
"Hey," Gwendolynn said, a bit uneasily at first, "I can tell you anything, right?" she smiled just as uneasy as her words that crackled through.
"Uh oh," Emily concluded mischief. "What did you break this time?" she tried to look past Emily, only to see the statue with cracks in it. "That thing?" she pointed.
"It has nothing to do with the busted statue." Gwendolynn replied.
"Doesn't look broken to me," Emily replied, "Or are you the one who dropped it and put the cracks in it?"
"We're getting off topic!!" Gwendolynn almost yelled, "Were you….ya know, whispering creepily….like….seconds ago?" she paused many times to hear how crazy she was sounding…..and she was sounding rather crazy if she'd say so herself.
"Uuuh…" Emily pretended to take a couple of seconds to think, "No." she stated, "No, I don't skulk around abandoned places, like you. Now, we have to get back to town before the sun sets. I don't know about you, but I'm not very good at seeing when there isn't any light, and I didn't bring any tinder because I wasn't expecting this game of yours to end up with camping in the woods while we have our duties tomorrow morning. Are ya comin or not? Because I sure as hell am not making it over that wall by myself." Emily tried to end on a playful note, but Gwendolynn was deep in thought.
"Huh?" she snapped out of her trance, "Right, yeah, let's get going…." Gwendolynn finished.
Most days as they walked home, they would summarize their days to each other when walking home at sunset. They made it a point and a habit to see each other at least once a day, and with how deep their friendship was, and for how long it had gone on, they both knew everything about the other. The only exception this time was that Gwendolynn was starting to have doubts about who she even was.
"My life…." Gwendolynn started after the silence had gotten to her. "Has all of it been a lie?" she asked, and Emily stared at her almost hurt by that question.
"That depends, have you ever once lied to yourself…." Emily responded. It seemed cold, even to her, but what else could she say.
"Do you think….." Gwendolynn started.
"Well….I have always known that you were different….." Emily again tried to comfort her friend. "I guess I never knew in what way you were different, or the severity of it for that matter…..But it's a hell of a possibility."
"I don't think so," Gwendolynn stated, as she looked upward at the sky with more resolve than Emily had ever seen, "I don't think it's a possibility, I think it's a fact….." she trailed off.
"And with this 'fact'" Emily started, "what do you plan to do?
"I want to learn what I've never learned." Gwendolynn almost cut her friend off.
"So…."
"Think about it…..If I am….you know….then that back there….my life could have been….." Gwendolynn paused, carefully considering her next words.
"Better?" Emily concluded her statement.
"No," Gwendolynn quickly shot back. "That's not….."
"Do you see what it was back there? That was carnage." Emily continued.
"But if I'm an elf, then…..should I have been…." Gwendolynn trailed off, and they both stopped walking when Emily suddenly hugged Gwendolynn much tighter than usual.
"Absolutely not." Emily assured her friend, "Imagine where we would be without you….."
"But," Gwendolynn countered, "Where I belong….."
"Where 'you' belong?" Emily backed off of her friend, making direct eye contact, "You belong where you feel you belong." Gwendolynn sighed in response.
"I just….." Gwendolynn stopped to collect her thoughts again, "I've loved my life here…..Everyone in town is my friend, and I don't have anything to gain by throwing that away…." she trailed off again as she started toward the town, Emily following behind her.
"But?" Emily asked, still trying to stay in Gwendolynn's field of vision.
"But I feel like I should at least take the time to learn about them…..I don't know where that will take me, but I know that I need to start there, back in that abandoned town…."
Another long silence fell between the two, and after a dozen or so paces, Emily sighed.
"Then I'll help you." Emily resolved.
"Even though you're afraid of heights?" Gwendolynn joked.
"I'm serious…." Emily started, "You might be friends with everyone back in town, but I'm barely friends with any of them..." Emily hurried to stand in front of Gwendolynn, blocking her path. "We've made this discovery together, so we're in this together. Okay?" She reached her hand out with uncharacteristic formality.
"Right," Gwendolynn assured her, grabbing her friend's arm by the wrist, and they both exchanged a handshake much the same way that Knights would. "We're in this together."