While Azuri considered struggling, being uncertain whether he would survive the fall, and doubtful of reclaiming his true form without Elani's assistance, he resigned himself to his only remaining action. When they rushed for the gyrating lens, which numbed all color to grey, and drowned all noise in its whispering pulse, Azuri closed his eyes...
...and smelled flowers. From the chill of the Abyssal oasis, they had plunged into a moist heat, so pleasant that he opened his eyes to the flap and squawk of the blackbird, and a creamy white fog obscuring all but the barest suggestion of trees.
Alighting on a twisted tree bent nearly perpendicular to the misty outlines, the bird released the snake none-too-gently upon its iron-hard bark, then, with a sarcastic crook of its talon, dispelled both enchantments. While she slipped one leg over another in a graceful pose, Azuri flopped forward, his arms and legs dangling on both sides of the trunk.
"You might have spared my dignity," said Azuri.
"Like you did?"
"I was saving you," he grumbled.
"So was I," she growled. "Against my father's orders, I might add."
"And Ialuna?"
"If we are lucky, she is dead. Even if she was lucky, she didn't know our real plan and likely fled to Alfyria. Also dead. Where are we?"
"I think..." Elani glanced at the misty outline of their perch. When she jumped up and down on the vague silhouette, it creaked and sprang back, making Azuri lurch forward to clasp the trunk with both hands. "...is it a tree?"
"That's precious, even for you," scowled Azuri. "I meant what world, if not what city."
Elani's tone was smug. "You've never been here, have you?"
"I promise to be astonished, after you enlighten me."
"As there's only one city here, this place is more wilderness than world."
"Only one?" Azuri gazed down into the mist. While the obscuring vapors were nearly opaque, this bit of information made sense of the vague silhouettes. They stood not on a fallen tree trunk, but on its tenderest bough. Several yards down, their branch dovetailed into another, then mingled with the blinding fog, erasing all distinction. Behind him, the wooden wall ascending into the haze was uneven and crinkled—tree bark. Realizing where he was, Azuri quailed, for while serving as the High Tzhurarkh's envoy had made him acquaintances of all shapes and sizes, one particular monster had ruined any fellow-feeling he once had for giants.
"Nymerea." Azuri broke the silence as if with great reluctance. "This is the Monster World."
While the giants inspired their world's nickname, everything on Nymerea was a hulking brute, not only its sentients, but the grass, beasts...and trees. While Azuri had thought their colossal perch a tree ravaged by storms, it was but a monstrous branch jutting from an unimaginably bent tree trunk,
towering through the mist to an unthinkable scale.
In reversing the gigantic tree limb's imperceptible taper, Azuri approached the tree's trunk.
"Where are you going?" asked Elani.
"I must see it with my own eyes," said Azuri. "Conceive it by myself."
"Is it any different from Alfyria?" Elani smiled smugly. "A place too immense to see or comprehend?"
Speak for yourself, he wanted to sneer, but as the words sprang to his lips, they died in the thick fog, having collided with the vast, crabbed wall of bark, which disclosed no clue to the tree's size and mass, and no other feature aside from the gaping blackness below.
"Is that a cave?"
"Remember where we are, Azuri."
He laughed. "It's a knothole. Is that the way out?"
"In a sense," she snickered. "Whatever slithers in there would make short work of us."
"We can't roost here forever."
"Of course not. While we must wait, we're to be collected."
"You're to be collected. I'm anything but calm." Azuri smiled wryly. He would have liked to savor the wordplay, and banter longer with the clever wood-witch, but there were too many questions. "It makes no sense." Azuri shook his head and sighed. "I've seen giants. In the embassy. They're only four times the height of an Alfyrian. Why should their trees be such immensities?"
"You assume too much, Azuri. Perhaps giants aren't the elves or humans of their world, but the goblins?"
"I wouldn't share your speculation with many giants," said Azuri. "With any. They're rather intolerant, and curious about new foods."
"The point remains. An Alfyrian should know that the scales of other worlds needn't hold true here."
"You're enjoying this."
"If I am, forgive me. Though my father prepared me for these wonders, my mind leaves human tracks."
Azuri rolled his eyes. "If you had wanted to be grateful, you might have spared me earlier."
"I didn't know you that well, Azuri. You took liberties I wouldn't allow any man."
"I'm not speaking of the low blow—in fact, let's agree never to speak of that again. I meant on Alfyria. You had only just facilitated my escape when you delivered me up to your father, who, with his choice words, rendered me his puppet." For all her elven blood, Elani had been ill prepared for Julaba, where she balked at the elite geometry of the Elven World, so that his rescuer often had to be led by the hand and guided by voice, having willfully closed out the higher order by squeezing her eyes shut.
"Why would that hurt your feelings? Should I not be my father's daughter?"
"For a moment, you reminded me of my own."
Elani's face became withdrawn, then recessed again into shame and the darkening cowl of her cloak. "More than once, Azuri, you were a great help in my regaining my equanimity." As the shadows of suppressed emotion tangled in her face, a snarl won out, drawing the rest in line. Whether her tamed glowering was sad or angry, he could not be certain, but he suspected the witch had little sympathy for anything that had once crawled before her.
While Azuri's feelings warred as well, he was full elf, centuries older, and better at composing an artful mask. Even as she held Azuri's hand, and his measured voice steered her through the wicked angles of Alfyria, he had resented her touch, not from any instinctive dislike, but from finding himself involuntarily attracted to the daughter of this conspirator.
"What should I have done?" Her tone was black with venom. "While we are not so unlike that you cannot advise me, you are more diplomat than spy, and with me it is vice versa. We each have secrets the other would not like, Azuri."
Yielding to a sudden instinct to sequester himself from this half-human shrew, Azuri flung himself halfway over the bough above, grasped a blossoming sprig, dragged himself to all fours, then rose to his feet.
"What are you doing?"
"It may only be a state of mind, but the air seems cleaner here."
"Remember, I'm to be collected. They're not expecting you."
"Don't give me another thought. This tree is as big as a world. I have everything I need right here." While Azuri aimed at cheery optimism, he succumbed to a sullen, creeping sarcasm.
"There are things...creatures..." Infected by both the breathlessness of exhaustion and a puff of exasperation, Elani threw her hands in the air and turned her back on Azuri.
From that bough, it was only another crawl to a higher one studded with shorn leaves, buds, and blossoms, and so neatly nibbled, it was as if a flock of dainty sheep had emerged from the knothole, dined on petals and leaves, then tiptoed back in the titanic tree.
While his interest was piqued by a tree big enough for grazing herbivores, this fascination died in thoughts of his daughter, who was not only a better student than he had been, but had fed these scientific leanings with a curiosity that often seemed a hybrid of obsession and wonder. Cyhari would have been fascinated by Nymerea's enormous fauna.
While Azuri had never been interested in nature, science, or magic, school had kindled his life-long interest in people, for even students, scholars, and other learners were only people, which is to say, political entities that did not know they wanted to be swayed to his point of view. As this interest had expanded, he had become an inveterate traveler, and soon accumulated a collection of experiences that served as worthwile conversation starters as he quietly amassed influence in the High Tzhurarkh's court.
All of it squandered by a drop in the giant's pouch. When his honor had become purely honorary, whatever standing remained to him he had steeped in blood. Now his reputation was only bad, as only ghouls would deign to hear tales of a coward, fugitive and murderer. He came back to himself with an unsettling chill.
"When I did penance in the tower, my grieving shudders felt less the pulse of life than the inevitable shroud of death. Even here, on this teeming world, I'm lost in the swarm. Whether you rescued me from my cell, or my self, it means nothing if the creeping tip of fate's infestation draws me back into the giant's pouch."
"I can hear you."
"Do you wonder about fate?" Azuri called back.
"Only how to change it."
"Can it? How long have you followed in your father's shadow?"
"Decades. I'm swamped in it."
Azuri chuckled. "You're not that old."
"Being old was something I changed, Azuri."
"Than that felon did give you kinulcra. Why am I not surprised?"
"As an exile, he would have been justified. But while the law did not stay his hand, custom did. When he chose a human life for me, I found my own way."
Azuri's sandles tingled. Far-off rustles whispered, then clicked, and as it rose to an intense scribbling, then scraping, he glanced down both sides of the wide branch, but saw only boughs trembling in the breeze. If they seemed to purr, he told himself, it was only his seething mind. "And you sought him out? You're more forgiving than I am."
"Who said I forgave Frellyx? I hate my father."
"Then why are we here?"
"Can I not want something of my own?" By the creaking of the lower branch, the swaying of its attached boughs, and her light step to and fro, Azuri gathered that she was pacing the branch.
"Then you want nothing good," he said, "for nothing good can come from the Monster World."
"And which good things came from Alfyria? Their ancient colonies where my ancestors were slain and enslaved, and now gamble their wages in decadent casinos, or do you mean their vainglorious architecture? Or is it the kinulcra, hoarded not in prudence, but in spite, knowing they could share some of their vast reserves with other worlds." When she sighed and stopped pacing, her branch bobbed up and down. "Was that you, Azuri?"
"Was what?"
"Not that any worlds or peoples are good, Azuri. Not even Abyssal oases, for all their greenery and solitude, have any stock in goodness. With nothing good to want, pardon me for wanting choice booty from the ashes."
When a nauseating drawn-out gargle came from under the branch, Azuri stepped back to the chilled tree bark, gripped the trunk, and peered down into the mist..
"Azuri!" cried Elani.
The retch stretched even longer, and was rendered even more noisome by a spine-shuddering screech of splintering wood, as the thing poked its shaggy head atop the branch, and the rest of the hulk shimmied up after. Golden leaves feathered it like armor scales, while ivy green crowned and maned its spasmodic, booming roar, showing spiny teeth like sabres. While it trailed vines for a tail, its ferocity left little doubt this massive beast was more lion than orchid.
Azuri now clutched the shakashia. While the shortsword drew but an estranged phantom of his iluree, the heirloom blade dishonored and revoked by his crime, this unfamiliar weapon cut new, raw instincts, for he did not remember drawing it into hand, had just as unconsciously seized it from a knocked-out guard in his escape, and now, by some deeper instinct, which coupled nausea for the tree-beast with self-loathing, thrust for the leaves where its breast might beat--
--when he was yanked up, dangling and breathless, from the tightness constricting ribs and guts.
Each snaking, gripping finger was wider than his belt. As his eyes bulged, he gaped at a haggard beard even mangier than the orchid lion. Elani clasped the nape of its shaggy neck.
The giant's other hand steadied on a neighboring branch as it shuffled down the titanic tree's creaking, rattling branches. As if unwilling to allow Azuri a single breath, the giant did not unclench his fist, but hooked it around branches as his other hand found its next rung, so that every shimmy of their descent pressed Azuri to cold, mist-dampened bark, and sometimes raked him through cow-eyed tree grazers, gigantic birds asleep under shuddering feathers, and other vine-trailing, vegetal predators. Despite the hindrance of climbing with one and a half hands, the giant climbed like one long familiar with each handhold, foothold, and toehold.
As they descended, the mist thinned, until they landed with a boom on a broad dirt path cut through the colossal foliage. While the fog overcast this woodland, luminous shrubs and berries glittered in the shade.
When the mighty grip eased, Azuri's chest heaved, drawing in two gaping mouthfuls of air back to back. The thick, heavy air of the Monster World rushed to his head until his vision seemed to glitter.
"Won't you introduce your friend, Elani?"
"That's presumptuous," boomed the giant. "Friends are familiar, and I don't know either of you.
At best, I'm charmed, but we're hardly friends. And since our meeting portends disaster for our worlds,
daughter of Frellyx, I can't say I'm happy to know you. I'm Zvoru, caretaker of Gulzik Rhu. And your presumptuous friend?" Zvoru's brisk, stomping tread kicked up a cloud of dirt and scattered cawing and crowing horrors, whose leathery flap then winged for higher branches.
"Azuri."
After a silence, the giant said,"he shouldn't be here."
When the fingers tightened around Azuri, his pinched, burning chest, expanding against the crushing grip, felt like a soap bubble bracing against a hurricane.
"Azuri is my guest, Zvoru."
"Very good."
When the fingers loosened, a breath rushed in, and Azuri's bulging eyes seemed to seep back in,
with an uneasy bubbling around the lids.
Zvoru said, "Gulzik Rhu isn't homey, but it can accomodate two elves."
Azuri's glare scorched first Zvoru, then Elani. "Gulzik Rhu? Take us to Uenarak."
Zvoru's gigantic chuckle sounded like a battering ram blasting through wood. "While two elves are sometimes welcome in Uenarak, today's speakers promise blood. Morsels of any kind are unlikely to survive a feast."
"I might forgive you calling me a snack, but not 'two elves,'" snorted Azuri.
"What do you mean?"
Having stooped to peer at his mouthy handful, Zvoru then craned his neck to eye Elani. "While giants are a careful, meticulous people, your minuscule arguments and petty prejudices are too subtle to mean anything here. You can only split things so small before we say they do not exist."
When Zvoru strode under a ponderous branch broader than the keel of the widest Alfyrian ship, they were drowned in shade glinting only with the dull glimmers of a mammoth silver-gray fruit crawling with chittering vermin over and under its wriggling peel. As he loped along a bridge-sized tree root, a humongous worm glistened around an adjoining root as if it coiled around its better, nobler half.
"You're saying that if you can't see my bigotry, it's of no matter to you," said Azuri. "That's very high-minded. I shall follow your example."
The giant laughed. "Follow in my footsteps, little elf, and you'll twist an ankle in my boot print. The petty races are too shallow to tread as deep as giants."
"So they're all like this," muttered Azuri.
"What was that?"
"Pay no mind to me and my invisibilities," snarked Azuri, "elves should be neither heard not seen."
"To be fair, it depends on the elf."
Zvoru's massive strides and rapid step soon cleared the misty forest for a blinding spread of towering flowers, their azure and violet blossoms gaping for the streaming Abyss-light, and their pistils, stamens, and clouds of petals scuttling at the skies. As some pushed past his waist, and others shot to his breast, the giant mazed through the wild garden for its core, a tree wider than the foundation of any Alfyrian castle, its spreading branches rivaling the Palace of One Hundred Castles in magnitude.
If its splendor was somewhat less than the High Tzhurarkh's abode, it was no less awe-inspiring. One might sincerely call this monster a forest of its own, muzed Azuri.
"Here is Gulzik Rho," said Zvoru. "Largest of the Igresku trees, and shrine of The Nameless."
"I've heard of him," said Azuri. "You serve the Divine Atheist."
Zvoru scowled. "As Gulzik Rho's caretaker, I serve Nothing and No One. My calling is to beat any fools who come to worship. You can neither serve nor worship a Nameless Nothing. For the effrontery of subsuming this Nothing, my name was consigned to onlivion, and I am now known only by disillusionment, or Zvoru."
"Don't take this the wrong way, but I'll have a hard time calling you that, now that I know the meaning. What was your name?"
"Elves have such little brains," snorted Zvoru. "It was forgotten, as I just said."
"Who forgot it? You? Other, um—anti-worshipers? Can we call them laity? Were you forgotten by these, er, enthusiasts? As nothingness neither forgets nor remembers, I wouldn't presume that you mean your Divine Atheist him-er, itself--what is the opposite of it, anyway? Surely you weren't forgotten by your Holy Nothingness, as that begs so many questions."
"Worm-brains," muttered Zvoru.
"What?"
"One of our words for you tiny people. Not only do you teem everywhere to cross-purposes, but you cannot see five feet without the twining slither of words."
"On the contrary, I would not be here if I watched my steps, cared for my life, or thought of my future."
"But you're only a shard. Like people, concepts and ideas are bigger than words, not of one piece, and a fragment of the larger thought."
Under its palatial canopy of leaves, the trunk veered left and right in an endless horizon of tree, so that if Azuri had not been approaching it for a half an hour, he would have thought its trunk an enormous wooden wall. When Zvoru pushed inward, a patch of moss yielded, revealing an enormous hall which shot past the limits of Azuri's vision.
"As you can see, Igresku trees never stop growing."
"Even after carving a castle in it?" Elani said lightly. "That is impressive."
"It's hardly a castle," said Zvoru. "But yes, Igresku do cling to life."
"There's no kitchen?" said Azuri.
"You're hungry." Zvoru worried his massive lip. "While I am not such a rude host to entertain guests with no thought of serving a meal, I had only expected Elani. Share if you will. Frellyx will be along shortly."
Setting them atop a table which teetered as they found their footing, Zvoru took a bag of sweet-smelling cloth from a basket along the wall and poured out gigantic nuts, gourds, and melons, any one of which would have sated any elf.
"You mean us to eat this raw?" Elani put her hands on her hips.
"I thought elves don't like spicy foods."
"Since we're to be acquaintances for the evening," said Azuri, "I will elucidate some of our miniature eccentricities. Not only has half-elven Elani lived a wholly human life, she has recently returned to her spicy youth. As for me, I can stomach raw fruit, but have relished too much goblin fare not to regret every bland elvish meal."
"Moreover," said Elani, "these rinds and hulls are rock hard."
Sighing, Azuri unlimbered the shakashia and sliced the cap of a giant nut, then the stem of a gourd, opening their sweet, fragrant pith to clamor on his empty stomach, such exqusite hunger pangs that he lurched to his knees to scoop out an apple-sized crumb. While Azuri had to chew the dry kernel to powder before he could swallow, having done so, he craved more, for while the nut was dry and bitter, it sated his appetite.
"I'll leave you two songbirds." When Zvoru turned to his workbench, there was soon a wooden rattling and the overpowering smell of glue, coming in noxious, saccharine waves.
"You presume much," Azuri called to the giant's back, but going either ignored or unheard, he diverted his cold stare to Elani.
"It's perfectly understandable," she said. "When you see two animals, do you not assume them a mated pair?"
"So they think us animals. Don't bother answering. I know it to be so."
"Not only do I know of your run-in with Eurilda, I met her once, some years ago."
"You're not so familiar with her as I am," Azuri laughed.
"Your laugh is false, Azuri."
"I may be unamused at the thought of Eurilda, but my laughter is no less sincere for being vengeful," said Azuri, whose face began to feel stuck, so rigid was his smile.
Elani smiled also, but could not meet his eyes. "If I do take you into my confidence, you'll make me regret it."
"Why should you regret it? You bear no love for Eurilda."
"While I have no love for her, I have her the only way that matters."
Azuri glared at Elani. "What could you possibly mean by that?"
"Forswear your vengeance, and I might tell you."
"Ha! Never."
"Only for an Alfyrian moon. And not the quick one," she added.
"I could never wait so long."
"Were you really expecting to see her before long?"
"But you're my good luck piece. Yesterday morning, I was incaracerated on Alfyria. Since making your acquaintance, I've passed through palaces, Doorways, and worlds. By keeping you in sight, I expect to see my heart's desire."
Elani laughed. "Amusing, but chilling. Shouldn't that be Cyhari?"
Azuri creased his brow as his scowl deepened. "Goblin moon."
"Then you swear?"
"If I was as vengeful as I desired, I might have slain Ialuna."
"But do you swear?"
"I do so swear, for the space of a goblin moon."
When Elani's smile broadened, it seemed half-human and half-witch, as if she had erased all traces of elvenkind. Reaching in her robes, she produced a clumped-up fistful, which gradually unwadded on her palm, springing back into the shape of a squashed pouch.
"I see by your expression that you know this very well."
"That's Eurilda's!"
"And more to the point?" Elani cocked her head in a knowing glance.
"The rumors were true?" While it might have lightened his construction duties to trust a new prisoner's gossip, Azuri had never believed that a goblin had vanquished Eurilda.
"Very much so."
"Then...that is Eurilda!" Plucking his shakasia from where he had embedded it in the table, Azuri bolted towards the witch, who leveled a finger to stay him in his tracks, sword point trembling mid-lunge.
"Must my magic enforce your promise?"
"This was your true purpose on Alfyria," said Azuri.
"Yes. A royal concubine took the pouch from your High Tzhurarkh."
"What need has Frellyx of Eurilda? If it is the pouch he wants, I'll tear out the offending matter."
"As her master, Otoka the Wise, has collected a group of rebels, she is an important bargaining chip, Azuri. The giants want to suppress their own insurgents before joining the fight."
"And what will happen to the pouch?"
"What does that matter?"
"While her person is vile, her pouch is rather interesting. Its fate matters."
"I've seen your unrelenting interest," snorted Elani. "Must I leave you with Zvoru? Although he once forswore sentient flesh, that was ages ago, and Uenarak's civic spirit has changed. Once the dirty secret of a handful, with none owning to this unsavory relish, giantkind now takes pride in their appetites. On a normal day, I'd trust him, but these are not normal days. You'd be better off coming with me, so long as I can trust you."
"It's not like I'd toss the pouch in the fire," said Azuri. "It would be a small revenge just to hold it for a moment."
"Would you promise not to wish ill will upon Eurilda?"
"Of that I am incapable, Elani. She humbled me more than you can imagine."
"Try me. What was it like?"
"Imagine yourself tossed in a grave, its dirt too loose to hold you fast, but so everpresent that you swim the crawling, shuddering soil for miles, days, continents, eons, abysses."
Elani's lip curled in scorn. "Wasn't your back against the cloth?" She snickered. "I heard you soiled the cloth." She stifled her spasm of laughter with the back of her hand. "Forgive me, Azuri. That was unworthy of either of us."
"All that remains of the harrowing experience are chaotic feelings. From the instant I was shrank and enclosed in the fiendish matrix of her pouch, to the moment of my extraction, my memory was abstracted, swallowed by a witch's crude miniature universe, a microcosm of the Abyss."
"As are we all." Elani's eyes twinkled. "If the myths are true."
"You think I don't know my magical confinement took a religious shape? Not that my private Abyss was my own personal horror, but one intimate to that monster, and not only an unfinished universe, but a child's sketch of one, its rhythms so primitive that I could only hear my heartbeat, the shivers of the blacked-out world, and a bitter mind creeping like some primordial organism."
Having tossed his head back with a shuddering sigh so that his white mane flicked about his shoulders, Azuri's attention was then dragged back to their monstrous situation.
"Even being on a giant's table, and feasting on their snacks like rodents, is better than the pouch. It's better to be small than a shadow in an abyss, than a whisper of nonexistence."
"Don't take this the wrong way, Azuri." Elani sighed. "I'm too exhausted to pay any more mind to your cowardice."
"Cowardice?"
"You just made us out to be no better than vermin, having taken a moment of weakness for your defining characteristic."
"That pouch didn't make me," scoffed Azuri.
"No, but it unmanned you."
As the stomp of giant boots echoed from walls and ceiling, Azuri turned from Elani and quelled his rage, not wanting his host to think less of him for being baited by this half-human. Zvoru trudged over, clutching a lantern which cleaved the rising curtain of night darkening the windows. He was followed by another guest, gigantic, but no giant, for giants never had violet hair and beard, nor pointed ears.
"Father," Having dipped in a low curtsy that had not been fashionable since the century before last, Elani averted her eyes and raised her hands in a gesture meant to dignify one she honored, although her face was drawn tight with resentment, and her lips curled in smoldering anger. While elves unfamiliar with lesser races often overlooked emotional responses, just as they would ignore a krydayn breaking wind, Frellyx strode to the table, glanced down at his daughter, allowed himself a most un-elven snicker, then allowed his bloated eye—its blue veins faint and red veins bulging, strung through a creamy white tinged with yellow and flecked silver—to waver over Azuri.
"I have often said you were a generous host, Zvoru, and one with a knack for matching outlandish gifts to unacknowledged desires," boomed Frellyx with a hint of amusement, "but this present is more unwanted than unlooked-for."
"Why would I bring a surplus elf to our meeting? He was with your daughter."
"This is no meeting," said Frellyx. "Having protested the war council, you play nanny to return to Ellur's good graces."
"Playing," snorted Zvoru. "As if I have free will. As if I would curry favor with any speck of dust, Alfyrian or giant, in the endless rain of nothingness. In every passing instant, we live or die according to He Who Dreams. Our Abyss is but a single drop in the undivided unity of the Void."
"Another day, priest." At Frellyx's sardonic grin, Zvoru's fist barreled so terrifyingly fast that the giant elf only dodged by backpedaling to the wall, scraping his head on the clawed foot of one of the nineteen gargoyles graven in the image of The Divine Atheist. While Azuri couldn't be certain,
having collected a smattering of facts when dealing with giants, he believed this gargoyle, its stone talons glinting with red speckles from Frellyx's scraped scalp, was The Dreamer in his aspect of The Abnegator, denier of all things.
"Have a care, caretaker!"
"Withdraw your insult," said Zvoru.
"What did I say? Are followers of your void-god above caring?"
"I follow No One, and believe in No One. I am no priest." The giant scowled and raised both fists. "I am sworn to crush all faith, whether false, blind, hypocritical, or unthinking, as your case may be."
"Your god is difficult." When Frellyx wiped the back of his head, a thin ribbon of blood streaked his palm. "Why are you so eager to share your belief, or disbelief, or whatever you call your creed? To elves, anything not the product of thought is at worst a source of shame, and at best an embarrassing effusion."
"Get out," spat the giant.
"We're running late as it is." Scooping up Elani and Azuri, Frellyx brushed past so forcefully that he knocked Zvoru off balance, then barged through the door so hard that it sagged on its hinges.
"Out!" The giant's lunging step, just a breath or two behind them, was an absurd contradiction of his command. Having seized a mace so huge that each stud was like a catapult stone, his white knuckled grip heaved it so high that he swung too hard and too soon, staggered on one foot, swished forward, and only stopped this barreling spin by snatching a low branch. When this rustling bough set not only the tree, but the meshing branches of the whole grove, ashiver, Frellyx brought up his arms to guard his face, and Azuri and Elani, still tightly clenched in his fists, were pummeled and abraded by the coarse, scratching branches.
When Zvoru pursued them to a gurgling brook, Frellyx dashed across its rippling current, his boots only eddying its surface as if he was buoyant as a dragonfly. The cascading stream sprayed monsoon-sized splashes, soaking the hacking, sputtering Azuri as the giant hurled one stone after another, each the size of a small shrub, to crash, splatter, and splosh, one landing so close, just ahead,
that Frellyx had to overleap its sloshing impact. While a brook to a giant, this wide and mighty stream was a modest river to Azuri, who was so rattled up and down, that between the pump of Frellyx's fist, the waves, and dissonant boulder splashes, he became nauseous, puked, then blacked out.
As his eyesight darkened, his mind flooded with faces, not only Cyhari's deathly pallor but Frellyx's haughty, graven arrogance, a stony face as beautiful and grotesque as the god-gargoyles of the Divine Atheist.