The Elfsong of the Fairyfloss

Christmases enough have passed since the incursion that we have enshrined it in song.

The creatures came then, from a land we had no reason to know existed, and they stole from us our king. There was no fighting that day, the task done quietly in the night. Like many, I still find it in my nightmares.

The first who came to us, taller than even our buildings, stalked through our homes, watching us sleep. Some said they had seen the ghoul--was it fair to call them a person or even ascribe gender to ragged strips of flesh and cracked bones? We explained this as their having been lost in a peculiar fancy. The fiends that followed were smaller, easier to mix among us, like us in shape but not us. It was they who stole the king, though at the behest of their king. Kings delegated. They keep their hands clean, even when their hands are nothing but elongated bones.

It should have been an act of war, but we could not make a move without our king's leave. On whom, exactly, would we have warred? How? We knew nothing of our enemies but that they were dead and still moved.

Our king knew the way back to us from the moonlit lands. He knew the way back to us from anywhere in the mortal realm, but he did not speak of it. He could fit through impossibly small spaces, could change the pace of time to suit his tasks. The knowledge of traveling as easily as walking through the threshold of a cinnamon-warm home was lost to us, his subjects. It was better to be a living servant than a dead rebel.

Some, though, would be sure to test the boundaries still. The young, indeed, who had grown up fifty years hearing the stories of that ill-fated night and could not trust that it was more than another legend, sung in rhyme by choirs to familiar tunes. In this way, it was impossible to forget our history, but what is history but fairy tales to those who did not live through it?

Our legends speak of the king being stolen from us, of mortals doing his duty, but we understood these only as moral lessons. Too much depended on his performance. We believed that was true, but not that it would ever have to happen.

Christmas was one night, and it was all year. When the king returned from his labors, he slept for a month, so exhausted did the effort make him. His hibernation was as close as we came to the turning of the season. If he were not blessed with our immortality, he could not have survived more than a few Christmases before collapsing to dust. It was more of a curse in that way, his deathlessness. He was mortal once and, as our liege, could never again be.

Once, the realms were closer, the intermingling of the magical and mundane nightly. We had our enclave against the disbelief. We were a proud and robust race once, envied and feared. Now, we were misshapen and diminutive in this island of ours, one of the few places we could stay without harm from the mortal world. We all knew that and abided by it. Some songs told of elves, stir crazy or filled with wanderlust, who had tried their hand at the mortal realm and were never heard from again. I want to say that they managed to start a life there, that they found elves from other places and were safe and happy. I do not care for lies, though.

We were tricksters, we elves. We made deals and pacts to those who did not understand, who infringed on us and gave us a reason. We trapped humans in our cunning as easily as waving a hand. Or, at least, we did in the tales we told one another outside the sight of the king.

Oh, we loved him, but we knew to fear him. He was neither wholly us nor wholly human. We loved him, but we could not trust him with our whole hearts. What we had done to him could spur his revenge. Immortality is not a generous gift.

We were not what we had once been, before our king, if one could believe the stories. Tall and strong. Beautiful beyond all reckoning. Beguiling. Living by our magic and wiles. We were none of these now, but we remained tricky.

"Is it true you spoke to him that night, Fairyfloss?" asked Gumdrop.

I did not have to ask what he meant. I had become a part of one of the legends, that I dared to question our liege what had happened in the other world. Once he was rested, we could ask after his time in the mortal realm. He reveled in telling us these tales more than most anything in the world. We loved to hear them even more, as this gave context to all we did for children. There was more magic in assembling toys for them than any could imagine -- more so as the necessities of technology advanced and our arcane knowledge went from seamless joints to circuit boards -- but it was a necessity. The energy produced by the belief of human children gave shape and strength to our world. Without that, the architecture would crumble. Without that, we would lose the boon of our home and would suffer the pangs of the mortal realm.

I told Gumdrop I had, as he knew. The king was exhausted that night, not himself. I had no right to ask, but my curiosity got the better of my compassion. The king's jobs were to keep us in high spirits, for the magic would not work well if we were glum. We might have liked the lies enough to tell ourselves they were the truth.

That night, before his hibernation, the king said that he thought it was his time, that he was finally going to surrender being our king. When he saw what I had heard, horror filled in his eyes. This was a secret I was not intended ever to share. I don't know what our king would have done if I had said anything in response. I was quick enough to find some other task to occupy my days until I could be sure he was deep into his slumber. I could only hope to receive the sacrament of his forgetting in dreams.

The king never said another word to me, so I cannot be sure either way.

I would never tell the others what I had heard, but there was no avoiding the rumors that I had. I made up lies in the past and didn't know if the other elves believed them, but they pretended to if they did not.

The burden of his words was left on me alone.

There had been other Christmases since the ghoul had stolen our king. None were unusual.

It was months before Christmas. I saw the footprints trailing away from the village. I could not say in following what I saw in these that so provoked my curiosity. I told myself that it was my duty to investigate them in case one of the young elves had gotten it into their head to try the barrier between our world and the Arctic outside. I did not know what would kill them sooner: the frigid temperature or breathing the air of those who could disbelieve. So few of us ever died. None wanted to see the tally increase, no matter how out of tune some of our brethren could be.

There was no prohibition on coming into the forest, which only escalated my respect for our king. Had he forbidden it, we would have explored it in-depth within the hour. His subjects are loyal, but we are more than that curious.

I found the doors some miles into Candy Cane Forest, the pines so looming that the sun overhead was absent. I could not describe what sensation drove me on now, the pretense of saving a young elf abandoned.

Most glyphs on the doors were foreign shapes. Here, I knew at once I had made a mistake. I was not special among my kind, not different to outside eyes. I was not meant to be here. No elf was. My presence here was profanity, and I would pay for it.

Without question, I knew which of these portals went to the sunless realm of the ghoul. Before it was the carcasses of a dozen elves in varying states of decay. Some were skeletons. Others looked desiccated, drained of their vitality, scavenged, vacant sockets staring. I felt dread at approaching them, but I had never seen one of the dead for long. We could be killed, I knew. In the workshop, accidents happened, and not even our magic held reliable sway over a fatal injury. With tender revulsion, I lifted a head from the ground, its body staying where it had fallen.

Twinklejoy. A saw blade had met her neck some years earlier. It was no one's fault, not even hers. Our machinery is imperfect as we retrofit it to assemble more complex toys. Accidents are inevitable. I doubted she felt any pain then and bled out before we could shut down the machine.

It would be a century more before we could replace her. Our king kept our population steady. Gestation for us is a process of many Christmases, childhood far longer.

Now, her remains lay before the door to the dark realm. I could not remember where her body had gone after the accident, who had taken it. We left the workshop in an impromptu memorial and went to other rooms afterward because work could not afford much delay. When we returned, it was as though the accident hadn't happened, all her blood erased. We returned to our machines and busied ourselves so that we did not have to remember what had become of our sister.

I looked back at the footprints I had followed. They were deeper than mine. That's what I saw in the village. That's what had brought me here. Someone had carried something heavy this way.

What had become clear, leaving only who. The tracks were not old. Whoever did this had been here only a little while before and could not be far now.

None of us had ever been murdered, as far as I knew. There were few secrets in the community we did, and the animosity of familiarity was bred out of us a millennium earlier. We all knew one another, and most could recite the lineage of any elf going back five generations. New blood did not exist, which eased the genealogy. I would know if one of us were killed.

Except for those whom we were told had left for adventure. Except for those who disappeared in the night and were never seen again. Those who we believed found a new life in the mortal world.

Those who had walked away from the village and warned no one, left no note, as I had this night.

I swallowed the thought. Some elf might have come here and had the wisdom to tell none of us. Coming here, being led here, did not have to be the death sentence it felt.

What story would they tell about me when I never returned? How would my disappearance be enshrined in song?

If I died this night, I would not go to my fate cowering. We elves were once a proud and brave race before serving as toymakers. I would not disrespect my ancestors by begging.

I turned to flee, but I could no longer find my bearings in the woods. I looked to the footprints I had followed, the distinctive oak leaf tread of them, but I could find no lack of them. The steps were everywhere at once.

The corpses, the shadowy world, were in front of me. If I went back, escaping the open grave in specific, surely that would have been enough. Not There was all the direction I should need.

Any place must be better than this one. I looked to the doors for a reprieve. None suggested my home in the North Pole, no evergreen nor present. Could this mean that I had not indeed left? If I ran between the doors, that had to be the solution.

I ran, eyes closed between a tree glyph and a rabbit. I opened them only when I tripped over the leg that had once belonged to Twinklejoy. I tried the experiment a few other times, any straight line bringing me back to the center of the circle.

This was a trap. I nudged the corpse pile's sparkling green and red fabric with my toes to see if I might recognize another elf there. Had they had died before coming here, or had this circle itself had killed them? I did not see obvious trauma, aside from Twinklejoy, but this gave me no reassurance. I could only grant that this was cursorily true, having neither the experience nor inclination to know further.

My fingers began to numb. So unfamiliar was this sensation that I thought it was magic. After a few minutes, I understood. This was cold, something the magic of the North Pole kept at bay. If I stayed here, I would freeze. I gave an involuntary giggle at the morbid irony, one of the king's elves freezing to death.

If I could be cold, where I had wandered was no longer the North Pole. Magic, of that there was no doubt, but not our magic.

There was no escape from death, slow as glaciers or fast as a blade, but one of the doors.

While the iconography was not something I knew well, I could pick out symbols that I had seen in the gifts I had made over the centuries. The clovers of playing cards, those were for the feast of St. Patrick. The rabbit was easy enough to identify as Easter. The skull belonged to the ghoul. Nothing could make me go through there, even if the dead did not pile high.

I turned from them all, finding no temptations, and there saw a door that was just a door. It was unassuming, a rectangle of wood, and aroused my curiosity like nothing else.

I placed my hand on the knob. It was neither warm nor cold. It did not pulse with energy. I would have ignored it if it had been a part of a structure. Projecting as it did from the air, its otherwise normality glared.

I twisted the knob, waiting for the trap to spring.

Nothing.

On the other side of the door was warm air. It was not the North Pole. If nothing else, leaving here would arrest hypothermia. I could deal with the threat of the unknown once saved from that death. From death and whoever had come to the grove before me, carting the fallen bodies of my people.

I made my way through the door into a copse whose leaves were red and brown, but it was a forest all the same. Before me were twinkling light, so unlike the ones from home, lacking the festivity, but more compelling for that. It would be a hike to them, one I would have considered a chore in other circumstances.

I hopped down the path, letting gravity help where it could. This world was not made to accommodate someone of my stature. I whispered a spell to relieve coming fatigue and speed my steps.

Nothing happened.

I knew then that I had trespassed in the mortal realm, where magic was all but forgotten.

My people could have come here and survived as safely as they could without magic. Our ears pointed, and we were small, but we would not stand out too severely among the mortals.

I turned back to the door, now vanished. I brought my hand through the air where it should have been, feeling nothing, not even the residual energy of it.

My throat balanced the dread of having lost myself and the thrill that I was somewhere new, in a world about which I had only ever heard flattering elfsong.

I hopped down the hill, no path before me but what I made.

I felt the claws on her throat in an instant, holding me against a rock.

"No," said the creature above me. Not a ghoul. Not one of my kinsmen. Not a mortal. "You aren't welcome."

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