Darkness of a Distant Home

The group nervously went forward. Each step a venture. They eyed the trees with suspicion. Rhinegold was sure that there were things watching him from the brush.

Anluan wasn’t perturbed as the others were. He walked with confidence as the road stretched out before him.

     “I don’t trust these trees,” said Rhinegold angrily.

No one else spoke. The trees were tall, but the branches hung low. Each leaf was glossy and deep green. The branches were so entangled and grew so thickly, that the sun was nearly blocked out.

The branches were dotted with little red, orange, and yellow berries.

     “Poisonous,” Rhinegold had muttered.

Orli looked back. She could still see the familiar forest that stretched all the way back to their home; the thin slanting trees, the pale grasses, and the sunshine.

“Goodbye,” Orli whispered.

The Dark Woodlands, that’s where they were. This place had been described to them as a myth when they were younger. Perhaps they would have turned back if things were different.

     “I’m tired,” said Fionn, Anluan’s younger brother.

“Have you enjoyed too much smoke of the fine herbs of the forest?” said Rhinegold bitterly. Fionn’s eyes were glazed and he looked weak. The pack he carried was filled with nothing but the silver leaf from home.

Rhinegold hadn’t told Anluan, his closest friend, about this. Anluan loved his little brother and wouldn’t have believed his brother’s love of the deathly smoke anyway.

     “We’ll oblige him,” said Anluan as they came to a large clearing.

     “Look there!” cried Beacon in horror. Beacon was Orli’s identical twin brother. They were much alike in many ways and his voice was a more boyish version of hers.

     “What?” said Anluan, looking worriedly at his brother, who had thrown himself upon the ground.   

     “Do you really not see it?” said Rhinegold his voice betraying more fear than perhaps it was proper for him, the protector of the group, to display.

     “Look above you,” said Orli, showing more disgust than fear.

Anluan looked up. Hanging by their feet from the branches were ten young men, recently dead. Their cloaks were cast upon the ground and their long hair trembled in the breezes.

Some of their eyes were still open; glassy and wide, some milky white, some amber. They had the sallow faces of those who had lived a painful life and had come to a painful end. Their arms were tightly bound to

them and their fragile lips were blue with their death.

     “I refuse to stop here!” said Rhinegold. He was unnerved, though these dead ones were their enemies.

     “What do I care for the Yarokim?” mumbled Fionn, eyes shut, “They were soulless bastards when they lived. What do I care for them? They were following us to kill us.”

     “Loose corpses dangling from the treetops are something I’d like to never look on again,” said Rhinegold.

     “As if you hadn’t produced many a corpse just like these,” said Fionn, not opening his eyes, “our capitol is empty, save for the dead bodies of the treacherous Yarokim.”

“Be quiet!!!” screamed Rhinegold, filled suddenly with loathing for this living, breathing boy and with compassion for the treacherous dead.

     “Don’t speak to my brother that way,” said Anluan calmly, “we will stop here only for a moment.”

Anluan sat in a pile of leaves with all the dignity of the prince that he was. Orli and Beacon sat beside him, their faces devoid of expression. Rhinegold kept his distance from them, lay his pack on the ground, and rested his pointed ear against a tree.  

Rhinegold was very tall and slender with thick black hair in a braid that fell down his back. His eyes were deep blue and somber. He had been more lighthearted once, but too many had died for him to feel like that anymore.

He was twice orphaned. His parents had come from a faraway place and had been filled with arrows on the threshold of their destination. The family that had taken in this strange baby had been killed too, though he didn’t know of his sister from that family, for she had been gone a long time. The Yarokim had set the town where he grew up on fire.

By chance, his younger self had run off that afternoon, to see the queen, Fionn and Anluan’s mother, in the valley. The beautiful woman was being buried and no one had allowed him to go. He would never forget looking back up the mountain and seeing a smoking pile of ashes where his home had once been. He would make his peace with the Yarokim one day.

Rhinegold was an oddity wherever he went. The pale-haired elves of the valley and the mountain had never seen a person who looked anything like him. As a child he was scorned and as he grew older, people who didn’t know him were frightened of him.

He was loyal just as any other citizen of the capitol was. He had fought with the king’s guards to the bitter end. He had protected Anluan and Fionn and anyone else he could. The king and his guards were dead now, all of them but him.

Now they were trying to deliver a desperate cry for help, but they were in a forest that they all thought was a fictional tale until a little while ago. Would they get where they were going? Rhinegold didn’t think so.

      “We need to get out of these woods,” Rhinegold called to the others.

     “Rhinegold, don’t be impatient,” said Anluan.

     “Anluan,” Rhinegold said, “someone killed these Yarokim. This forest is going to have us too if we don’t leave.”

     “Rhinegold, I know you hate these trees, you hate the entire wood, you hate this journey, you hate my brother. Hold your piece for once. Sometimes I wish you hadn’t come.”

     “Anluan,” Rhinegold whimpered with shame.

     “I’m so sorry,” said Anluan, but his eyes were still distant.

Orli, Beacon, and Anluan began speaking inaudibly among themselves. Rhinegold slouched against the tree. He made no attempt to join the four on the other side of the clearing.

Rhinegold felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned. A woman stood barefoot behind him in the shadows. When he looked at her, he could see himself; the black hair and the deep blue eyes that were so hated by the elves of the valley.

     “We’ve been watching you,” she said softly, without menace, though when he glanced over his shoulder, he could still see the dead Yarokim hanging upside-down in the air.

     “We hate strangers,” she said.

     “That is evident,” said Rhinegold, surprisingly unafraid.

     “But we’ve never before seen our own face in a stranger. You have our face, but not one of our names. Did your friend call you Rhinegold?”

     “He did,” Rhinegold said. His adoptive sister had named him after a hero of legend. It was just another reason for him to be ridiculed.

     “Come with me,” the woman said.

Rhinegold nodded absently, but his mind was racing. The child found in the mountains who grew up in the valley was perhaps not so much an oddity as he thought. These woods he so passionately loathed, these trees he distrusted, and this woman who looked so like him, so far away from where he’d used to live, this was where he supposedly belonged.

Rhinegold looked back at his childhood friend with sorrow, but his curiosity was more powerful than his grief. Then he followed the woman into the darkness that was his home.