Chameleon in Chrome Ch. 11

On many low branches in several trees on the opposite side of where that person might stand this day, there are many birds perched yet they do not sing or chatter to one another. They only sit and look on.

Near to the trunk of a wizened old oak, there is the knuckle of one of it's massive roots where it has risen up through the earth and now lies covered thickly in moss. On that root, a curious pair sits side by side, their earlier chase forgotten completely. A young fox kit had found a young hare and began it's hunt as it is wont to do at such times. The hare led the kit here just trying to get away, but they sit almost together now and look on just as the birds do.

The light here is not a constant thing. In a few places, at different times during the day, the light from above is reflected in the water and it shimmers over everything. Today, as it often does, it shimmers and dances over the form of someone sitting, seeming to look into the water at something.

Actually, she does not see the water at all.

She sits in thought and contemplation.

The pattern in her long dress is indistinct in this light, but the garment is a slightly rustic-looking thing at first glance. Yet like many things in this place, there is more to be seen if one looks. There is only one thin strap over a shoulder and in some places there are what look to be tendrils of a vine-like plant running here and there with the lack of direction which is usually shown by plants of this nature - and yet, it might not be like that at all and may instead have been what the dressmaker had intended.

What is distinct is that the very edge of the hem is wound with what appears to be golden thread.

But in order to see these details and others like them, the observer must be able to look past the wearer of the garment and that is a very difficult thing to do.

Today, she has tied her long golden hair up, revealing her long and slender neck. She sits with her bare shins crossed, her knees drawn up so that she can rest her right elbow on her right kneecap. Her left wrist rests on her right bicep and her right hand hangs down.

To see her like this is to see one of the very few of the last living First elves, for that is what she is.

To most contemporary people - those who know a little, anyway - they might think that she must be very, very old indeed, but it is not so. In human years, she is only a little under one hundred and fifty years old.

In the terms of her kind, she is still an Elf-maid.

But she has the knowledge of her forebears in matters of this land and she governs in a way as she waits. She is the last guardian of this part of the world and she waits to leave one day and sail into the west like all of the others of her kind.

There are still elves here, though they are other sorts mostly and many have lost most or all of their ties to ones like her. It does not matter to her. She will do as must be done while she is here.

There is little to be seen in her face as far as expression might go. She is lost in thought and ponders several things at once. Her beauty is absolutely obvious, but it is her eyes which maybe tell a better tale, being a little dark for one with such light hair and light skin.

Her forest is shrinking.

Every day, people cut some of the trees and she has been here long enough to know that all of this will pass into nothingness one day. The trees will be felled and the animals will scatter homeless in the world, and some of them, not being able to adapt to a life with no forest, will perish.

She knows that she could mount a good defense, but she has no wish to become the thing which would need to be cruel in her protection, some soul of the haunted woods which these would then be known as.

And that is only one of the many things which she thinks on this day.

Not far away, she is aware of another who lives on borrowed time. His kind is not widely removed from her own, though he is a stranger to these woods. He came here with some others who choose to accept him as their leader, but now the way back has been shut and they are all trapped here in a place which is a little wrong for them.

She wonders about allying with him to drive the humans back, but to her mind it doesn't seem like the best course for either of them.

Yet there are some in his company which would make fine warriors for such a defense.

As the humans encroach upon things and places of which they know nothing, she is a little painfully aware that no matter what, some of their bumbling will soon disturb things better left alone, things which have lain quiet for so long and ought to be left that way.

She thought of an ancient ruin first erected by her kind, though it has lain out of human memory for an age now.

She winced slightly as she thought of the ones who resided there now, an extended family of trolls ruled by a ...

Alright, a female who began as a human, who is perhaps not the epitome of feminine loveliness to many, though she has a wondrous body. The elf knew that the female grew her considerable power by taking the essence from the male trolls as she copulated with them in order to obtain it.

Not wanting to leave the image in her mind as an unnecessary and unkind thought, she amended her surmisal by saying that the female carried the facial characteristics of some elven sorceresses that she'd known once long ago when she was an elfling. It could be said that there was beauty there, though it tended to appear rather severe.

One thought leads to the next, they say and it was then that she remembered a different ruin inhabited now by a renegade witch, one whose kind was a little uncomfortably even closer to her own. She sighed.

Another matter best left to sleep undisturbed.

At that point, she recalled a time not long ago when one of her soldiers came to tell of a strange thing which was found in the forests in one of the few outlying areas where the humans hadn't ever gone. It appeared to be a strange-looking home made to travel in.

She remembered a night just before when she'd seen a strange thing, some object or thing which streaked across the sky and passed out of sight. Her first thought was that it was one of the rocks which sometimes did that, coming from no one knew where to fall to the ground.

She'd asked to be taken there and found something like what had been described to her, though to her, it looked as though it was made to fly somehow. There weren't many answers coming to her or any of the ones who'd led her there, but after a little time, one of them called out that something had been found.

A distance away in the forest, she was led to the remains of a being of some sort. It was a creature - female by what any of them could tell. Tall by their standards and covered in a grayish fur, they eventually concluded from the remnants of feelings about the body that she'd passed from starvation just after reaching this place - which could have sustained almost anyone. But then, the elf guessed, perhaps it had already been too late.

The dead one looked to resemble one of the forest predators, though much larger and quite obviously not related in any way.

She found that this was more mystery than anything of importance and just as they'd prepared to leave, she noticed something. There was no apparent way to look inside and their searching had revealed no way to get in. But she'd seen a tiny little light built into the surface which blinked slowly. Placing her ear against the surface, she could just hear a thin sound which came to her when the little light was on and stopped when it went out. That was as much as they could learn from the thing and they left.

At last, her thoughts turn to the humans as loath as she is to think of them.

Most are poor and work day after day at tasks whose purposes elude her. There is a lord of them near here and she regards him as an idiot, though she tries to think on his deeds in case she misses the point or something like that, though nothing much comes to her.

She cannot understand his thoughts, knowing as she does that he sent his son and some of his soldiers to aid his half-brother - an equally stupid oaf - in a fight over some land squabble with another lower lord. There will soon be a fight a little to the north of her woods which she sees as men spending lives for no other purpose than grasping greed and stupid pride.

She also knows that the other lord will employ one of the 'horned ones'. She has no proper name for them and doesn't know much about them other than the ones that she knows anything of tend to be quiet and withdrawn, likely out of the way that they look.

Humans tended to be ... unsettled in their presence. If she knew anything at all of this fight, she doubted that it was anything but something that the human lord had foolishly begun. A pack of his thugs set against another pack of thugs. The elf shook her head.

She knew that it would last far less than a day and she already knew the likely outcome. The horned one would win this and almost everyone else would be dead. She was only a little surprised that it had taken this long to come about in the first place. She also knew that the one who would likely lay them all down was growing upset at things which she couldn't change in herself - which was why most times, she was so quiet and withdrawn like the others.

Lately, she'd given them some thought, wondering if she might find in them a force which might be used to right a few of the things which were wrong in the way of things.

Finally, she thought of the other outcast among the humans and felt a little hope.

Her expression changed as she concentrated on the surface of the pool until she began to see into it as her thoughts carried her vision a little far away until the one in her thoughts came into her view.

That one is what the other humans call a young witch.

For the first time this day since the elf came here, her expression bore a slight smile.

A witch who makes barrels.

The smile widened a little on that lovely face after a moment.

Well everyone has to do something, she supposed.

------

On an eerily silent battlefield, where the crows only begin to gather.

It was only just after midday, though one wouldn't know it if they'd just gotten here. The skies were cloaked in dirty-looking, heavy, and restless low clouds that scudded past, driven by the fitful breeze which had only it's direction for a constant. Above them there was a darker overcast from the bellies of the storm clouds which stretched from one ridged rim of the valley to the other, a sombre sort of gunmetal grey where lightning flickered from cloud to cloud randomly.

It had the appearance of a brooding thunderstorm but the structure was a little more complex than that. The bolts of searing static discharge were not random beyond the cloud-to-cloud flickers occurring only in the areas of the clouds which had been designated for that - a sort of safety valve to keep things on the boil, but not beyond that and not completely unpredictable beyond the timing of the blasts in the clouds up there.

The timing up there was random in a thought-out way, but the lightning which actually made the half-mile trip down from the heavens, well ...

There were no limits then and it only crashed to the earth when and where it was needed and that was not happening at all for the moment.

Another of the few constants in this miserable bitch of a day was the rain, a cold and steady thing which worked both to dampen one's spirits almost as much as it was there to put out the little blazes which still burned over a few bodies and carts.

As a result, the air carried various scents, depending upon the breeze and where one stood. Smells like the eye-stinging, choking pall of damp, burned grass, the smell of charred wood and of course the sort of scents which seemed to be able to seize one's nose for a second, sometimes causing one to snort in an effort to be rid of them.

The odor of burnt horseflesh and worse, the sickly sweetish scent of burning man flesh.

A lot of the ground lay untouched and only a little trampled with grasses and weeds trying to raise their heads toward the thin light, but that was the minority overall and even so, there were large patches of blasted and bare earth which now were little more than low, still-smoking piles of disturbed earth and stretches of black mud which were obscured in many places by the bodies of the dead.

Farther out, what had been low trees and shrubs now stood - where they still did - blackened and charred, some of them smoking a little as well all the way out to the fringes of the battlefield. The smoke from those fires as they sputtered and hissed kept everything shrouded in a damp, crawling fog which seemed to wreathe the world in this place.

Challa stood in the same smoke and rain. Her feet and legs were in boots, buckled boots which covered her legs to the knees. Above that, she wore a slightly long black leather skirt with hardened strips of leather hanging down. Other than the color and the inner skirt, it was a thing worn by many of the men here.

Her thin torso was protected by layers of black cured leather reinforced with metal bands just beneath the topmost layers which did not hide her leanness though her smallish breasts were well-covered. The overall pattern to the layers was much like what was used on Elven armour; thin, supple layers and lots of them in overlapping patterns.

A bit of her white-blonde hair flew just a little free, having escaped from under the mask which most people assumed was a helmet.

Most of the people who'd seen her as they'd prepared for this battle had assumed that the horns were parts of that helmet, an error which she'd done nothing to correct as only half of the horns were on the mask.

She stood looking down at a corpse.

One particular corpse out of the thousand and some who lay here.

The most important one of all to her because this one represented what would be her exposure to the elements later when it grew dark. It represented her failure to obtain a warm and dry place to sleep and her failure to be able to eat an evening meal yet again.

Her ribs were heaving slightly and there was a reason for it which had little to do with being out of breath or overexertion. She was angry, but she managed to keep it at that.

If she'd had any actual loyalty in this, she'd be furious now.

The body lying in the mud before her had until very recently been her employer.

She'd kept her mind clear thus far, but as the moments passed, she was beginning to feel embittered again. It had bothered her for several weeks now, but with this job here to do, she'd been a little successful at pushing it out of the way.

Now however, she felt it as it began to return.

Challa hadn't cared about the real issue or the stated thing which she'd been told needed avenging as she'd stood in this dead lord's hall to make her offer. She'd told him that she was prepared to save a lot of the lives of his men if he'd allow her to show him her thoughts as to a proper plan.

The lord had sipped his ale and wiped the excess from his grey beard and mustache with his sleeve as he'd turned to look at her. He pointedly told her to do as she saw fit once the battle began - as long as his side won the day. He told her that he already had a plan and he told her none of it.

From long before the dawn, she'd been here waiting for them as the two sides of this thing had gathered, coming from two directions. She wondered just what it was that could get these men, the good as well as the bad, to get up and leave a warm bed behind them while it was still night and for what? To stumble quietly for most of the way here, many no doubt wondering if this day when it came to them would leave them alive at the end of what was to come.

Nothing wise came to her as to the thing which had made them strap on what armour they owned and tie the ends of a sword belt together. The only two things which came at all were that every man there feared his lord - by oath or by the fact that they were being paid to fight, and the lords in this each wanted to arrive before the other one so as to be able to claim the best starting position.

All that she saw was a muddy moor ringed by thin woods.

So, standing in the chill grey light just as the red dawn tried to push through the clouds, she'd watched as two lines were formed facing each other across two hundred yards or so of slightly marshy ground. There were shouted taunts and the clashing of swords against bucklers and shields for a brief time before pipers began to blow whatever family or clan screechings were considered obligatory.

After that, the two lines ran yelling toward each other and as they crashed together, the men began hacking at one another.

Some plan.

Apparently, her employer considered that winning the field through attrition was the path to take in this as Challa herself could see no stratagem of any sort. And if he won the day, she had no doubt that he'd be congratulating himself over being so shrewd. Dead men do not stand in line waiting to be paid their due.

As she might have expected - and as it happened in the event, there were always a few who considered themselves to be crafty and tried to get to her lord as well as the one who caused the flames and death to rain from the sky and watery pits to open under some of the men. She could easily take care of herself, but keeping an old idiot alive when he'd seemed to make a point of ignoring her ...

It had been her mother who'd had the gift in arcane matters. After learning at her mother's knee the skills and incantations most often needed on a battlefield, Challa grew and took heed to the instructions of strategy, of tactics and such from both of her parents.

Her father had taught her the blade, everything that he knew. He'd taught her all of the flashy moves, but had concentrated on her complete mastery of the ones which allowed her to cut down opponents with ease and a minimum of invested effort and move on.

Her lovely mother had taught her the very efficient, though sometimes difficult-to-manage art of Laying Waste.

So, though it had not been a part of her agreement with the lord, Challa had done extra duty trying to keep the fool lord alive, stepping up at the right moment as she judged it to cut the sneaks down with a flickering, frost covered, single-edged sword.

It didn't help that the fool tried to look brave, standing up in the stirrups and bellowing when he knew that he faced archers and yet did not think that there was always a fair chance that at least some of them could actually shoot straight across the narrowing distance the longer that it went on.

For just the thinnest sliver of time, she'd seen the one whose arrow now stood out at the point where her lord's clavicles came together. A well-placed shot, it had gone in and speared him through the airway, nicking through an artery as well.

That archer perished half a second later, slumping down into death with a shocked expression and a three inch thick lance of solid ice through his chest sent from her open hand. But it changed nothing for her. The plan that she'd wanted to pitch to the old fool took his safety into account.

But he'd wanted to do things this way.

With this little manor lord dead now, she knew that all of this had been in vain from her perspective.

It is almost always next to impossible in the business of war to be paid off for services rendered once your patron has expired.

Her trouble was that she was unknown in this area and so she couldn't have insisted on being paid up front. Now she was tired, wet, hungry and filthy, and still almost without a copper to her name. Her annoyance at working as hard as she had for an obviously stupid, selfish and cruel lord just to make a little coin to live on, and now seeing it all come to nothing kept her quietly upset and it affected things a little.