Mayor of elf town 4, p.1
Mayor of Elf Town 4, page 1
Mayor of Elf Town 4
Dante King
Copyright © 2022 by Dante King
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Contents
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Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
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Prologue
“Ah, so it is true,” the purringly sibilant female voice said, “the amalgamage has returned.”
Each word reverberated through the passageways of my head as if they had been sounded on a gong, bouncing from one neuron to the next like an endless Newton’s cradle.
I shook my head. I was standing outside of a door. Where the door had come from, or where I had been before I found myself standing there was… unclear. Unimportant, now.
All that mattered was the door and the shimmering light flickering from under it. Apart from the light, the door itself was fairly nondescript save for a faded inscription carved into the lintel, which I couldn’t read.
“Come, show yourself to me, Amalgamage,” the voice boomed through my head again.
Fucking infernal elf, I thought. Goddamn infernal to the last degree.
Why I thought this particular voice was so dratted and annoying, I didn’t quite know.
Did I even mean infernal? Infernal or internal?
The woman laughed then; a high, cruel laugh comprised of sugar-dusted razor blades and honey-dipped hypodermic needles. The sound thrilled me and killed me by inches, acting like a double fish hook through my spine and cerebellum.
The door opened. I didn’t touch it. Never even raised my arm. However, the portal opened nonetheless. Silently. An ode to some top notch craftsmanship or a nod to the ominous, I wasn’t sure.
Abruptly, I found myself in the room beyond. There was nothing at first, only a swirling gray smoke, but then an unexpectedly grand space, which was surprisingly familiar, coalesced out of the whirling fog. It looked to be a private study or, perhaps, a small deserted library, or even a throne room that had been changed to suit another purpose long ago.
A striking dais of finely sculpted marble sat in the middle of the beautiful room, illuminated by a sort of silver-gray light that reminded me of a snowstorm—had there been anything visible outside a quartet of tall, thin windows set into one wall and flanked by luxurious-looking curtains.
Two large statues depicting solemn figures, unknown to me, stood on either side of the dais. Each of the figures had its head bowed and its arms extended reverently toward the low stone stage. In front of these two figures were a couple of plain benches, which reminded me of the pews you would find in a church back on… back where I had come from.
What with the grand austerity of the room, the pew-like benches, and the overwhelming, yet indefinable, sense of terrible veneration that pervaded the place, it did not take too much imagination to think that someone—or something—had been worshiped here.
The laughter sounded again, jarring my mind like a needle skipping across a record, dislodging the uncomfortable notion that I had been here before, that I had thought these thoughts before…
For a moment, I thought the laughter was coming from the dais. It was completely covered in a labyrinthine design of etchings. There were eddying clouds, trees, creatures, and figures all mixed up and swirled around.
And all of them were engulfed in silver fire. A silver fire that was alive and moved hungrily around the dais.
I blinked. Frowned. All of this was ominous enough, in a beautiful and incomprehensible kind of way, but there was something about the dais that niggled at me. There was something missing. Something that drew my attention to its absence like a lost tooth draws a probing tongue.
A ball, my sluggish mind hypothesized. A ball of… crystal.
In a flash that lit my mind’s eye, I saw it. Saw what should have been there.
It was a vast crystal ball, about half as tall as I was. The point of contact, where the perfect crystalline sphere touched the dais, looked impossibly small for an object that appeared so intrinsically heavy. If it had been there, it would have been filled with a slow-moving fog. The fog, or smoke, or whatever it might have been, would have moved with a grace that captivated the eye in much the same way that flames did.
It would have been mesmerizing. Mesmerizing on a primal level.
“And I am not mesmerizing, Amalgamage?” the voice hissed.
The top of the dais, where I had been gazing absently, snapped into focus.
A face stared down at me from a space some six feet above the dais. It was a woman’s face. It was proportionally perfect and beautiful, yes, but it was also cruel, haughty and without mercy. As my gaze ran over it—and I wouldn’t have been able to take my eyes from it if there’d been a gun to my head— I saw that she had pointed ears.
An elf, then. The damned infernal thing, I thought.
The face was without a body and had seemingly coalesced out of the swirling smoke, of which everything in this place was made. Even as I thought about how weird and unlikely it was that an entire place should be constructed from something as insubstantial as smoke, the outline of a body manifested out of the thickening fumes.
It was an excellent body, as bodies went, radiating prowess, agility and power. Yet every angle of it, every line of musculature defined by the solidifying smoke, somehow spoke of a deep-seeded vindictive viciousness. With the uncanny stretching of time that was unique to nightmares and traumatic situations, the elf woman was made whole. She had the sleek beauty of a cobra—a streamlined, graceful, lethal elegance that could be marveled at just as easily as it was prudent to fear it.
You are not good, I thought to myself, the conviction forming in my mind instinctively.
The woman opened her mouth and laughed again, making me wince and grit my teeth so hard that I feared they might shatter.
“Imagine if we lived in a world where it were all so simple, Amalgamage!” she said, baring her pointed teeth. “Wouldn’t it be nice and neat if Tavalon was a place where the evil folk could be conveniently located somewhere, insidiously committing their evil deeds. What a fanciful fiction it is, the idea that all that is necessary is for someone like you to come along to separate them from those you deem to be good and eradicate them.”
She crouched and wagged a claw-tipped finger at me.
“When you are not here though, you know this is not the case,” she said. “You know that this world, and whatever world you hail from, are the kinds of worlds where the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every sentient being.”
I tried to answer her, tried to form an argument, to tell her that I knew people who didn’t have to wage any such daily war with themselves, but my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth.
“And who do you know, Amalgamage, who is willing to destroy a piece of their own heart, hm?” the elf purred.
I came from a good place. I knew that, although I was struggling to recall the details. I shouldn’t have doubted that, but this female apparition was making me. She was eroding my sense of self, her presence chipping away at my identity and beliefs. The thing was, where I usually lived, in a place where everybody I knew was virtuous of heart, this woman stood out because she wasn’t.
No, this female elf, whoever she was, exuded malevolent intent like a captivating perfume. As far as her obvious ill-intent went, she was unapologetic.
And, in a part of my male psyche that would forever be a silly, impressionable little boy, I was wowed and hooked by that acknowledged lack of care about how she came across. It was the confidence that snared me. The hardy fearlessness. The complete lack of shame for being who she wanted to be. The comfort and genuine honesty for acting in any way she liked. The imperturbable read
“You killed the ogre, the one that styled himself a king, Amalgamage,” she said.
Without meaning to, I nodded. I had a feeling we’d had this conversation before.
“Kings… Leaders…” she said, scorn dripping off the words as she drew the last letter into a scalding hiss. “Bridge-makers and grave-diggers. Foolish beings who do not see that the only destiny waiting for them is to lose all that they ever gained.”
“What do you want from me?” I asked.
I knew the answer to this one too, didn’t I? Still, I found myself hungering to hear her answer. I longed to hear her make them real.
I wasn’t sure if I had spoken the words or only thought about speaking them. Such concern became irrelevant, as she answered me all the same.
“I am an infernal elf,” she replied simply, her purring voice icy cold as venom in the vein.
“I know,” I said, knowing for sure now that she was an Infernal elf, not just an infernal elf. Even though I was suddenly aware of this, I spoke the quip I was certain I had made before.
“Don’t… Don’t be so hard …on yourself. We all… have our off days. That’s the line, isn’t it?”
Her almond-shaped eyes narrowed. It was impossible to say what color they were, them being made of solidified smoke as they were, but the shades of gray darkened perceptibly. She leaned further toward me, resisting the gravity that should have required her to put her hands out to balance or support herself. Her dark gray knee-high boots were resting a clear inch above the surface of the dais. She looked down at me.
“I will have you for myself, Amalgamage,” she said. “You have robbed me of a plaything I was almost ready to release in retribution upon Tavalon. As I said before, this means you will now take his place.”
“Well, it’s… nice to be wanted,” I gasped.
The cold eyes narrowed further. Disdain and derision were written upon every inch of the woman’s flawless face.
“We’ll see how nice it is when you start to inadvertently destroy everything you hold dear,” she said. “You will be mine, Jake Walker…”
Jake Walker…
Jake Walker…
Jake… Walker…
Jake…
“Jake!”
My eyes snapped open, and I took in a deep, gasping breath. My heart hammered in my chest, fluttering and banging like a bird trying to free itself from a cage of skin and bone.
“Jake!” called a female voice—a different female voice. A familiar one that I soon recognized as Lilah’s. “Jake, are you coming?”
Such had been the clarity of the dream, that I felt like I should have been wrapped in my bed sheets, sweating and panting. As it was, I was lying serenely on my back, staring up at the thatch of Lilah’s cottage roof.
“Let him be,” I heard Nelri, the other elf I shared this cottage with along with Lilah, say to the nature elf Matriarch. “He was restless last night. He will catch up with us.”
I heard the door open and close. The soft tramp of my companions’ footfalls, squeaking and crunching in the fresh blanket of snow that had fallen during the night, soon faded.
I looked sideways as I tried to hold onto the dream fragments. Outside the window, under the eave of the roof, I could see fat flakes of snow falling lazily past the whorled panes. A peaceful sight. A peacefulness that was not mirrored by my inner turmoil.
I sighed slowly out through my nose. Even three weeks after the battle with the Ogre King at Solburg, I was being plagued by these dreams. Sometimes the scene would play out just as it had in reality. Other times, like last night, there would be subtle differences. Some nights it felt less like I was visiting a memory and more like I was being visited by the mysterious and ominous Infernal Elf.
I pushed myself up from the pillows, leaving the warm depression of my body in the fragrant and comfortable straw and snawfuss hair mattress.
Just a dream, I thought.
Yeah, it might’ve been just a dream, but people who thought dreams weren’t real just because they weren’t made of matter, of physical particles, didn’t know dreams. Since I had found myself pulled into the world of Tavalon, I had been forced to face the fact that those things I had previously thought of as dreams could be real.
In fact, all too often they were.
Chapter 1
“Taking time to enjoy the little things” was a common idiom that had taken on a fresh meaning for me, ever since I had fallen through the portal that Lilah had conjured between Tavalon and Earth. Back on Earth, before I had been trapped in this strange and wonderful elven world, I had been less inclined to see the beauty in the day-to-day things.
I suspected that the drudgery of my existence had played a crucial part in this. I was a small cog in the brutal, merciless, uncaring machine that our society had become. I had lived paycheck to paycheck, working my ass off just to survive, just for the privilege of existing. I had spent my days eking out a meager existence, all the while being bombarded twenty-four-seven by advertising and marketing telling me what I needed to buy in order to finally be ‘happy.’
Back on Earth, back in my old life, nothing had ever felt in tune. Nothing had ever felt like it made sense. I had always had the indefinable sense that our society was heading for a cliff edge. What was more, we were all heading toward it knowingly and with smiles on our faces.
I had become so accustomed to people just blindly grabbing at and jumping on the bandwagon of whatever was going: veganism, health foods, ice baths, cronuts, hypnotism, group encounters, Tinder, writing a novel, yoga, the cinnamon challenge, fidget spinners, smashed avo on toast, fucking rubber loom bracelets, and then being shocked and surprised that nothing lasted and things changed.
I supposed that people had to find things to do while waiting to die. While stopping to smell the roses was a pleasant thought, most people only wanted to try it until the next thing came along.
I had become disillusioned with a nation that had felt more and more like a third world country dressed in Prada.
Now, though…
Getting dressed in the cozy comfort of the snug elven cottage that I shared with Lilah and Nelri was a lengthy routine, but it was soothing. There was an element of ceremony to it, almost. There was a reason to wear what I wore.
Previously, in my job as a salesman at a high-end clothing store, I had thrown on the most expensive shit I owned each morning. This had been in an attempt to wow customers, sure, but it had also been one of the myriad ways I tried to trick the outside world, and myself, into thinking that I was okay with my lot in life.
As I pulled my linen shirt over my head and then tucked it into my soft hide trousers, I smiled. Nowadays I had far less stuff, but it was all practical and useful. I didn’t have to think about what I had to wear, or why, because my clothes all served a purpose.
The breastplate I wore was made from many v-shaped layers of green leather and blackened steel with pointed edges and subtle decorative swirls and botanical patterns that you could only really see when I moved into direct sunlight. I had not made a habit of wearing it of late, but the winter days were steadily getting colder, and I thought that if I was going to layer up, then I might as well add a layer that protected me.
The breastplate covered almost everything from the neck down and ended at the top of my groin, making sure that all those important, squishy parts of me—my liver and lungs, for instance—were protected.
Not for the first time, I ran my fingers admiringly down the sides of the custom-made piece of armor. The back and front pieces of the cuirass were held together by the strange and organic material known to the elves as foewoemis.
The making of foewoemis was one of the nature elves’ most closely guarded secrets. It was constructed by the careful layering of a rare type of reed found only in very specific areas of the Torrwood. The reeds were compressed using nature magic until they had the tensile strength of the finest steel plate. Essentially, this produced a kind of Tavalonian kevlar.
After this, I covered my upper arms with my rounded, layered rerebraces, made from leather and thin slivers of perfectly beaten steel, which sat under the leather and metal-scaled shoulder plates of the cuirass.
