Fear the Dead

The outside world was unknown to her, but she could see a glimpse of it through the window in his room. The large, glass-filled porthole offered an ample view of the forest beyond the living wood walls of the cottage. She could not seek it out, but the old Dryad cared little about privacy and rarely bothered closing the door to block the sightline from the front room.

From her fixed vantage point, she could make out a cabin in the distance, grown and shaped from the same variety of magical trees that formed the Dryad's home. Between the two, a fire pit roared under an iron pot. He was making dinner: stew, by the smell of it. Her mouth watered a bit as the savory aroma tickled her taste buds with the memory of succulent pork and tender vegetables.

The door of the cottage stood open to the mild midsummer night, throwing moonlight onto the dirt floor in a perfect arch. How she longed to cast her gaze upon the forest through the unobstructed doorway, but that was not her fate. She could only see what lay before her: the kitchen to her right, on the other side of the doorway; the small, cluttered living room where the Dryad stacked his finished projects; the short hallway, with doors to a storage closet and water closet on either side; and his bedroom at the end, directly ahead of her.

He was in his bedroom but not in sight (no doubt tinkering with some trinket or another) when the cottage doorway darkened. She saw the shadow of the undead elf long before she could hear the shuffle of its steps, but the smell took longer to catch up. Just a faint trace of decay and dislodged earth wafted off the greenish, mottled flesh of the visitor, no doubt on the hunt for a meal.

Down the hallway, in the Dryad's bedroom, the clanking had succumbed to a heavy, tense silence like the world itself was holding its breath. She knew better than to scream; it would do her no good, and the Dryad was more than capable of handling the threat. As if to illustrate the thought as it occurred, a wet thwack sounded from the bedroom, followed by a quiet thud and a louder thud in quick succession.

She looked on silently as he dragged the headless corpse outside with one hand, carrying the slack-jawed head in the other. The slatted door to the cellar creaked open and slammed shut as he deposited the remains in his workshop, then again as he returned to the front yard. Soon, she saw his face looming over the cooking fire through the window in his room. He stirred the stew with bloody hands and gazed back at her.

The flames danced in his sunken eyes, and she wished she could look away.

*****

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. The pitiful, emaciated flame twinkled and stretched in the draft of a gentle breeze, calling attention to its uncustomary presence and attracting the eye of the Dryad. She watched with mounting unease as he dressed hastily and shuffled out the door armed with his blade and a staff emitting a weaker light than the candle.

It had been decades since she had seen anything other than the swirling wooden walls of the living room. Long before The Fall, a Djinn's curse had left her in the Dryad's custody with little hope of liberation. When she had last looked upon the world, it was intact and teeming with life that she longed desperately to be a part of. The aching desire dulled with the passing years in a dappled green room filled with knickknacks and contraptions buried under pages of crowded script penned by the hand of a madman. 

Then, after undead swarms had taken over the cities and the Plague Cats had taken to roaming the forest, what hope had remained was dashed with the rest of the population. The cabin and the cottage had once been the furthest outposts of a small but thriving village, but the Dryad alone remained after the gruesome demise of the cabin's former occupants. They were his last living subjects, brief though that life had been, but the candle reignited the long-forgotten fuse of possibility in her mind. 

Through the window, she saw the Dryad approach the cabin, light from his staff bobbing with his shuffling gait and glinting off his blade. The light disappeared as he crossed the threshold of the cabin in search of the visitors. As the darkness closed in once more, a pair of voices whispered at the cottage door.

"It's in here somewhere."

"How long do we have?"

"Not long. He'll break through the loop soon."

She heard them cross the threshold and step onto the spongy wood floor. Soft footfalls overlapped in a cacophony of hushed noise in the kitchen, punctuated by the creak of a cabinet door or a drawer thudding closed. "I found it." The noise intensified and closed in.

A silhouette passed between her and the light in the window, and then a thick cloth descended to obscure her view. Muffled, she could still make out the voices as she felt herself be lifted and dragged away, through the door and into the unknown.

"I can't believe it was so close to the door."

"He must have thought the Resistance was obliterated in The Fall."

Ragged breaths and rough jostling movements told her they were running as they spirited her away. a minute passed, maybe more, before a bellowing scream sounded in the distance and brought her liberators to a skidding halt. The Dryad had freed himself of whatever ruse the burglars had used to occupy his attention and had likely discovered her absence. 

"Time to go."

"Yeah. We should be far enough away. Let's hit it."

She felt herself being lowered to the ground with exceptional care and remarkable speed. She could smell rich loam, sharp grass, and musky leaves through the cloth—the scent of the forest. A bright, sour note cut through the earthy aroma as a quiet, high-pitched whirring noise and a steady blue glow surrounded her. The noise, odor, and light intensified until they overwhelmed all other sensations, leaving her adrift in their disorienting sameness.

The intense discomfort fell away to dark silence after a moment, and the sudden absence of sensation doused her in cold panic. The scent of the forest was gone. In its place was a faint trace of something chemical. A dull hum, like a beehive in the distance, remained in the void left by the birdsong and chittering she had become so accustomed to hearing. Overhead, beyond her veil, there was a double line of stars offering a weak light.

There was something eerily familiar about the foreign environment, like a memory that swam just beyond the reach of her recall. She had spent nearly a century as the Dryad's prisoner with only a small window's awareness of the outside world. She watched the family next door build the cabin. She watched the village burn in the distance as the Plague Cats razed the forest. She watched the undead villagers swarm the cabin only to find the mangled remains of an experiment gone wrong. 

His muscles wasting away as food became scarce and he searched for an escape from the inevitable end and the wretched stench of rotting meat that filled the air when he found one.

The headless bodies twitching in the living room as he discovered which nerves responded to magic and which could not be reactivated after death.

His twisted efforts to attract new subjects to the clearing with offal culled from his failed attempts at cultivating undead companionship.

His frantic, whispered confessions as the light of the fireplace danced with the madness in his hollow, sunken eyes.

One of her captors retched and the other swore, dragging her back to the present. Rapid footfalls clicked in an echoing crescendo as the source approached the trio. A woman spoke over the symphony of clicks and her voice echoed in the emptiness as well. "You found her?"

"Yes, Madam President." She could feel thin fingers lifting her from the ground. The veil made a slithering noise as it slid away to reveal a face she knew but couldn't place. An ancient elven woman gazed at her with a warm expression she couldn't name. Tears glistened in the woman's lavender eyes, spilling into the crepe paper crinkles of her cheeks and joining on her sharp chin.

A single drop fell onto the mirror's reflective surface, rippling across a face that was not the president's, but her mother's.

***** 

Years before The Fall, the Dryad paid a hefty sum to a Djinn to trap her spirit in a looking glass after she rejected his marriage proposal. The Djinn, his people enemies of the elves and opponents of their rebellion, gladly obliged. A few nights after the bargain was struck, he came to the home of the leader of the Resistance with a choice to offer. If she told her compatriots to lay down their arms and surrender to the oversight and governance of the Alliance, she would be spared. If she refused, she would never speak again.

Her young daughter, warned to stay hidden until the Djinn had gone, watched from the closet as her mother melted into a pool of liquid silver. She feared she would never again look upon her mother's face. With guidance from her mother's right hand, she ascended to leadership and steered the Resistance to the safety of a new underground shelter. She designed the vault to resemble their home in the old mines of her mother's homeland: stark, dark, and cool.

When the Alliance betrayed the people, unleashing the Plague Cats and the zombie curse on all those who lived below the towering peaks of Newcastle, the elves were safe and out of reach. The president led her people to prosperity and health, scavenging and scouring the surface for survivors. When she learned the Dryad had survived the fall and remained in the Living Forest, she vowed to save her mother from his demented grasp. 

Finally, after nearly a decade of organization and development, she held her mother in her hands. She stared at the eyes of a young woman haunted by a lifetime of bearing witness to the misdeeds of a madman—the madman who created the Plague Cats from poisonous frogs and long-toothed tigers. Somehow, they would find a way to free her from this crystalline prison. One day, she would hear her mother's voice once more.

"Hey Mom," she chuckled tearfully, grazing the mirror's surface with her fingertips and leaving wakes of ripples behind. "Welcome to Novana, the new home of the Elves."