Armageddon's Children - Terry Brooks [82]
They looked very much the same, these two—slender and Elven-featured, with slanted eyes and brows, narrow faces, ears that were slightly pointed at their tips, and a way of walking that suggested they might take flight on a moment’s notice. They had the look of cousins, though Kirisin thought that facial resemblance aside they were nothing alike.
“You’re probably right, Erisha,” he agreed, still smiling. “I will try to do better starting tonight. But I’m awake now, so I think I will just stay awake until dawn.”
“Kirisin . . .”
But he was already down off the veranda and walking away. He gave her a short wave as he disappeared into the trees, just to let her know that there were no hard feelings. But he didn’t slow.
The Elves were the old people of the world. Some believed they were the prototype of humans, although Kirisin had always thought that nonsense. Elves, he told himself, were nothing like humans.
Yet they coexisted in a world on which both species had made an impact, for better and worse. At the moment, the impact was mostly human-generated and all bad. The humans had lost control of their world. It had happened over time, and it had happened to a degree that no Elf could comprehend. They had systematically destroyed the resources, poisoning everything, at first locally and eventually globally. They had begun warring with each other with such ferocious determination that after a century of violence more were dead than alive. Nature had responded, of course. Plagues and storms and upheavals had finished off what humans had begun. At first, the Elves had told themselves that much of what was happening was a part of nature’s cycle, that things would eventually be set right. They weren’t telling themselves that anymore. In fact, it had gotten bad enough that some were advocating that the Elves come out of hiding to try to set things right.
Of course, much of the fault for what had happened lay squarely at their own doorstep, Kirisin thought darkly. It had been their decision to go into hiding centuries earlier when the human population had begun to proliferate and the Elven to decline. Coexistence seemed a better possibility if the former knew nothing of the latter. Elves had always known how to disappear in plain sight.
It was not so difficult for them to fade into the forests that had served as their homes since the beginning of time. It was the wiser choice, the elders of that time had believed.
So they settled for surviving in a human world and did so mostly by keeping hidden. The humans called the Cintra the Willamette, and the land surrounding was called Oregon. It was remote and sparsely settled, and the Elves had little trouble staying out of sight. When humans came too close, they were turned aside. A slight distraction was usually enough—a small noise here, a little movement there. When that failed, intruders often woke from an unexpected fall or unexplained bump on the head. It didn’t happen often; there was nothing in the deep woods that appealed to most humans. The Elves warded their homelands against the encroachments fostered by human neglect and poor stewardship, but their efforts of late were proving insufficient. Soon, something would have to be done. The matter was already under discussion in the Elven High Council, but opinion was divided and solutions scarce.
As the Elves were beginning to find out, absenting yourself from the affairs of the world was an invitation for disaster.
Ahead, the crimson canopy of the Ellcrys appeared through the trees, bright and shining even in the pale moonlight, a beacon that never failed to make the boy smile. She was so beautiful, he thought. How could anything be too wrong in a world that had given her life?
He stepped into the clearing where the Ellcrys grew and stood staring at her. He came here almost every morning before the others woke, a private time in which he sat and talked with her alone. She never responded, of course, because she never responded to anyone. But that didn’t matter to Kirisin. He was there