The Exile of the Sea Elves (Gnostem #0)
Flash Fiction February Day 8 - Prompt: "They would learn to live their lives aboard a fleet of ships and never see land again" (Also premiering a world I've been messing around with for about a month)
“There’s an old tale from the far-east, well beyond the Reified Mountains,” Broralan Mountainminer started. The master storyteller loved to entertain crowds at the jarl’s palace, but there was no audience in all of the dwarven vertical village of Mount Ruskin as dear to him as his husband, Krobranth, and their son, Ralan. “The tale tells of the split of the elven folk. It starts in the Chronotopic forests of the ancient wood elves, those eternal beings who live amongst the tanagers and gibbons, the macaws and koalas in treetop canopies.”
Ralan, falling into the immersion created by his father’s cadences and dulcet tones, was transported across the continent and back hundreds of years.
Sarnellyn Waxwing ran over ruddy wooden bridges, making chaotic spurts look as graceful as the flight of the elegant creature whose name she bore. Hundreds of feet below, on the teeming forest floor, the shadows of her pursuers closed in. Despite their reputation around Gnostem, the elves of the chronotopic forests were not a harmonious population.
As she neared the middle of one bridge between buildings, an arrow whizzed by and pierced the rope holding the bridge intact. It hung by a thread. Sarnellyn had foreseen the bridge’s collapse, though, and counted on it.
The bridge gave way and seconds later she reached terminal velocity.
Sarnellyn awoke unharmed. Her pursuers lost her in the fall, but they’d be searching soon. She took off again toward a safe house on the edge of the forest, overlooking the Sea of the Sublime.
“Made it back safe,” Sarnellyn called as she entered the house. The slender frame of another, hunched over a table, didn’t look up. His eyes were transfixed on a scrying dagger.
“That was one hell of an escape. Way to shove it down their throats,” he said.
“They call us freaks and refuse to understand our powers. Their loss.”
“Don’t get settled yet, though. We still have a fight.”
“They’ve never tried to shoot one of us down before, Deiran. I don’t get it. We’re wood elves too, why are they instigating civil war? For what?” Deiran shrugged. He’d obviously been asked the question too many times to attempt a response. “I think it’s time to leave,” she added.
Deiran sighed, but didn’t protest. Sarnellyn locked the door of the safe house and headed toward the stairs. After centuries among the treetops, Sarnellyn’s faction of wood elves was driven underground by a different, more militant faction.
Sarnellyn was among the few thousand in these forests belonging to an ancient tradition of chronotopic fey magic. This magic influenced the relationship such elves had with space and time; they experienced the universe in its cyclical truth, seeing time and space laid out plainly.
It is theorized that chronotopic magic is in fact a tool of Stagnos, the god of civilization, so the chronotopic elves do not control it. They cannot see the future or change the past, but they do have an intimate insight into the inner-workings of cosmic constructs. But other theories abound.
Many other wood elves, for example, saw this power as unnatural, an aberration that must be destroyed at any cost. So these wood elves drove Sarnellyn and her faction underground and then sought their complete destruction.
Sarnellyn had seen this coming, though.
In an underground cove, Sarnellyn created a port. With the help of other chronotopic elves and the resistance within the general wood elf population, Sarnellyn had enough ships prepared to sail through the Sea of the Sublime. She wasn’t sure how long they’d sail, but adaptability was a key feature of elves all through Gnostem.
As Sarnellyn went to give the evacuation call, explosions shook the ground and riddled the safe house with holes. The wood elves were attacking. As expected.
They launched flaming boulders from a trebuchet set up on the cliff overlooking the cove. Where the cove had tree coverage, the wood elves rolled glass bottles off bridges hundreds of feet in the air. The bottles shattered below as alchemical reactions within catalyzed into brilliant fireballs.
This was more than an attack; it was a genocide.
Sarnellyn sounded the alarm and scrying daggers throughout the underground compound blared. Thousands of chronotopic elves fled, boarding ships, dropping sails, and readying arrows.
The offensive forces were slight in number, but they had every other advantage—arial attacks, the benefit of surprise, and incendiary artillery. The chronotopic elves saved what they could, but ships sank as boulders flew through hulls and smoke choked out all resistance.
Sarnellyn took off toward Deiran before evacuating herself. She gave the order for ships to leave as soon as they could. She ran up the stairs of the safehouse through smoke and flames and found her friend buried under steaming rubble.
“Go, Sarnellyn, lead the rest.”
“No, we can save you, we can get you a cleric or somebody. Let’s go!” She tried moving rubble but screamed as it seared her flesh.
“Go. I have one more surprise for these assholes. Bet ya they don’t see it coming,” and he smiled.
She fled. She tripped on her way, unable to see clearly through the tears and smoke. At one point as she lay on the ground, another explosion sent ripples through the dirt around her and she knew, as she would know, as she had always known, that Deiran sacrificed himself for her escape.
She was the last of the chronotopic elves to make it aboard one of the fleeing vessels. The losses were catastrophic; they were cut asunder, with only a few hundred making it to sea.
But they built back, as they always had, as they always would. This was the path they had walked, and will walk.
Sarnellyn led the chronotopic elves on their quest to build a great, floating city in the Sea of the Sublime. Chron Deiran became their home, a place forever after known as the great floating city of the sea elves!
Broralan finished the tale with a mighty fist hefted above his head.
“Can we see Chron Deiran?” Ralan asked.
“We can’t, Ralan. It exists, as the chronotopic elves themselves, among the folds of spacetime.”
“So they never made it back to the Chronotopic forests?”
“No, indeed. They learned to live their lives aboard a fleet of ships, fated ne’er to set foot upon land again.”