[Wk 32] The Elven Unification, part 1
The elves thrived in the dewy jungles that spanned most of Orachii. The planet was small and humid and lush, and the elven communities stretched across every mainland. Their dwellings were clusters of twenty to thirty families, tucked into the mile high branches of expansive trees with flexible trunks. Their homes would move with the wind, resting on the thick, stable leaves bursting from branches that rippled like waves.
Their homes were like their lives; juxtapositions of things that should have conflicted, but didn’t; realities that played off each other without insisting one needed to be less so another could be more. Their existence revolved around the immediate honesty of their nature. Their character, their essence, was made tangible and glaring by the color of their skin; each elf was its own unique shade, typically six whisper-thin feet of unabashed hue, with fine translucent hair that curled like curious tentacles around their bare shoulders and waists. The abundance of their energy poured from their souls through their skin; their bodies shimmered with auras the exact shade of their characters, and their desires were focused and often fulfilled by the energy their auras afforded them.
They lived for thousands of centuries in relative ease. Unrest was not uncommon amongst the elves; the distress would tear soft, swirling, empty holes in the brilliant energy that seeped from their bodies. But the tears, minor or major, came and went much like wind and rain, and the elves meandered through their near immortal lives unfettered by their reoccurrence.
Katalyi would never have put hirself on a list of dissatisfied elves. Ze had always thought the speckling of hir kindred’s auras were beautiful in its own way. Ze even embraced the tears’ unpredictable natures, marveling at their innumerably varied presentations across hir kin. The speckles not only appeared in different shapes and sizes, but also at any part of life, sometimes mere months after a baby was born, and sometimes hundreds of years later, when the elf was a venerable constant in the community. Katalyi’s clan, like Katalyi hirself, had always embraced the character changes wrought by the fickle splotches. The elves understood them as part of their essence; when feelings are left without acknowledgement, rifts in auras were natural. The holes changed the fabric of the community as they changed each individual, but never in a way that lessened the basic nature of the elves. It read to Katalyi like texture; ruffles on a long swath of silk.
Katalyi’s aura was riftless; it gleamed a pure lavender so light, many figured hir for a rare white aura elf. Ze’d been told that babies’ speckles were common and fleeting, that the more severe rifts occurred later in life. Ze assumed this was correct, but even with hir crystalline memory, ze couldn’t remember a solitary speckle in hir aura as far back as ze reached.
When hir sibling, Tarakyi, had hir heart broken, the rift that eventually consumed Tarakyi’s aura was wide and unabashed, a glare that ripped through the sultry sage of Tarakyi’s aura. The elders of hir clan barely noticed; the rifts of individuals rarely disrupted the health of the clan’s communal aura. The needs that came from heartbreak during the middle years of elven life comprised most clans’ biggest health crises. Tarakyi’s rift was no different; life warbled on, relatively unshaken.
Katalyi grew increasingly worried as the months ticked on, and the rift widened rather than dwindled. It lurched across Tarakyi’s every move like an angry toddler, causing hir simplest acts to backfire in often spectacular bursts of disarray. The holes in Tarakyi’s aura began to erode Tarakyi’s memory of hirself. Katalyi would find Tarakyi standing in front of hir bed, closing and opening hir hands as ze tried to remember how to make hir aura pour from hir palms the way it used to.
Tarakyi lost her ability to sing to the birds. Hir mouth opened, and a weak wisp of foggy light slipped from hir lips before ze began to choke. Later that day, Tarakyi discovered ze couldn’t make things grow; hir hands waved puffs of nothing across soil and branches while the plants gazed back in dismayed judgment. Tarakyi’s attempts to encourage the health of the vines wrapped around the beams of their treehouse brought mold and dehydration which slunk into the veins of their tree with a relentless blatancy that made Tarakyi weep.
Katalyi found hir own helplessness intolerable, watching hir only sibling fumble destructively through each day without respite. Soon, Tarakyi was too torn to use hir aura at all. Katalyi tried to find ways that would help Tarakyi remember hirself, find hir way back. Ze began to question Tarakyi, lightly at first — a gentle ask in the morning about how often Tarakyi still thought about Lordun, followed by a wry chuckle at Tarakyi’s response (“Every time I scrub the toilet.”). Ze asked and listened and noticed that every so often, Tarakyi’s rifts looked smaller, less oily, less hungry. Katalyi kept pressing until one morning, Tarakyi swung into the main room from hir bedroom vine, and said,
“I need to report the harm Lordun caused me. I need hir accountability, even if ze claims no penance. I need to say it.”
Tarakyi’s rift closed, vanished, leaving hir in the quiet, steady, flicker of sage and solace. Katalyi was stunned.
Is that it? That’s all it took? These months of agony, and now Tarakyi is fine?
Katalyi requested an audience with the elders, too.
