[Wk34] The Elven Unification, part 3
The elders were more receptive to Katalyi’s depleted body lying in the center of their hall than they were to hir enthusiastic request mere months prior.
Katalyi and Tarakyi’s success stories had followed them to the hall and stood around them in a vibrant cluster of boundless health and support. The entire room resonated with the purity of their desire for a riftless future; burgundy, bronze, slate, emerald, lilac, taupe, and turquoise auras shimmered and flowed across the floor to cradle Katalyi. What was left of Katalyi’s lavender aura squirmed against rifts that roiled and ripped across hir body, mauling hir skin with angry burns and lacerations. Hir once-lavender blood pooled in oily, colorless splotches on the pristine floor of the hall, clinging to hir clothes with a neglected petulance that made the elders cringe. The dynamic auras of hir newfound family soothed the pain that wracked hir body and eased hir struggling heart, but the rifts persisted despite their reaching; it was clear that hir aura was failing.
The elders, who had not been called to use their auras to heal another elf since the Cockatrice Siege of the Blood Moon’s Winter, muttered in disappointment amongst themselves and then clustered around Katalyi. They draped their noodle-esque fingers across hir indifferent torso and released their energy into hir body. Their rare auras, the white and black auras that typically developed only after cultivating their understanding of auraic energy for thousands of years, poured into Katalyi’s heart, soaked hir skin, and seeped through the holes in hir aura, seeking to mend the wounds that had spread so catastrophically through hir being.
Tarakyi held hir breath, along with the crowd, as the elders worked. They stayed motionless around hir body as the labor of the elders stretched onwards. The elves were patient folk; they waited through the hours in quiet murmurs and encouraging nudges. When dusk crept into the windows, they parted.
Katalyi was unchanged.
The room was silent.
The elders resumed their seats at the head of the hall. They nodded quickly to each other, agreeing without discussion on their deliberation.
“We will become riftless. We will gather our clans across our world and commit to Katalyi’s need. Hir health is our health.”
The elves dispersed the hall and gathered their families. They committed themselves to reaching every clan on their planet, and encouraging their kin to rethink their rifts. Many were met with immediate welcome; there were clans that had suffered losses; elves that never fully healed, who meandered through their near immortal lives as a fraction of who they truly were because they couldn’t close the gaps that rendered them less.
And while these successes were encouraging to Tarakyi, ze noticed that they did nothing to heal Katalyi’s rifts. Hir sibling remained motionless and fading fast in hir bed. When news of elves disagreeing with the movement reached Tarakyi, sitting by Katalyi’s bed, Katalyi’s breathing would choke and yet another spot of lavender would disappear into a rift. Tarakyi spent hir evenings crying by hir kin’s bedside.
Many of the elves’ auras were brighter, fuller, and everlastingly functional in response to the call for change; their auras embraced the work and throve on the challenge of bringing everyone into the fold. But a few elves, in remote clans nowhere near Katalyi or hir quickly unraveling health, succumbed to rifts just as Katalyi did. Their auras shred with an unhindered speed that terrified their families, their glows stunned to ruin at the faltering of so many in the community. The wounds of these individuals spread to their clan’s communal aura, wreaking ill and rot across the trees they lived in and the food they ate and the air they breathed. The pulsing heart of their society faltered, and many of the clans were flung into a chaos they hadn’t dealt with in millennia.
The stricken tallied. Each wound hit not only a specific elf and that elf’s clan of origin; it then ripped new tears in the already-wounded across the globe, rendering the sick sicker. What had started as a movement for freedom from rifts had become a spiraling inferno of unstoppable rifts that seemed to communicate across continents. The clans began to panic; one by one, the dissenters of the movement agreed, horrified by the harm they had caused, to invest.
The work began, finally, to make its mark. Rifts were disappearing as new methods for understanding their auras were discovered, taught, and implemented. The elves learned quickly and every seamless aura was honored and welcomed as a new birth in the clan. They fought to nourish the whimsical energies that permeated their bodies in such a way that the needs of their characters were heard and met. The Stricken, the handful of elves that were struck down like Katalyi, were the last to heal. As the communal auras refound their vibrance, the Stricken in each community began to mend. Word spread.
Tarakyi answered the door after the last clan had healed its Stricken. Hir face was drawn, but hir aura was thick and healthy around hir figure. The elders stood at hir doorstep and asked to speak with Katalyi. It was time to congratulate hir on the success of the movement.
Tarakyi led them to Katalyi’s chambers. They stood in hir bedroom doorway and stared in silence at hir colorless body, withered on its bed.
Katalyi had died.
