Flash Fiction

By Lugh

Rememberence

Elves, like all races, have a myriad of traditions. In fact, they have so many traditions it can be difficult to keep up with them, especially for someone who was not raised amid the regulated chaos that is life under hill. One important tradition deals with honoring the dead. For such a long-lived race, life can seem immortal; yet, there is death, and each death must be properly remembered, for when an elf dies, where their life-blood flows roses grow. These roses are the truest of red and highly sought after by humans, although they do not know how the blooms came about, nor why they will not grow in any but their native soil.

Many myths surround these infamous Elvin Blood Roses, especially in one little village up north. There an ancient Rowan stands guard over the largest known patch of Elvin's Blood ever discovered. Oddest thing is, the entire patch is interspersed with a small flowering plant with its own mythology that goes by the name of Maiden's Tears and a single dense patch of Nightshade right in the center. How these three, typically incompatible, plants came to be together in one place and continue to live in harmony it is not understood by humans. But because of this, the Elvin's Blood Roses that grow there are unreachable by those who wish to harvest them.

I, however, am not human. This is the place I go to honor my dead. I recall as a small child my father, or the human I thought was my father, telling me the story of my mother's death, and his role in it. I felt his grief and his sorrow even at that young age. Now I know the man who died was my father. I think he knew it too; he just did not want to believe it. I am fae; there is no denying that. The centuries between my birth and the telling of this tale are proof enough. Here, by the Rowan, I kneel and listen to the spirits of my dead, and again I see their deaths so that I might remember:

As my father told the story, t'was a full moon, when the young woman who was to be his wife slipped out from her bed called by the haunting song of an Elvin lord. On his flute, he played in the field below the old Rowan that is surrounded by the ash, dancing in the pale moonlight. His need for her fueled the song and she responded leaving behind her family and all she knew.

The Rowan where I now knelt.

Her betrothed, determined to win back his love, went on the next full moon, when the veil between the worlds was the thinnest, to the field and demanded his beloved back. He was armed with nothing more than a hunting knife and his pride.

Nothing happened.

Every full moon for months, he made the journey out to that grove he went. A full year had passed and he had just about given up hope, yet he continued to go because his pride pushed him on. The tale has it the last time he went pleaded and begged and finally he dared them to send the hounds after him because nothing less would keep him away.

The next time he arrived, he stood ready; his hunting knife in hand, and the hounds came. A pair of them only, but hounds none the less. The snapped at him and chased him, and he slashed out at them with his blade of cold iron -- the death metal. In his anger, he did not realize when he dealt the deathblow to the first hound so intent was he on killing the second. Then he felt his blade slip between the ribs of the hound. The creature took a gasping breath, which gurgled with blood. Then it began to shift forms. Confused the bedraggled beloved looked over at the first hound and found it to be a male -- the most beautiful male he had ever seen with blond ringlets and eyes the color of the sky at sunset. Then he looked at the second and was horrified at what he saw. His own beloved; drowning in her blood. He picked her up and wept tears of sadness that he had done this, tears of confusion that she was a hound. He could not ask her why, but he could forgive her so he did, and he felt that she forgave him. Blood had splattered everywhere in that field ringed of ash by the big rowan, and the next spring wild flowers bloomed -- roses for my father for I had been born only weeks before, and Maiden's Tears for my mother who loved him deeply.

Years passed in the space of a few heartbeats then I see the man who raised me, the man I called father. He had loved my mother although he had killed her and her love. He walked to the center of the field and the roses parted for him to pass, and then he sat and wept for the longest time. I wonder if he saw what I see today. Did they grant him that much before he took his own life? He did not seem unhappy in the end. Oddly, he seemed finally at peace. Where his body rested, the nightshade grew.

I stood and stretched; it was almost dawn. The night of remembrance was nearly done. Walking over to the nearest patch of roses, I plucked one from it's vine, being careful of the dagger like thorns. There was a young lady in the nearby village that I wished to see, a maiden yet, and her father, well he did not approve of flute players. She, however, liked roses, particularly Elvin's Blood. I had watched her stand near the field and dance under the Rowan, weaving among the ash. The spell she wove was an ancient one, and one that even a half-breed such as I could not resist. I sniffed the sweet ambrosia and hoped she was not betrothed. I did not want to end up like my father for I would have no one to remember me.

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