Treefather
"Where am I, and what happened?" I wondered aloud.
Of course there was no immediate answer. Had I expected one, I would have been foolish. I would have been human.
Like him?
Strange, did I think that or say that aloud too? It was so hard to tell. The noise of this strange wind drowned out almost everything, even thoughts of him.
The landscape was bleak; lifeless and austere. Yet it was also somehow familiar, like I had been here before, in another time.
Another lifetime?
Something about that question haunted me, like cruel laughter and mocking eyes. Fire flared up in front of me, engulfed me, yet left me cold.
"Why?" I asked the wind then gasped as the landscape seemed to tilt and swirl like eddies of mud in swampy water.
It had been in a swamp I had first seen him. He had been out hunting night birds, and I could see his cruelty even then. It had been without remorse that I had sprung his traps, knowing that he hunted not for food, but for sport. I had always been careful, had taken or used some animal form when doing so, yet he had somehow known. If I had been his constant watcher, he had been my constant odium.
I gasped again as reality, or what served for reality in this strange land, reasserted itself. I knew this place. It was his keep, his place of cold, indomitable stone, like the walls around his icy heart. And there he was too, revealed as his true self, a black shadow in a charcoal storm.
"Come to also join our cabal, Elanee?" he mocked, and the memories asserted themselves, forcefully, undeniably, like he had done with my body that one night in his room.
"You killed me."
It was a statement of fact, though he seemed to think it required some response.
"Of course," he smiled, malice dripping from the void that served as his mouth. "Did you think I had forgotten? About all those sprung traps, or what had happened back in Merdelain?"
I winced at his horrid use of the Elven, as if it had been a slap.
"How?" I managed, reeling in confusion and pain.
"I could always sense you Elanee, my little watcher in the wilds. Just like I could sense your arrival now."
"Why?" I asked again, half expecting the world to smear and warp, as when that question had brought me here.
"Because of the power of hatred."
"I do not understand…"
That seemed like such a feeble shield against what my eyes, or whatever allowed this ghostly form to see, told me so clearly.
"You are looking at that power right now you stupid elf," he seemed to voice my thoughts.
"Then if we are all dead…"
"Still a little slow on the uptake I see," he laughed, thunder rumbling overhead. "The King of Shadows sees all hatred."
"No!" I shouted as reality folded in on itself again and I was suddenly back in the Mere.
I looked into the dark waters and cried out to my god.
Oak Father forgive me!
It was his face that looked up at me out of the dead water. It had been my own hatred that had so utterly doomed us all.
