A/N: Merry Christmas everyone! I hope you all have a peaceful holiday. Wherever you are, whatever you observe, whether you're with family, friends, or are enjoying your own solitary company, I want you all to know you have my appreciation and love. Thank you for reading.


Chapter 13: You Must Go and I Must Bide

Bernard sat alone. Truthfully, he was supposed to be patrolling the hallway, minding the elves, and keeping them calm. But he could hardly do that when he was more nervous than any of them. The elves, to their credit, seemed to sense his unease. They kept quietly to themselves and gave him plenty of space in the process. He was meanwhile content to let them. The drone of their whispers washed through him as he felt his heart pound heavily in his chest.

He reached into his messenger and pulled out a snowglobe. Its silver base was tarnished, but the water was as clear and the inlaid gems as bright as the day it had been made. He had given a similar globe like this to his boss's young son Charlie. Occasionally he wondered if the boy had kept the object. This one he had given to Lydia many years ago, as a token of his affection and a means by which to connect them in days almost as dark as these ones. Bernard thought for a moment then turned the snowglobe upside down. Swirling it back and forth a bit, he wondered what might happen when he righted it. He pictured her standing before him as she had done long ago. In his mind he saw her in her Victorian dress, her young face with its lingering childlike light. But he also saw her as he had minutes before. Tall and upright, her face stern but womanly atop a suit of metal. The light in those grey eyes might have changed, but did they really look at him any differently? Maybe not, he thought. He turned the snowglobe right-side up and held the base in his hands.

Snowflakes spiraled in the base in a whirlwind. Then as he looked into the swirling water of the globe, the landscape within the glass changed, and he could see the village as it lay outside. A line of wood elves stood in formation, forming a wall guarding the settlement of cottages. Even as he thought of her, the image within the globe focused in on Lydia, and suddenly he could see her close up. Her face was wet. Elrodan spoke to her, and she wiped tears off her cheeks. Bernard closed his eyes briefly and hung his head. Curiosity won out over his shame, and he looked back at the scene in the globe. After a volley of arrows failed the stop of the slow invasion of the massive dark wall that approached them, the wood elves drew their swords and advanced on horseback to meet the Erlking's monsters on the snowy plain.

The garrison of wood elves that had come to the Pole was less an army and more an exploratory team. Highly trained as they were, their small numbers put them at a disadvantage on the plain, where the Erlking's forces covered the ground like a writhing, louse-ridden blanket. Any resentment Bernard, or indeed any of the elves, harbored toward Gilrohir for his merciless drilling of the wood elves evaporated as the two opposing forces collided. A small but well-trained garrison was better than nothing, and Bernard quickly realized that, without them, he and all his elves would have been easily slaughtered. He hardly took a breath as he watched the ensuing battle, as the reality sunk like a stone inside him that if this battle went poorly, they were all well and truly lost.

Yet the wood elves were well-trained. Few of them had seen true battle, and their inexperience was another strike against them. But their instruction had lasted not months or even years, but centuries, and even the historians and healers among them were experts with their weapons. The wood elves' arrows were not quite as impotent up close as they were at a distance, but their efficiency lay in taking out their opponents eyes or striking at the vulnerable flesh of their necks. Gilrohir quickly discovered that depriving the monsters of their heads seemed the quickest way to dispatch them and shouted orders to his soldiers that they should concentrate their efforts on the beasts' throats.

Despite his discontentment with the elves' irascible commander, Bernard had to admit that Gilrohir had well-earned his place as their leader. If it had come to light that the wood elf had been born wearing a suit of armor, none watching him on the battlefield could have doubted it. Gilrohir moved like water, or like a sentient stream of smoke, but he was as lethal as a knife blade in the dark. The Erlking's horrors with their lumbering mass could not catch hold of him to crush him with their warhammer-like hands. He slipped and flipped just far enough away to escape their attacks, only to twist back to dispatch them with calm efficiency, slicing his sword through their necks like a medieval landscaper scything his way through tall grass

Orëna too proved her worth very quickly as Gilrohir's second-in-command. Her half-dwarf stature gave her advantages her full-blooded elven comrades did not have. She possessed some of their agility, but her thick, stocky muscles made her a borderline behemoth of strength. She carried a sword in one hand and a battleaxe in the other, swinging them gleefully about, chopping the Erlking's monsters to splinters like they were made of balsa wood.

But neither of them were the true objects of Bernard's interest. Bernard didn't know much about fighting, at least not with anything other than words. But he thought Lydia was not doing terribly badly. Inexperienced maybe, and not with the fluid lethality of Gilrohir or the brute strength of Orëna. But she was holding her own. As well as anyone could hold their own against such creatures anyway. Lydia cleanly sliced the head off one of the smaller monsters, and when it collapsed into the snow in a muddy puddle, Bernard felt a surge of pride along with his disgust.

Soft footsteps puttered toward him, and he looked up to see Judy approaching him with a silver carafe in her hand. With her pointed princess hat and her velvet dress with the fur trim, she did not look to have a hair out of place. If the battle had disheveled her at all, the disorder had been entirely internal.

"You should drink something," she said without preamble. She produced a small metal cup and filled it.

"How did you-?" He trailed off, goggling at the carafe.

"I have my ways," she said coyly as she handed him the cup. "You okay?"

He could have lied. He even wanted to. Lying would have been easy. But Bernard couldn't bring himself to be dishonest, not now. Not to Judy.

"I really messed up, didn't I?"

Judy blinked at him for a moment, as though his bare-faced honesty had surprised her. She winced sympathetically then shrugged her velveted shoulders.

"A little. What do you have there?"

Bernard shifted guiltily. "It's a snowglobe. Like the one I gave Charlie. I gave it to Lydia a long time ago."

Judy gasped and crouched beside him.

"You can watch from here?"

Bernard held the snowglobe a little further out, like they were children sharing a picture book. They watched the battle in silence for a few minutes. Judy did not share his apprehensions by half and watched Lydia with an enrapt smile on her face.

"Wow, she's really come along, hasn't she?"

Bernard felt his brow furrow, but he did not respond. Judy took her eyes off the snowglobe for a moment, and their eyes met. The little smile fell from Judy's face.

"She'll be okay," said Judy with her own brand of quiet confidence. It was as though she had told him the sky was blue. She knew it to be true, and that was that. Bernard silently wished he could share in that certainty, but fear and regret gnawed at his insides like ravenous dogs.

"You don't know that."

"I believe it. And you know what I always say."

The briefest ghost of a smile crept onto Bernard's face.

"'Seeing is believing.' I remember," he said. A cold sliver of dread slipped back through his insides and chased the smile away. "I just don't know if that's going to be enough this time."

When Judy had nothing to say to that, he turned his eyes back to the snowglobe.

"Look out!"

The voice that cried out was his. He had yelled the words without thinking as a juggernaut thundered straight toward Lydia. It was twice the size of the one she had felled before. She could not hear him of course. Too late, she turned and saw it barrelling toward her. It swung a mighty arm and slammed into her side. She was hurled from her horse and landed hard onto the snow. After rolling across the ground several feet, her body came to a stop several dozen yards away.

"Bernard, what is it? What happened?"

Judy had not seen Lydia thrown from her horse, but she had heard him shout. Bernard did not answer, nor did he take his eyes off the globe. Lydia's grey mare evaded the monster's swinging arm and ran to her rider's side, dipping her head and pressing her muzzle to Lydia's face. Lydia did not rise.

Bernard saw no more. The snowglobe slipped from his fingers, hit the stony floor, and shattered.

"Where are you going?" asked Judy as he got to his feet.

"I have to go. Lydia's in trouble. I have to help her."

"Bernard, you can't. It's too dangerous."

"She's in trouble," he repeated helplessly.

"Is she really in any more trouble than she was a minute ago? And what can you possibly do for her? Bernard, think about it."

Judy's hand clasped around his wrist. She had instinctively predicted his next thought, that he could disappear and materialize on the battlefield in some desperate, foolhardy attempt to help Lydia. But he could not do that now, not with Judy's hand clamped down on his arm, not without taking her with him. And he could no more bring her into a warzone than he could bring himself to cut off his own hand to separate them, and she knew it. She knew him too well.

Bernard felt his knees begin to collapse underneath him. Judy had dragged him away from the wreckage of the shattered snow globe, ordered him to stay put, and was now sweeping broken glass into a pile with a rag. Bernard buried his face in his hands.

"What have I done?"

Judy said nothing as she returned but wrapped her arm around him and leaned into him, trying to lend whatever comfort she could with her presence. In spite of himself, he leaned back just a bit and covered her hand with his. All he could think now was the pool of blood beneath Lydia's broken body when he found her fallen from the roof of her house. Did the blood pool beneath her again, staining the snow crimson? Or had her armor protected her? Had her company protected her? He could not know. He could only wait now, with Judy's warm hand only the barest comfort around his arm.

"She'll be alright," said Judy after a while. "You'll see."

Her tone did not possess the same confidence as before, though Judy had tried her best to pretend. Neither of them spoke again. Doubt hung between them heavy enough. They both felt pointedly the truth that there might not be another miraculous escape from death for Lydia this time.


In another corridor on the other side of the factory, Santa Claus and his wife patrolled their own hallways. They passed each other briefly a few times an hour, and every time, they exchanged nervous glances but said nothing. Hours later, a knock at the door startled them both.

"Do you think it's one of the elves?"said Scott.

"Would the Erlking knock on the door?" said Carol as though she was not willing to bet her life on whether or not he would.

"Wanna play rock, paper, scissors to see who answers it?"

Another knock sounded. Carol grimaced at her husband.

"Alright, alright, I'll do it," said Scott.

He opened the door only a few inches and stuck his eye to the crack. As soon as he saw the wood elf on the other side, he threw the door open wider. The wood elf was fair-haired and pale-eyed. He had a bruise over his left eye that was cut and seeping blood. His sword was still in his hand, its blade not covered in blood but what looked like mud.

"You may emerge, but please, stay out of the way."

Wood elves voices were usually light and airy, but this elf's spoke in tight and strained tones which wavered as he spoke. He began to walk away, but Scott stayed him by grabbing his arm.

"Wait, what happened? What's wrong?"

"We have driven back the creatures, but many are wounded."

Scott could sense that the elf was not finished but desperately did not want to go on.

"And?" prodded Santa as gently as he could.

The wood elf paused as though he had been compelled to speak a curse word. He bit his lip, and a shaking breath exited his lips

"One of us is slain."


A/N: Update on me. My neurosurgeon has left surgery up to me. The problem I'm facing is severe enough to make surgery a legitimate option but not an absolutely necessary one. For now anyway. But the problem has gotten measurably worse. I'll decide for sure in a couple days, but I'm strongly leaning toward going through with it now. This will definitely have an impact on my ability to write and edit (though I'd be out of work on medical leave for a month so who knows.) I will keep you posted.