Sylvanlight, Book I by slflew

Chapter 6. "Over time, the unease began to pass..."

Chapter 6.

Occasionally in life we come upon things we can't understand because we have never seen anything similar. ~ Memoirs of a Geisha, by Arthur Golden

The next night, Gwen slept peacefully in her bed, the covers rising gently up and down. Alongside her lay the curled figure of the cat. The refrigerator clicked and hummed; Gwen turned over and sighed. The dark figure that haunted her dreams, the angelic face crowned by twisted branches, had come back, making her heart beat faster and her quilt rise and fall more quickly.

A car hummed by the house, its lights shifting through the blinds, lighting up her room briefly, shadows moving and widening back into darkness. In the bathroom, water plunked into the bathtub from the showerhead. The cat suddenly pricked his ears, then raced off the bed and into the depths of the house. Gwen's parents both woke up in the darkness and lay in one another's arms, afraid, as a quick flash of lightning filled the room with blinding light. They counted the seconds to the boom of thunder, relieved that the storm was distant. Gwen too jerked awake, the rumble of thunder throwing off the beat of her heart.

Indeed, it was not just the Maddox household that had such unrest - all of Ash Mills listened, frightened, to the stormy night, lying in the dark and recalled the terror of the hot, swollen summer from the year past. Teens on their computers that late at night got up from their screens and stared out of their windows at the heavenly lights. The trees shook and birds took flight in droves, fleeing as the storm rumbled around them.

Gwen's room was suddenly illumined by a brilliant red light, quite unlike the white lightning. She started and, now truly fearful, ran towards her window. Gwen had a deathly fear of fire - as a result, her nightmares had once consisted of the forest near her house being set afire, and now this concerned her, as the lightning might have caused it to burst into flames.

She opened the blinds to see that her worst fears had been realized. Rolling smoke was rising from the direction of the town. Then, from the thundercloud above, red fire began raining down, hitting the ground with cracks and booms as loud as thunder. Judgment day, was her brief thought before a fireball landed in the forest near her house with an explosion that rocked the ground and made her ears ring. She grabbed the windowsill to steady herself as her panicked father ran to the door of her room. "Get away from the window," he yelled, grabbing her hand. Without thinking, she grabbed her great-grandfather's silver compass off her dresser before her father pulled her down the hallway. Another explosion made them lose their footing and crash against the wall. "Go to the basement!" he shouted over the shriek and whine of falling fire, "We're under some sort of attack!"

"But if the house burns, it will come down on our heads!" She yelled back. Her father charged down the stairs as her mother ran down the hallway to get Alicia, who was weeping in fear. Her father, having woken up her brother, opened the door - "Let's go!" and they ran outside. Gwen stopped in her tracks. "The cat!" she cried, and turned to get it, but her father grabbed her. "He'll be all right! He'll take care of himself!" Lightning flashed once more, and they saw that cars from the houses near theirs were streaking down the road. Cinders from the acridly burning forest were floating on the wind now, and another explosion rocked the ground. His gaze taking in everything, her father flung open the garage door. "The roads will be clogged!" he yelled, and pulled out their bikes. They hopped on them and in their pajamas they started biking towards the main route.

When they got there, the road was indeed backlogged with cars, families fleeing the blaze of destruction. Another lightning flash suddenly revealed troops along the road, pulling people out of vehicles, brandishing guns and yelling. Her father, on an idea, deftly turned and led them through a nearby forest - "If we get to the river, it should provide a natural fire break!" - and they bumped through among the trees, reaching the logging river that wound through the town. By then, most of the buildings around it were ablaze, or thrown flat by the blasts; the forest was burning hot behind their backs.

They jumped into the river, hoping that the water would save them from a horrific death. The night passed thus - full of blinding lightning, dark choking smoke, screams, explosions, and gunfire. Cinders blew past them on the wind as they ducked, tearing their clothes to put over their mouths to breathe and over their heads so that the cinders wouldn't set their hair on fire. They weren't alone in this idea. Nearly forty people bobbed alongside them, coughing, not talking as they listened to the destruction around them, shocked. As Gwen watched, the roiling clouds briefly parted, flashing metal within their depths.

Then, barely visible, the thundercloud moved to the east taking its destruction to yet another town. The sun faintly dawned, barely visible through the thick smoke. A gunshot cracked close by, and Gwen looked at the southern bank. There a group of soldiers stood. "Come out of the water, or we'll start shooting you one by one!" shouted their leader in a thick accent. "We have more troops on the other side! You can't get away!"

Gwen looked at her family, eyes too dry from the heat for tears. How could this happen? Her father nodded wearily, and they started swimming slowly for the bank. They stood there dripping before the soldiers, shivering, as the soldiers eyed them. The leader turned to them, gesturing for the troops to lead the soggy group somewhere. They prodded them with gun barrels to get them moving, then herded them through the broken remains of what had been a vibrant community. Flames still flickered in the hearts of buildings, which were being searched. Other groups, worn and haggard, some protesting, some badly wounded, were also being pushed towards the southern end of town - to the graveyard, Gwen realized, her heart sinking in her chest. They were going to die.

Another shock awaited her bleary eyes. The graveyard was a mess of broken headstones, and sitting among them was a dark silver, greasy ship - a spaceship, it appeared. This was odd, since their captors were quite human, but they did speak a different language as well as English, so they might be foreign invaders. Why then were they destroying small towns in an unimportant state with such technology?

Their captors were lining up the survivors in rows, brandishing their weapons and shouting. Gwen waited in a row, silently praying fervently. An old lady beside her rocked back and forth, muttering under her breath about fire and judgment. Their captors suddenly stiffened and performed some sort of salute, and Gwen glanced towards the ship. A dark cloaked figure emerged from it, then turned towards the prisoners. The sunlight, turned sour yellow-red by the burning black smoke, glinted off a horrifically cherubic mask. It was the Elf King.

So there they stood, among standing gravestones and broken ones, standing over death and facing it in the eye.

The Elf King spoke to a group of commanders out of her hearing, then they in turn spoke to their soldiers, as they started moving along the lines. They would ask a person their name, which a scribe would scribble down, then the guard pulled a knife from a sheath. People suddenly got visibly agitated, some of the women screaming; Gwen herself couldn't help but gasp.

Then the guard pulled out as well a large clear stone, yanking the person's hand towards him. The knife flashed, the person flinched, and the guard held out the stone, which turned red. The scribe's pen scratched some more, as the red faded away from the stone. Eventually they came to her, and she held out her hand. The guard lifted his eyebrows in surprise at the furball, then looked at her. "Gwendolyn Alexandria Maddox," she said, cringing in anticipation of the knife. She closed her eyes as the cold blade slashed across her finger, causing her to flinch. The guard pressed her fingertip to the stone, which began to turn red as symbols flickered through its depths. The guard sucked in his breath, murmuring in his own tongue to the scribe, whose eyebrows lifted as he wrote eagerly. Then they moved on.

Behind them, soldiers began pulling people out of line, dragging them, kicking and screaming, into the depths of the ship. Families were torn apart, mothers crying for their children, some who wouldn't be quiet were hit brutally. The elderly were left behind; those that were taken into the ship, she noticed, tended to have brown or black hair, with blue or grey eyes. A soldier came for her brother, putting him into a headlock, pulling him into the ship. Then a solder came for her and shoved her towards the ship.

An odd sort of calm stole over her - she was numb from the shocks of what she had seen. Up the ramp she walked, shuddering at the sight of blood on the metal surface. She couldn't stop her shaking as she walked into the darkness, a corridor barely lit by sickly oil lanterns. The sound of weeping filtered down to her. The soldier unlocked a door and the weeping grew louder, and he shoved her into the dark. She stumbled on someone, crashed to the floor, and curled up, surrounded by people and by the utter darkness. Her shudders didn't die away for a long time, until the ship thrummed beneath her, and she drifted into a fitful sleep.

No one had seen it coming. Twelve ships in all rained down devastation and took prisoners in various spots throughout the Northeast, starting wildfires that burned for months in the forests of the Appalachians. But even more damage had occurred than the humans could count - the ships had taken the Fair Folk home as well. Over a hundred thousand souls were taken to the heavens.

The crowd left behind wept and cried out as the soldiers left, their ship shuddering and flying into the churning clouds. The town smoldered , the forest in burning ruins. Lightning from a thundercloud arced along the ship's hull, giving it a jump of power as it thrust itself out into the stars.

All had turned to ash and dust.