Darkness and Hellfire

Chapter 36 Indomitable Will, Intelligence, And Charisma.

Lenna held no funeral for Macken. She knew that she was the only one who would grieve him. His parents had only started paying attention to him after his brother had been killed and he had no mate or friends outside of his squad. The drow way to honor the dead was incredibly different to the human way. Usually a legendary warrior would have a statue added to the Halls of Heroes in the capital if what they had done was truly worthy of legends being passed down through the generations. Macken was not a warrior worthy of something like that so his funeral would have been simple and quick.

In Contantis, Macken would have been cremated and his ashes would have been alchemically treated and made into incense to be lit at the temple. As the ashes burned away, into a dry and heavy scent that felt like the weight of a life lost, his spirit would have been carried to Dri’El’s side. That was what the priests had always said anyway. After that, Macken’s name would have been moved from the Cla’Cen list of living family members to the list of those that had passed on. Oftentimes a small banquet would be held for those that were truly close to the deceased to reminisce but by the time the following day had started the world would have returned to normal.

For elves, a family member or friend’s passing was not as final as it would be for a human. Everyone knew that elvish souls came back eventually, just without any memories of their past. Elvish souls could not be created but they also weren’t usually destroyed. A human soul could end up in the hells where it would be subject to any number of untold horrors before it was finally consumed or burned as fuel. A human soul could end up in purgatory or a gods domain to wander until its residual power eventually bled away into the very realm it walked and it vanished for all of eternity. The same was true for most of the other races. But elves, elves would almost always come back to the realm of the living.

Lenna knew that one day she might see Macken’s soul again. She knew that it would definitely one day walk Primatia again. That did not mean that her anger was any less real however. Lenna had skipped past the funeral rites and moved directly to preparing for vengeance. Once Jala was finished cremating Macken she would reinfuse the knight’s ashes with the residual power of the moon deities that she had extracted. Once that was done it would be made into a wood-stain and used to treat a shield.

Jala was not going to simply fulfill the task for her niece. Everything Jala did was to a personal end, even helping Lenna. Jala was using the experience of the project to further her understanding of deific powers and how they interacted with other commonly revered objects and spirits. Jala had ordered a leaf from the Elona’s Sapling tree. The trees were found all throughout the Garden of Elona. The problem was that the garden was actually a forest the size of a continent with trees that reach a hundred times the normal size towards the middle. Elona’s Saplings were scattered seemingly at random throughout the garden and what set them apart was their sheer magnitude.

Elona’s Saplings were similar to ash trees only they would grow at a rate of one inch per year indefinitely. As far as any references could confirm there weren’t any reports of a storm bringing down a single tree. There were rumors of Elona’s Saplings reaching to the clouds towards the center of her garden. These trees were always referred to as saplings because no one knew how big they could grow or at what age they would mature. As they grew their leaves would scale up with them. Jala had specifically requested a leaf four feet tall and around two feet across. The only reason Jala could even make such a request was that there was an Elona’s Sapling visible from the human lands that bordered the Garden of Elona.

Elona was so ancient that some thought of her as the first being to have ever walked their planet. She had so much power that even dragons knew better than to enter and expect to be at the top of the food chain. Most of the information on Elona was rumor and myth as she was, by her very nature, almost impossible to actually witness directly. She was a huntress who catered to a forest that housed creatures of unimaginable danger. She had rules that none could break lest the garden devour them. There was even a legend of an arrogant ancient red dragon turning into a cloud of red mist for his crime of torching a small part of the forest to make his nest.

Taking a leaf from one of Elona’s Saplings was risky but she hadn’t seemed to mind, yet. The humans knew better than to risk Elona’s wrath too much after an incident that happened during the last dragon surge. Humans had fled into the Garden of Elona in order to hide from the massive onslaught and clash of dragons. Elona might have let them hide there had they not made one fatal mistake. The humans had decided to build a city of stone, soot, and metal inside of Elona’s Garden and she had taken exception to that. The entire city and every refugee inside of it vanished without a trace.

Jala knew better than to ask for the bark of such a revered tree but a simple leaf would hopefully be within her, Isaac’s, budget. Jala had used Alexander and his connections to make the request but only the gods knew how long it would take until the leaf would arrive. In the meantime Jala would make the magical stain and any other preparations she would need in order to make a shield capable of stopping the moon. Jala had informed Lenna of the process in a very long winded letter riddled with tangents and unnecessary explanations. All Lenna really cared about was that Jala was going to make the attempt and that she had a plan.

While Jala was hard at work, Isaac was trying to find a way to distract Lenna with varying degrees of success. Between Kingsmen, books, training, house planning, and recently, taking Lenny out for monster hunting practice, he had been doing a pretty decent job of it.

As the time passed Lenna’s grief bled away into another burning ember within her. Now, next to the rage of her ancestors at what she had done and who she had become, there was a coal that gave off a dull red glow that, maybe someday, would be put out with the blood of an evil god. She hoped that one day she would be able to hit Dri’El in a place that would actually cause him pain. Lenna knew that killing half of the moon was not something that was realistically possible. She also knew that if she did somehow manage to do it that Lua would also die. That fact alone hit her like a cold bucket of water.

With the knowledge that Lua and Dri’El’s lives were tied together in a similar way to how Lenna wanted hers and Isaac’s to be, she resolved to take her vengeance in a more indirect way. Instead of trying to kill someone that should not be killed she resolved to simply hurt him in a way that he hadn’t been hurt before. Unfortunately all of the information she could acquire pointed towards the same thing: The only way to hurt a deity is to lower the quantity of what they have dominion over. For Dri’El this meant that she needed to brighten the dark side of the moon in some way, free all of the slaves in the drow empire, and reform their entire culture to value peace, love, and music. It had been eight days since Macken’s death when Lenna finally hit her forehead on the table in frustrated acknowledgement of her impossible task.

“Lenna?” Isaac aske with some concern in his voice. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s impossible. It’s useless.” She sobbed into her book. “He’s untouchable.”

Isaac started to rub her back as he gave her a comforting smile. “If it was doable by normal means then someone would have done it by now.” He reminded her. “Impossible tasks can become possible with the right application of indomitable will, intelligence, and charisma.”

She turned her head so her cheek was resting on the pages and her one eye could see him. “Charisma?” She questioned. The rest of it made sense to her but the charisma part seemed like nonsense.

Isaac nodded. “That is probably the most important part actually.” He explained. “Take Chris Windwalker for example.” He began. “If Chris’s impossible task was to climb the tallest mountain, how would he go about it?” Lenna gave him a look that seemed to say ‘get to the point’ so he continued. “He would find someone who could carry him to the top and then get them to do it or he would find someone to regrow his legs and convince them to do so or maybe he would find some crazy artificer to make him metal legs with nonslip enchantments or something. The point is that he can’t do it alone. He would find someone capable of turning his impossible task into a possible one and then have them perform a very possible task in order to do so.”

“So I need to find someone who can mind control the violence out of the entire dark elf population.” Lenna replied flatly. “Or maybe Eliza can make a ballista capable of shooting glowing stones to the dark side of the moon and I can spend the next eighty thousand years trying to turn night into day one candle at a time.”

“Okay I get it.” Isaac replied and sighed. “But I am sure that even if we cannot ‘turn night into day’ in our lifetimes we can set something in motion at least.”

“Like what?” Lenna questioned.

“I don’t know yet.” Isaac replied honestly. “We are still at the indomitable will and intelligence stage. Once we come up with a plan we can use charisma to bring in the right people to make it happen.”