The Humans And The Conflict
Chapter
1
Midnight black and crimson blood, gather your evil into my heart...
Ever had one of those days where the world seems to stand still? Where the snow flakes seem to fall so slowly and quietly, it's like there's no sound in the universe? It was one of those days today; a cold September afternoon where there was nothing but trees covered in snow, bare, leafless, and silent. The air was even still and without a breeze.
Satoshi Hikari plodded through the three inches of pure white snow, pale hands deep in his pockets and an unlit ciggarette hanging from his lips. He didn't shiver from the below freezing cold in his heavy white jacket lines with fur on the inside and long white jeans. His slim black and white boots crunched ice beneath him as he walked through the wintry forest, straying from the places he'd been, and seeking the places he hadn't.
With a frustrated scowl, he swaggered off course and wandered under a tree, leaning his back to it and taking out his lighter. He was trying to quit smoking because his father had died from lung cancer, but sometimes it was too much for a lonely teenager traveling alone to resist anything that served as a distraction.
After his smoke, Satoshi wandered a bit farther into the wood and found a river, where he slung off his pack and rested on the shoreline. Tossing the last of his ciggarette, he leaned his head back against the tree trunk and closed his eyes. It was below zero and dropping fast but it didn't bother him. He opened one eye and spotted a cottage across the river. Of course, it didn't hurt not to freeze to death, too. He got up then, grabbing his pack and throwing it over to the other side. Backing up, he took a deep breath, and took off, clearing the river with inches to spare. Taking up his backpack quickly, he ducked through the bramble bushes and walked up to the house.
Rika was helping petunias grow in the elvish world when he heard a strange noise behind her. Standing up and brushing off her short white dress, she turned around and tucked her golden bangs behind pointed ears and blinked,
"Yes, who is it?" She asked in confusion.
A black mass appeared and made a sound like a screech of horrible saddness. It burned Rika's ears and she screamed, clamping her hands on the sides of her head,
"Stop!"
Turning, she scrambled away.
Rika ran through the forest, short blonde hair moving with each bouncing step she took across the underbrush to escape her pursuer. Apparently she was being chased by a dark lord's ghost minion; they were the sole key to mixing the real and elvish worlds, thus revealing the colonies of elves that lived in their seperate dimensions. Rika knew this, of course, and was running to tell her father, the lord of the lands, Darcia.
Satoshi sat in front of a fire sipping green tea from a stone cup with no handles, staring deep into the flames, feeling strange. He had knocked on the door of the cottage and a boy his age had taken pity on him out in the cold and brought him inside. That boy was Daisuke Nishara, and he sat on his bed off to the side of the fire in his hand made kimono, blonde hair askew, hazel eyes blinked,
"So where'd yo' come from, mister winter?" He asked in a very Welsh accent, tilting his head to the side.
Satoshi shrugged, "Mainly from Ireland, but that place was too peacful and smooth-running for me. I need action, so I left. Been all over Asia and Europe, to Japan and back," he sipped at his cup again and looked around. "Why'd you decide to make this little house way out here?"
The boy shrugged, twiddling a loose string on his blanket, "I built it ou' here for my bride and I, but... She died many a year ago."
Satoshi almost spit out his tea, "You were married and widowed already?! How old are you?!"
Daisuke laughed as if it was funny to tease new comers, "I'm seventeen. My Da is a priest, he had us married three years after we me'. She was shot by a hunter a year afta, and I didn't have th' heart to leave this place." Satoshi nodded slowly,
"You know that's against the law, right?"
Daisuke blinked, "What is?"
"To be married at fourteen!" Satoshi bursted.
Daisuke rubbed his head, "No' if yo' have all four o' the parents approval. Then i'tis."
Suddenly the wind picked up, rattling the trees outside, shaking off their snow, and Satoshi shuddered. He hated weird noises. Daisuke was yawning, so he didn't notice,
"Her name was Risa, an' she was th' most beautiful thing in th' whole world." He lay down amound his pillows, putting his arms behind his head, "Her hair was short, golden, like sunshine in Spring. Her eyes were a saphire blue an' sparkled like 'em, too. Her smile had a funny way of setting me at perfect ease, and when she kissed me, I could barely breathe. She was a beautie, all right." He closed his eyes and sighed, "I miss 'er..."
Satoshi nodded, "I'm sorry. She sounds like one of a kind."
Daisuke smiled behind closed lids, "She was. We never did get to have that little son she wanted... But no more use lookin' into the past. 'Night, snow lad."
Satoshi frowned and leaned back in the cloth recliner. It was surely hand-made and wooden, but what would happen if it ever sparked? Too fidgety to sleep, he got up and wandered over to the window. It was a full moon tonight.
When Rika reached her home city, she froze at the entrance. The buildings were torn and destroyed, the air polluted with gasses and dust, the people gone. Her people. Shaking her head quickly, she ran into the destroyed city, hopping over debris and bodies. Tears streamed down her eyes. This wasn't supposed to happen. She tripped over a fallen stone pillar and hit the ground hard, crying out in pain; both for herself and the future. They were elves. An immortal colony who were constantly reminded how they could not die. Living, breathing, growing things, watching everything else wither away. And yet not themselves. Rika got up, limping a few steps before pounding the broken pavement the hardest she'd ever done in her 2000 years of life. She needed to find father - Lord Legolas.
Rika burst through the doors to her palace's throne room and gasped. Her father sat in his chair with a knife in his chest, dressed fully in his royal attire and crown.
"Father!" She screamed, staggering up to him. "Father..." She sobbed, stroaking his pale face, brushing strands of blonde hair from his closed eyes. His face was rested but Rika wept still. She loved her father more than anything in the world; since her mother had left he'd been her only family. "Who's done this...?" She choked.
Lord Legolas's eyes cracked open suddenly and he looked at her as if she was smoke, "Rika, my daughter..." Rika kissed her father's cheek, damp cheeks brushing his, "Father, rest now. The other world meets you." Her father groaned, "Rika, the Dark Lord has risen once again... He has risen, to claim the Erstaz diamond..."
Rika blinked, kneeling before her father, "Where is it, my Lord?"
Legolas closed his eyes once again, "It lies... Within the City's Children..." He went slack then, and she knew her father was dead. Wiping away her tears, Rika stood and cast a protection spell on her father's body, then turned and faced the door. She didn't know who the City's Children were, but there was a fairytale that said they dwelled in the human realm, with the sinners, murderers, and unclean filth of reality; hidding away the two peices of the jewl from evil. It had the power to copy anyone's immortality and store it for the next to touch the stone, but it also had the power to make one mortal. Rika climbed the stairwhell in the palace to her room and packed a backpack with infinate space, throwing on a tan cloak and jumping from the window. Landing with a thud in the back courtyard grass, she stood and straightened up. Her mother had taught her how to open the portal between worlds when she was very small and though she remembered it she was afraid it wouldn't work, since no one else had ever tried it before. Maybe it had just been her mother able to do such a thing as merge two opposite worlds into one. Maybe it would backfire and destroy the other dimension too. Eyes glinting with determanation, she started into the forest. It was a risk she would have to take.
Home 
So I hope this is all right. Comment and rate, please!
