The Tale of the Elf Prince and the Spark Girl

Part Two

Darcy fell onto her hands and knees, her ability to scream suddenly coming back to her. And she did just that, screaming at the top of her lungs as her hands sank into soft, leaf-strewn earth. Her items and shopping bags scattered out of her grasp and onto the ground in front of her, but they were forgotten for the moment as Darcy heard her scream echo into the vast forest she suddenly found herself in. She jerked herself up off the ground and quickly circled around, finding herself surrounded by tall ancient trees with a wide and deep river that cut through it. The water babbled loudly as it rushed over small stones and boulders in the otherwise quiet forest.

Darcy kept circling, letting out shuddering breaths and gripping her hair as she tried to understand what had just happened. This was definitely not Manhattan! She wasn't even sure she was on the same fucking continent anymore! Was this even her planet?! She thought of the front cover of the freaky book that had caused this mess. Where she stood now looked almost identical to the drawing. There was a forest and the river... The only things she couldn't see were the mountains, which very well could be around here somewhere - these trees were just so tall that she could hardly see the sky at all - and the people in the canoes. Darcy wasn't exactly sure she wanted to come across the lithe creatures she had seen in the book. She remembered seeing swords at their belts in one of the drawings. What if they were hostile?

She was so on edge that the twitter of a bird overhead in the trees made her just about jump out of her skin. "Shit!" she breathed out, finding herself having a mental blank on what to do. "Shit shit shit!" She noticed that the light around her was waning. It was dusk wherever she was, and it would be dark very soon. "This cannot be happening," she muttered to herself in disbelief. She looked over to the book that lay a few yards away from her. A part of her wanted to toss it in that river and never look at it again... But another part of her was pretty sure it was her only hope of getting back home. She walked determinedly towards it and scooped it out of the leaves.

"Counter hippie spell, counter hippie spell," she said under her breath, frantically scanning through the pages for the one that she had read off of. As she passed through the pages, some of the now English words jumped out at her because of their strangeness, like 'Middle-earth' and 'orcs' and 'hobbits.' "Whatever those are," she said distractedly, finding herself unable to be curious in her current predicament. She finally found the page with the dark handwriting... but that was it. There was no other writing that matched it. She continued flipping through the pages, growing more desperate with each flip. "No, no, no!" she ended up screaming in frustration when there was no forthcoming counter-spell.

Suddenly there was the sound of something rustling in the underbrush off in the distance behind her. Darcy instantly stopped searching through the book and froze, feeling her chest constrict as fear and adrenaline pumped through her; she hadn't even thought about the fact that she might attract something's attention by being loud. 'Way to go, Darce,' she inwardly berated herself. 'It's a pity you don't have a megaphone to scream into, that way you can get killed faster!' She slowly turned around. The forest was becoming so dim that her vision really couldn't distinguish between shadow and movement, even with her glasses on. In the far off distance she heard the snapping of twigs. Darcy felt a cold chill go down her spine. Yeah...there was definitely something coming towards her. And it sounded like it was heavy and walking on two legs.

Shivering, Darcy backed up, searching the darkness for the source of the footsteps. A movement finally caught her eye... and she found herself looking at something even scarier than those creepy alien things she'd seen on TV when Thor's crazy brother had tried to take over the world. This thing in the distance was massive and had dark greyish-green skin. Long matted snarls of greasy black hair framed a face that not even a mother could love, especially because it had jagged, rotting teeth. It sniffed the air and then stared right in her direction with a hungry grin.

Darcy snapped out of her paralysis right as the thing came running towards her, roaring the most horrible noise she had ever heard. She screamed, dropping the book on the ground and sprinting over to where her purse lay, frantically digging out her taser as fast as she could. It was coming toward her at a powerful pace, only yards away from her when she turned around with the taser. Making a split-second decision, she decided to aim for its head rather than its body because it wore some crude type of armor. The electrical charges shot out of her trusty weapon and stuck to the temples of its forehead. The thing stopped, roaring in shock as it lost the function of its extremities. It fell down hard onto its knees and shook as electrical pulses ran through it.

"Ya feel that, asshole?" she crowed, as her weapon hummed with power. "That's what you get for trying to mess with Darcy Lewis!" she yelled at the thing, sending more volts through it... But she spoke too soon, because only moments later it gave a blood curdling roar and reached up, pulling the charges off its face with a determined grimace as it shook. It rose unsteadily to its feet.

Darcy's eyes widened in terror. "Oh shit." She let go of her taser and stumbled backwards. She fell over the stupid freaking book! She quickly crawled away, never taking her eyes off of the monstrous thing as it came towards her. It was walking slowly, predatorily, like it had already won the game of 'catch the human' and was thinking about which of her limbs it was gonna eat first.

Darcy finally was able to scramble her way up onto her feet but her back hit against the wide circumference of an ancient tree. The creature was close enough that one good lunge was the only thing necessary for it to get her in its grasp now. She could see the scarification that mottled its lips and smell its breath that stank of death. This was it. This was how Darcy Lewis was going to die. At the hands of some terror that she couldn't even name. She closed her eyes and shrunk down against the tree, hoping that this was all just a terrible nightmare and that she'd be waking up in the comfort of her own bed any moment now.

But it wasn't a dream - and this wasn't the way she was going to die either - for at that moment something happened. Before Darcy could even get a grasp of what was going on, an arrow was penetrating through the side of the creatures head. Its eyes, which had been so triumphant just a moment ago, bulged in shock and agony, and then the creature fell away from her.

Darcy stayed flat against the tree, taking in shuddering breaths as she stared at the monster's prone form. Black blood oozed out of its head onto the forest floor. Dead. It was most definitely dead.

And she was alive. This information slowly sank in. Darcy's gaze moved to the arrow that had saved her. It looked rustic, like it belonged to the forest, with golden feathers fringing its end...

As if pulled by an invisible string, Darcy looked in the direction that the arrow had come from. There was a suspended moment when all was still, not even a leaf rustled, but she knew that someone was there, just outside her vision. She could feel it deep in the marrow of her bones.

Even though she was waiting for something to happen, she still wasn't prepared for the being who seemed to materialize soundlessly out of the depths of the forest. He was...like nothing she had ever seen before. The first thing she noticed was even though the darkness of night was creeping into the forest, this being seemed to exude a radiance from within. He was tall and lithe of limb, with long pale hair and bright blue eyes. They were set against a face that had high cheekbones, an aquiline nose, and lips that were thin, but shaped in a way that was alluring to the eyes. He was dressed in earthen tones, which would make him almost impossible to see in the forest if it weren't for his eye-catching hair and silvery adornment that clasped his moss green colored cloak together.

Darcy's mouth had fallen open as soon as she had laid eyes on him. For what seemed like the first time in her life, she was at a loss for words.

His keen eyes shone a silvery blue as he eyed her cautiously. He seemed to be at just as much of a loss as she was. His stare kept going from her face and then darting away to her taser, which lay uselessly on the ground. And as he seemed to try to make sense of her, she was slowly making sense of him as well. Getting past the blinding attractiveness of this dude, Darcy was finally able to notice that he had pointed ears... and lots of ammunition, in the form of two blades crossed behind his back and his nifty bow and arrow set.

'...So this is an Elf. He definitely doesn't look like "Santa's little helper." He looks like a warrior of the forest... Someone who could just as easily take me down with an arrow the way he'd taken that ugly Frankenstein thing down.'

He said something, stepping slowly towards her, causing Darcy to jump. His words were indecipherable, but he sounded inquiring, which was a good non-threatening sign. Darcy shook her head in an 'I don't understand you' type of way, hoping that wouldn't offend him.

His expression became even more puzzled. He searched her over with his gaze, his eyes lingering on her clothes for the tiniest moment before he seemed to catch himself and bring his eyes back up to her face, like looking at her bulky sweater and skinny jeans was indecent or something. Darcy relaxed a little. 'OK, so he's super modest. That definitely takes some of the scary factor away.'

He paused a moment, and then asked her curiously in a tongue that seemed to ripple against her skin and cause all the hairs on her body to stand up on end, "...Pedich Edhellen?"

Oh. Darcy had no idea what he just said, but it was beautiful. "...Huh?"

His puzzled frown deepened even more. "Heniach nin?"

Darcy awkwardly darted her gaze around and shrugged in a self-deprecating way, feeling major butterflies because of his ethereal words and stare. "Um, me no speaky...erm, whatever it is you're speaking," Darcy said, chuckling self-consciously and inwardly wincing at her bumbling words.

The Elf tilted his head to the side as she talked, his eyes focused on her lips, like he was trying to read the words as she said them, but his eyebrows scrunched together in his deepening confusion.

"...And I take it you don't speak English." Darcy sighed. "Of course you don't," she whispered under her breath, really just talking to herself at this point. "Because that would make my life easier, and we know that can't happen - because the universe is out to get me for some past discretion I did in a former life, obviously. Yeah, Darce. Real smart. So glad you followed your gut instinct into a crazy little shop of hippie horrors and got sent into an alternate dimension where Elves are real and there's huge monsters that try to eat you. Ugh. Because I've obviously not had enough excitement in my life already, what, with tasing and running over a Norse god, almost getting killed by an alien robot thing, and that one little incident where I stepped on the coattails of Fury's trench coat and almost got knifed because his secret agent reflexes kicked in. But I'm not suppose to mention that last one," Darcy said as an aside. "No. Now I can add whatever the hell this place is to my list of 'Extremely Bizarre and Fucked Up Situations that Darcy Lewis Finds Herself In,'" she said with air quotes. "And I realize that I am still standing next to a huge dead body," she cringed, quickly sidestepping away from it.

She blushed when she was done with her rant and realized that the Elf was eyeing her curiously with an eyebrow raised and his lips quirked to the side. It seemed even language barriers couldn't hide the fact that Darcy was strange and talked a lot.

He seemed to decide something then and there, because he unclasped his cloak and offered it to her.

Darcy eyed the elegant lines of his outstretched hand. "You want me to put this on?" she asked dubiously, motioning to the cloth.

He inclined his head slightly in the affirmative.

"OK," Darcy said awkwardly, taking the offered material. It was as soft as the most luxurious Egyptian cotton and as light as a feather. "Thanks." Despite the fabric's light weight, she found it to feel as warm and snug as a thick comforter once it was on her. What a weird illusion. "...So this means we're like, friends now, right? You're not going to kill me?"

He, of course, didn't answer her because he didn't understand her. Instead, he offered her a bemused smile and then whispered something in that strange and enchanting language. Darcy wasn't sure if she was tripping out or if the wind in the trees really was whispering his message across the forest. She didn't have much time to psychoanalyze herself, however, because all too soon wild horses came galloping full speed towards the Elf and her.

To Be Continued

*Pedich Edhellen? - Do you speak Elvish?

*Heniach nin? - Do you understand me?