Chapter 21: 19: The end and beginning of the life of Túeth

Author's note

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Content Warning

This chapter contains flashbacks of Túeth's back story. As has been hinted at before, it's pretty ugly. The sexual content itself is glanced over and not delved into in any graphic detail, that's not what this story is about, but this is definitely one of the chapters that lives up to the R-15 rating and the "Gore" content warning placed on this series.

Túeth’s POV

Two and a half years ago, Túeth had gone through the worst day of her entire life. The dark elves, the abominations created from the twisted energies warping the bodies of elves into beasts. These creatures were well known to every one among the fey races. These immortal monsters were a source of fear, especially for those with elven blood.

The dark elves were creatures filled with nothing but pure hatred for everything that lived, but the elves from which they were created were a race they took particular pleasure in slaughtering mercilessly. On that day, two and a half years ago, the village in which Túeth lived found itself in the sights of these monsters.

The worst thing about these devils was that they were cunning. She had heard about the rampaging berserker beasts that humans transformed into when exposed to the arcane energies, but the devils spawned from the elven line kept their intelligence, although it was now twisted toward causing nothing but fear and suffering.

These devils took their village by surprise, the scouts outside the town were overwhelmed with stealth and surprise tactics, and killed before they could bring the alarm back to the village. And they didn’t just take out a few scouts either. They liked to toy with their prey. Before the village was attacked, they had gone around to kill each of the scouts. They knew this because, when it came time to rotate out, nobody came back. Not even the ones who went to relieve them.

This was when the people in the village knew something was wrong. Everyone was given a sense of unease. All of the warriors rallied in the village square to attempt to organize a defense. However, that was exactly what the devils had been waiting for. The entire square was engulfed by five fireball spells going off at the same time. It was not just the gathered warriors who were destroyed in this surprise attack. Every nearby Lakira tree that had turned into a home or place of business was left nothing but a smoldering stump.

The fire and confusion spread quickly, and there was nothing but confusion everywhere. As people tried to get their heads about them, arrows began flying out of the darkness, and with every bolt shot an innocent person’s life was lost.

Túeth had survived these first waves of attack because her mother had told her to stay inside their home while she had gone out to check on what had happened. She opened the door and took five steps out before, in front of Túeth’s very eyes, her mother was shot through the head. She huddled and cried as the sounds of people screaming and dying surrounded her.

After some time had passed, a white-haired elf with skin that looked a sickly dark blue, and rough as though he had just stepped out of the ocean covered in sea brine, turned his glowing red eyes toward her and smirked. He grabbed her by her hair and dragged her out to the ruins of the village square where several other women along with some of the humans taken by the village were gathered. They were all thrown in front of a woman who seemed to be their commander.

The horrible creature who had dragged her there, who only looked like an elf in shape, uttered something to this dark-elf woman in what her people knew as the abyssal tongue, the language of those who lived in the underworld such as them.

“Hehehe, good.” The woman responded to him in proper surface elven, and given what she said next, Túeth had come to realize the reason this woman had decided to speak in elven was for one reason and one reason only, in order to further terrorize her captives by speaking what was to be their fate in a language they could understand. “The humans will be brought with us, their offspring between our kind and their kind make the best slaves. As for the weak inferior elf women up here, they are useless. You may kill them after you’ve had your fun with them.” The woman gave a poisonous smile as she declared their death sentence, and then the creatures descended upon them and had their way with anyone that they found appealing.

Túeth had been violated by them that day, it was disgusting. If her fate was to die, she would have preferred that they would just kill her. At some point, she heard a shriek from next to her. She turned to see what had happened, and she looked on in horror as she saw the severed head of a young girl she used to babysit being held up by the hair as those monsters just laughed.

As though this was the signal, the rest of them seemed to have come to the decision they had had enough, and the final round of slaughter began. Soon it would be her turn as well. Minutes ago, she had been begging for death. But, in this moment when it was finally approaching, Túeth only wanted to live. One of the monsters grabbed her by her hair and the dagger was raised. Túeth shut her eyes tightly, preparing for her death.

In that moment, as though answering her wish, everything went white. At first, Túeth had thought she had died in that moment. However, the lie was quickly put to that as she was dropped and all around her she could hear those devils screaming in pain. Túeth began to crack her eyes open, but then quickly shut them again in pain. She realized the reason they were screaming. Something had lit up the entire area with a light so intense that it had blinded them all and left them writhing in pain.

After this, she felt the earth under her begin to shake. The intense light continued to cut through everything and Túeth had now pressed her hands over her eyes in order to further block out its intensity. She did not know what was going on, but it was something very very big. The devils around her began to shout things to each other in their abyssal tongue. Confusion was everywhere. This was when, finally, the sound of a great explosion could be heard. A booming sound so large that Túeth felt it go through her entire body like a physical blow. After that, she was picked up by the wind. She seemed to remember herself screaming, but the massive sound was so loud that she could not even hear her own voice.

It was not only the sound, she heard the wind kicked up by what could only be an explosion that completely dwarfed those fireballs the monsters had launched against her town earlier that night so completely that even a spark from a fire wasn’t a fitting comparison. The light, the wind, the sound, all of it was simply at such a massive scale.

She was flung through the air. She did not know how many branches she hit along the way, but she knew for sure she must have gone right through a few leaf covers as she sailed through the air. She took no notice though as all she was sure of was that she could not orient herself to anything. She flipped end over end in the air, and there was so much chaos and confusion that she could no longer keep track of anything at all.

She did not even know how she landed. All she really remembered was waking up when it was morning, and her entire body being broken and battered. She could not move a single limb, every single part of her was broken and caused her excruciating pain just to do such a simple motion as wiggling her finger.

She could not move. She cried out in pain, shouted for anyone at all to find her and help her. Her voice was about the only thing in her body that worked right now, and even that was weak due to an unknown number of broken ribs. It became clear that nobody seemed to be coming to find her. It was likely that nobody had survived at all. Well, at the very least it got those dark elf bastards too, whatever that was.

She lay like that in pure agony for two days. Again, she reached a state where she was begging for death. She stopped wishing for rescue, and instead began to wish for some starving wolf to find her and just put her out of her misery. She might even do it herself at this point, but her arms would not even move enough to do that.

She wondered why she didn’t die in this time. Her injuries were incredibly severe, normally she ought to have succumbed to them in a matter of hours. Later though, she found out the reason. When that explosion had happened, the entire area was filled with a massive abundance of spirit energy, and this great energy had sustained Túeth for those three days that she lay there injured and unable to move. Even with spirit energy that dense, more dense than could even be found in the most populated human city center, a truly impossibly large amount of spirit energy that defied even the wildest imagination, it could still not cause her wounds to heal themselves. All it could do was sustain her life.

And it did sustain her life, and on that third day after it had happened, she began to hear voices. She thought at the time that it had to be a hallucination. However, she eventually recognized those voices as speaking Elven, and she let out a weak cry. Her voice was so weak from her broken ribs though that it could not reach them. Fortunately, someone seemed to spot her broken body and brought the small group over to her. She turned to look up at them and this time they were close enough that her weak cries for help could reach them, and it was fortunate for her that they had brought a healer with them.

-

Túeth had relived those memories of that terrible day over and over in her mind for the past two and a half years. She had been haunted by them constantly. When she had turned up pregnant, she had told everyone it was the child of a boy she knew that she had a thing with, not wanting to give them the truth. When the twins were born, she was asked repeatedly to see them, but she could never bring herself to go to them. It did not take long at all for someone to notice their grey skin, but it was taken as a sign of illness.

People thinking the children were ill only made them more insistent that she should go see them, but she had become terrified by this time. Terrified of what people would do when the entire truth came out. She would re-live the nightmare all over again.

It was better that she had nothing to do with those children. One way or another, they were going to die. Those were her thoughts, and after six months had passed and nobody had said a word about dark elves or grey elves to her, she began to wonder. All this time, the master magus of the town, master Eirlathion, had stayed with them constantly. There was simply no way he hadn’t noticed. But, on an almost weekly basis that man seemed to appear in front of her late in the evening trying to convince her to go see the children. And yet, he never said a thing about what she feared the most. That is, until one day, about a week after he moved the children to his own house.

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It was an absolutely ridiculous thing he had said, that one of her daughters apparently made her own spirit energy. It was unbelievable, but... when she did stop to think about it, maybe... The twins had been conceived right next to that explosion, what was now being called the heaven’s fall. And, in the first days of their time in the womb, they were bathed in that massive spirit energy that was enough to keep her alive despite her severe injuries. Given those circumstances, something could have actually happened to give at least one of them the extraordinary abilities master Eirlathion was talking about.

Two and a half years ago, Túeth’s life had effectively ended. Time had stopped for her on that day. Now, she lived every day almost like a ghost, and constantly jumping in fear of what was going to come next. The idea of going to see her daughters at master Eirlathion’s house, it scared her. It terrified her. She just knew when she looked into the face of her daughters, all she was going to be able to see was those monsters yet again. She saw them in her sleep, and she saw them every time her mind wandered for too long during the day. They had shattered her life, and had taken away everything she ever knew, and now she was also cursed with a constant reminder of what had happened to her.

However. What would she do if she did not go to them and help master Eirlathion? She saw something in him when he said that they could be saved. Túeth did not care what happened to those girls. It would very much be better for her if they had died in the womb. The master seemed to have assumed that the reason she did not tell anyone about them was because she didn’t want to see them die. That was not the truth at all. She did not tell anyone about them because... she did not even know the reason why she didn’t.

Several times she had hoped and wished that someone would just discover the truth and put an end to them already. However, there was no way she could ever bring herself to tell anyone about it. She had never even considered it. The thought never even crossed her mind until the master had said how he felt he could trust her because of how she had never told anybody about them. She spent the entire next day fighting with herself and asking herself why she really hadn’t told anyone. She had wanted them to die several times already, but for some reason every time she reminded herself of that fact she could feel a searing pain in her heart.

For the first time in two and a half years, she considered the idea of telling someone about the real father of those girls. And, in that moment, a crippling fear that rivaled the moment she had seen the first of the girls beheaded in front of her paralyzed her entire body. She saw that head swinging by her hair in her memories, and then for a brief second a lightly grey skinned baby's head imposed itself over the face of the young girl. This image in her head was enough to freeze her thoughts cold.

Well, the master was right about one thing at least. She was not going to ever be capable of telling someone the truth about those girls.

-

Túeth did not even know why she had decided to go to the master’s house the morning they had agreed upon. Everything in her told her that she hated the very concept of this idea. And yet, for some reason, she just felt like she had to do it. It was as though she was trapped. He had told her to come, and she did.

After this, he told her more unbelievable things. Not only could her daughter release spirit energy, but now he was claiming she could shut it off at will? She could not conclude anything except that she was being lied to, fed a story because he was just trying to trick her into seeing her daughters. When she came upstairs, the master showed a reaction of fear and shock and ran to one of her daughters who was laying in the lap of a human child.

She could see her daughter’s arm laying limply off the human child’s knees, and her head lulled to the side with unfocused eyes. When this combined with the bluish grey skin of the grey elves, she looked exactly as she might look if she was dead. But then, when the master yelled at them for a little while, she suddenly sat bolt upright. She began to protest a little before she started crying, and then the human child backed her up saying something about how they were supposed to fake being sick when someone other than the master was around.

As the master was yelling at the children, Túeth was starting to feel it. The intense and overpowering spirit energy began to flood the entire room. It was not like the area around the heaven’s fall, but just between the two human children and her daughter, who the master had said was producing her own spirit energy, this house felt more full of spirit energy that a human town ever could.

She had spent the last month of her pregnancy in the nursery filled with human children, and that included these two. She knew that they also produced a crazy amount of spirit energy just between the two of them, but now with her daughter’s added it felt as though it had doubled again. He had been telling the truth after all.

But it wasn’t just that. Her daughter was also talking. She had also been warned about that one the day he had come over to her house, but it had almost gone over her head to be honest. But, now that she was seeing it, she remembered what he had said and she was shocked. Her daughter was talking at only half a year of age. She knew a human started talking a lot earlier, but elf babies usually didn’t start talking until they were at least two years old.

Well then, everything he had said was right. Túeth could see why the master would take such an interest in these children. She had to admit. There was something absolutely incredible about them. Surprisingly, she could not see their father’s face in them. She was simply too shocked by the absurdity of her daughter to the point that it was as though her mind forgot to be traumatized by the past. Instead, she found that she was beginning to fear her children for an entirely different reason.

“What happened?” She asked master Eirlathion when he seemed to have calmed down. She felt kinda strange about the whole thing. No matter how you looked at it, it was as though he was their parent instead of her. Well, he pretty much was actually. For the last half year, it had been him who raised them.

“I really don’t know.” master Eirlathion responded, shaking his head in exasperation. “She seems to be Ok now, so I guess it wasn’t as serious as I thought, but when I tried to view her mana and spirit pathways while she was playing sick, it looked as though she had seriously damaged her own spirit. Honestly, I really don’t know what to make of that girl at all. I have never seen something like her.”

“Hmm... I didn’t believe you at first when you said she could talk. Is it only her that’s like that?” She asks the master as she tries to make sense of all of this. She really didn’t know enough about the spirit and things of that nature in order to know what this was all about. She knew the basics that every elf knew, that while they had physical bodies like the humans, they were really a lot more like the lesser fey in that damage to their spirit could easily reflect in their bodies, and when their spirit was too damaged they would loose their life by way of their physical form simply vanishing.

The opposite though could also be said to be true, for instance when her body was broken and crippled for those three days. The abundance of spirit energy kept her spirit strong, and that allowed her to keep her life despite the injuries that should have, by all rights, been fatal.

Normally, there were very few ways to damage someone’s spirit directly. For an elf, it could receive indirect damage when the body was injured or when they were sick, but attacks directly to the spirit were the stuff of legends. It was the sort of thing that the villains did to the hero of the story, an obstacle that they would have to overcome and seek the treatment of the best healers to repair.

Despite her misgivings before, the thought that her daughter had caused something of that nature as a self inflicted injury was stirring up complicated emotions. It made her worry about the girl. It was ridiculous. Just a few days ago she was wishing, and now she realized, also dreading the day that they were discovered and then put to death by the other members of this village. With that being the case, it definitely seemed strange that she was concerned about her daughter’s state now.

Túeth walked over and knelt next to the human child who was still protectively holding her whimpering and crying daughter. The human looked up at her and then reluctantly loosened his arms so she could see her baby that he was holding. The baby quieted her sobs and looked back at Túeth, and she was immediately overcome with fear and uncertainty. She had abandoned this child and for the past half year she was waiting and even hoping for her death. She had no right to be with her now.

Without saying a single word in the exchange, Túeth stood on the spot and immediately ran down the stairs. She sat down at master Eirlathion’s table. Soon, she noticed she was shaking. This was all just too much. She couldn’t do this. She was a bad mother. She could clearly see it now, the road to her children’s salvation. With children that amazing, and the support of the master, they could definitely find some road to life for them.

Túeth had given up on them ever living long ago. She had not even considered it. And now, with it in front of her and impossible to miss, she felt more terrified of anything than she ever had in her life. When her village was attacked, she could see that she was going to die at the hands of those devils. With the certainty of death in front of her, she could be resigned to that fate. However, this twisted mix of hope, promise of great things to come, and at the same time dread at the horrible things that could also happen, and most of all just the huge world of uncertainty that covered the gap between them. The whole thing was easily the most terrifying thing Túeth had ever experienced in her short 73 years of life.

Túeth was glad she hadn’t eaten anything today. If she had, she would likely have vomited in response to the turbulent emotions shaking her to the very core of her soul. All she could do in this moment is hold her head, tremble in fear, and cry. She was in a place now where every choice she could possibly make seemed to look like it promised the worst kind of destruction. Every choice would destroy her life. If she helped raise her daughters and they turned out to be as great as their early life now promised they could be, maybe good could happen for her, but that decision felt like it was the most terrifying choice of all of them.

1st Arc: Infancy

Act 1: Neural Growth

End

Author's Note

This is the end of the 1st act of the infancy arc. The next chapter will be an intermission which will take the form of a lore chapter in which the more important of the conversations between Aerien and Gaerien that I couldn't fit in organically before but give a lot of important lore information are all gone over. The 1st conversation is time set to just after the 1st one during chapter 10, and the last 3 are time set to take place after they are brought to Eirlathion's house. There are a few others that do not have a definite time set, but take place some time in the 5 months between those two events.

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