Chapter 58: Book 2 Chapter 7 (part 2): The Faceless Woman

Author's note

Hey everyone, I'm over my illness and managed to fight against writer's block and burn out in order to get you a chapter without waiting an entire week. (seriously, I was getting a little scared it would go over a week. It was hard.)

Anyway, this is the chapter I was concerned about having too much disturbing gory content, but was roundly assured the mere show of the gory aftermath here is tame compared to the emotional punch chapter 5 had. I guess that writing this kinda stuff just hits the writer harder than it does the reader. I was kinda disturbed writing it, so I guess I figured the reader would experience the same.

Anyway, I will count the above paragraph as my content warning. Enjoy.

Eirlathion’s POV

Eirlathion, the millennium old village magus, was frightened to even leave his house. At the same time, he wanted to be as far away from this house as he possibly could. These conflicting thoughts were triggered by the same thing, the evidence of the evil that happened last night as he slept too cowardly to confront the very monster who instigated it.

That monster was someone he had begun to regard as a friend, but this incident had reminded him of the warnings all the mages told about the tree spirits. Tree spirits will only aid the elves so long as it is mutually beneficial for them. They do not actually care about the elves. Some older nymph may care about a mage such as him if they have been living with them since their birth, just as he had, but for the most part they do not care at all and will soon stop once they gain power as a dryad.

The tree spirits were the will of the forest, and they only tolerated those who lived under their branches. Actually, the very fact that Dryad still seemed to show they cared about him and the children may just be because they have barely been a dryad for a day. He wondered how long it would be until that stopped, and from what he had seen of their first actions as a dryad he was beginning to feel they would be in great danger staying around here.

Eirlathion shook off these distracting thoughts. He was just stalling by entertaining them, and only upsetting himself more. He was going to have to go out eventually, and this would mean witnessing the results of the carnage of the night before. If he did not step forward now, the killing would continue.

He looked up toward the open door at the end of the hall he was standing in. Dryad had long since opened the way for him, but he didn’t want to look at what he knew he was going to see. Sure enough, just from the small limited view he had from here he could see what seemed to be a woman’s torso, visible from just below her bust line down to her upper thighs, laying limp on the ground. This was not a huntress, but just a common civilian woman as evidenced by the lack of any of the fur armor. Instead she was covered in the long light greenish robes that were the fashion among the elves.

He could see a hand, it was completely mangled. There was blood on the thumb that did not seem to be from an injury to the hand itself, and there was discoloration of a bruise on the back. Worst of all though was the angle it was at compared to the rest of the body. Arms were not supposed to bend that way.

As Eirlathion continued to hesitate, the sound of wood groaning, the tell-tale sign of a tree spirit warping the shape of their tree, sounded up right next to his feet. He turned to see what was happening, and a thin wooden pole rose up in front of him until it reached his shoulder height. As soon as it stopped growing from the floor, it fell toward him, hitting him on the shoulder before his brain caught up and secured the item in order to prevent it from falling to the floor.

He looked to Dryad’s projection. They did not say a word, but the message between the eyes and the identity of the item they had just given him was clear. This was meant as a walking stick in order to secure his shaky knees. In other words, ‘get a grip and just go.’

He knew he had to. Since Dryad’s intention was obviously not to appear and break it up with their own words, that meant the job fell to him in order to break this up. Taking a breath in order to steady himself, Eirlathion pushed himself up off the wall and gave his new staff a few taps against the floor in order to get a feel for it. Well then, no more stalling. Now he was going to have to actually see the handiwork of the spirit he once thought his friend standing right next to him.

Eirlathion squinted his eyes against the sun as he walked out into the open. He looked one way and then the other, keeping himself alert. Dryad had said that the two sides had not stopped fighting. Either side could easily mistake him for an enemy and attack. He was pretty sure Dryad would protect him in such a case, but he didn’t want to take the risk. Besides, if Dryad could go to such an extreme, it might not be a good idea to count on their protection in the first place.

The corpse of the woman he had seen from the entrance was at his feet now, and there were quite a few more in the immediate vicinity around the tree. This must be where the whole thing started. Having seen that there was nobody alive ready to present a threat, Eirlathion took a deep breath and steadied his nerves before looking down at the face of the woman at his feet. What he saw was… unrecognizable.

The face of the woman was literally bashed in, nothing but a mass of blood and bone fragments at the front of the head. For some reason, Eirlathion found his eyes focusing in on her hair. There was something about the contrast between the bloody soup of visible bone and teeth that somebody had made of her face and the hair that was only lightly tussled just a few inches above the gory sight that he just found… haunting about the sight as it burned its way into his mind.

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Eirlathion leaned heavily on his staff and slid down it next to the woman’s side. “I’m sorry.” He croaked and lightly touched his finger tips to her forehead. He had no idea whether or not Dryad would have listened if he had taken action and tried to convince them, but he hadn’t even tried. He was just.. a coward, too weak to face the reality of what was happening right out side. He had denied. He had told himself that something this horrible couldn’t possibly happen here. But it was happening, right next to him as he tried to ignore it. How many of these could have been saved if he had just said something?

No, that was the first thing Dryad had said when he woke up. “Hmm… I’m disappointed master.” The words echoed and haunted him in his memory and connected with his current thoughts. Was Dryad… actually WANTING him to step up and challenge them!? Does that mean… they would have actually stopped if he had just spoken up? Eirlathion’s stomach gave a churn and he felt sick with that thought. At the same time, rage built up inside him. Rage at himself, rage at Dryad, rage at these foolish people who were weak enough to start this repulsive barbarism out of just some emotions that Dryad had stirred up in them.

Before he came out, he had been wondering about how he was going to go about this whole making peace between them thing. How he was going to approach them. Now, he didn’t care about doing things carefully. He was going to end this, and he was going to end it now! He pulled himself up on his staff Dryad had given him with the anger he was feeling turned to a look of determination on his face, and then he let the emotions within him explode into his voice.

“I am the master magus Eirlathion of Cundo village! The dryad of the village has said that the need for the fighting is over! Both sides! Please! Withdraw your weapons!”

Eirlathion considered going out and trying to find the hiding spots where one side or the other was hunkered down, but then he was quickly distracted as he looked down again as he realized he would have to watch his feet in order to avoid stepping on one of the many already trampled corpses. Several of them around were actually in far worse shape than the faceless woman at his feet now. At least, in her case, her chest and abdomen were still together and her arms and legs were not repeatedly crushed to the point of rupturing due to the skin being pierced by broken bones. Several of the other bodies around here really were in that kind of shape. Because of this, it was not just the bodies themselves he had to be cautious about, he also had to avoid stepping on some of the strewn entrails from a few of these unfortunate people.

As he glanced around, Eirlathion noticed something even more disturbing. Bloody feet. It was not all of them, but a few of the broken corpses had blood on their shoes. They were completely covered. However, there was no obvious injury to the leg that low down to justify that level of blood. It was not all that hard to figure out what had happened. These people… all this blood… none of the carnage he was seeing around the foot of his house was caused by a weapon of any kind. People had done this to each other with nothing but their feet and hands. Stomping on their neighbors repeatedly until… until THIS sort of thing happened.

A new horror struck Eirlathion in that moment as the full implications struck him. He looked back to the faceless woman. Her body was not in the kind of shape these others were, but somebody had really gone to great lengths to stomp her face in. Who would actually do that sort of thing? The only answer was, it had to be someone who REALLY hated her. There was somebody in the village who wanted this woman dead, and hated her enough to target her face for all of the punishment they wanted to dish out.

Eirlathion had been blaming Dryad for all of this. Dryad was definitely at fault, none of this would have happened without them, but there was also some real evil in some of the people living here as well. Whoever did this, they took the chaos of last night as an excuse to target this poor woman. It would have to have been near the beginning. It would have been before the two sides started just fighting one another, which means she was accused of being one of the people who were spreading rumors. Did she even do what she was accused of? It could have easily been that she was completely innocent and just caught up by the mob.

For a moment, these thoughts almost made Eirlathion loose his nerve to save the ones who were still alive. This realization severely damaged his attachment to his own people. The only thing Dryad did was cut the chain that bound up the true evil of the elven nature that always existed under the surface. They had removed the inhibitions, and the true monsters that they really were had been released for one night, and this was the result. If that was the case, did they really need to be stopped from doing what they were already doing anyway? Would it even be possible? Would they turn on him next?

That last thought made him pause and he remembered Dryad’s words from just moments ago. Elves are no better than humans. He had been upset with Dryad when they had said it, but seeing this faceless woman made it a very real concept to him. If elves really were the same war-crazed monsters under the surface, he very well could be attacked by either side as he went to approach them to start the negotiations for peace. Everything was catching up to him. Something in the memories Dryad had obtained must have given them a lot of information in regards to situations exactly like this. And, right now, they were trying to teach him in the most brutal way possible what the true nature of people was.

Could this be the reason Dryad had decided he should be the one to go and negotiate peace? Did Dryad WANT him to experience first hand being attacked by the very people he was trying to save!? He wouldn’t put it past them. If that was the case, he was going to have to be a whole lot more careful. He also did not have the luxury of giving in to his dark thoughts and allowing them to finish each other off either. Calanor and his little group were still holding themselves up somewhere, and Dryad had said they rescued some children. At the very least, they needed to be gotten to safety.

“Dryad!” Eirlathion shouted back toward his house. “Can you tell me what direction the survivors from Cundo are in?”

Subscribers' quote of the chapter

"Eirlathion started to grow up to be a fay that can fight even the most horrible demons."

-Lord Fufundra

(Also known as "Fufufu" over here in the SH comments section.)

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