A Fantasy Yarn, or Ealigh

In the years before, when dirt was new and legends were real, there were but four countries, four cities, four states. They surrounded four temples which paid tribute to four deities, two gods and two goddesses. The world was fresh and the people got along with each other and the deities lived in harmony with the people. Land owned the land and no one took it away from someone else.

Decades passed and the people aged with the years as did the children of the people. The land grew older at a slower pace, a crawl to the people’s walk, with the ocean’s age crawling beside it. As the deities aged, they needed more strength and the deities grew older at a sprint when placed beside the people. They took their strength from the element they controlled. To the north lived a goddess of fire with flames heating her liquid passion to a rolling boil. The south held an earth god whose only desire was to play games and talk to people, learn stories and gossip with people. A goddess lived in the east with a personality of the wind, ever-changing and able to go from a breeze to a gale to a tempest. The final, youngest deity was a god whose temple was on an island and who only awoke when the tide was in on the beach.

In the beginning the states were paradise where you barely had to work but as the years passed and the deities need for power grew, the states became hell. The north became bitter and cold with the lack of fire since Shandi, the fire goddess, took away most heat from the land to use as her strength. The south had a famine for little they planted grew and all of the animals in the forests starved until they were nothing but slack skin hanging from brittle bones. The earth god, Gaieog, ate all of the minerals and fertilizers that were in the ground. The east was hot and dry and windless, becoming a desert for all the weather was gone for the goddess of the wind, of the weather, Galiel, swallowed it completely. The west, with people who knew the sea and the tides and lived at peace with it, was overrun by higher and higher tides until more and more of the people were forced to live on boats on the oceans. Fossea, the water god, now awake all the time, filled his temple with water and created huge waves on which the western people had to navigate through.

Most people stayed in their countries but some moved; the north moved south and the east to the west and so on. The further the people moved from their homeland, their problems became less and less prevalent. They met each other in a land where the weather was temperate and the land was like the deities’ wrath had never touched them. It was a forest, with trees that were close together and bark black, and in the center of the Shvandell, the name the people called it, was a plain of high grasses that reached up and tickled your knees with a high hill reaching above the rest of the plain by five feet. A river ran through the forest and split itself around the hill before rejoining and flowing out of the plain and into a small lake in the forest.

Seeing that the land was fertile and the water was pure, the wind was blowing and the air was warm, the people left their old nationalities and began a new city and a new state. The ex-Southerners farmed the land and the ex-Westerners fished. The ex-Northerners hunted deer and rabbits and the ex-Easterners raised the chickens and cows. The leaders of the four traveling groups created a government and the hospitals and the school. Life was what it was forty-five years ago: peaceful and tranquil, free of the god’s power hungriness.

The days passed by and so did the years and the small city grew and prospered. They stretched their boundaries moving further and further into the Shvandell and the gods moved out further and further into the world until their realms touched on another. The larger nation and city of Donnoko was peaceful and didn’t know war but the deities’ borders were filled with battles between creatures commandable only by the deities doing their bidding. The people saw the war in the sky with the light shows the clashing gods created like lightning fighting lightning with thunder cheering them both on till one crashes to the ground. They saw that with each month, the lights grew brighter and closer and the thunder cheered louder and louder and that soon, they themselves will have to fight to defend the Shvandell and Donnoko.

They didn’t have metal; only wood and rock. Axes were crude and barely suitable for cutting down trees and knives were small and hard to handle, both unfit for battle. They couldn’t tame the elements as well as the deities and they felt hopeless. No one could save us, they thought, and Donnoko will be destroyed. We are powerless, worms and grubs able to be flicked off of the log of life by the weakest of the gods with them taking our lives. A savior is what we need, a person who can tame the elements and harness the gods.

The river flooded higher and the winters grew as cold as the summers grew hot and less and less food would sprout and a savior still had not shown itself. Their hope faltered and they started to prepare for defeat and the consequences of all four gods taking their elements from the land. A slight cross wind had started to blow along the river and the current turned, now flowing from the lake to the island where the two opposite currents clashed and formed funnels. The people never noticed; they were too busy rationing food and water and making parkas.

During the busiest hour of the day, the hour before lunch, a ship, five feet long and two feet wide with a small mast, glided up the river from the way of the lake. On the ship stood a man with eyes chiseled from granite and he stood with an air of royalty. The shirt on his torso was torn and ragged and showed off a slight build, like that of an acrobat, and a precious opal, continuously changing colors with the heat and chill of his blood, was implanted on the back of his right hand. All saw him, few came over to him, but no one spoke to him.

His ship hit the island and stopped. He stepped off of it and the current reverted back to what it used to flowing with the ship also floating down the river. The island seemed to grow beneath the man’s feet and the air around him seemed to warm. He was tall but he wasn’t large, either with fat or with muscles. The man looked lanky and gangly and clumsy like a drunken man with three legs in a race.

With a low voice, like that a shepherd might use to soothe his sheep, he said, “Where is your courtesy? I am a traveler, a person whose feet will burn unless the move and mind will wander if the body cannot. I know the north and south, the east, and the west. I request food, water, and shelter and, in return, you may ask me for a favor. Any favor, I will, and can, fulfill.”

A small boy in the crowd, touched by the short speech, yelled out, “Protect us from the deities and save Donnoko.”

The man smiled. “That can be arranged. My name is Ealigh and I shall live on this island until the gods come. When that day comes, you will need to do one other thing for me.”

“What is it?” the same boy asked.

“I’ll tell you when that day comes,” and with that, the people rejoiced. They cried out that they have their savior and the Shvandell will live forever. They made a feast for the city with breads and cheese, wines and ales, soups and stews. All the citizens of the city ate well until they couldn’t eat anymore and Ealigh ate more than anyone else and put away more alcohol than that of which could kill a normal man.

With Ealigh in the city and farming the land, plants grew and livestock lived. All but one family trusted the man with the safety of the state and they didn’t show their contempt outwardly, afraid of being branded and ostracized. The children adored him, worshipped him, and asked him questions of the world and other places. One boy, whose parents came from the south, asked him why he travels. Ealigh replied: “Wanderlust and an answer.” The boy asked what the question was and he replied: “Why are we here?”

Two weeks passed until the nights turned as bright as day and the first of the trees died. The people began to worry. Why hasn’t he done anything yet? We gave him our food and he promised us that the gods would be weakened, they thought. They looked at Ealigh, not as a savior anymore but as a con artist only out to help himself. It was another week until half of the trees died and half of the forest was gone, simply disappeared into the bright flashing light of the battlefield.

The next day or night, which one, the people couldn’t tell, Ealigh told the families to bring the children and their fathers and mothers and have them surround the island facing it. The people obeyed as they had before when Ealigh asked them to do strange rituals. They questioned his ways but never doubted the results whether in farming or raining. Usually Ealigh only asked for five or, at the most, seven. The whole city was almost unheard of before this.

Standing tall on the hill and looking out over the people congregated before him, Ealigh spoke like a general directing his troops. “You will not fight for Donnoko for only I will. Like before I will borrow your taming of the elements but this time you will not get it back. I will save Donnoko, the last refuge against the gods, and the world. Questions?”

A father from the west asked, “What will happen when the gods are defeated? Can they be destroyed?” This caused a murmur to ripple through out the crowd but this didn’t faze Ealigh for he just smiled and raised the opaled hand to quiet the group.

“It is true that they are immortal and cannot die but that doesn’t mean they can’t be controlled. We could imprison them with the elements but, by itself, that would be far too weak. If something could act as the other half of the key that holds the deities in a separate dimension, the world could blossom and bloom. Does anyone have any ideas on what that mystical catalyst could be?”

All the people’s faces were in a grimace and their minds worked, the cogs turning tooth by tooth at a rapid pace but the cogs simply would not connect and meet. They went through idea after idea but nothing seemed right. One yelled out a “song” but songs soothe only the savage beast and not the immortal deity. Another yelled out for a “poem” but poems can only move the mortal heart and not the heartless gods. Finally a woman shouted out the answer Ealigh had been waiting for this whole time. Words and names hold knowledge and knowledge is the epitome of all power, military, monetary, political. With a simple sentence, you can kill or maim, damn or bless. A story could destroy the world and a book, the known universe. Words are mightier than mind, the body, the spirit. The tides tell tales with its own separate language and the wind spins yarns with its own separate speech. Arcane languages are strongest, leaving mysteries in the minds of all who try to decipher its meanings. Words, syllables, letters could command the gods and not through prayer and pleading but through force. Language controls everything, anything, all things.

Ealigh asked for a piece of parchment and a quill with ink. He sat them down beside his foot and told everyone to inhale and hold the breath so it could be infused by the taming art. When they were allowed to exhale, Ealigh breathed in filling his lungs with their multicolored breath, red, blue, green, or yellow, and took control of the elements and became even greater than the gods. The clothes he wore seemed to shimmer and reflect the light from the battles. They looked metallic, though the people of the town didn’t know what metal was, and cold but it was hard, durable. He fell down, as did the people, and they rested for an hour.

Ealigh awoke first and began to write on the parchment. He first drew circles and then filled them with loops and lines and connected them to one another. It was as if he were possessed because of the way he was writing so quickly, almost causing the paper to burn from the heat of his quill. He called for another piece and continued work, barely losing a step in his rhythm of dunk, scribble, dunk, scribble, sharpen, dunk, as he incorporated the next piece.
The citizens awoke and went to their houses. They boarded the windows and doors and ducked their heads between their heads, both praying and kissing their butts good-bye. A disaster was coming, they knew that but they did not know whom the disaster would affect. They hoped for the best but prepared for the worst, they were optimists with pessimism, an all-too-common characteristic in people.

Three hours and three more sheets of parchment later, Ealigh stood up and his knees popped. He stood on one of the sheets with the other four pointing toward the cardinal directions. His arms elongated and looked like limp noodles and fell upon the ground, moving toward the water like snakes. His feet hardened, took the color of birch bark, and dug into the ground becoming roots and sucking out nutrients. His back broke for muscles grew out of his back, bursting easily out of that ratty shirt, but soon the muscles lightened in color and became downy with feathers, and the wings continued to grow and started to flap. His eyes grew moist and leaked, nut not with tears instead molten rock came from his ducts, and his hair flamed and burned and the smell wafted down through the town.

The parchment to the north started to glow blue, a color like that of the sea at noon in August. The one to the south grew orange and red, the color of the sun during the searing summer at sunset. To the east, the paper glowed as green as the trees in the most perfect spring in the loveliest temperate forest. The eastern parchment grew white and gray, the color of a cloud wanting to storm but only wants to look like their cotton brothers. They all hovered three inches off of the ground and were no longer lying flat but instead were standing perpendicular to the ground.

The Schvandell’s trees, which had died, now grew and flourished and gave a part of their lives to aid in Ealigh’s power. The deities control weakened as Ealigh’s far reaching strength destroyed their troops of creatures, like a giant’s foot stepping on a grapevine. Ealigh pushed the deities further and further back until they were pushed into their temples and were forced to border them up for fear of destruction of their haven. Instead of being on the offensive, as they always had been used to being, they had to fight only to protect themselves.

With the god’s hiding, Ealigh told the parchments to go and they soared towards the for temples’ doors. They each went to a separate temple over which they had a greater power. The papers shut the temples up as they became a huge stone slab that only those who could control the elements could open and unlock. The parchment, on which Ealigh was standing, started to swallow his feet and his legs and continued to move up along his body. He was a god now and needed to be placed with the others. He was a god but he was still a traveler who journeyed for a question which he will now never answer. As the final strand and piece of hair went into the other dimension, the Dimension of the Deities, the sky darkened for it was night and all of the fights were over.

The citizens saw the stars and came out of their homes. They surrounded the hill which had shrunk to a valley and water filled the hole. A single cat’s tail shot out of the boiling pool and surrounding it was the parchment, still paper and not stone. All the people cried; some out of grief of losing Ealigh, others out of relief that Donnoko, and the Schvandell, survived the terrible cataclysmic event of the deities need for power and strength. The central city remained and the world evolved. Ealigh and the deities became heroes, then legend, then lore. The world moved onward but the deities had no legs.