Lemme tell you about this elf named Keef. Ever since he’s been outta prison, he’s been spouting off his confession at every tavern in town anyway, so I don’t think he’ll mind if I put my spin on it.
Keef moved to Brumewood City sometime after the war. Immediately hated the place. Always whining about the fog. Said it wigged him out how he couldn’t see ten feet in front of him, how he never knew what was behind that veil of mist, how the floating firefly lamps looked like monster eyes.
Old buddy from the war hooked him up with a janitor job at the infantry outpost. Steady beer money was enough to keep him in town.
But really, he stayed ‘cause of Amennoel.
Amennoel was the bartender at The Randy Sapling. Quaint little place, perched between four redwoods a hundred feet up. Heights were never Keef’s thing, but he climbed those spiral stairs fifteen minutes after his shift, on the dot, every night. Twice on the weekends.
Keef was sweet on Amennoel. Talks about her to this day. Obsessed with her heart. Her heart this, her heart that, her heart’s so big. Now, I’m paraphrasing here; he didn’t actually say “heart,” more referring the geographic region in which her heart resided. But I’m romantical in that way.
Here’s the thing though: Amennoel was taken. Married to the tavern owner, Big Boothwyn Poppydance. Everybody loved Boothwyn. Hulking but cuddly, boisterous, handshake like a toppled sequoia, could make a constipated dragon laugh. One of those naturally beloved guys.
Beloved by everybody, but Keef.
Keef couldn’t stand the way Boothwyn slapped his back. Called him Private Sourpants. Was jolly. What business does an elf have being jolly?
You see, Keef thought himself big stuff, being a direct descendent of Buck Thornsight, that famous archer who kept a thousand bloodthirsty goblins from invading the Capital with nothing but his bow and spit. You know, that guy.
Keef was real proud of this piece of ancestral trivia, even carrying around a tattered tapestry square of old Buck, pointing out the family resemblance to anybody in range.
It always rankled Keef’s britches that he was just a foot soldier, despite his fancy heritage, but Jolly Boothwyn, son of a barrel-maker, was his Captain. Keef worked commissary duty under Captain Poppydance for three years, yet Boothwyn didn’t recognize him. Keef had to remind Boothwyn they were in the same company. Twice.
But Amennoel and her fabulous heart, well, that was enough to keep Keef a regular.
She was a sweet gal, I’ll give Keef that. Genuinely a kind soul. Apparently, when Keef showed her the tapestry square, she said “Oh, wow! You two have the same smile!”
That simple, polite kindness was enough to convince Keef she saw the inherent nobility inside him, which everybody else was too dumb to see.
One day, Keef was chatting up Amennoel after work, about how his boss was such a jerk making him clean stuff, as if his very job was to do such things, but Amennoel was staring off, losing track of his story.
“Am I boring you?” he asked.
She apologized, saying she was having a rough day.
Keef pressed, and after some attempts at changing the subject, she relented, whispering, “Some days, I could knock Boothwyn’s head off, you know?”
And that was that, there was no going back for Keef. Amennoel apologized for gossiping about Boothwyn, whom she loved dearly, assuring Keef she was just venting, but Keef didn’t believe her.
He knew that was her secret message to him. Her cry for help. She saw the true Hero that he was, and she needed to be rescued.
He had hope for once. He and Amennoel had a future together. He just had to convince her to drop Boothwyn.
Digging shit out the latrines, Keef made merry fantasies of spiriting Amennoel away to some beach where they could plant their roots, never plagued by fog again. But he was just a janitor whose salary only had room for necessities. Beer was a necessity too, you see, so he could court Amennoel. He truly hated the stuff, forcing down four pints a night with extreme reluctance, of course.
Without more money, he was stuck.
Then, one night, salvation came from the least likely source.
Sloppy at the bar, Keef felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Boothwyn’s butler. Keef grunted, saying something clever like, “You gonna get a step ladder and throw me out?”
You see, Boothwyn’s butler was a Clayheart dwarf Boothwyn brought back from the war. Got the dwarf doing all his errands and shit. According to Keef, the butler was unsettling, only communicated through grunts. The dwarf’s beard was even shaved in the elven fashion, which always cracked Keef up, like “Grow three feet and maybe you’ll fit in. The beard isn’t the issue.”
The butler nodded towards Boothwyn’s office.
Keef got all flustered figuring Amennoel spilled the beans about her love for Keef, and now Big Boothwyn was going to beat his face in with his Big Boothwyn fists.
But, being the Hero he was, Keef followed the dwarf to meet his destiny.
Boothwyn was at his desk. The fly lamps hadn’t been conjured yet, so the only light was the sallow dusk coming through the blinds. Whenever Keef tells this part of the story, he gets real particular about how that light came through those blinds, casting black stripes across Boothwyn’s body. It put sweat on the back of his hands.
Suddenly, Keef wasn’t in Boothwyn’s office. He was back in Onyxia during the war, ten years prior. His first assignment recruiting Clayheart dwarves to the elves’ side in the fight against Grimoth Chaffmaker. Keef would pay the Clayhearts to turn on their dwarven brethren who’d allied with the Chaffmaker. Keef gave the Clayhearts thistlewhip seeds, and they’d sneak into Onyxian towns disguised as day laborers, and plant the thistlewhip in the bad dwarves’ fields at night. When dawn came, the thistlewhip would burst into life, growing into seven-foot tall, walking, whipping, barbed vines, annihilating everything in their path for six hours, until the noon sun withered them dry. Keef never forgot the first village decimated by his thistlewhips. Found an old dwarf woman lying in her bed, diced into a hundred neat slices, hardly disfigured so surgical were the thistlewhip’s cuts.
She was smiling. Never saw it coming.
Anyways. Back in Boothwyn’s office, the way those blinds divided up Boothwyn’s face gave Keef the creeps.
Keef looked visibly agitated, but without a word, Boothwyn put some whiskey in Keef’s shaking hands.
Keef thought, “Hey, maybe Boothwyn ain’t so bad. He was in the same war. He gets it. Knows what I need without making a big deal about it.”
The fog of whiskey obscured all those pesky memories for a time.
“Have some too,” Keef said when Boothwyn poured him a second glass.
“I don’t drink.”
Keef was about to comment that Boothwyn was in the wrong profession, but Boothwyn launched right into his pitch:
“Hey, I know I razz you a bunch about how I don’t remember you, calling you Private Sourpants and all that, but that’s just razzing, you know? Of course I remember you. I remember every face in Aspen Company. You’re my brother, I hope you know that.”
Keef coughed, unsure how to take that.
“You remember when our boys took that temple on the south end of Miteseyo Valley?”
“Of course I remember. The Beards poured hot metal on us. Lost half our platoon.”
“Til we came in with the rowan singers.” Boothwyn smiled. “Showed those little freaks why they should’ve stayed in their holes, and let the big boys fight, instead of joining the wrong side.” Boothwyn’s butler handed him some water. ”Thank you.”
Keef took the liberty of sampling some more whiskey. When the hot steel fell on his comrades, they’d screamed with such an unnatural pitch, it sounded like a flute. They’re in that cave to this day, immovable metal statues.
Boothwyn waited a beat for Keef to finish the glass.
“When the temple was secured, and you infantry boys were setting up in the lower chamber, Captain Birchtale and I were exploring the upper chamber. Now, I’m not proud of this part, but we found something.” Boothwyn took a theatrical breath. “The temple’s tribute collection. Most gold and shiny stones I’ve ever seen. Birchtale and I agreed to keep the treasure, not share it with the Company. Like I said, shameful. We collapsed the wall, blamed it on a cave-in. You remember that?”
“Uh-huh,” Keef said. “Had to move further north. Had to sleep in snow.”
“That’s right. And I regret that too. But I’m gonna make it up to you.”
“Bit late for that, ain’t it?” Keef said.
“Not the way I see it. Thing is, Birchtale and I never got that treasure. After our boys caved-in Onyxia and quartered the Queen, the Clayhearts took over what was left of the Queendom and made some changes. They outlawed the old Onyxian religion, which was sensible. But the fucked-up thing is they sealed all the old temples. When Birchtale and I returned after the war, the temple’s cave door was soldered shut with iron, and we no longer had the power of the Empire behind us. Couldn’t get in.”
Keef snorted at the comeuppance.
“So I opened my tavern, met Amennoel, and moved on. Birchtale got the fever and died. Life’s good, love my bride, but…” Boothwyn shrugged. “You know how it is. Emperor doesn’t care about his soldiers, not during peace time. Money’s sparse. I got some parasites breathing down my neck. Gambling debts.”
Keef perked up at this potential piece of leverage.
“So I gots to thinking, hey, I know where salvation is, untouched, just waiting.”
“But the treasure’s sealed up,” Keef said.
“Sure.” Boothwyn gave one of his most winsome smiles. “But that’s where you come in.”
Keef squinted something fierce. All that booze was giving the walls a tune to jig to.
“You work at the outpost, right?”
“Yeah.”
“They got a lot of weaponry there, right? In case shit goes down.”
“Sure.”
“But those peacetime brats holding down the fort, they don’t know their ass from an arrowhead. They were just babes when the war was going.”
“Yep.”
“Most of them are in my bar an hour before their shift ends. You’re the only one who does the work. Only one with integrity there.”
“You know that’s right.”
“So how hard, hypothetically, would it be to get your hands on some thistlewhip? Let’s say three seeds. Hypothetically.”
Keef considered this. “Not hard.”
Big Boothwyn put out his hands like “Well?”
Keef took a moment to steady his sight. “You want me to steal some thistlewhip?”
“Yessir.”
“So…”
“So we can tear that temple door off its hinges and get that treasure.”
“With thistlewhip?”
“You know better than anyone what one seed can do, let alone three.”
He knew that old dwarf woman’s smile, off-balance from the slice cleaving her face.
“Yeah. Could work.”
“Fifty-fifty. You get half.”
“Half of what?”
“The treasure, brother, keep up! You deserve it. The whole company deserved it back then. But now, you know how it is, everybody’s scattered across the Empire, or dead. You’re the only comrade I know. You deserve it on their behalf.”
Keef nodded. Boothwyn wasn’t that bad after all, but he still wasn’t right for Amennoel. He was a gambler, a booze peddler. Amennoel deserved a Hero with a dashing smile. With that treasure, they could run off together. Wouldn’t even need to hurt Boothwyn or nothing. Once she saw Keef could provide for her, she’d be all his.
“You’ve got a deal.”
From how Keef tells it, stealing the thistlewhip seeds was as easy as expected. Guard on duty was playing shells with some cooks, and Keef strolled right into the armory, grabbed three plum-sized seeds of destruction, and shoved them in in light-proof black sack without a hitch.
Keef didn’t tell his employers he was taking time off, as if they’d give it to him. As far as he was concerned, he’d have no need for a job when he returned.
The night before Keef and Boothwyn left, Keef chatted with Amennoel at The Randy Sapling.
“You excited for the fishing trip?” Evidently, Boothwyn’s excuse for being out of town was a fishing trip with a barfly.
“Yep,” Keef said. “Say…”
Amennoel looked at him with those elven princess eyes, like she’d walked right out of a tapestry.
“You like the beach?”
“Sure. Family visited Azulith when I was a girl.”
“You liked it?”
“It was alright. Pretty. But hot. I like Brumewood better.”
“You gotta be shitting me!”
“Hey, this is my home.”
“All this bullshit fog. Black mold everywhere. Damp as a troll’s ass-crack. You’re crazy.”
“The fog’s cozy. Makes me feel wrapped up, like a blanket.”
“I think you’ll change your mind.” Keef gave a knowing smile.
Amennoel looked at him with a strange expression. Keef interpreted it as restrained excitement. I don’t know what it was. I wasn’t there.
The next morning, Keef was getting all bothered, loading provisions into the wagon. Boothwyn’s butler was leaning against a nearby redwood, chomping down on an apple.
“Lend me a hand, will ya,” Keef commanded, not asked.
The butler moseyed over, hand outstretched. Confused, Keef reached out, and the butler dropped the chewed-up apple core in his hand.
“The fuck!” Keef dropped the core, and was about to clobber the dwarf, when Boothwyn appeared.
“To the Road!” Boothwyn jovially slapped Keef on the back.
Keef climbed into the wagon and said, “I don’t gotta sit next to your butler do I?”
“My butler isn’t coming,” Boothwyn said. “Wouldn’t be proper.”
And with that, they were off.
The trip from Brumewood to the Onyxian mountains was five days solid ride. Honestly, not much to report here. I usually take a smoke break whenever Keef’s telling this part of the story. Rivers. hills. I think there was some business with a troll? Keef makes it sound like the troll was chasing them, and they narrowly escaped with their lives, but to me it just sounded like the the troll was crossing the road to pick some blueberries, and they over-reacted.
They eventually reached Loam Town, a farming village of the former Onyxian Queendom, now a territory of the Evergreen Empire run by the Clayheart dwarves who’d allied with the elves in the righteous fight against Grimoth Chaffmaker.
Keef described Loam Town as the usual post-war pastiche: busted stone-huts with rat-gnawed roofs, scrawny dwarf kids pissing in the streets, packs of dogs hunting stray livestock. You know, Victory.
“I’m so glad I pulled her out of this pit,” Boothwyn remarked as they rode through the town.
“Huh?” Keef asked. It was the first thing Boothwyn had said all day.
“My butler,” Boothwyn said. “She was just a kid during the war, one of those ragamuffins running wild in the streets. One of our Clayhearts we recruited to the cause. Planted more thistlewhip than any of them. A real work ethic.”
“Your butler’s a girl?” Keef was stuck on that revelation. “How do you even know with the beard?”
“Oh, I know,” Boothwyn replied. At this point in the story, Keef would usually give a big salacious wink, especially if he saw I was in the audience.
“Why’d you take her home?” Keef asked.
Boothwyn looked at him like he was an idiot.
“I saved her. Look at these creatures. We freed them from the oppression of those uppity mountain dwarves, gave them the same rights as elves, and this…” He waved at the town. “This is all they could do with that blessing?” Boothwyn stared off for a while. “Couldn’t let that hard-working little girl end up like this. So I rescued her.”
“Merciful of you,” Keef said. He didn’t add that he was about to rescue Amennoel in much the same way.
After Loam Town’s crumbly outer wall, the settlements thinned, and it was just bare chaparral as the Onyxia foothills started in earnest.
Sometimes Keef skips the next part, but I usually badger him to tell it. Keef doesn’t think it’s important, but I like it.
You see on the road up to the temple, this lone dwarf was blocking their path.
Boothwyn called out, “You lost?”
It was a truly ancient dwarf woman, like she could hardly get out of bed, let along trek the two miles back to town.
The dwarf didn’t answer. Merely smiled at them. She was digging a hole right there in the middle of the road with a tiny trowel. Her white hair was all a fury, a storm, the coldest of blizzards.
“Madness…” Boothwyn steered their wagon around her. “Absolute madness.”
Keef couldn’t help but agree. Something about how she was blocking their way really chafed him.
Then, they arrived at the temple. An iron slab covered the moss-choked cave hole, soldered neatly to the mountainside. There were no geometric designs carved into the metal, as was typical of dwarven architecture. Merely a single maxim written in both dwarvish and elvish:
Forget your old way
It will poison you
“You ready?” Boothwyn asked Keef.
Boothwyn pointed to a spot at the bottom corner of the iron slab.
“One seed should do. We’ll need one to dig the treasure out too.”
To be safe, they waited until dark before removing the seed from the bag. Then they dug a shallow hole, only a few inches deep, buried the seed, and poured a drop of water over the mound. Thistlewhip is a simple weed, doesn’t need much, just a swig of water and some dawn light.
As for the light, they brought a sun summoner, which is basically just conjuring bark with elvish runes on both sides.
“You wanna do the honors?” Boothwyn asked.
Keef nicked his forearm with his dagger and rubbed the sun summoner into his welling blood, making sure the blood filled all the runes. The medallion began to glow.
“Stand back.” Keef pointed the medallion at the mound, and a concentrated beam of the golden dawn light shot out.
The thistlewhip vine stabbed out of ground and grew into a seven-foot spear. Smaller, angrier vines sprouted from the main shaft and began whipping with a demonic fury.
Keef and Boothwyn stepped back about twenty-five yards and watched the show. As the thistlewhip mutated into a vaguely humanoid shape, it whipped its indestructible vines at the mountain wall, tearing out hunks of granite the size of Keef’s head. It worked with a mindless devotion, cutting efficiently and tirelessly until there was a hole big enough to walk through. With no stone left to stand in its way, the thistlewhip turned its faceless, knotty head towards the mule. The poor creature backed away, but found itself caught in the wagon’s binds.
“Better burn it before it kills our ride,” Boothwyn chuckled.
Keef flipped the sun summoner to the noon side and filled its rune with his blood. White noon light shot from the medallion, and the thistlewhip caught fire, withering to ash in seconds.
“What I tell ya?” Boothwyn clapped Keef on the back. “Just one seed’ll do it.”
They entered the temple through the fresh wound in the mountainside.
Their comrades were still there, cast in infinite iron skin, mouths open though their song had long since died. Keef and Boothwyn took a moment to pour out some whiskey and leave a few bites of date bread.
The rest of the temple didn’t warrant the same reverence: No drops of whiskey for the ceremonial cisterns now toppled and cracked; no moment of silence for the meditation cushions once hand-stitched by blind priestesses, now damp and moth-eaten; no whispered prayers for the statues of the mountain ape gods, now orphaned in the darkness.
It was just dwarf shit after all.
Boothwyn led them to the upper chamber to the crystal priests’ quarters, and the entrance was clogged with stone, just like Boothwyn promised.
They buried the second thistlewhip seed beneath the rubble.
“I got it this time.” Boothwyn cut his arm.
The thistlewhip pulverized the rubble in minutes. After charring the thistlewhip, they walked into the priests’ quarters, and Boothwyn pulled open a discrete door to another smaller chamber.
According to Keef, the reflection off the treasure was blinding.
“Which half you want?” Boothwyn grinned. “Left or right?”
It was nearly dawn before they’d finished loading the treasure onto the wagon. There were still probably three more loads sitting in that room, but Boothwyn said if they put any more on the wagon, the axel would break.
“Don’t be greedy, Keef my boy,” Boothwyn said. “With this haul, you never dig another latrine.”
Keef agreed, but secretly planned to swing back by on the way to the beaches, once he snagged Amennoel.
On the road back to Loam Town, they saw the old dwarf woman again. The hole she’d been digging through the night was deep enough to hold her. She was pulling armfuls of dirt over her chest, burying herself, looking them right in the eye as they passed, never breaking her smile.
They didn’t say a word, just kept driving.
The trip home was uneventful. Not even a troll this time.
It was after midnight when they arrived in Brumewood. Not wanting to wake Amennoel, they went back to Boothwyn’s office to celebrate their safe arrival.
Keef honestly wanted to just fuck-out of there, count his loot, and buy a fancy cloak, but Boothwyn’s butler brought out some celebratory cider.
“Why not?” Boothwyn said. “I’ll break my code for one drink.”
“One drink.”
“To Peace,” Boothwyn raised his glass. “And dwarven piety.”
“Here, here.”
The cider was surprisingly strong. Almost immediately Keef felt his shoulders loosened, along with his lips.
He looked around at the tavern office and thought perhaps he’d open his own place, now that he had the means. He’d do a better job too. Come up with a better name, that’s for sure.
“The Randy Sapling…” Keef said. “Where’d the name come from?”
“You don’t know?” Boothwyn chuckled.
“Wouldn’t be asking if I knew, would I?”
“It’s from that famous joke.”
“Can’t be that famous if I ain’t heard it.”
Boothwyn poured them another glass. “Oh, you’re gonna love it.” He settled into his orator stance, and dove into the joke.
Basically, it’s one of those long, exhausting jokes meant to wear down the audience until they’re right at their breaking point, and then you hit them with some dumbass pun or nursery rhyme that’s so stupid it comes back around to being funny.
I’ll spare you the full experience, but the gist was: an elven princess, for some reason, acquires the attention of a very horny tree, who proceeds to molest her in increasingly vile ways.
You know, one of those classic raping tree stories elves love so much.
So, this happens over and over, violation after violation, and eventually the elf lady gets fed up and chops down the tree. Then, years later, she gives birth to a pine tree. She’s understandably bemused and asks her gardener what’s going on. She killed the pervy tree years ago, didn’t she? How is this possible? Her wise gardener nods solemnly and hits her with this elvish proverb:
If you fell a tree, leave not its roots buried,
For if you forget, one day its fruits you’ll carry.
Micah Giddens grew up in Elk Grove, California where he combatted suburban malaise with a MiniDV camera, making dumb Youtube videos with his friends. He now lives in Chicago with his wife and two cats (Grendel and Ludwig). When he’s not writing, he’s commiserating with his writing group Draft Quest, or taking mediocre photos of the city. Like a Ninja Turtle, his favorite foods are pizza and candy. His fiction has appeared in Spooky Magazine, Red Sheep Magazine, and in the Morgana Le Fay anthology by Flame Tree Publishing.