The Sanneyir's Seizure

[frill 2277]

 

The Warden in the midst of his lapse of movement.

 

***

 

The Sanneyir’s seizure

 

When midnight came, and their home was as quiet as the grave, there was little sound beyond the drawn of blades so sharp and minute it was as if they were being drawn in tandem into the ear of Leatherback.

 

”Wake up Leatherback!”

 

The lone Ithelanen seemed fixed in some sort of unresponsive catalepsy, the four men about him unmoving as they awaited some response. To any untrained or ignorant observer of the aging, lonely elf, it would appear that he were a dead man propped upright - a facsimile of some mal’ drained of whatever bile and vinegar that pulsed through his organs and puppeted into standing in the town square, freezing at the sight of movement like some great beast of times long passed taking indulgence in a children’s party-game. 

 

The four citizens of the Pale addressed him again, no response beyond the hummingbird-like quivering of the chest of the circled elf who was dedicating each stitch of the cloth he called character to trying to suppress that very movement. He could not tell how long he lay in a trance in the town-square, whatever defensive stupor he maintained rolling into hours and into days. The old elf, the functions of his brain possibly lapsing to the rolling bouts of dehydration that a man stood hard-fast and perfectly motionless for hours would only know full well, did nothing to greet his friends about him. No gesture extended to those he had known for years, the stress of some war that had been whispered to his ear by humans long-distance and father caring seemingly weighing on every movement with such gravity that he simply could not.

 

By the second day, those wondering for the health of the decrepit Leatherback had peeled away, instead going about their day in the empire’s elven slave-town. With the men finally turning their backs, whatever psychic slight that had waylaid Leatherback into staring as a deer-in-lamplight had dissolved into the ether with an imperceptible haste, the elf staggering from his own city in a fearful, sun-bleached fugue.

 

It seemed that although he had been unresponsive and unmoving, what remained of his cognizance had yet to be pickled by acerbic shock. Britches stained and sodden, the lone archer reached for a tail that he had yet to possess, if but only to tuck it between his legs before making his delirious, odd-footed pace towards the nearest human guard. Perhaps the great leader of Elves outside-of-Malin had always felt safest in the hands of those who hand out such a sobriquet so freely.

 

“In Aldemar,” the exasperated elf cried out between deep breaths, his legs exhausted from the run that brought him to the gates of the Bastille and further weakened by some psychosomatic lethargy only ever induced during the expelling of any and all dignity that a “great leader” retained, “Tresery, surrounded.”