The elf studied the three human faces before him, his own an unreadable mask, but he did glance at Tomas who subtly nodded that he should cooperate, and the elf began to speak his tale. He started slowly and began with the history of his people as it obtained to this current crisis.
Time seemed to halt for Amirantha, Father-Bishop Creegan and Pug as the elf painted images with his words. He spoke of a struggling band of refugees, fleeing this world for another and the few thousand survivors who mastered the land around them. The images he evoked, of the reverent elves planting the saplings of the great trees they called the Seven Stars and building their first city around them, then expanding their control over the entire world.
His tale became epic as the elves who had fled to the stars became masters of all they beheld. Arts flourished, music, healing and scholarship. They encountered other races, and Gulamendis was unapologetic in recounting how those encounters became conflict and how relentless and unforgiving the taredhel were. Those who would not yield were destroyed. And few yielded.
Their client races withered and died out so that after five centuries, on all the worlds of the Clans of the Seven Stars, only the elves endured.
Pug remained stoic during the narrative, but Tomas, his oldest living friend, could see his subtle signs of worry as the tall elf spoke. They were a harsh and unforgiving people, as relentless in nature as the moredhel, but so much more powerful.
‘For nearly a millennium, we had peace and we flourished,’ said Gulamendis. ‘Then we came to a new world. It was devoid of life, but life had once abided. We saw the rubble of structures and the remnants of civilization. We investigated and discovered another portal, one not of our fashioning. Our aremancers studied it while others scoured the world, seeking clues as to what had happened. Those who worked with the portal unravelled its secrets and we opened it to yet another world. And there we met the demons.’
He looked from face to face and asked, ‘Have any of you not faced a demon?’
Pug said, ‘Of one stripe or another, all of us at different times.’
Looking at Amirantha, Gulamendis said, ‘You are a summoner, yes?’
Amirantha nodded, ‘I am.’
‘You understand then, better than these others, what is required to bring a demon across the realms to our own dimension.’
‘Yes,’ said Amirantha. ‘The magic is complex and difficult to master.’
With a smile that could only be called ironic, the elf said, ‘That is why there are so few of us. Those who lack talent do not survive the learning process.’
He paused, and said, ‘We are explorers, and for centuries we used our translocation portals, what you call ‘rifts’, to reach other worlds.
‘Explorers died and most worlds we found were uninhabitable, but over the centuries we moved through the stars.
‘For two hundred years or so, some have spoken of finding this world, our Home, the world from which we sprang. Some were against it, thinking it likely that this world had been destroyed by the war between the Valheru—’ He glanced at Tomas ‘—and the new gods.
‘Others dreamed of finding this world free of strife, as it was in our oldest myths.’ Again he glanced at Tomas, ‘Though they judged it likely we might again face our former masters.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Until I met Tomas I, like most of my people, thought we had risen so high, that we could vanquish the Valheru should they endure.’ He lowered his eyes. ‘I fear that our pride is why we fall before the demons.’
‘Tell us of the demons,’ urged Pug.
‘One of our explorers found a world, desolate beyond measure. Barren rock and empty oceans, but once lush.’
‘How could you judge that?’ asked Father-Bishop Creegan.
‘The world had been inhabited; we found the ruins of great cities. We found artefacts belonging to the people who had lived on that world. Within the cities were sprawling gardens with cleverly designed irrigation. Given the volume of water employed, we assumed that this hot dusty world was once verdant. Vast plains of farming land, again with miles of irrigation systems still in evidence, lay exposed to relentless hot winds, stripping them down to rock and sand. From the age of the artefacts and buildings, we judged the world depopulated less than a century before.
‘Yet there was not a hint of life. Of the great race that once inhabited this world, we found nothing, not even bones; little remained to give us any hint of who they might have been. They were physically small, we think, because their doorways were short and their rooms tiny by our measure, yet they built majestic monuments, great pyramids of stone. We found art, paintings and tapestries, though few showed any hint of their maker; they tended to abstract designs of rich colour. We found a few likenesses, and we think they may have been a race akin to the dwarves.