Thursday, December 30, 2021 - The Kingdom of the Huldufólk

“Look, look,” Ella said excitedly, meanwhile, her finger was glowing steadily leaving trails in the air that hung for a moment and dissolved into glittery dust.

Reynard regarded her with wide eyes, “How much have you been practicing?”

“Hmm.” She started counting fingers on her other hand using her glowing finger, “I get up and go for a run, then shower and breakfast, then practice for three hours…” she went through the past few days, “… about ten hours a day for the past five days.”

She looked a bit puzzled, “I didn’t even realize I was getting so caught up in this. And honestly besides a feel, I have no idea how I am doing this.”

“I suspect you are the kind of person who can’t stand being bad at anything. But this amount of dedication seems unhealthy to me.”

“The lesson they taught hs is that magic has two axioms. The Law and the Art.” He switched back to the topics at hand, “The Law of the Improbable means the more unlikely something you want is, the harder it is to do. The Art of the Fanciful is that you must understand the effect you want to create to create it.”

Ella thought for a moment, “I feel more like it isn’t creating so much as finding it. Like I reach for the light, and it is there.”

“Well that is true enough. I myself often envision my arm reaching into a realm of magic and having to reach further to do something more difficult. But I was only only part of the way through my year when it all fell apart.”

Ella sympathized, thinking a bit about the physics work she had left undone.

Ella spent the rest of her time trying to make a her light brighter. Reynard kept pushing her to go deeper, but that analogy didn’t quite fit. She felt like she was flipping though a book of light, each page different, and as she flipped, each page heavier.

She tried to bring fire in, but she couldn’t get a simple one to appear. Even though the light she was drawing for super intense, far brighter than a light that Reynard could make, she couldn’t make it fire, the light itself left them sweating and uncomfortable

Ella had to stop and spent time making the light appear at a distance instead. The room had grown warm from the lights she had been conjuring and her fingers felt burnt.

She tried to focus it to a narrow beam, trying to feel the light as a laser and it let her cool the room down some but she needed goggles to protect her eyes and she gave up.

Reynard said, “Another rule. Making real effects versus visual illusions is much, much harder.”

“What about sound? Or smell?”

“Very, very hard. Nobody knows why. Healing like I did is also extraordinarily hard and I can barely manage what I did. Although I can almost feel I could restore my finger. But the great wizards who could perform such acts, they are long gone.”

Then he left her with, “Protect that tooth. It is clearly helping you and will make you formidable. But someone more interested in power than I would take it from you.”

As he walked out, Ella grabbed and held the pendant in her hand and started to think how she could keep it safer.

Jae-Young regarded her. “I don’t think I am going back to New York.”

Ella looked at him knowing where this conversation was going already but not able to stop herself from following the script, “So… are we breaking up?”

His elfin eyes regarded her, but she could still read the emotion in them, “I never thought it would be like this. But I just can’t, I just…” he trailed off.

Ella had it crystallize for her, “This is like one of those self-discovery things. Isn’t it?” She had tried to keep her voice calm but it came out a bit broken at the end. She was not going to cry.

“Like I never knew others like me at all. For the first time when I close my eyes and think about what I look like, I don’t envision myself as human. I can be myself, whatever that is!” Jae-Young’s voice was pleading. Pleading with her to understand, and the worst part was she could.

She got it, perhaps too well. A tear threatened to escape and she quickly blotted it with her sleeve. “I… I ummm… I need some time.”

“Yeah. Sure. I’ll just leave. Let me know… yeah. I’ll step out.”

Ella thought to herself that was a clean breakup and quick. Maybe she would do a bit of math or something. Maybe she was being overly avoidant — and with that she lost it and started crying.

The next day she woke up in bed a mess. Her eyes were a bit puffy and her hair was all over the place.

“Fuuucck, this is where I am supposed to get a huge bin of ice cream and veg out watching crap TV.”

Instead she got up and started bouncing up and down to loosen her muscles up before her usual morning run. She needed to move some.

When she left the bedroom, Jae-Young was asleep on the couch in the sitting room. He was snoring a bit. She sighed and looked at him. She pulled up his blanket where it had slipped down and worked her way through the tunnel to the outside.

The wind was brisk, and some sleet and ice hit her face as she pulled on her hat and checked her gloves. Soon she was running hard through the snow 100 yards out and back at a brutal pace through the sleet and hail, fifty burpees. 200 yards out and back. 300 yards out and back. She skipped her workout playlist and just listened to the wind. Punishing her body to avoid thinking.

The storm worsened and she cast a light spell on the entrance and struggled to maintain it while doing exercise. She kept looping back to the entrance because she feared getting lost anyway, but she needed to move.

Then she found some heavy rocks and debris and started carrying them while scrambling through the snow.

Eventually she crawled back into the tunnel far enough the temperature changed and stripped out of her now wet weather gear. She was still soaked and shivering now.

When she got to the main chamber, the Great Hall, where she had first met Jóhanna, she saw Jae-Young and another two elves sitting on a bench, pulling on their boots with heavy duty cold gear around them.

He stood up and stared at her, “Umm. We were about to go looking for you.”

“Why? I go running every morning.”

“Well the weather is kind of extreme and after last night…”

She stared at him for a brief moment and then laughed, “Get over yourself. I am not going to say I am not upset. But come on! As if.”

Well apparently elves could still blush because Jae-Young’s cheeks turned a bit pink and he looked down and, yes, he actually shuffled his feet a bit. Adorable, thought Ella, even as she knew it was part of saying goodbye.

He said, “Well, I am glad you are okay.” He straightened his shoulders and looked at his companions, “Let’s go to town and get some food to bring back since we are dressed for it.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out his ring and jammed it on. His featured changed back to human, and Ella took a breath as it felt so long since she had seen him in that guise. The other two went to a cabinet in the room where they pulled out other magical disguise jewelry: a bracelet and another ring. The magic did a similar thing, taking their elfin features and transitioning them to a human equivalent.