Fonlap fled the shimmering curtains of the tent, lit magically without fire in the warm summer night. He fled the somber singing, the dread of the slow sitar chords and the cymbals and the hand-drums, and ran out across the bare wasted earth. The Seven Tears loomed over him monstrously, catching the dim light of Shar and twisting it into iron and blue splinters.
Those crystalline monuments stood stark on a blasted expanse of scree, a cavernous valley unrelieved by green shapes. Not every eye could perceive the faint glow those bastions still emitted after more than a century, but to Fonlap they glimmered as bright as the distant stars and hummed maliciously as a swarm of yellowjackets. The lifeless pebbles surrounding the monuments were dull moonlit grey but they stunk with the sacrificial blood of millions. The meaty pungent stink of hot, cancerous, miserable death, body upon body upon body without count and the rotten ruddy fluid running from the mountains of carnage in rivers until the reek of it polluted the pure blue of the very sky.
Fonlap leapt across the bare stones in his slippers towards the green edge of the ruinous valley and deeper still until growing things surrounded him and obscured his view of the fairy-lit tents. The forest air beyond the edge of barrenness was clean and fragrant, a perfume across the odor of the valley’s old sins. Flowers bloomed here; moss grew across the rocks; underbrush and trees had built up a bandage against the wounds in the earth. Younger mortal creatures might say this was an old forest, but any elf could perceive at once the recent lacerations in which it grew.
The distant holy speech of water drew Fonlap’s slippered feet deeper and deeper into the trees. Like the springs of Home that gushed pure and bubbling out of clean mountain granite – the same wordless hymn. Somewhere in this forest, clear cold water was speaking, and Fonlap intended to find it to wash the tears from his face.
;Hello young Son of Strawberry; spoke a voice like wind rustling through columns of bulrushes, like the whistle of fetid air from the cracks of a deep, blind cave.
Fonlap froze, the curving expanse of moonlit water suddenly murmuring at his feet a few paces across. The bed of it was full of pebbles and granite boulders, pink and yellow and pale green, the bank of it lined with tall grass. Across the few feet of water, a black shape loomed higher than elf or man – slender and featureless.
“Who are you,” Fonlap cried without guile or pretense. Truly had his senses failed to perceive this being, and naked tears still ran damp on his cheeks.
;Greet me and I might say, young Son of Strawberry; spoke a voice like wind across a treeless plain of sundried autumn grass.
“Good evening friend. I am Fonlap of… of the Strawberry Creed,” he spoke with the quaver of fear.
No response from the tall shadow forthcoming, Fonlap could not control his tears. He knelt by the water and began to weep. The rings in the brook expanded outwards from where the tears fell like raindrops. The black figure crouched, and extended some long limb into the opposite bank to touch the faint lines in the water.
“I… I’m sorry. I can’t help it,” Fonlap whimpered.
No answer. The figure crouched as still as a panther. Its limb did not disturb the water in the slightest. The drops of Fonlap’s tears spread like waves against its unlit digits.
“Who are you?”
;Why do you weep; croaked the voice like the overgrown limbs of old willows on a riverbank, rubbed together by wind.
“Who are you!”
;Why do you weep; croaked the voice.
The silence would have ached, but for the sweet, pure noise of water babbling across rock in the night.
“I have pain,” Fonlap said.
No answer but the water.
“…because my father lies. And my people lie. They believe a lie. And they expect me to believe the lie.”
No answer but the water.
“Who are you?!”
No answer but the water.
Fonlap fell to his knees, and the grass bent around him. He braced himself on the smooth rocks of the brook’s bank, but his tears ran into the clear water like raindrops. Where they splashed in the black brook, a light flickered as if the sun shone on the wet skin of a ripe red strawberry – that sweet, that rich, that fresh. The brook carried the splashes in wide, shiny rings to the dark slender limb across the water.
“We did wrong. We did great wrong. We who should be better. We who should know better. Our betrayal. Our betrayal led unfathomable thousands to their deaths. Thousands upon thousands. Millions, maybe.” Fonlap could not control his grief; he held himself on all fours, hands and knees wet, his leaking face directly over the riffles of the water.
;Why; spoke the voice, after a pause, like dust blowing out of a tomb sealed for a thousand years, opened at last to starlight and curiosity.
“Pride. Foolishness. Love. Ancient desire.” Fonlap looked down at his hand, white in the black starlit waters of the brook. “Weakness. Weakness!” His shrill grief echoed in the trees.
;Yes; spoke the voice, sand scouring an ancient diminishing bulwark in a vast desert. ;But you were not alive to know these things. You are not a witness. How do you know;
“I…I found the records. I read, in my father’s own hand, his report. He met on the Wandering Island with the goblins and the Starlit.”
;What did he write;
“We did not merely withdraw, and we did not council the humans to withdraw. We lied. We told them we would help. But we did not help. We hindered. We withdrew, and we sucked the magic field in the area dry. We left the humans helpless when they were depending on us.”
Silence, except the babbling of the clear, cold water, hung for many moments.
“It was wrong. We lied to them. And we lie to ourselves.”
Silence, except the babbling of the clear, cold water, and the soft sobbing of a young elf, hung for many moments.
;Cross the water to me; spoke the voice like the hissing of a pot beginning to boil.
Fonlap pushed himself to his feet and rubbed his tear-streaked face with wet hands.
“Who are you?!” he whispered. The figure rose to mirror him, lifting its slender limb from the water.
;Cross the water to me; the voice repeated.
Fonlap hesitated; but his slippered feet stepped into the water, cold and fast. He crossed the smooth slick stones of its bed; his trousers were wet to his thighs, no higher, when he reached the other bank where the figure loomed above him. He peered up into the fathomless depths of its shadows where two eyes glimmered like stars. He felt the sensation of a smile down at him from an immeasurable distance.
;I know you, Fonlap Avra Jezby; spoke the voice like a bumblebee’s wings. ;And I love you. You have shared with me a secret. A secret from your heart;
Slender limbs, many of them, surrounded Fonlap’s shoulders. He knelt on the smooth stones of the bank. The limbs cooled him like water on a hot summer day; they warmed him like bright sunlight through the clouds on an autumn afternoon. They gave him the tingling happiness of a proud father’s or a comforting mother’s embrace. The moonlight and the starlight disappeared in an enveloping darkness.
;And so I will tell you a secret. Will you let me;
“Yes,” sighed Fonlap in a breathless ecstasy. “I love you, though you are a stranger.”
;Good. Good;
The limbs began to grasp. They tickled. They stung. They tore. They gashed. Fonlap heard himself laugh, then gasp, then scream, and scream, and scream. Sharkskin hands rubbed his body raw, toothed fingers tore into his chest. The pleasure of it grew beyond tolerance, the pain of it beyond comprehension. Visions of the earth erupting, of demonic destroying hordes, of the very fabric of life slashed and torn and unraveling, filled him like a million insatiable rapists. The many limbs tore him apart, bone by bone, down to his beating heart, while the hordes ripped apart the world. A gulf of complete darkness loomed stormlike on the horizon even as a single golden thread of hope shone woven through the whole tapestry of chaotic madness, a single rope cast down to climb out of a bottomless hell. Fonlap grasped the rope and held, screaming forever, the many limbs still scraping his insides out.
;You see; whispered the voice, after an eternity of penetrating horrors, crisp autumn leaves rubbing together on a forest floor.
Fonlap felt his raw knees against the smooth wet stones of the bank again at last, gasping for air as if he had surfaced from deep water, his arms clinging to the slender cloth-like bunches of the black figure.
“By the Seed. We must all stand together, or…”
;Yes. You see;
“Or…”
;Yes;
“We stand together, or else we all fall together. All of us who were divided by the Seven Tears.”
;Yes. And you, young Son of Strawberry, will help to build the bridge;
Fonlap began again to weep. The many hands were still inside him, full of potency. Comfort and horror at once. He held to the figure like a hanging, drawn curtain. His tears ran into the formless folds of cloth and disappeared. Neither the stars nor the moon shone in their blackness.
“Who are you?” Fonlap asked again, quietly, as he wept.
;I will show you; said the voice, the rustling of velvet drapes at a breeze through an inner cloister.